Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Mitt Romney: "I Won't Detail My Plans Because I'll Lose"

by Sunnyjane


One day Mitt Romney told the truth and look what happened


In a momentary fit of unintended candor, Mitt Romney admitted that if he tells American voters the truth about his plans for the presidency, he doesn't have a Popsicle's chance in hell of coming up with two hundred and seventy electoral votes in November.  And he has the party he represents to blame.


So why won't a man who wants to be President of the United States of America tell the citizens he intends to lead what he will do?  Simple answer: he can't.


Fortunately, we have the rare opportunity of taking a Hindsight is Always 20/20 scrutiny of the Romney campaign's predicament before we trot off to our respective polling stations this fall. Understanding how Romney got here, and why he cannot be honest with Americans, is paramount in determining what we can expect if the worst happens and he should become President Romney.


A Conniving Cabal of Conservatives Collude 


While the new President and First Lady were attending the ten Inaugural Balls in their honor in January 2009, the seeds of sedition were being sown at a restaurant just a few blocks off Pennsylvania Avenue by the detritus of the once respected Republican Party, who we should feel free to refer to as The Caucus Room Conspirators.  While this group of fifteen pus-suckers dined on $60 slabs of aged prime rib and fine wine, somewhere between the Oysters Rockefeller and the Crème Brulee they developed a simple scheme to sabotage the presidency of Barack Obama.


As Robert Draper reports in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, their plan went like this: oppose every economic policy the President proposes; immediately begin attacking vulnerable Democrats to win the House and Senate in 2010; criticize the President throughout 2011; win the White House in 2012.   Newt Gingrich, who said just recently on Politics Nation that he was glad and honored to have been part of the gang that night, left the meeting behaving like he had just gotten a...um...happy ending with one of his mistresses in his former House office.  You will remember this day, he told his fellow dinner companions as they back-slapped one another when leaving the restaurant. You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.  (It is entirely logical to think that to Newt's blighted space-colony-on-the-moon imagination, he actually expected to become the GOP's anointed savior in 2012.  Wrong.)

It is hardly breaking news to report that, except for passing the Affordable Care Act, (which was challenged by the National Federation of Independent Business and has, remarkably, been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court) the subversive plans concocted by these regressive obstructionists have been successful.


Then the Tide Took a Turn


I'm a National Spelling Bee 
reject but I helped put those
idiots in the House of 
Representatives.  YAY!
As 2010 finally became 2011, the Republicans were congratulating themselves on the successes achieved by winning the House of Representatives.   Mitch McConnell had already publicly and definitively stated that the GOP intended to make Barack Obama a one-term president.  So assured of a victory in 2012 were all Republicans and their Tea Party acolytes that the final list of eight presidential candidates ended up resembling a group of dimwitted seventh-graders who failed the first semester of An Introduction to American Political History.


The President had tried bipartisanship compromise and a willingness to negotiate, to no avail. It is a symptom of their arrogance that the Republican leadership failed to understand that the Democrats would use those hard-line refusals against them in the election. Then the media finally woke up and started calling out the Republicans for being Obstructionists...the Party of NO...the Do-Nothing Party.   The Obama campaign was carefully collecting opposition research and would soon begin to cull all the asinine far-right and anti-American-progress ideological opinions and ideas that were put forth -- and relentlessly reiterated -- during the GOP's tedious primary debates and endless campaign stump stops.


The Box that Barack Built 


This was supposed to be easy!


In an effort to recover from the extremely embarrassing shellacking Democrats received in the mid-term elections, President Obama went into Bring-It-On mode in the spring on 2011.   Fed up with the distraction of the birther issue, he stemmed that tide by releasing his long-form birth certificate, and took great delight rubbing Donald Trump's nose in it at the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 30.  Then the President returned to his home (that would be the large white structure on Pennsylvania Avenue) and watched as Navy Seals took out Osama bin Laden in a top-secret raid that he -- and he alone -- had approved.  


President Obama began throwing proposals, bills, and  issue compromises at law makers left and right; but now stuck with a bunch of ill-mannered, inexperienced, no-tax-increases Teabaggers, what passed for the GOP leadership in congress had no recourse but to continue with the playbook and refuse to consider anything he put forth. Every time the obstructionists said NO, the president took his case on the road and presented it to the American people, pointing his finger directly back at the House of Representatives.   It did not take long for the polls to reveal that only ten percent of American voters approved of congressional lawmakers' performance.


While the nearly thirty GOP primary debates had all the civility of a pack of vultures at a skunk's wake, they did illuminate the pathetic shortage of real leaders in the party. Mitt Romney was called out for being a flip-flopper, a liar, a vulture capitalist, and for having no core values.  All true, of course, but by handily rolling over his opponents with big-money attack ads, he was able to emerge as the GOP candidate.  As Grover Norquist so eloquently blathered at CPAC this spring, All we have to do is replace Obama. ...We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.  And while there was little excitement over Romney's ascension to the lofty role of candidate, tough! Ye gets what ye pays for.


Romney fumbled his way to the top of that GOP primary landfill by peddling his twenty-five years as a corporate job creator and by flinging around tons of Koch money.   (Giving credit where credit is due, Romney is keeping some advertising agencies afloat at the moment.  And personally, I don't believe that there is any truth to the rumor that he has outsourced those jobs to China, but...)


The job-creator meme turned into a complete flop as the truth about Romney's so-called job creations turned out to be jobs created for workers in China and India, including his outsourcing jobs while governor of Massachusetts.


The President, mainstream media, bloggers, and even the social networking sites have blasted Romney so badly on this campaign issue that he's practically stopped talking about it all together.  In one hilarious bit of weak defense, Romney's senior adviser Ed Gillespie appeared on CNN recently to strike back on this issue by retorting that the President's campaign has outsourced telemarketing to Omaha, Nebraska.  Heh.


So just quickly, let's look at what positions Romney won't talk about.  As Think Progress reported recently, the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil issues include the Lily Ledbetter Act, The Dream Act, what tax loopholes he'd close, whether he would support the full authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and which federal agencies he would close.


In addition, Romney once said he thought the Ryan Budget Plan was marvelous, realized the stupidity of taking that particular stance, and quickly added that it was not his own plan and that he would be offering a different plan.  And the details of his new plan?  Well, mine has more choice, and I'll leave it at that. It's something we're working out.


On his economic plan to reduce the deficit, Romney told Time Magazine's Mark Halperin on May 25 that if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I'm not going to do that, of course.  The only problem here is that the Republicans are committed to forcing austerity measures on the nation; John Boehner had already threatened to block the renewal of the debt ceiling in order to compel Democrats to agree to austerity by making radical cuts to social programs.  After this Well, shit! moment, Romney has refused to discuss his economic policy, telling Bob Schieffer recently, Well, we’ll go through that process with Congress as to which of all the different deductions and the exemptions...  (Translation: Hey, Bob, I've gotten my ass kicked on this issue once, so I'm just going to wait for Boehner and Grover Norquist to tell me what my plan is.)


You know things are not going well for Romney and his reluctance to share his policy plans when even Rupert Murdoch is frustrated at the lack of details.




And on July 1, Murdoch was still showing his irritation with Romney.  Does anyone else find it strange that Fox News has not reported on Murdoch's being so annoyed and unimpressed with Mitt Romney?


The media (beyond the likes of Rupert Murdoch) are becoming quite frustrated with Romney, as outlined in this great June 26 segment of the Martin Bashir showThe Mitt Maneuver: Romney's Unique Ability To Divert, Obfuscate, Ignore and LIE.  Perhaps Mitt is under the impression that his sacred garmies will protect him from close scrutiny, but that's as big a fantasy as believing that Americans will vote for a businessman who made his millions by taking away their jobs and socking the proceeds in offshore banks so he can pay a lower income tax than Warren Buffet's secretary.    


And his stance on immigration?  Well,  I think we may just have to give this subject closer scrutiny in the very near future.   Stay tuned.


End Note




Be wary, voters.  What Mitt Romney is selling is something Americans can't afford.  If a Republican presidential candidate won't share his policy plans -- his vision for America -- you can bet that whatever he puts forward will be meant to screw over the Ninety-Nine Percent.
      

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