1963

“Why’d it take so long to see the light? Seemed so wrong, but now it seems so right.”

—The Four Seasons, December 1963 

s a presidential candidate, he has changed his mind on an important social issue, one that continues to divide America. And those who fervently hold the view he now holds see him as their champion, despite his past feelings on the issue.  Those newly energized and enthusiastic believers are donating a lot of money to his campaign, expressing an eagerness to work to get him elected, and generally feel good about how his change of heart has helped their cause.

But I’m not talking about Barack Obama and the same-sex marriage issue.

In the late 1950s, Ann Keenan’s older brother married Mitt Romney’s older sister, making her a part of the Romney family.  A few years later, in 1963, Ann Keenan died a victim. Her death certificate explained:

Subarachnoid hemorrhage following septic criminal recent abortion with septic thromboembolism pneumonia and hepatitis with focal necrosis of liver

“Criminal recent abortion.”  Keenan had died of an infection following a then-illegal abortion, the infection possibly caused by unsanitary instruments often used in such abortions. Whether she was actually victimized by a careless abortionist or whether she, as Salon put it, “tried to self-induce,” she most certainly was a victim of an as-yet-to-evolve society—Roe v. Wade was still a decade away.

The cause of Ann Keenan’s death was not known even by her friends, due, it is suspected, to the fact that George Romney had become governor of Michigan just a year earlier. In the Detroit News appeared a short notice of her death, described only as “suddenly,” but with this line:

Memorial tributes may be sent to the Planned Parenthood Association.

As Salon pointed out,

Planned Parenthood was at that time an organization focused exclusively on birth control and family planning; abortions, of course, were not yet legal. But the group had sponsored a conference several years earlier supporting liberalization of abortion laws.

Apparently, the Keenan family believed it was important, by their suggestion to pay tribute to their daughter by giving to Planned Parenthood, to show that their daughter’s death could at least call attention to an organization whose position on legal abortions could have saved her life.

It is doubtful that any of us would have ever heard of Ann Keenan if it weren’t for Mitt Romney, who was 16 when she died.   Seeking to win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, Romney said the following during a 1994 debate, in response to Kennedy—prophetically, it turns out—calling him “multiple choice” on abortion rights:

On the idea of ‘multiple-choice,’ I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.

When Etch-A-Romney says we won’t see him wavering, we can count on a waver coming.  But keep in mind that he said the woman “who passed away from an illegal abortion” was a “close family relative that was very close to me.”

Salon supplied some additional details:

After the debate, the Romney campaign wouldn’t identify the woman Romney had referred to, saying only that she was the sister of Romney’s brother-in-law, and that she had been engaged when she became pregnant. The candidate himself said, “I hadn’t thought much about” abortion until the relative’s death, but that it “obviously makes one see that regardless of one’s beliefs about choice, that you would hope it would be safe and legal.”

That last phrase, “safe and legal,” is where the unwavering Mr. Etch not only wavered, he outright devolved. From his campaign website:

Mitt Romney is pro-life… Mitt believes that life begins at conception and wishes that the laws of our nation reflected that view. But while the nation remains so divided, he believes that the right next step is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade – a case of blatant judicial activism that took a decision that should be left to the people and placed it in the hands of unelected judges. With Roe overturned, states will be empowered through the democratic process to determine their own abortion laws and not have them dictated by judicial mandate.

In other words, Mitt Romney would have us return to 1963, when his “close family relative” who was “very close” to him, Ann Keenan, fell victim to the anti-choice mentality that dominated the political and legal landscape at the time. That, my friends, is the mother of all wavers, and someone, somewhere, should specifically ask him about it.

And as if Romney hadn’t done enough damage to the memory of the Keenans, who so long ago urged friends and family to give to Planned Parenthood in memory of their daughter, Romney said in March:

Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.

Someone should ask him about that, too.

So, there you have it. A man who said in 1994 that Ann Keenan’s unnecessary death made him “see that regardless of one’s beliefs about choice, that you would hope it would be safe and legal,” and who insisted, “I do not impose my beliefs on other people,” now says that we should return to the days before Roe v. Wade; that he would as president defund Planned Parenthood.

And to make it as worse as can be, Romney was asked in 2007 if he supported the 2004 Republican platform, which stated:

We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make it clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

Such a position, should it become law, could criminalize many forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. And His Etchiness was all for it:

I do support the Republican platform and I support that being part of the Republican platform and I’m pro-life.

This Mitt Romney guy, whoever he was, is, or will become, is, as I have said before, one strange and creepy cat.

How Conservatives Subvert Self-Government

“The entire modern conservative movement consists of an ongoing attempt to sever the relationship of a self-governing people to their government, to break down the concept of a political commonwealth.”

—Charles Pierce

n Sunday’s Joplin Globe appeared a column from a local college professor (of finance) named Richard La Near. Suffice it to say that, although I have lately ignored him, I have previously taken on this union-hating, learned man—God, how I wish I could put “learned” in quotation marks.

But this shouldn’t be ignored: Arguing for “partially and slowly” privatizing Social Security, the “Honorary Chairholder of Free Enterprise at Missouri Southern State University” butted in a long line of melodramatic conservatives by falsely calling the wildly popular social insurance program a “legalized Ponzi scheme.”

And while that should have been dreadfully ditsy enough, he wrote the following, presumably in reference to “Obamacare”:

The passage of one more entitlement program will prove that too much democracy can be devastating to a great nation. Again, the takers will outnumber—and outvote—the makers, and more people will vote for a living rather than work for a living.

Ah, how clever. And how cynical.

Now, I’m not one to extol the virtues of ignorance and bigotry that sometime (okay, often) accompany the exercise of our democratic heritage, but we are what we are. Abraham Lincoln called the American people his “rightful masters.” If La Near’s “too much democracy” brings about our national extinction, if we find that self-government by America’s rightful masters will one day lead to our ruin, then so be it.

As a bona fide member of the rightful masters class, I’d rather go down as the victim of people in welfare hammocks than of conservative capitalist carnivores like Mitt Romney, a man who has successfully preyed upon the working class such that he can bulldoze a $12 million, 3,000-square-foot beachfront house only to replace it with an 11,000-square-foot beachfront house.

Charles Pierce wrote recently:

In modern conservative thought…and in the mindset it seeks to ingrain on the people of the country, the government is the ultimate Other.

In doing so, the corporate masters of the conservative movement are good with all of this because they seek a wary, frightened and insecure people.

Yes, Amen! Yes! Conservatives seek a “wary, frightened and insecure people.” People suspicious and afraid of too much democracy, afraid, for God’s sake, of their own government! That’s the message Dr. La Near is trying to send.

Thomas Frank, in his book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared The Nation, essentially documents the attempts by right-wingers to take over government only to undermine it, to subvert it, to, as Charles Pierce so aptly described it, “break down the concept of a political commonwealth.”

You see, conservatives talk of a “commonwealth“—”a group of persons united by some common interest“—mainly in terms of war, of fighting terrorism or some other common enemy. There isn’t much of a sense of political commonwealth worth preserving here at home, beyond the small commonwealth of the wealthy.

Conservatives these days, for instance, see no pressing domestic need to provide an affordable college education to our kids or to keep sick folks from going bankrupt, but they do see a pressing need to keep taxes low on the rich.

John Dean, whose book, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, is a must read, said of contemporary conservatives:

they are radicals more interested in power for themselves and other Republicans instead of serving the general public interest.

There simply is no “general public interest“—no national commonwealth—that a conservative can love, so long as it is tied up with an effective, domestically-interested government. But we have to ask ourselves just what the Constitution means by its splendidly pithy preamble:

We the People  of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Clearly this government—our government—was established as an instrument of the People that would go about the sometimes messy business of forming a “more perfect Union” and creating fairness and peace at home, protecting ourselves from external enemies, promoting “the general Welfare,” and fortifying our Liberty.

It’s not possible to neatly separate the domestic duties of our constitutional government from its duty to defend us, as so many on the right are wont to do. The two are tightly bound together and Americans should also be tightly bound together around the idea that we are all-in on a we-the-people government.

And by using language like “legalized Ponzi scheme,” in reference to the old age fear-killer we call Social Security, or saying that “too much democracy can be devastating” to, uh, a democratic nation, Richard La Near, and others like him, are sadly pulling apart the bonds that hold us—we the people—together.

In La Near’s final paragraph, he wrote:

In conclusion, I would note that every great nation must periodically deflate to remain competitive. Those with flexible economic and political systems can do so…

America must “deflate to remain competitive”? I wonder just what segment of our society he has in mind that will have to do all the deflating? The deflated poor? The deflated sick? The deflating middle class? You will search La Near’s “financial Armageddon is coming” writings in vain for any kind of sign that he believes the wealthiest Americans should get in on the deflating, at least by paying a little more in taxes.

But you will find much wariness, much fear, and much insecurity about our democracy, about self-government, about America’s rightful masters. In short, you will find the philosophy of contemporary conservatism.

Romney’s Assault On Fellow Student Just Not That Big A Deal Compared To Barack Obama’s “Sordid High School Past”

The right-wing lying machine is an amazing thing to behold.

The ink was still damp on the Washington Post story about Romney assaulting a fellow high school student with a pair of scissors (even if it was only to cut his hair), when the fun began:

That story called the assault on John Lauber a “relatively innocent” high school prank. You know, sort of like giving someone a wedgy or something.

Breitbard also featured these “stories”:

My favorite of those was the “Does WaPo Know Obama Shoved a Little Girl?” You sort of have to read it to understand how stupid it is, but suffice it to say that a very young Obama giving a girl a “slight shove” on the playground because other kids were teasing him about being her boyfriend is not even remotely the same thing as an 18-year-old Romney forcibly cutting the hair of a boy suspected of being gay.

But we are talking about some serious Obama-haters at Breitbart, so this is not a surprising take.

Some Things You Just Don’t Forget

Mittens was a bully in high school? Who could have guessed that?

And now he’s lying about it? Who could have guessed that?

The Washington Post story of a preppy high schooler named Mitt Romney unable to tolerate the nonconformist behavior of a “presumed homosexual” was verified “by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another.”

John Lauber made the mistake of coming to the elite, all-boys prep school one day, “with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye.” Little did he know that the son of the Michigan governor would take it upon himself to make the world safe for tie-wearing and briefcase-carrying future vulture capitalists everywhere.

The young Romney demonstrated his fledgling leadership skills by leading his prepped posse in an assault against Lauber, tackling him and pinning him to the ground:

As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Oh, but the story was fifty years ago, says the Romney campaign today. These and other stories “seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”

No memory? You don’t remember that you held a kid down and forcibly cut his insubordinate hair?  John Lauber doesn’t remember the incident either. But that’s because he’s dead. Is Romney dead, or is it just his sense of decency that has passed on to the Mormon version of heaven?

Yesterday on The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd, I heard Ed Gillespie, senior adviser for the Romney campaign, say this:

Governor Romney doesn’t remember that incident at all. It’s understandable, it was in high school.

You know, come to think of it, I don’t remember all the times I bullied people in high school either. But maybe that’s because I didn’t bully anyone in high school.  I didn’t assault anyone with scissors during a hysterical, homophobic manhunt for my own manhood.

But Gillespie has it exactly wrong. You see, because the incident happened in high school is exactly why it is not understandable that Romney doesn’t remember it. High school has a way of staying with you, for good or for ill.

When I was in Fort Scott Senior High School, most decidedly not a fancy prep school, I had a horrendous case of acne and hair down to my shoulders, curly and fuzzy and culturally defiant, which, of course, was the point. Naturally, with hair like mine, going to school in a rural town of 9,000 folks earned me a lot of attention, almost all of it negative. And I remember, vividly, the few times that I was actually threatened by bullies, amid the normal day-to-day ridicule.

To be fair, I suppose it is possible that bullying has become so commonplace for Romney that the incident involving John Lauber simply blends in with all the rest. I mean, maybe he really doesn’t remember that first, early assault. Romney said yesterday on Romney-friendly Fox radio:

I had no idea that this person might have been gay.

“This person.” Is it too much to ask of Romney to give John Lauber a name? But keep that statement, as well as his campaign’s statement that he had “no memory” of the incident, in mind as we go on.

Romney continued:

As the article points out, I participated in a lot of high jinks and pranks during high school, and, uh, some may have gone too far, and for that I apologize.

Okay. So he acknowledges the substance of the Washington Post story and he is sorry that some high jinks and pranks “may have gone too far.” Now, let’s move on to a later interview he did with Neil Cavuto on Fox TV:

I don’t recall the incident myself, but I’ve seen the reports and [I'm] not gonna argue with that. There’s no question but that I did some stupid things when I was in high school.

Clearly, Romney says he doesn’t “recall” the incident involving John Lauber. He doesn’t remember it. If it happened, he’s not going to “argue with that.” Now, the problem with all that is earlier in the day, remember he said,

I had no idea that his person might have been gay.

So, how does Romney not recall the hair-cutting assault but does definitely recall that he “had no idea” that John Lauber “might have been gay”? Huh?

There is little if any doubt that Romney did what the sources for the WaPo story said he did way back in high school.  And there isn’t much doubt that what Romney is really more defensive about today is the reason he did what he did.

He doesn’t really mind all that much that we think of him as some kind of rules enforcer at an elite, leader-making school in Michigan. But he doesn’t want us to think of him as singling out someone who was perceived to be gay, who dared to be different in an environment where rigidity and conformity and ties and briefcases were the norm.

And while I don’t blame him for wanting to hide that dark truth about his high school days, wouldn’t it have served him—and all of us—better if he had just admitted the incident, apologized to the memory of John Lauber, and then used this moment to tell homophobic Americans that, like that young Mitt Romney, they have some growing up to do?

The Pursuit Of Happiness

Jim Wheeler wrote, as part of a comment on my Ideology, Reason, And the Brain:

In this country, as in the fictional Lake Woebegone, we insist that all children are above average. Not only that, we insist that they all learn the same things at the same pace, which when you think about it is absurd.

Jim has expressed that sentiment before, but it struck me as particularly true, after an event I was fortunate enough to attend last Saturday.

During “Senior Day” at Joplin High School’s last home baseball game, a school teacher introduced each of the senior players, along with their parents, as they walked to home plate for a photograph. During the introduction, the teacher related the after-high-school desires of each of the seniors. Most, of course, expressed the desire to go to college.

Except one. He said he wanted to be a “welder.”

Now, I had never heard anything like that before, despite sitting through several of those kinds of ceremonies. Granted, I only know this young man and his parents from the baseball team, but I like them very much, and I can tell you that I was not in the least bit surprised about his post-secondary education wishes.

This teenager is not the college type, and I’m guessing neither were his parents.  These folks were just raised with different interests and preferences, and advanced education means something different to them than perhaps to most people these days.

But guess what? We need welders to make this country work. We need folks who can do those sorts of things, and it was refreshing to hear that a kid, who has no doubt endured much you-need-to-go-to-college-programming from the system, could earnestly and honestly say, “No thanks, I want to be a welder.”

That high school graduate may not end up finding a cure for cancer or doing some other “great” deed, but he will be doing his part to keep America running, to keep civilization from falling apart.  And that ain’t nothing.

And my guess is that he will be damned happy doing it.

Obamalution

The most important civil rights issue of our time is whether gay folks will continue to be treated like freaks.

And now, at last, we have Barack Obama on the side of the angels of liberty, as he declared his evolution complete:

I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Coming on the heels of the anti-gay vote in North Carolina, I particularly admire—in fact I’m all gushy about it—the President’s admission that his evolving thinking has culminated in an affirmation of complete same-sex rights, which is essentially an affirmation of American constitutional liberty.

Would that he had made such a statement before that horrendous, last-cultural-gasp vote, in North Carolina, so we could see how it might have altered the numbers a bit.

Yet there it was, a historic and courageous statement that many critics didn’t think Mr. Obama would make at this time. Many thought he wouldn’t dare come out for homosexual equality before the election. Too much was at stake. The country isn’t quite ready for it.

But he did it, and “it” is not without political danger.  It will most certainly energize the Iron Age blowhards on the religious right, who will triple their efforts to unseat the homo-loving reprobate in the White’s House.

However, no matter what happens this November, even if Barack Obama is burned by the last flickering embers of white religious angst, even if conservative Christians rage against the dying of the white light and muster one final victory on behalf of bigotry, make no mistake about it: homosexuals will one day become—in every state in this union—equal citizens under the law.

And Barack Obama’s decision to fully embrace homosexuals as free and equal citizens has advanced that eventuation.  Not only that, it will have an immediate definite cultural impact: it will, no doubt, exacerbate the cultural piety-anxiety that many white conservative Christians already suffer from, but, more important, it will have a positive effect on the black community, many of whom have resisted the idea that all people—even those compelled by nature to love and desire other folks of the same sex—deserve to be treated as, well, Americans.

Ideology, Reason, And The Brain

My friend and Joplin blogger Jim Wheeler recently wrote a short review of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Social Conquest of Earth. Jim commented:

…I often find myself amazed at the depth of ignorance about science in the modern general public. It is almost as if we were two species, one cognizant and rational and the other, larger one, superstitious, primal, tribal, and bellicose. There is some evidence that groups of humanity may be evolving apart in those regards.

That’s interesting because on “Up with Chris Hayes” this past weekend, we were treated to an absolutely fascinating discussion about ideology and brains, featuring Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain, and Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Hayes introduced the two authors  by stating that an “insidious” feature of our current political polarization is that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to relate to people at the other end of the spectrum. They seem irrational, detached from reality, outright crazy.” He then posed this question:

If through evolution we’ve all inherited the same moral intuitions, then how do we end up so far apart on so many basic political issues?

Given the nature of our modern life, this question is one of the most important we can ask. Just what makes some of us seem, as Jim Wheeler suggests, “cognizant and rational,” and others seem “superstitious, primal, tribal, and bellicose“?

Now, anyone interested in this topic should follow the link above and watch the segment (I can’t post it here at the moment), but the answer to that crucial question seems to be pretty much how Hayes summarized the current “social-psychological research” on the subject:

“Reason” is essentially constructed ex post to come up with reasons to justify things that we already arrive at viscerally and through intuition.

In other words, all, or at least most, of us are led around by our emotions, by our gut, and we essentially adopt some form of reasoning after the fact to support our emotional preferences. If that is true, it has profound implications, no? It would mean, for instance, that in order to change someone’s mind, the appeal should be an emotional one rather than a logical, rational one.

Consider this story on NPR this morning:

When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country. About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can’t.

But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, the numbers were reversed: Three-fourths of Democrats said President Bush could do something about high gas prices, while the majority of Republicans said gas prices were clearly outside the president’s control.

The flipped perceptions on gas prices isn’t an aberration, said Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan. On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.

Nyhan suggested that,

partisans reject facts because they produce cognitive dissonance — the psychological experience of having to hold inconsistent ideas in one’s head. When Democrats hear the argument that the president can do something about high gas prices, that produces dissonance because it clashes with the loyalties these voters feel toward Obama. The same thing happens when Republicans hear that Obama cannot be held responsible for high gas prices — the information challenges their dislike of the president.

In other words, Nyhan continues, “partisans reject such information not because they’re against the facts, but because it’s painful.”  Now we can see why it is so hard to change someone’s mind with “the facts.”

All of which has now compelled me (!) to soon post a piece I have withheld due to its personally disturbing implications. The tease:

In his latest book, philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris tackles the issue of free will. He says,

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.  We do not have the freedom we think we have.

Goodbye, Dick

I have followed the career of Indiana Senator Richard Lugar for years and, God rest his political soul,  he will soon be gone from the United States Senate.

And good riddance.

The mostly phony Republican moderate or “centrist,” who was the longest-serving senator in Indiana history, has voted for domestic obstructionism time and again throughout Obama’s presidency (including Tuesday’s vote to preserve low interest rates for millions of college students’ loans), and it is bullshit to claim (as many have) that he was one of the last of reasonable, responsible Republicans. There wasn’t that much reasonableness about him, except for his relatively pragmatic internationalism.

But international issues are only a small part of the job senators are called on to do. Domestically, Lugar’s past behavior will compare favorably to the behavior of the Tea Party nut job, another Dick, Richard Mourdock, who beat Lugar in the GOP primary on Tuesday, should Mourdock beat the Democrat in November.

Lugar didn’t even reside in Indiana, for God’s sake. When he came “home,” he lodged in a hotel in Indianapolis—initially at taxpayer’s expense.  Is that the behavior of a moderate centrist?

To prove my point that Lugar’s reasonableness is only party-deep, I present his concession remarks. Keep in mind that this man was allegedly a “statesman” in the Republican Party and that he had a “collegial relationship“—even friendship—with Barack Obama:

Hoosier Republican primary voters have chosen their candidate for the U.S. Senate. I congratulate my opponent on his victory in a hard fought race. I want to see a Republican in the White House, and I want to see my friend Mitch McConnell have a Republican majority in the Senate. I hope my opponent prevails in November to contribute to that Republican majority.

Blah, blah, blah. Contrast those partisan remarks with the remarks of President Obama, who said:

While Dick and I didn’t always agree on everything, I found during my time in the Senate that he was often willing to reach across the aisle and get things done. My administration’s efforts to secure the world’s most dangerous weapons has been based on the work that Sen. Lugar began, as well as the bipartisan cooperation we forged during my first overseas trip as senator to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

Sen. Lugar comes from a tradition of strong, bipartisan leadership on national security that helped us prevail in the Cold War and sustain American leadership ever since. He has served his constituents and his country well, and I wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

Now, that is class. And Lugar’s boilerplate partisan comments are, well, typical of a contemporary Republican who—even in defeat—still bends his knee to Tea Party extremists. God knows what good Lugar could have done by calling out the extremists in his party, but we will never know.

There just aren’t too many Republicans that have that kind of fight in them these days.

Mittens Is A Creepy Kind Of Cat

I was watching television this morning, minding my own bidness, when I had what I thought was a hallucination. It was in the form of this headline crawling across the screen during Good Morning America:

ROMNEY TAKES CREDIT FOR AUTO INDUSTRY RECOVERY

What! I thought, as I rubbed my eyes. I waited a few more minutes until it crawled by again. Sure enough:

ROMNEY TAKES CREDIT FOR AUTO INDUSTRY RECOVERY

Could it be true? Could Romney’s affection for deception have finally spun completely out of control? Or was ABC News simply playing a little joke, sort of like if it had created this headline:

RUSH LIMBAUGH TAKES CREDIT FOR INVENTING SKINNY MARGARITA

That headline creeping across my screen would have made more sense to me.

In any case, it turns out it is true, at least the part about Romney taking credit for the auto industry recovery:

I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy. And finally, when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.

Now, I have recently called Romney a pathological prevaricator, but even I grossly underestimated the depth of his pathology. Does this man think he can hypnotize us with his audacity? Does he think his daring lies will induce some kind of collective amnesia and we will all forget about his infamous “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” piece in The New York Times? He told us then:

If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.

Romney also told Larry King:

Bailout of enterprises that are in trouble, that’s not the right way to go. I know President Bush started it with the auto industry. I thought it was a mistake.

He said that way back in 2009, which is about a gazillion years ago in Romney-time.

Mittens—who is running for president based on his bidness acumen—claims that his idea of a “managed bankruptcy” for the auto industry would have worked without the government bailout. Except there is this one crushing fact out there that contradicts his foolhardy claim:

The federal judge who presided over Chrysler’s bankruptcy told ABC News in an exclusive interview that the ailing company could not have survived without taxpayer money.

No bailout, no Chrysler.

As Jennifer Granholm, who was governor of Michigan at the time, said on ABC’s This Week a couple of Sundays ago, there would be no auto industry at all if it weren’t for the government bailout because no one was willing to put up the money to save the companies.”We were calling everybody, begging,” she insisted.

And here is an excerpt from a Reuters article in 2009 that enlarges the case for the necessity of the bailout:

The global auto industry would have collapsed if the U.S. government had not provided taxpayer-backed financing for automakers General Motors and Chrysler, according to the chief executive officer of Motors Liquidation Co…

“If GM had gone down, the world’s supply base would have gone down,” said Al Koch, speaking at the Reuters Restructuring Summit in New York. Koch was GM’s chief restructuring officer during the bankruptcy and now heads the GM unit that is being liquidated.

“There wouldn’t have been a manufacturer that could have completed a car, because somewhere on the car there would be a part that needs to come from a supplier that had failed,” he said.

All of which serves to show that with Mitt Romney, we are not dealing with an ordinary politician’s attempt to spin facts in his favor. No, no, no. He brazenly invents new facts and discards old ones, hoping to blind us with his bluster or to bewitch us with his bombast.

He is a strange and creepy cat.

The Sound of Mitt’s Silence, Part II

It’s good to know that “of course” Mittens doesn’t think his political opponent—who happens also to be the President of the United States—”should be tried for treason,” as a woman asserted at his town hall in Cleveland on Monday.

But understand: It’s not that Obama hasn’t committed treason—that may be up for discussion, I assume—it’s just that he shouldn’t be tried for it.

What bizarre times we live in. There is no indignity that can be hurled at Barack Obama during a Republican event these days that Republican candidates feel compelled to challenge.

Mittens defended his silence this way:

I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me.

Ah, the old Rick Santorum dodge. Remember this:

Santorum: Not My Job to Correct Voters Who Say Obama’s a Muslim

Now, the problem with Romney using the Santorum Shuffle here is that he has bothered to correct voters in his recent campaign past:

Romney to angry fairgoers: ‘Corporations are people, my friend’

How could we forget that wonderful moment where Mittens decided he should educate someone in the audience who dared suggest that corporations should be taxed more.

Apparently, corporations warm Mittens’ heart-cockles such that a bad word towards them spikes his pissometer and compels him to speak out. But not so when someone—as part of a question being asked of Romney—clearly states that Obama “should be tried for treason.”

Treason, the last time I checked, is a crime punishable by death in the United States. And one would think that if a disturbed audience member at a Republican town hall accused a sitting president of a capital crime like treason, that perhaps the presumptive GOP presidential nominee might have a McCain moment and object to it.

But nope. No McCain moment, perhaps because Romney’s confrontational courage was wasted during the Vietnam War in France, shilling  for Joseph Smith’s cultic church.

Let’s imagine that the questioner had said that Obama’s stance on abortion meant that he should be “tried for murder.” What would Mittens have said?

There is obviously no outrageous charge that can be made against Barack Obama that would stir Romney to decency. If accusing the President of treason doesn’t do it, nothing will summons from Mittens even a hint of decorum.

The man is a walking advertisement for political pusillanimity. He cannot and will not take on the freaks in his party. Even the creepy talk show host and theological teabagger Bryan Fischer is on to him.

Fischer, who claimed that Romney fired Richard Grinnell, his gay foreign policy spokesman, under pressure from right-wing homophobes like Bryan Fischer, said this:

… if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me?

How, indeed.

The Sound Of Mitt’s Silence

At a town hall in Cleveland today, a woman asked Mittens a question, but with a twist:

We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution. (Applause.) And I want to know—yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason—but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country.

Now, in order to highlight Mitttens’ response to the “tried for treason” comment, I want to put it in a special box:

Yep, that’s right. He ignored it at the time. Here’s the episode in all its ignominy:

It’s Like Sex For Them

Remember the supercommittee from last year? Remember how it failed to engineer a deficit deal and thus triggered those dreaded sequestered cuts that were supposed to make lawmakers see the light or else?

Well, we all know that “or else” won’t likely materialize in the end, but why deprive Republicans of a little fun in the mean time? Despite knowing they will not get any cooperation from Democrats who have given too much already in exchange for, uh, not much, House Republicans are set to bring up a their own hand-crafted bill for debate this week that would replace $78 billion in sequestered cuts that are scheduled to take effect in 2013.

Now, wasting their time on such useless legislation before the election this November is perhaps understandable, since there isn’t much else for Republicans to do these days—the ongoing War on Women hasn’t exactly been a polling success.

But as I suggested there must be some fun in it for the hard-core legislators, and sure enough here it is:

In addition to the $78 billion in sequester replacement, the bill contains an additional $180 billion in cuts aimed at reducing the deficit. Among the federal programs hit are food stamps, funding for the 2010 healthcare and financial regulatory laws and the refundable child tax credit.

Ah, there’s the orgasmic rub: Besides taking a stab at the Affordable Care Act, they’re putting a hurt on those most in need by cutting food stamps and healthcare funding and the refundable Child Tax Credit—such needy folks aren’t exactly big donors to GOP campaigns, now are they?—all the while making sure that Wall Street gets to take off its greed-monitoring ankle bracelet and go back to its life of slime.

Fun, fun, fun!  The collective conservative climax that will result should this Republican effort pass the House this week will likely be audible all the way to Joplin. Ozark Billy‘s in for a good time as he contemplates how much damage his (likely) vote can do to folks around here who need food stamps and a little money refunded to help raise their kids.

Remarks And Asides, International Edition

Come on, peoples, we’ve gots to keep up with The World:

Vladimir Putin is back as president of Russia, pledging to “strengthen Russian democracy, constitutional rights and freedoms.”  Yes, and free vodka for everyone!

The new president, whose election was no doubt fraudulent, was greeted by protesters on Sunday with a hardy, “Putin is a thief!,” after which the man who pledged to strengthen democracy, rights, and freedom had police bash the protesters’ heads and arrest them by the hundreds.

Now, that is the Russian democracy we all know and love! Welcome back, Pootie-Poot!

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Ah, that European debt crisis thingy: The French have given the finger to the Germans and other austerity fanatics in Europe by electing a real honest-to-goodness Socialist to run the country. Francois Hollande promises to renegotiate the deal the outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, made with Germany’s Angela Merkel on government debt.

I for one am glad that the world now has another prominent socialist making decisions, as Barack Obama is certainly getting tired of carrying the load.

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And the Greeks have also sort of flipped the bird to their austerity-minded handlers in high places like Germany by abandoning in droves their two main political parties in parliamentary elections.

Nobody now knows what will happen to the cut-your-way-to-prosperity philosophy imposed on the Greeks and across Europe, but the hardliners are vowing that Greece must stay the course.

A very critical Michael Brenner put it nicely recently:

Europe in effect has been locked into a fiscal chastity belt made in Germany according to German specifications.

Which means, Brenner argues,

relegating Greeks, Irish, Portuguese, et. al. to a condition of debt servitude for the foreseeable future. Severest penalties will be imposed on the poor and those of modest means, on the old, on the sick, on all whose well-being depends on the network of social programs which, all across the continent, has made Europe the most enlightened and humane society the world has ever known.

Yes, but the banks will come out okay, so all is good!

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And speaking of the leader of Europe’s anti-Keynesian fiscal policy, there is some trouble brewing at home:

Voters in Germany’s northernmost state ousted a governing center-right government made up of the same parties as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s federal coalition, according to exit polls based on partial results.

For Merkel, the defeat of her local allies in Schleswig-Holstein state could be an omen of worse to come.

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Now, after having read all that, aren’t  you glad you live in America, where our only real problem is our Kenyan socialist president who hates the country and apologizes for us everywhere he goes around the world?

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And speaking of the Kenyan socialist who hates America, Big O followed yet another terrorist SOB to Joe Biden’s “gates of hell” and killed an al-Qaeda leader who may have thunk we had forgotten all about him.

This time it was Fahd al-Quso who enjoyed the brief company of a U.S. drone before the missile sent him packing, piece by piece, to Allah.

Of course it will take some time before Allah gets the pieces put back together, but when he does I am sure he will have a nice heavenly reward for Quso, who was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole way back in 2000.

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Finally, I think it is important to note that Big O, who Republicans claim is weak on national security issues, has now sent more fragments of anti-American terrorist leaders to an afterlife with Allah than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ever dreamed of.  Okay, okay, Bush and Cheney probably did dream big dreams about killing terrorists, but Big O is gittin’ ‘er dun!