The other day I'm watching Rachel Madow interview Frank Rich from New York Magazine and they're in this deep discussion about the current strategy being deployed by Mittens Romney and his gaggle of hacks and it suddenly occurs to me that I'm watching a rerun of the brilliant 1984 movie Being There. The movie, based on a novel by the late Jerzy Kosinski, features the incomparable Peter Sellers as Chancy Gardner, a complete and total dimwit who only knows the world through a lifetime of watching television. Through ummm, chance and just dumb luck, the character ends up befriending the richest man in America, meets the POTUS, and as the movie ends, he's about to be called up to run the largest company in America by it's board of directors. Substitute Mitt for Chancy.
Now, to be clear, I am not calling Romney a dimwit. But as I sit watching all of these MSNBC pundits yakking away about the Romney camp and doing their best to decipher the latest anything being said, it's clear to me these people are playing chess while Romney and his crew are playing Chutes and Ladders. I mean, come on! Mitt and his band of bozos have yet to articulate anything with meaning. How will the deficit be reduced? What will he do about entitlement programs? How will he, the great job creator of yesterday, create jobs tomorrow? Oh yeah, by being a venture capitalist. The first thing those sharpies do after acquiring a business is ask how much fat can we trim (i.e. workers dismissed). It was NEVER about how many workers can we hire. The only economic anything from this guy to date is endorsing the Paul Ryan budget plan, which is, unbelievably, a plan to cut taxes further (especially for those rich mother-fucking job creators), give more to the Pentagon and starve social programs. OK, but there is just a couple of tiny issues with all that. Tax rates in the US are already at historic low levels and tax revenue is a 20 year low. You can't cut enough from Planned Parenthood or NPR to make the slightest dent in the deficit, and if cutting Social Security and Medicare is your solution for the deficit, you have NO chance of being re-elected. Don't forget Mitt, the tea-party is on Social Security.
During the primary and since he was the last moron standing, Mitt Romney has told anyone that will listen what a suck-ass person the other guy is and of course how the Prez has done nothing right, including saving GM and getting Bin Laden, which are both things he later took credit for. WTF? To date, Mittens has been only offering syrupy Americana and off-key singing of the national anthem to the masses at his campaign stops, and what a truly embarrassing thing that is to behold. Now I know Rachel and the others need some red meat, but it's bordering on pathetic when they and their guests spend agonizing minutes pondering what Mitt said in his latest speech, which is basically nothing. Just like Chancy Gardner, very smart people are doing their best to understand the deeper meaning of Mitten's blather when there is no deeper meaning. He's just continues to rehash the same shit as he did in the primary with no specifics, and it's just not possible to analyze it. Even the Republicans are starting to carp about his lack of anything concrete to say.
As I said beforehand, I do not believe Mitt Romney is a dimwit. But there are a host of other adjectives that work quite well, and I feel just a bit more authorized to offer them than perhaps your everyday political hack. You see, I've seen this type of creature before. My personal experience growing up in Utah and knowing many, many Mormons has afforded this point of view. In a peculiar twist of logic, many worshipers of God are actually quite convictionless. Their moral high ground is often a cover for a shameless, opportunistic pursuit of money and power, closet racism and for many men, a comfortable dominance over the fairer sex. I've seen it first hand with my own Father being ripped off repeatedly by his fellow brethren and the prevalent, unintended but impossible to miss attitude of authority toward women. Venture capitalism is the crowning glory of this - a soulless approach to taking advantage of the weaker in society; i.e. weaker companies with weaker workers and their weaker unions and doing it with other peoples money, not your own. Mitt Romney has displayed these characteristics over and over. Remember, he was once pro-choice when it suited his needs, a stance the Mormon church adamantly opposes, as it now oppose his heartless positions on immigration and slashing the welfare system budget. As I said, free of convictions that his own church preaches. But there is one area that Mitt Romney has no equal - lying with conviction. My God he's good. Most recently, his absurd accusation that the bankrupt Solyndra had provided money to the Obama Administration's friends and family was called out by even conservative people as a lie. Yet Mittens continued with it and even doubled-down in a later speech. In my view, this pathological lying is the old religious conflict between faith and facts. Again, being Mormon inevitably puts you in the position of having to accept faith trumping evidence - like carbon dating to establish the age of the earth (hint: it's more than 7,000 years old dude). The cumulative result of this nasty conflict is the ability to lie and to no longer feel any remorse about doing it. And when you grow up in the privileged class, this ability is reinforced from a lack of anyone calling you out on it. So the media, once again trying to play chess, spends bullshit time having to report about the lies instead of reporting on anything of substance that voters could use to make an informed decision. Taken all together, Mitt Romney is a very scary creature indeed. Which leads me to ask this obvious question: how could anyone want this lying, shallow, wooden, convictionless, money-grubbing douche-bag individual as the next president of our country??
I'll tell you who does. Join me next time as we explore further this nearly impossible to fathom concept of Mitt Romney being the next POTUS and then I promise to provide my dear readers with all the reasons he will not be elected; unless he happens to pick tea-party darling Rick Santorum to be VP and under this cover promptly tacks straight to the center and starts telling the truth. But he's too big of dimwit to do that, right?
