Spitting into your Mitt

I wasn't fast to sour on Mitt Romney. Not that I'd vote for him, of course, but he didn't seem as awful as the typical Republican. Many of my friends were more perceptive.

When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, I could tell he was lying about his views of abortion. But it didn't seem so terrible when he won narrowly, in part by making an issue of Shannon O'Brien's proposal to align the age of consent to sex with the age of consent to abortion. The 2008 Presidential campaign came, and Romney made his infamously expedient conversion to hard right views in ardent favor of a blastocyst-to-birth welfare state (and police state, too). That proved my 2002 belief correct.

This is a man who will say anything to win an election. He's running on a marketing plan, not on his own convictions. (It's not that I believe he lacks convictions; I think he does have true convictions of his own, but I suspect that they're too wingnutty and extreme and downright weird to ever win.)

The problem for Romney is that even Republicans, who desperately wanted to believe him, could tell that he's as smarmily insincere as politicians come. And, man, that's saying a lot. Sarah Palin, for instance, is about as self-promoting as they come, but she still from time to time lets slip some really outlandish bullshit out of her core convictions, however inchoate they are.

So, when Mitt offers up his ass to be kissed by the habitual ass-kisser Larry King, he of course says that Obama is "learning on the fly." Yep, Romney pretends that he would of course know exactly what to do about an episode in the economy that has no analogy dating back seventy years to a time when the organization of the economy was much different, much more local, and moved much more slowly. Romney says this with the same smug arrogance of the "masters of the universe" on Wall Street for the simple reason that he's one of them. His recipe for fixing this would not be so different from Tim Geithner (minus points for Obama), although it would be much more pitched to allowing disastrous failures. Romney would wind us all up in penury.

In sum, Mitt Romney is:

• smarmy
• insincere
• smug
• arrogant
• the exact wrong doctor for the economy
• and won't countenance the destruction of blastocysts in research that might help his wife Ann, who suffers from multiple schlerosis - and he reached this epiphany for craven political reasons

The ipecac candidate! But of course - of course - he's running in 2012, his non-denial denial notwithstanding. Otherwise, he'd have better things to do than show up on CNN.