Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi explained on Current TV yesterday that Joe Biden's gigglefest in the face of Romney-Ryan's farcical fix-it was profoundly befitting:
You should bring contemptuous laughter to this whole thing because it is not serious. That is the real problem with it. It is not even that it is cynical and it is nefarious, it is just not serious.
The "it," of course, is Romney's $5 trillion tax cut, to be accompanied, incidentally, by a $2 trillion bump in defense spending. (At the Pentagon, $2 trillion really is just a "bump.") Seven trillion dollars of additional, clearly defined debits--all to be erased by precisely $0 of clearly defined offsets.
What's more, voters are so impressed by Mitt Romney's fiscal wizardry that they have consistently given him the edge against President Obama in the surveyed subject of debt reduction. (The other day I heard a professional fact-checker lament that studies indicate that deluded voters tend to entrench in mistaken notions whenever confronted by corrections. The poor man looked thoroughly dejected: not lies but the truth--the unearthing of which was his job--had become the enemy.)
The confluence of the body politic's befuddlement and a Romney administration's unseriousness could synthesize in the next seriously befuddled Congress. Most politicians absolutely adore tax cuts and it goes without saying that they can never spend enough on defense, hence passing another $7 trillion in debt could proceed like crap through a goose. Now, show of hands: How many pols would vote to end the mortgage-interest deduction? Or end any deduction or any exemption? Even assuming Congress plugged all the major loopholes, taxpayers would still be left with $5 trillion in new, additional, Romneyesque debt.
And here's the real kicker: All this from the party that in the wake of the prodigiously reckless Bush administration swore to recommit itself to fiscal responsibility.
So, one wonders. How, tonight, could Obama not laugh? Romney's fiscal unseriousness is perhaps no more indescribably absurd than Ronald Reagan's or George W. Bush's; however Romney's represents the third friggin' time that "the party of fiscal responsibility" has so brazenly advocated the laughable debauchery of fiscal implosion.
Isn't that worth at least one good presidential chuckle?
I have always considered a chuckle or smile to be much better than a smirk. The former is a way of saying, "Do you believe this guy?"
The latter is just a show of arrogance.
Obama can do the first, Romney excels at the latter.
Posted by: japa21 | October 16, 2012 at 09:16 AM
The problem is the knuckle-headed voter. LIke your post says, they believe what they want to believe. This is why, at this point, I am skeptical that Obama can convince anyone of the atrociousness of a Robo presidency. The only thing left for him is to show passion and conviction, and fight for his Presidency like he is fighting for History.
Posted by: Melsouza | October 16, 2012 at 10:58 AM
$7 trillion in debits is disputed, i.e. Romney said it wasn't so.
Romney has a "5-point plan", which is not disputed.
This is all your typical low-information voter needs to know to support Romney.
Posted by: RP | October 16, 2012 at 12:19 PM
The real problem is not the guy in the audience. It's the media that will grasp at every innuendo and try to make hay of it. I believe that's one of the reasons why liberals were so rocked after the last debate. The media created the hysteria and liberals followed like lemmings. I hope we have learned a lesson after that, and despite your kind post about it him, I am not going to read Andrew Sullivan.
Posted by: Joy | October 16, 2012 at 01:05 PM