All the crying going on from Camp Mittens denying that Romney set out to screw Congressman Allen West out of his seat in Palm Beach County is just the usual exaggerated outrage that we should be accustomed to from Mitt and Company when they’ve been caught in the act.
Remember these are the same guys who are saying that Mitt’s the most electable candidate, but if we question Mitt’s electability we’ll only have ourselves to blame if Mitt doesn’t get elected.
Or something like that.
It’s hard to keep up with the rhetoric when a campaign has one set of lies to fool the public, one set of lies to fool reporters and one set of lies to fool themselves, in a paraphrase of war-time British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
“I must have missed something in today's column” wrote one rabid Romney fan, deliberately misreading criticism of Romney, “what office in the Florida legislature does Mitt Romney hold?”
None, of course
And no one is saying that Mitt Romney, much less his campaign, set out specifically to hurt Colonel West.
What we are saying, and what has been acknowledged to have some level of veracity, is that people in the Florida GOP who represent Mitt set out to hurt West during the redistricting process. They did it because they are essentially hostile to the Tea Party element. So get used to it because these are the people who Mitt picked to surround himself with.
It’s a pretty safe assumption that Mitt agrees with their point of view. You know, the whole birds-of-a-feather thing?
These are the same type of folks in the GOP who within days of the nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president on the Republican ticket, were describing her as a hillbilly-gone-wild at Neiman Marcuses from coast-to-coast.
What’s worse they were collecting paychecks from John McCain while they were twisting the knife into Sarah Palin and the Republican ticket. Remember that money you sent to McCain? It went to support a hatchet, not a ballot.
And while the rest of us were knocking on doors, working GOTV, McCain staffers were thinking up better punchlines on the Palin family. Forget about TARP. The moment McCain lost the campaign was the moment he turned a blind eye to his own campaign staff leaking “information” on Palin.
Getting past the idiocy of such a move, let’s move on to the policy behind such a move.
Clearly there are two GOPs today.
There’s a GOP that thinks that we got into the fiscal mess that we are in because both parties lost the fiscal restraint that is the necessary handmaiden of limited government. There’s another GOP that thinks that the only thing that matters in the election contest for president is how much money you can raise and if you sound plausible on TV.
Guess which side Romney’s on?
These are the guys who helped Fannie and Freddie securitize the real estate market; these are the guys who brought us Sunshine Charlie Crist; these are the guys who gladly, warmly will try to put the Humpty Dumpty back of the wall if only they can figure out how to monetize, regulate it and tax it and lobby for it. For them, hostility to the grassroots goes beyond ideology. It’s an ingrained habit.
They know they can’t win the ideological battle against the soul of the GOP, so instead they just gerrymander us. Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida could very well gerrymander Mitt into the nomination, despite his obvious flaws.
There are two people in our country who as chief executives, passed and signed socialized medicine schemes.
One is Barack Obama.
The other is Mitt Romney.
These are the guys who support the guys who socialized medicine.
“You're absolutely right when you say that there's no room for Allen West in Romney's GOP,” wrote another Romney fan. “Uncompromising ‘idealists’ like Allen West who oppose moderate (bipartisan) ideas out of sheer spite have no business in the GOP. It's the only reason why beating Obama in the fall isn't going to be a slam-dunk.”
Of course they hate Sarah Palin and Allen West.
Palin and West are the guys who support the guys who will get stuck with Romney’s- and Obama’s- White House bill.
I hope I’m wrong about Romney. I hope that if he wins the nomination, he goes on to be the greatest president in the history of the US.
But the odds are against it if the company he keeps tells us anything.
And I’d rather be wrong now, than wrong later, as I fear some Romney backers will be.
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