Dana Milbank has mapped Exotic RomneyWorld, featuring bizarro speechifying, in one handy, column-length tourist guide, which I thought would be even handier in one printable, indeed memorizable, paragraph -- a little something you could, perhaps in rap form, hurl verbatim into the witless face of the next pseudoconservative coworker or beer-belching in-law who defies you to name anything that Mitt Romney is lying about.
Everything that follows has been gainsaid by fact checkers.
Ready? OK. Take a breath. Here we go:
President Obama, exclaims Gov. Romney, has orchestrated the "weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression" and conjured an "unaccountable panel with the power to prevent Medicare from providing certain treatments" and he "didn’t even mention the deficit or debt" in his SOTU address and he has "failed to even pass a budget" and he "never worked in the private sector" and he "gave" GM and Chrysler "to the UAW" and he has "added regulations at a staggering rate" and conducted "a government takeover of health care" and he's ending "Medicare as we know it" and he's "the only president to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare" and he's squandering "about $100 billion a year" on Obamacare and he's gutted our Navy to WWI levels and he's been "apologizing for America abroad" -- and Lord have mercy "we’re only inches away," because of President Barack Obama, "from no longer being a free economy."
Now, in Romney's defense, if he were to take away the Obama-villainizing lies, he wouldn't have much of a campaign left. What would he talk about? I'm quite serious. Romney could vaguely promote the Ryan/House budgets as English/Irish/European-style roadmaps to fiscal discipline and national character-building austerity; but the monstrously Medicare-voucherizing and poor-bashing specifics of those budgets would horrify centrist voters. So that's out. Or, Romney could talk up his Pentagon buildup of Reaganesque proportions; but that would only flag his intention to blow even bigger holes in the federal budget. So that's out. Or, Romney could blather about "getting" the wickedly terrorist "bad guys"; but that's already been done, or is being done, by Obama. So that's out. Or, Romney could market a more expensive, more bloodletting war in Afghanistan; but such inspired militarism is intensely opposed by six out of every five Americans, and the opposition is still growing. So that, too, is out.
What does that leave? You got it -- or rather, Romney's got it: not much. A few phantasmagoric references to the pseudoconservative buncombe of cutting yet more taxes and slashing even more regulations -- let's see, that consumes eight or nine seconds -- and then 15 minutes of soaring, utterly fact-free Obama-vilification. See above. It's all Romney's got.
You hit the nail on the head so succinctly. The rap song?- 'I ain't got nuttin', I'm an etch -a -sketch, just a wretch... !!
Posted by: caribbeanobserver | April 07, 2012 at 10:42 AM
williard is a sociopathic, pathological LIAR. Can you imagine if he oozed in a la bush via the extreme 5? No on would know anything that's really going on in the USA. Ol' etch a wretch, eric ferhenstrom, would be twisting those knobs on mitt @ 90 miles an hour.
Posted by: Cha | April 07, 2012 at 04:33 PM
Very, very nice.
Can you expand down here on the weaker economic recoveries since the depression?
Posted by: John Haas | April 07, 2012 at 08:39 PM