In all the endless discussion of Mitt Romney’s courtship of the conservative movement, it’s never much occurred to me that his “electability” appeal to GOP voters depends on conveying the general sense that he’ll do anything to win. But that’s the interesting point buried in a long Michael Barbaro/Jeremy Peters article on Mitt’s abiding nastiness as a candidate. Check this out:

The Romney campaign’s shortcomings have been on vivid display in recent weeks, from verbal stumbles to a failure to stir the passions of the Republican base.

But even his battered rivals acknowledge that Mr. Romney is proving unusually adept at defining, diminishing and disqualifying a serial cast of challengers through relentless attacks.

His campaign has deployed every tactic in the negative-campaign playbook. It has issued Twitter messages poking fun at Mr. Gingrich’s penchant for rhetorical excess (with the hashtag #grandiosenewt). It created digital slogans and a letterhead disparaging Mr. Santorum’s long career in government (“Rick Went to Washington,” they read, “and he never came back”). It created dozens of Web videos denigrating President Obama’s economic leadership (“Obama isn’t working”). And it benefited from the advertising onslaught unleashed against Mr. Romney’s rivals by a “super PAC” backing him.

As successful as the strategy has been, though, it has raised questions about Mr. Romney’s role in turning the primary process into something akin to a civil war, even as it has demonstrated a ferocious, whatever-it-takes style that could hearten Republicans if Mr. Romney ends up in a general election matchup against Mr. Obama (emphasis added)

If that’s true, then Romney’s efforts to pretend he’s the “true conservative” in the campaign have been something of a waste of time. All he really needs to do is to prove he has absolutely no conscience or inhibitions about negative campaigning. Because that’s what “base” activists want more than anything else, even more than victory: a holy war against Barack Obama to articulate their visceral hatred of the incumbent, with which they hope to infect persuadable voters. Mitt’s well on his way to passing that most crucial test.

So now that George Will is saying that Republicans should forget about the White House and concentrate on willing Congress, what is the state of play in Senate elections this year, particularly given Olympia Snowe’s unexpected retirement?

At WaPo’s The Fix, Aaron Blake has a very useful summary of how the landscape has changed:

The GOP’s plans to regain a Senate majority looked good from the outset this election cycle, with the playing field for 2012 including just 10 Republican-held seats and 23 Democratic ones — including several in red states.

Considering the GOP needed to gain only four seats to win a majority, it was pretty clear early on that it was very doable.

From there, things only got better for the GOP, with the retirements of Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) opening up previously untargeted seats. In addition, embattled Republican Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) resigned, giving Republicans renewed hope to hold his seat. All of a sudden, the GOP had legitimate chances to win upward of a dozen Democratic-held seats, while really having to defend just one or two.

Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-Neb.) retirement in late December was just the icing on the cake for a GOP whose hopes of winning the Senate looked to have improved over the course of the calendar year, even as the political environment shifted from a Republican-friendly one to more neutral.

But the pendulum has now swung back — at least a fair amount.

This week, Democrats nabbed arguably their best pickup opportunity in the country when Snowe unexpectedly announced her retirement. And they avoided Nebraska becoming a lost cause when Kerrey changed his mind and decided to run after all.

Much like Nebraska, in North Dakota, Conrad’s seat appears to be less and less of a lost cause for Democrats, with former state Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp (D) looking the part of a formidable opponent for freshman Rep. Rick Berg (R)….

What’s more, Snowe’s retirement and Elizabeth Warren‘s strong campaign in Massachusetts have given Democrats something they haven’t had all cycle — a couple of really strong pickup opportunities. And if Democrats can steal both of those seats, Republicans’ chances of taking the majority will be severely undercut.

And that’s without the possibility of Republicans having debilitating primaries in Indiana and Arizona.

No wonder George Will is asking GOPers to get focused on this stuff.

I originally missed it, but Red State’s Erick Erickson sorta kinda came to Rush’s defense today, or to be more precise, lashed out at former GOP senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina for saying Limbaugh’s words were “insulting.” But even ol’ Erick, whose personal style is more than occasionally similar to Rush’s, couldn’t help but admit The Master may have screwed up this time:

Well of course Rush Limbaugh was being insulting. It is not something I would do and I do think we’re going to now focused on what he said for a while and that it will be a distraction from the central argument, but he was using insult and sarcasm to highlight the absurdity of Sandra Fluke and the left’s position.

He goes on to rant for a while about the indignity of having to pay for contraception, which he says has nothing to do with health and everything to do with sex, and even complains about Fiorina’s 2010 campaign. But the fatal admission is there: the big puffed-up radio wizard is in trouble—maybe a lot more trouble than he got into with his little hillbilly heroin problem a while back.

You never know with these things, but there are signs aborning that Rush Limbaugh’s two-day tirade against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke may have been a very serious mistake. When the President of the United States goes to the trouble of personally calling the victim of a media bully to comfort her, the bully is getting into the kind of danger zone usually reserved for nasty tinpot dictators and perpetrators of heinous crimes. And when the Speaker of the House representing the party you have lorded it over for many years finds it necessary to denounce your behavior, you might want to consider a vacation of a trip to rehab.

Limbaugh has already lost one major sponsor (Sleep Train), and there’s quite a campaign underway to gather petitions to all his sponsors suggesting that might find a better use of their advertising dollars. So far all Rush has been able to muster is some spluttering at Obama for his Super-PACs accepting a big contribution from Bill Maher, and a half-hearted effort to play the victim himself, a role for which he is singularly ill-equipped.

Probably the worst sign for Rush is that the right-wing blogosphere is not (so far) exactly springing to his defense. There’s a lot more stuff up on conservative sites continuing the mourning period for Andrew Breitbart than there is about Limbaugh, which gives you a sense of how far Rush has strayed over the line. Worse yet for him, the incident will give the whole wide world a fresh opportunity to reacquaint themselves with his overall corpus of work.

So at least until such time as he’s driven to his knees in abject humiliation, it’s a moment to savor. There’s nothing much more appealing to Americans’ old-fashioned sense of rough justice than watching a bully get pummeled.

It’s not an entirely original thought, but it’s still interesting that in a pending Sunday column (according to Politico, which has an advance copy), George Will is going to suggest that conservatives write off the 2012 presidential contest altogether, and concentrate on holding onto the House and winning control of the Senate:

Will argues that a Republican-controlled Congress would be able to strongly oppose the president’s agenda.

“If Republicans do, their committee majorities will serve as fine-mesh filters, removing President Obama’s initiatives from the stream of legislation … [A] re-elected Obama — a lame duck at noon next Jan. 20 — would have a substantially reduced capacity to do harm,” he says.

Will asserts that the GOP has a group of capable candidates waiting in the wings.

“From Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal to Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan, Republicans have a rising generation of potential 2016 candidates. … [T]he presidency is not everything, and there will be another election in the next year divisible by four,” he says.

You know, I’m an old enough donkey to remember an awful lot of cycles when prospects for my party nine months from Election Day looked pretty bad. But I don’t remember much of anybody publicly saying it was time to take a mulligan, focus on the down-ballot races, and look ahead four more years. Will must be feeling pretty certain about this, or woke up one morning in a really bad mood. Wish he had the power to make it official, and save us all a lot of trouble between now and November.

It’s never been much of a secret that America’s self-conscious libertarians, small and hardy band that they are, love a good eye-gouging internecine fight. Perhaps it goes back to the days when the Guiding Spirit of the movement, the novelist Ayn Rand, regularly denounced the burgeoning Libertarian Party as “plagiarists” and “hippies” even as its activists burned incense before her altar.

But I don’t quite know what to make of the apparently long-simmering battle (now ripening into a lawsuit) between Charles Koch and Ed Crane for control of the Koch-financed and Crane-operated Cato Institute. Jane Meyer of the New Yorker has a good brief backgrounder on the dispute, which apparently goes back at least to 1992, and did not keep Kock and his various tentacle-organizations from keeping the money flowing to Cato. From the statement just released by Crane, his main beef with Koch is pretty clear:

Charles G. Koch has filed a lawsuit as part of an effort to gain control of the Cato Institute, which he co-founded with me in 1977. While Mr. Koch and entities controlled by him have supported the Cato Institute financially since that time, Mr. Koch and his affiliates have exercised no significant influence over the direction or management of the Cato Institute, or the work done here.

Mr. Koch’s actions in Kansas court yesterday represent an effort by him to transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda. We view Mr. Koch’s actions as an attempt at a hostile takeover, and intend to fight it vehemently in order to continue as an independent research organization, advocating for Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.

My, my, Charles Koch has a “partisan agenda?” Who knew? But this sort of dispute should feel familiar to libertarian fans of Cato, since it was precisely the Libertarian Party’s threat to take away votes from Republicans Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford (employers from time to time of her protege Alan Greenspan) that enraged Rand. Even among libertarians, you can’t take the politics out of politics.

I’m in Georgia today, so I’ll join the EST crowd for lunch:

* At Salon, Tom Schaller notes how rapidly same-sex marriage has flipped from a conservative to a progressive wedge issue.

* TNR updates its carousel of hippie-baiting drawings on the cover of The Weekly Standard.

* Not looking too good for Dennis Kucinich on March 6.

* Breitbart death conspiracy theories abound.

* BYU professor’s comments on race revive unsettling debate among Mormons.

* Pollsters freaked out by threat of enforcement action against “push-polling” by NH Attorney General.

Back after a break.

A couple days ago I suggested the spin wars over Mitt Romney’s narrow win in Michigan might actually influence its significance, insofar as the GOP Establishment’s fragile confidence in its boy Mitt Romney is his most important political asset.

At the end of Michigan Week, and on the brink of Super Tuesday, it’s not that clear how it is all sorting out. Yes, the panicky talk about finding a new Establishment candidate has abated, for the moment. Yes, Mitt has zoomed back into a solid lead in at least one national poll of Republicans (Rasmussen) and has also seen his support spiking in the last Gallup Tracking numbers.

The MSM, however, is beginning to treat Ohio as the truly significant Super Tuesday contest, and there Santorum is maintaining a lead in post-Michigan polls. Mitt’s spate of Michiga-centric gaffes in receding in the rear-view mirror, but his Blunt Amendment screwup is keeping alive fears that he has some sort of secret death-wish or political Tourette’s Syndrome.

So what to make of the current situation? Are the national polls a leading indicator of a Santorum Crash in Super Tuesday states, or is Santorum’s stubborn strength in Ohio a sign of a fundamental problem Romney has in the Rust Belt states that he overcome in Michigan by virtue of his homeboy status?

Nate Silver put up a highly relevant post late last night that provides an excellent guide to what to ignore and what to pay attention to in the pre-Super Tuesday public opinion surveys, based on an analysis of the race so far:

[

T]he polls have been reasonably good in the last few days before the election. Not perfect by any means — worse than general election polling typically is, for example. But no worse, and probably somewhat better, than in past primaries.

In densely polled states — that term, importantly, would disqualify Colorado — there haven’t been any huge surprises on Election Day itself. If you think it counts as a surprise that Mitt Romney won Michigan by three points when polls showed a rough tie, or that Rick Santorum narrowly won Iowa when he was a couple of points back, you don’t have a realistic conception of how reliable primary and caucus polling is.

On the other hand, the polls have been pretty awful at most points prior to about three days before the election, seeing surges and momentum shifts that often dissipated.

So by that standard, it might be a good idea to ignore current polling and start paying attention to surveys that are in the field right now, and will be published over the weekend and Monday.

Still, keep your eye on media coverage of Super Tuesday as either a mega-primary with many fronts (ten, to be exact), or as Ohio plus a bunch of other places. The latter interpretation could make Ohio matter more than the delegate count or the number of primaries and caucuses won. Romney, of course, could make the question moot by winning the Buckeye State as well. But then again, it would be perfectly in character for him to find another way to inform Ohioans he could buy and sell the lot of them with pocket change.

It was a bit of the same-old same-old when Rick Santorum argued at a campaign stop in Washington State today that Republicans need to nominate him because Americans just hate moderates:

“We want a conservative nominee because that’s our best chance of winning. Look at the races in the last 30 years, we nominated a moderate: [John] McCain, [Bob] Dole, Gerald Ford. When George [H.W.] Bush ran for re-election back in 1992, after raising taxes and increasing spending. They all ran as moderates. We all lost,” Santorum said.

“Every time we’ve run as a conservative, we’ve won,” the candidate continued. “Why? Because Americans want a choice. If it’s a difference between somebody, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, you know what, this country is going to probably going to stick with the person they know. We need to have a sharp contrast. Someone who paints a very different vision for America.”

It’s the ancient cry of the ideologue, left or right, captured most memorably by the title of Phyllis Schlafly’s famous book on behalf of Goldwater in 1964, A Choice Not An Echo. I guess you could call it Rick Santorum’s tribute to the announced retirement of Olympia Snowe.

But it was interesting that Santorum did not include in his litany of failed moderates another name: George W. Bush. It’s true, of course, that W. never lost an election, but it’s become conservative gospel in recent years that W.’s big-spending non-conservative ways doomed the GOP in 2008. It’s also true that W. ran in 2000 as the designated candidate of the conservative movement, and was treated as a world-historical colossus, and the Liberator of Iraq, by most conservatives when he ran for re-election in 2004. But that love faded very quickly.

The most relevant fact is that Santorum is having to struggle 24-7 in this campaign against constant claims from Romney and Gingrich and Paul that he is no “real conservative” because he supported two of George W. Bush’s major domestic policy initiatives: No Child Left Behind, and the Medicare Rx drug initiative. Rick’s even apologized for the former vote, in the course of suggesting that neither the feds nor the states have a legitimate role in education policy.

But like John McCain in 2008, Santorum’s become a victim of a rightward lurch in the GOP that’s been breathtaking in its speed and scope. Yesterday’s good solid conservative policy is today’s socialism. Mitt Romney gets to pretend he wouldn’t have supported W.’s horrifying heresies against conservatism because he wasn’t in Congress and didn’t have to take a position on them. Gingrich, ironically, earned a pass from complicity in Big Government Republicanism during the decade that began with W.’s election because he had been forced from office in disgrace. And Ron Paul, bless his pointy head, did indeed vote against all of it, though he probably didn’t really know he was representing the Wave of the Future in all those lonely votes he cast.

But you couldn’t blame Rick if at the end of litany of losers the mental addition: “You, too, W!”

It wasn’t the main point of his piece, but WaPo columnist Michael Gerson yesterday casually referred to the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal as making George W. Bush and his team “an administration facing events that aren’t its fault but that are its problem.”

As it happens, Gerson’s act of retroactive absolution conflicted directly with the most recent bipartisan report from the Senate Armed Services Committee:

The report…issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican…represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other episodes of abuse.

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own” but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials, who “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

Rumsfeld, naturally, sent word via a spokesman (since when do former Cabinet members have “spokesmen?”) that the report was “irresponsible,” but I think we know who has more credibility on this particular subject. It would be nice if writers like Gerson didn’t buy the old spin when referring to this particularly dark moment in recent U.S. history.

One of the things about checking out of political talk for a day or two is that it offers a moment for regaining perspective. Checking back in today, I see a panel on MSNBC where a Republican consultant is complaining that Republican candidates are talking about anything other than the economy. I hear Rick Santorum complaining that “the media” have invented the current preoccupation with contraception. I read background reports that congressional Republicans feel trapped by the furor over the Blunt-Rubio Amendment, and wish it would all go away.

For much of the last year, Republicans have been saying constantly that all they have to do is to focus monomaniacally on the economy and they can’t lose in 2012. But somehow or other, they don’t. When the Catholic bishops went ballistic over the administration’s contraception coverage mandate (or to speak more strictly, over the scope of the “conscience exception” it provided), the air was filled with Republican cackling over the epochal, victory-sacrificing mistake Obama had made (echoed, as a matter of fact, by some Democrats). The GOP presidential candidates were all over the issue, shouting about this unprecedented threat to religious freedom.

Now that the controversy hasn’t turned out like they anticipated it would, suddenly Republicans are pretending they never cared about it to begin with.

The simple truth is that the GOP’s conservative “base” cares passionately about “cultural issues,” is constantly rewarding candidates who exploit them, and has elevated to totemic status blowhards like Rush Limbaugh who palpably want to return to the patriarchal mores of the 1950s.

I’d have more respect for Republicans if they just came right out and admitted that these spasms of cultural reaction—these “Terri Schiavo Moments”—are highly illustrative of the vision for the country’s future that they and their party stands for. You could make a pretty strong case that the GOP deployment of economic arguments—and certainly the fiscal arguments they only care about when they are not in power—is the real distraction from the fundamental determination of conservatives to re-create the society of their imagination, where Dad was large and in charge in every home, where Authority was rarely challenged in the classroom, the boardroom, or the bedroom, and where America itself was only wrong when it failed to fully exercise its righteous power.

But even if I’m exaggerating the power of cultural issues, it really is time to call ultimate B.S. on the whining of Republicans when their dog-whistles and out-loud overt appeals to advocates of cultural counter-revolution backfire on them. You made this bed over decades of efforts to mobilize cultural conservatives, boys; you have no one but yourselves to blame if it turns out a majority of Americans decide you have gone around the bend.

When I mocked a droolingly ignorant column by CNS’ Craig Bannister suggesting women supporting a contraception coverage mandate were having too much sex, I felt a little cheap. Clearly, Bannister was some marginal antediluvian crank who only existed as link-bait for hard-pressed progressive bloggers who needed a easy post now and then.

Little did I know Rush Limbaugh would pick up the same bizarre line of attack and repeat it—nay, raise it to even higher levels of toxic absurdity—for (at least) two days. Given Rush’s status as He Who Must Be Obeyed on the right (remember then-Chairman of the RNC, Michael Steele, having to apologize to Limbaugh for daring diss him back in 2009?), we’re getting dangerously close to a moment when the “subsidizing sluts” argument for opposing the contraception mandate will become mandatory for the GOP presidential field.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman summed up the current state of the controversy:

If Limbaugh hasn’t gone too far this time, then “too far” no longer exists. Those Republican politicians who have genuflected to Limbaugh in the past — do any of them have daughters? Wives? Sisters? Mothers?

Will any of them dare to raise their voice in protest or disgust? Because again, if this is not going too far, what is?

What bothers me most is that Rush’s regular listeners must love this stuff, or he wouldn’t keep it up. And don’t tell me it’s all a shuck: anyone who finds this sort of crap hilarious probably enjoys tormenting small children and stray animals.

Good night, washingtonmonthlonians. A pleasure as always.

I don’t agree with my friend Jack Shafer that it’s okay to speak ill of the recently departed. Even if the deceased was your bitterest enemy and richly deserves a trashing, common decency, especially toward the person’s loved ones, demands a cessation of hostilities, at least until the body is in the ground.

At the moment, news of the death of right-wing media provocateur Andrew Breitbart has many people offering ritual condolences or holding their tongues. Still, the announcement has been followed by a steady stream of “good riddance to bad rubbish” tweets from liberals like Matt Yglesias. This in turn has outraged Breitbart’s conservative fans.

But here’s the thing: Breitbart did not afford the customary courtesy due the dead when Sen. Ted Kennedy passed away:

Andrew Breitbart, a Washington Times columnist who oversees Breitbart.com and BigHollywood.com, tapped into the anti-Kennedy vein in the hours after the senator’s death was announced, posting a series of Twitter messages in which he called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”

Moral rules cannot long hold if there are no consequences for transgressing them. So I think that in the interest of protecting the rule about not badmouthing the recently departed, there should be a proviso that those who willfully and publicly break the rule do not deserve the protection of it when they die. By this standard, Yglesias gets a pass. And Christopher Hitchens, who was notably uncharitable to Bob Hope and downright vicious to Jerry Falwell when those gentlemen died, would have had no right to cry foul at Katha Pollitt’s devastating sendoff of him—and indeed, I doubt he would have.