In our monthly podcast, it’s my job to do a cheap (dirt cheap) imitation of Mitt Romney. (Matt’s got the heavy lifting – he has to talk like a horse.) And I think you can tell if you listen to more than one episode, my impression of him is shifting. But I think you might agree that Willard’s own impression of himself has mutated a hell of a lot faster than anyone would have imagined a few months ago.
We are truly living in a post-modern age of political rhetoric. Romney has a massive right-wing orchestra to blow hard on every note that passes his lips. He makes a claim, and it gets chorused incessantly by FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and countless others like them to millions of Americans. Together they create such a storm surge of bullshit that it pushes far inland to where the mainstream corporate media lives. They who spend most of their time trying to disprove the canard that they are radical leftists feel compelled to report on whatever’s being tossed up, whether it’s the massive Benghazi coverup or the “racism” of Shirley Sharrod. That’s how national news stories are made. That’s how a deadly skirmish in Libya becomes a bigger scandal than Bush’s failure to stop the 9/11 plot.
Then of course there’s the fact that neither candidate wants to talk about global warming. I guess it takes time away from agitating for more drilling, more fracking, more wanton extraction from every available patch of land. Needless to say the right-wing gas machine is totally behind this, but then so is the mainstream and even the mildly liberal media. If I hear one more pronouncement from one of the three white dudes at Politico that we’re heading for a fiscal cliff, I might explode. One morning late this week, I literally watched them complain about the presidential candidates not giving ample time to the debt issue while right behind them a weather map showed the approach of Hurricane Sandy, a.k.a. Frankenstorm, whose confluence is no doubt fueled by our warming atmosphere.
Needless to say, there’s plenty of blame to go around for our current state of denial on a whole range of vital issues. But if someone deserves a trophy for obfuscation, it’s Romney.
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It is often said that incumbency has its advantages, and it certainly does, but it has many drawbacks. One is that, as president, it’s harder to go around saying what you are going to do because the first thing people wonder is, well, why aren’t you doing it now? You are, in essence, applying for the job you already have. Your performance in that job is an actuality, not an abstraction. On the other hand, if you’re the challenger, you can promise anything, make any wild claim, run against mathematics itself, and act as though you have a big vat of miracle sauce locked up in your car elevator, and that once you take the oath of office, you’ll start ladling that stuff all over everything that’s bad and make it good.
claiming that this can be balanced by closing loopholes on upper income earners. Horseshit. Where’s the proof? They don’t have any numbers. They can’t name deductions that they would suggest in any negotiations with Congress. They’re talking about an enormous gap that their plan would greatly expand, they claim they can close it, but they offer no details. They’ve got a secret plan to cut taxes and balance the budget while raising military spending: it’s called “Just trust us.”