When The Rominee's main political advisor said they'd just erase it and start all over again, he wasn't kidding. The more I think about the first debate (and when I do, I get that sick feeling of knowing how gullible voters are and how amoral Mitt Romney is), the more I'm simply astounded that he decided not only to ignore everything he's been saying since before the R primaries, but to lie about them as well. Not to say he changed his mind on everything, whether it was taxes or the 47% or education funding or teachers, but to pretend he never said any of it in the first place.
Frankly, many of the positions he took when he transmogrified into Nelson Rockefeller are reasonable ones -- at least to the extent that tax cuts as problem solvers can be. They just don't happen to be remotely close to what he'd been saying till then, nor are they in any way compatible with the teabaggerism unto which he'd cleaved himself (in the biblical sense) like a man on a ledge.
The polls have narrowed. Some have the etch-a-sketch artist leading. Romney, as I've said since before the debate, could well win the election. If so, he'll have done so by lying continually about Barack Obama ("he doubled the deficit" "he hasn't signed trade agreements") and by abandoning the very voters who got him the nomination. Which tells us a great deal about Mitt and about teabaggers. We always knew he'd lie about anything, and change any position no matter how fundamental it might have appeared. But teabaggers? Don't they claim some sort of ideological purity? Aren't they the ones who hold their truths to be self-evident and their candidates' feet to the fire? So why aren't they screaming bloody murder and abandoning the former one-term governor in droves, the way he so suddenly and thoroughly abandoned them? Gee. Could it be that they're the fact-free self-indulgent hate-justifiers who just want to get rid of the black guy I've been saying all along?
It's paradoxical, if predictable. Until the words flowed from him at the debate, as if downstream from a dairy farm, Mitt "Who Me?" Romney had been claiming "severe" conservatism, dismissing every point he suddenly espoused. And voters liked it! All it took was a total reinvention riding in on a passel of lies, and they ate him up like mama's apple pie. Well, hey, now the man's making sense. For the past few years he's been running on assholery, and has earned the title well. But, gee, what he said in the last hour seems peachy keen (or is it "squeaky clean?") So, heck, what's not to like? This must be the real guy. The stuff that never made sense? His pandering? Kissing teabagger ass?
Sing it, boys.
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