GOP Says Obama Is Worse Than Carter Without In Any Way Implying Carter Did Better Things

We've been waiting to see how the GOP would eventually tackle this particular, inevitable political messaging problem: At some point, they would decide to ditch "Obama is Jimmy Carter II" -- Jimmy Carter, of course, having been the original History's Greatest Monster -- in favor of Obama is worse than Carter. But they can't explicitly say that "Obama worse than Carter" -- because that would imply that Carter wasgoodenough, in some way, to surpass Obama. That can't be true, because Carter never did anything even remotely good in his entirely life. And so, a quandary . Hmm... ah, here we go, Kentucky turtle Mitch McConnell has come up with something, because that's what Mitch McConnell does.

Campaigns are a pretty robust discussion about the future. I do think it’s interesting to note that the whole notion of earned success and capitalism seems to be under attack by this administration across the board. Not just in the campaign, but through the actions of the government itself. They seem to have forgotten what made this country great, and what has lifted literally millions of Americans out of poverty for a long time has been a robust capitalist system. I think the view of this admin is that if you’re making a profit you must be up to no good. You must be either mistreating your employees or cheating your customers or both. They’re here to help us. Of course their ever-helpful approach to this is the reason we’re having such a difficult time coming out of this economic slowdown.This is certainly the most anti-business administration since the Carter years, and at least you could say this for President Carter: he was largely incompetent. This administration has actually done a lot of damage to the country.We hope we can begin to clean up the mess and repair the damage after the election.

But but... but, yes, here's the thing, so Obama has been more damaging and thus worse than Carter, yet this would mean that Obama has beencompetent, so does this (a) render the concept of "competency" a useless metric of presidential performance or (b) cause the universe to implode?

Here's another framing to work with: Of the last three Democratic presidents, Republicans impeached the one they hated the least.

[ TPM ]