The Truth Shall Set You Free

On his way to the nomination, Mitt Romney made a career of lying, and he's doing it still. Presumably, he always will. What lies will he tell us as president? Willing to say anything to advance his self-interest, and doing so all his political life (I say "political" because I don't know about the rest, although he's told some whoppers about his status with Bain), Mitt Romney, one would have to assume, could make LBJs Vietnam lie and George Bush's Iraq lie look like words from the mount. That would, so you'd think, scare the crap out of anyone.

Doubled the deficit. Fifty percent of green investments failed. Apologizes for America. We need more teachers, we need fewer. Time for talk with Iran is over, time for talk. War, peace. War is peace. Peace is war.

It's usual that candidates run to the extremes to get their party's nomination, and then to the center if they get it. But Mitt Romney has been unique. He's run on lies, continuously. And, while doing so, appealed to the furthest right, right up to the debates when, suddenly, he materialized as someone else entirely. I assume his calculus is that, having nailed the teabaggers to his wall of lies, they'd never leave.  Information, to them, is like garlic to vampires. And he -- correctly, evidently -- figured that people who saw the debates as a way to decide for whom to vote (i.e. people who simply weren't paying attention till then) would buy whatever he chose to sell, no matter how opposite from what he'd been saying mere moments before.

And guess what: he's right. He and Fox "news" treat voters like the sheep they actually are. Because it's true, and it works. Surrounded, in my life, by people who think and who pay attention, to whom politics is a topic of conversation all the time, not just once every four years, for a minute or two, I've gotten a very skewed idea of how Americans think. Or that they think at all. This election, if nothing else, has proved that you can win by banking on stupidity and inattention. And by "banking" I mean billionaires bankrolling the effort.

Speaking of which, right on cue, some Rs are now talking about limiting money in elections.* Once they get what they want, ie a Supreme Court for decades, as far right and politically active as Antonin Scalia, they'll wrap it up and make sure rich Ds can't do the same.

Buh bye democracy. Buh bye education. Been nice knowing you.
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* I read that somewhere recently and now I can't find a link. Maybe I'm starting to hallucinate. Next thing you know, I'll be claiming Romney told the truth about something.