May 3rd, 2012Top StoryMitt Romney's Case Against a Mitt Romney PresidencyBy Mobutu Sese Seko It's about as easy to lose track of Mitt Romney's political gaffes as it is to lose track of the number of drinks you've had during a beer pong tournament. Their pace is relentless, both are sort of shamefully satisfying, and ultimately they make your head hurt. To save mental space, I've tried to assemble Romney's gaffes into a Frankenstein error, a Katamari of campaign stumbles: "Mitt Romney let the dogs out, only to fire them into a corporation to kill people via creative destruction and win a $10,000 bet." But there's always something new. This week, Romney's leadership of his advisors as well as his own words about leadership in protecting America seemed to suggest one thing: Mitt Romney believes that the United States cannot afford to elect Mitt Romney. You've probably seen the first story: Richard Grenell, Romney's newly minted foreign policy expert, was silenced on a major conference call, unceremoniously closeted by the Romney campaign and subsequently resigned. Because he was gay. Don't start the waterworks yet. Grenell played lackey to George Bush's UN Ambassador John Bolton, bearer of the Ur-Freeper mustache and the sort of person whose idea of a response to UN protests over bombing the Middle East to a sheet of glass would have been to don a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. Grenell fit right in, and his nastiness extended to the personal, where he used Twitter to slam Rachel Maddow, Michelle Obama and Callista Gingrich's appearance without the leavening aspect of "not being incredibly obvious and unfunny." All of which is to say that Grenell has a robust neoconservative background of being indifferent to killing a lot of people while also being a huge dick. Even with his history of sharing corporate-camp bunk beds with Bibi Netanyahu, Romney's unfair "Massachusetts Moderate" reputation needed counterbalance from someone like Grenell. Unfortunately, all it took was the homophobic outrage of a far-right Christian loudmouth and director of an SPLC-designated hate group named Bryan Fischer to change the strategy of the presumptive GOP nominee's campaign. Grenell's homosexuality, which disrupted no aspect of Bush-era diplomacy, could somehow be fatal to Romney. Naturally, seeing the bar set so low, the National Review oozed under it:
After years of voting and working for the sorts of people who leverage restricting his civil rights in order to "mobilize the base," it's pretty safe to say that Grenell isn't jumping ship any time soon. When your own employers make you the boogeyman to get votes and you don't shop your resume around, you're probably a true believer. (And if sexual pursuits really motivate political behavior over all other concerns, where was the huge middle-aged male voting swing for McCain over his MILF policy?) But this is Planet GOP, after all, where gay people are fervid, priapic little deviants who can't help but indoctrinate children and think broken thoughts with the broken dicks that they keep trying to cram into the wrong openings. I mean, Christ, if the ambassador from Tehran is exotically long-lashed and Persian enough, Grenell might sell out our war plans for a handjob. This might just be saucy, shabby sexual politics, but Romney's pitch to the American people is "LEADERSHIP" and capable management. When Romney's being charitable to Obama, he uses codewords to call him stupid ("in over his head") while championing his own expertise. Given his campaign approach, it's significant that the three natural responses to the Grenell matter are all negative:
The first two are bad on their own, but the vacillating wussiness of the third was the sort of thing castigated by Romney himself. After Romney condemned Obama for "politicizing" national defense and the assassination of Osama bin Laden—a truly rich accusation coming from the party of "Mission Accomplished" and fishily timed political benchmarks in Iraq—people like William Saletan at Slate and Ben Armbruster and Igor Volsky at Think Progress printed substantial quotes from George Bush, Dick Cheney, Ed Gillespie and Zell Miller politicizing the war on terror and slamming John Kerry for his lack of leadership and resolve. One person who joined them was Mitt Romney:
Not only does this quote challenge Romney's ability to manage his own staff of advisors and his attitude toward targeting bin Laden (to borrow another 2004 phrase, "He was against it before he was for it") but it impeaches him on practically anything else. He was for a woman's right to choose before he was against it. He was for stem-cell research before he was against it. He was for his own healthcare program before he was against it. Militarily, economically... our very way of life is under attack. If Mitt Romney is to be believed, Mitt Romney is an existential threat to it. We "don't want presidential leadership that comes in 57 varieties." America needs resolute leadership it can count on, and Mitt Romney has ruled out a candidate like Mitt Romney in no uncertain terms. Unless, of course, he changed his mind about that. "Mobutu Sese Seko" is founder of the blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo? |
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Thursday, May 3, 2012
Mitt Romney's Case Against a Mitt Romney Presidency
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