By M. Ulric Killion
Photo Source: “It was also shamelessly maudlin, mendacious in the extreme, and otherwise completely of a piece with the entire campaign that has been waged by the man who delivered it in triumph last night”, Charles P. Pierce, Game Over: Mitt Romney's Big Night, Esquire magazine, April 25, 2012.
On April 24, 2012, Willard Mitt Romney (“Rmoney”) gave a sort of pre-ordination speech that addressed his ascendancy to the GOP’s 2012 candidate for the office of U.S. president. Never mind Newt Gingrich, though now re-assessing his campaign, and Ron Paul, who is still challenging his ascendancy, Rmoney took the crown and set it upon his head, as in the coronation of a king.
For this reason, and countless others, the 2012 GOP primary race will go down in history as the worst kind of political circus, the worst variety of forked tongues, the most bloodletting of political campaigns, and a distinguishable extremism that will haunt the GOP for years to come. In other words, when it comes time to vote in November, one would certainly have to share some of their extremisms or extreme positions in order to the punch the GOP ticket for POTUS.
When reading several articles covering Romney’s speech, one article stood out from many critiques of his performance. This is the article written by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire magazine), which, as usual, is very revealing about Rmoney. This is because Pierce’s article essentially reveals what the average American dislikes, dreads, and fears about his candidacy for president. For example, Pierce writes,
The naked lack of shame about the whole speech was the only real story of the night. The notion of Willard Romney, Champion Of The Proletariat is so utterly preposterous that it fairly cried out for coverage. But the speech was well-crafted and delivered with something approaching actual gusto, so that, apparently, was enough for now,
He’s getting better at being shameless. Believe that. In retrospect, it's hard to believe anyone ever took seriously the notion that Romney was not inevitable.
This is also one of the reasons that Rmoney will always be the flip-flop guy, the etch-a-sketch meme, and simply unlikable. Pierce clearly reveals this reality about Rmoney in his characterization of the “Champion of the Proletariat.”
As Pierce also observed,
This is now a sleek, edgeless machine and, at its heart, is a sleek, edgeless, but altogether genuine, carnivore. At odd moments, Romney sounds very much like Richard Nixon without the latter's merry carnival of lifetime neuroses. (Romney, in fact, unlike his father, is very much the kind of Republican Nixon once wanted to be — vicious and wealthy.) For example, at one point in last night’s speech, after he'd assured all those moms and pops on food stamps that he was on their side, he told them of their dark future if the president is re-elected:
With Obamacare fully installed, government will come to control half the economy, and we will have effectively ceased to be a free-enterprise society. This president is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He's asking us to accept that Washington knows best — and can provide all.
We will have effectively ceased to be a free-enterprise society.
That passage is pure Nixon, when it is not pure Glenn Beck. (We’re back to “czars” again?) Massachusetts did not “cease to be a free-enterprise society” when he passed his health-care plan there. (He can look at my insurance bill if he’s still unclear about that.) But because he has rolled so powerfully to the nomination, he can say pretty much anything at this point because the power of his campaign now far outweighs the truth of his words. There once again is a rising sense of inevitability about him, and he is most comfortable with that. There is nothing light or casual about what he's doing. He sees a property worth buying, and he’s in it for the kill.
Quoting Paul Krugman (New York Times), “Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are?”
In the interim, the GOP right wing nuts leave an American populace with the choice of their extremism versus non-extreme ideas and policies.
For instance, the right wing nuts, in perpetuating a falsehood, deny that President Obama is a Christian, which is a convenient falsehood they intend to use as a false rationalization for voting against Obama.
In the same breath, they also do not consider Romney to be a Christian, because he is a Mormon. However, in the case of Rmoney, they conveniently rationalize his non-Christianity as being a non-issue for them.
It is also notable that the right wing nuts as a whole share a strange sort of twisted logic that they intend to vote against the POTUS, but not for Rmoney. They same goes for their illogical rationalizations, which allows them to conveniently pretend that Obama is a communist or socialist, and that he is not even a U.S. citizen.
Their outrageous extremisms and falsehoods, while outrageously shocking are admittedly also outrageously funny at times too.
One would have thought that the right wing nuts would have found a candidate that they actually wanted as their choice for the U.S. presidency, rather than their wing nut logic of now employing a strategy of simply voting against President Obama. But, then again, the right wing nuts often belie common sense.
It perhaps for these reasons, and many other reasons, with each passing day the now emboldened right wing nuts, while in denial of non-extreme ideas and policies, seem to become even more extreme and nuttier.
In the end, as for Willard Mitt Romney, the jury is still out on who he is, and what he stands for, although it a certainty that he is the champion for neither a struggling American middle class, nor the less fortunate.
This is because everything that we have come to know about the real Romney, with leaks of information here and there, leads us to believe that he will be the champion of Wall Street and corporations, rather than the average American or real Americans.
For now and perhaps forever, for the average America or real Americans, Willard Mitt Romney remains simply out of touch with the lives of average Americans.
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See also The Republican Conundrum
All Rights Reserved by M. Ulric Killion, 2012.
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