"I realize that there will be some in the Fourth Estate, or whichever estate, who are far more interested in finding something to write about that is unrelated to the economy, to geopolitics, to the threat of war, to the reality of conflict in Afghanistan today, to a nuclearization of Iran. They’ll instead try and find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.”
Joan Walsh asks whether Romney's catastrophic trip to London is evidence of something more than an odd personal style or a strong feeling of entitlement on Mitt's part:
I’ve found myself wondering over the course of the campaign whether Romney has some kind of personality disorder, so dissociated does he occasionally seem from the well-worn routines of normal human interaction. Maybe we should be asking to see his medical records and not just his tax returns. I don’t mean to be flippant about that or insensitive to any kind of problem he may struggle with. But his struggles are our struggles; he’s running to be our president. There is something very odd about Mitt Romney.
Maybe Mitt is relying too much on his campaign advisers and not enough on his gut, and that is why he is acting strangely. Didn't Al Gore have a similar problem when he ran in 2000?
UPDATE: Perhaps Romney is in fact suffering from a personality disorder. My theory that he might be relying too much on his advisers during this overseas trip does not seem to hold water given these facts:
Romney’s top political advisers stayed home, though chief strategist Stuart Stevens flew to London to join the entourage Friday. The only senior communications aide on the ground to help Romney navigate the public-relations controversy that erupted following the Olympics readiness comments he made Wednesday to NBC News was press secretary Andrea Saul.
And by the way, the Cock Koch Brothers now believe (apparently) that climate change is real and it is man-made. Too bad they didn't come to that conclusion 12 years ago, when we could've done something about it.
Mitt Romney retroactively cancels visit to London.
Dear America: in the future if you want your candidates vetted, just send them to London.
Remember, Mitt Romney is in London with advisors & a full staff - he didn't build those gaffes on his own.
England! We're sending you Michele Bachmann next. We've got a million of them!
At this point, it would be an improvement for Mitt if he tested positive for steroids.
I don't always travel to England, but when I do, I remember to insult the populace. Stay Republican, my friend.
The trip was meant to make him look presidential... it made him look like Mr. Bean.
According to my friends in Gloucestershire, Brits are already beginning to call Mitt Romney "the American Borat."
Mitt Romney makes George Bush look like Aristotle.
Another verdict from one Romney meeting: 'Apparently devoid of charm, warmth, humour or sincerity'
Serious dismay in Whitehall at Romney debut. 'Worse than Sarah Palin.' 'Total car crash'. Two of the kinder verdicts
Romney achieves what no amount of BBC propaganda could - uniting the Brits behind London Olympics!
Mitt for President? Peter Sellers and Being There come to mind.
The 1% just can't catch a break
Did Romney just single-handedly make foreign policy into a 2012 campaign issue? Put another way -- do we really want this guy to represent America overseas? Or put yet another way: Do we really want this guy to answer that Three AM Call?
Mitt Romney’s big international tour got off to a rocky start Thursday morning, as British officials including Prime Minister David Cameron took offense at the Republican candidate’s criticisms over London’s preparedness for the Olympics.
Romney expressed wariness over England’s ability to pull off the Olympics without a hitch, as well as reservations over security. ***
“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world,” Cameron said. “Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”
What's Romney going to do when he gets to Israel, claim that the Holocaust didn't actually happen?
Conspiracy theories about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aide
Huma Abedin being linked to the Muslim Brotherhood publicly dribbled
down to the lower echelons of conservative politics this week, with an
Arizona Tea Party leader promising to launch a recall effort against
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for his defense of Abedin.
Last week, a group of Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Michele
Bachmann (R-Minn.) drew widespread condemnation from both sides of the
aisle for the loosely sourced contention that Huma Abedin, the
Muslim-American wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
McCain strongly pushed back
against this charge, taking to the Senate floor to call the allegations
"nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable
woman."
Wes Harris, the founder and chairman of the Original North Phoenix
Tea Party, now says McCain's words have given him grounds to mount an
effort to unseat the longtime senator.
The Asshole Harris added that Senator McCain is an "embarrassment," then laid out all of the reasons why he -- Harris -- hates Muslims so much, then concludes by saying this about Senator McCain: “Go to hell, Senator, it’s time for you to take your final dirt nap.”
I can tell you this much: I dislike this Harris character even more than he apparently dislikes brown people. I think he and his fellow Tea-Baggers are racists and they should be treated as such. Any group that wanted to intentionally bring down the American economy just to prove a fucked-up political point clearly hates America, and I'm just glad to see mainstream Republicans finally having the balls to stand up to these traitors.
Other than that, I have nothing against the Tea-Baggers.
And by the way, the aforementioned attempt by the Tea-Baggers to bring down the American economy (also known as the Debt Ceiling Crisis of 2011) ended up costing taxpayers $1.3 billion.
Yes, I actually think this ad is more effective than the one Obama put out featuring Romney singing America the Beautiful, and that was an excellent ad:
For the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who has repeatedly promised on the trail to "get tough" on China, opposing the manufacturing seemed a likely stance, except that while at the helm of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Romney outsourced the production of torchbearer uniforms to Burma.
For Romney, the 2002 Olympics anecdote represents another instance of outsourcing under his stewardship, as President Barack Obama's reelection team continues to assail him for shipping jobs overseas while at private equity firm Bain Capital. It also exposes an embarrassing oversight in allowing the uniforms to be manufactured in Burma, which until just last year was controlled by a brutal military regime.
OK, let's see if I've got this straight: Romney's campaign cannot refer to Mitt's Governorship of Massachusetts because during his four years in that post, his state was 47th out of 50 in job creation, as Governor he supported a woman's right to choose (his words), and he enacted RomneyCare (nka ObamaCare). He also won't be able to campaign using his tenure at Bain Capital because of all the outsourcing and bankruptcies his company caused. Now it looks like he can't use his experience running the 2002 Winter Olympics because he outsourced in that endeavor as well.
It's a real problem for Romney -- given that he is running out of things to say about himself during the rest of the campaign. Maybe he can claim he took a leave of absence from the Olympics at the exact time someone else made the decision to outsource the uniforms to a brutal military regime?
One thing is for sure: The GOP elite is so frustrated right now with how the campaign is going that they are practically using the "N" Word to describe Obama. Former New Hampshire Gov John Sununu spit out the following attack on the President this morning on . . . where else -- FoxNews:
"He has no idea how the American system functions. And we shouldn't be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S., he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago."
Sununu also added: "I wish this president would learn how to be an American." Translation: Obama is not only a Negro -- he's a foreign Negro!
“John McCain ran for president and released two years of tax returns,” Romney explained. “John Kerry ran for president. You know, his wife, who has hundreds of millions of dollars, she never released her tax returns. Somehow this wasn’t an issue.”
The problem with this particular line of attack? John Kerry's wife was not the Democratic nominee in 2004 -- John Kerry was. And Kerry released twenty years of tax returns.
By the way, because I'm enjoying Romney's Bain Capital/Tax Return Scandal so much, I've been watching a lot of Republicans being interviewed on it, and I can tell you this: Pretty much every Republican interviewed on this issue does the exact same thing. Here is my take on the standard GOP approach in answering such questions:
Q. Governor So-and-So -- do you think Mitt Romney needs to release more tax returns?
A. Well, that's up to Mr. Romney, but let me just say that Barack Hussein Obama and his socialist-fascist-Kenyanist policies are destroying this country. Obama clearly hates America, he's an evil man, and will raise your taxes, take your guns away, and has no record to run on. Did I mention he's from Kenya and that he is probably a Muslim and was no doubt heavily involved in the planning of the 9-11 Attacks and probably flew at least one of the 9-11 planes personally and then . . . .
Q. But Governor, back to the issue at hand: Is Mitt Romney hurting his campaign by refusing to release more tax returns?
A. No he's not, but the question you should be asking is why does Barack Obama hate Israel so much . . .
Just watch one of these interviews if you don't believe me.
Bottom line: These guys really must think Romney is in trouble right now.
UPDATE: There can be no doubt that the GOP's most famous drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, feels that Romney is in big trouble right now. Here's what Limbaugh had to say about Obama today, right on cue:
"His father was a communist. His mother was a leftist. He was sent to prep and Ivy League schools where his contempt for the country was reinforced. He moved to Chicago. It was the home of the radical-left movement. He hooks up to Ayers and Dohrn and Rashid Khalidi. He learns the ruthlessness of Cook County politics. This is what we have as a president: A radical ideologue, a ruthless politician who despises the country and the way it was founded and the way in which it became great. He hates it."
Are you getting the impression that Rush is a little flustered right now?
This Political Wire tweet says it all: "Romney campaign comes up with worst talking point ever." It comes as a reaction to the appearance of Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney, on CNN's "State of the Union" with Candy Crowley. Gillespie told Crowley on Sunday that Romney, who has faced a slew of criticism this week over when exactly he left Bain Capital, "retired retroactively" from Bain.
Interestingly, the Romney Campaign's attempt to redefine Mitt's 1999 "leave of absence" from Bain as a "retroactive retirement" is a great example of yet another Romney Etch-A-Sketch moment. Gillespie said the exact same thing on Meet The Press this morning, so this is clearly a talking point that the Romney Campaign is intentionally pushing and not an example of someone misspeaking.
Do you know why Romney and his people have lost control of this situation?
Because instead of admitting that some outsourcing occurred under Mitt's watch, they decided to come up with this elaborate explanation as to why a company's sole shareholder, sole director, chief executive officer and president -- who, by the way, was being paid a six-figure salary at the time -- really had no control over what was going on at Bain when the outsourcing was occurring. As RomneyCo is learning the hard way, their attempt to explain all this away simply does not withstand even minimal scrutiny.
To use an Olympics analogy, it would be akin to a team trying to perform an intricate synchronized swimming routine only to have someone drain the pool while they are attempting it. There's no water in the pool anymore, Mitt -- it's time for you and your people to climb out and dry off.
. . . this is the one that will most piss off the Republicans:
I've often criticized the Democrats for being politicallygutless, but I won't be doing that today. It's a brilliant, memorable, and vicious ad.
UPDATE: Here is the best analysis I've read yet as to why Romney's story regarding Bain Capital adds up to nothing more than a metric fuck-ton of horse-shit.
"[H]as any candidate for president ever had a resume that shrinks during the campaign instead of expanding? If so, I can’t much remember it."
- Ed Kilgore, noting that Romney can't campaign using his governorship of Massachusetts (because it he didn't do anything notable as governor except pass RomneyCare); and now, according to Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-Virginia), Mitt can't use his Bain Capital experience either.
And here is a great quote from Former President George H. W. Bush:
"The rigidity of those [no new tax] pledges is something I don’t like. The circumstances change and you can’t be wedded to some formula by Grover Norquist. It’s—who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?"
And by the way: How do you know that the Romney Campaign thinks it's in trouble with regard to the Bain Capital Shit-Storm? This should be the first clue: "Mitt Romney will sit down for interviews with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News on Friday, according to multiple reports."
Romney rarely makes appearances on non-Fox news shows, and now he is making four of them in one day. Wow.
Is it too late to find another presumptive GOP nominee?
Excellent interview. It demonstrates beyond any doubt that the GOP has no interest in providing health insurance to the 30 million Americans currently uninsured, and that is why the radical right is so pissed off at Obama right now.
ObamaCare, although not perfect, is a step toward providing universal coverage, and the Republicans hate that. Christ, they are still pissed off that we have such things as Social Security and Medicare in this country.
UPDATE: Hunter at Daily Kos makes this point better than I ever could, so here it is:
It is not Chief Justice John Roberts' fault that he did not get the memo that government forcing people to hand over money to private insurance companies or pay a tax penalty for not doing so is now not a conservative idea, but a fount of liberalism and evil. When he was nominated, that idea was the conservative stance on healthcare. Hell, it was considered the "conservative" approach even by the likes of Newt Gingrich, and was eventually put into practice by none other than the severely conservative Mitt Romney. Choosing the devoutly corporatist approach would seem a perfectly reasonable conservative opinion, in any other circumstance but this one; you can forgive Roberts for being a bit flummoxed as to what is being expected of him. * * *
So fine, Roberts is now getting plastered for ostentatious liberalism, and all because he didn't realize that conservatism dictates that even deeply conservative ideas are bad if there's a bit of partisan gain to be had in saying so. In every other case, he toed the conservative line, but this one was the important one, so now he's a pariah. Now he's even a liberal.
It demonstrates quite a few things, I think. It demonstrates how yesterday's conservatives can become tomorrow's supposed "liberals," in the eyes of the conservative movement. It demonstrates the flip-flopping required of conservative intellectuals in order to retain favor with a party for whom consistency is readily tossed aside according to whatever election-year needs might gain more advantage.* * *
I oftentimes wonder what would have happened had Mitt Romney won the 2008 Republican nomination and then won the presidency. He obviously would have advocated that RomneyCare be enacted on the national level, but would the Republican Party have backed him up on that?
I think he would have had universal GOP backing because (1) he's a Republican, (2) he's a white guy, and (3) the Individual Mandate is a fucking Republican idea. And the Republican Party would have done a much better job at selling it.
