Josh Green, quoting Romney’s Twitter nemesis, comedian Rob Delaney, “Romney fascinates me endlessly,” Delaney said before his show at a Montreal comedy festival last week. “He’s such an attractive target comedically because more than any other candidate in my lifetime, he just wants to be president. That’s it! He longs for it. Feels it’s his birthright. I can imagine him getting elected and just saying, ‘Well, that’s that then!’ and staring out a window.”
He just needs to be President. It would, complete him.
I wonder about Willard’s Mormonism. Does Romney justify his mendacity for theological reasons? Does Romney understand Jesus did come to America, (or appeared so-to-speak. as reported in the Mormon holy epic?) Against these several things I’m curious about, the probable toxic contents of his unrevealed tax returns are, to me, boring. Oh, he won’t destroy his campaign by releasing any more returns.
Today, I am amazed Romney and his courtmen figured out a way to lie, and, piss off military men and women in a single swoop. How could Mittens be so stupid to let this happen?
Meanwhile, and speaking of someone “substantial and important,” who is by reputation Mitt’s intellectual superior, Paul Ryan, some ripe and embarrassing footage:
How can Ryan be considered intelligent and also spout anti-intellectual clap trap such as that on display from the beginning to the end of this clip? It showcases his puerile Randian fantasizing and his sober allegiance to the thorough-going banalities of his ideological fixations.
Curious about Ryan, I now know way too much about how his youthful enthusiasms got the best of his raw intellectual potential. I’m fairly certain Ryan will never tutor himself on the principle ways purist political ideologies–as a genre–are in all cases found to be disreputable and incredible.
Ryan has earned another profile, this time in The New Yorker. I already knew he believes his own bullshit. Jared Bernstein caps his brief comment about the profile and Ryan.
The moral of the story is to beware of politicians pumped up on ideological visions stoked by novelists and fairy tales about how slashing taxes and spending sets us free. The world is more complicated than that. Our economic challenges will never be resolved by those who pledge never to raise taxes or spending any more than it would by those who pledge never to cut them.
And especially don’t be fooled if they happen to possess the numeracy to write their ideas down in budgets. Their numbers just don’t add up.
Reminding me of Reagan, the iconic Republican who figured out the political advantages of matching the ‘supply-side’ with white resentment. Romney, as I sense his motivations, wants to usher in a sea change as Reagan did in his time. It seems to the point that Reagan, now a template, wanted to get his foot in the door as a matter of his having successfully retailed a fresh ideology, and then, once elected, Reagan just did what he wanted to do. So, he was a Keynesian; a proxy cold killer of hundreds of thousands of innocent Hispanic peasants; a radical anti-Constitutionalist; a taxer, borrower, profligate spender; a negotiator with terrorists; a benefactor of jihadis; and, incidentally, the headman for a famously corrupt administration; and one that served as a finishing school for future war criminals Rumsfeld and Cheney and many others.
Soon enough, during the eighties, in effect, the contras came to feast on the Laffer Curve.
Already, the fever dream of leading American military might into a desert world war in Iran has struck chicken hawk/draft dodger Romney’s fancy–with all his talk about stopping Iran’s capability. If Romney is elected, my guess is that Ryan’s fantastic plan to rapidly race to the bottom in the name of Ayn Rand will end up being subsumed by a counter-productive conflagration in Iran.
bonus:
It is helpful always to remind yourself that, in the mind of Willard Romney, there are only two kinds of people — himself and his family, and The Help. Throughout his career, and especially throughout his brief political career, Romney has treated The Help with a kind of lordly disdain. It was there when he swooped down from snowy Olympus and shoved an incumbent Republican governor named Jane Swift under a train. It was there in the general election in 2002, when he glibly pushed aside the Democratic candidate, state treasurer Shannon O’Brien, who raised almost all the same issues against Romney that the president and his people are belaboring him with today. The only time it didn’t work was in his race against Senator Edward Kennedy, when Romney found himself up against a candidate with so much money that he couldn’t outspend him, and so much historical gravitas that he couldn’t ignore him.
The Help has no right to go pawing through the family books, giggling at the obvious loopholes and tax dodges, running amok through all the tax shelters, and probably getting their chocolate-y fingerprints all over the pages of the Romney family ledger. And, certainly, those members of The Help in the employ of the president of the United States, who is also part of The Help, have no right to use the nearly comically ostentatious wealth of the Romney as some sort of scrimey political weapon. He does not have to answer to The Help. I mean, jeepers, he’s running for office.
This isn’t stubbornness. That’s often an acquired trait. What this is, fundamentally, is contempt. Contempt for the process, and contempt for the people who make their living in that process, and contempt for the people whose lives depend on that process. There are rules for The Help with which Willard Romney never has had to abide, and he has no intention of starting now. My dear young fellow, this simply is not done. (Charles S. Pierce, Esquire, July 16)
