That Smirk
I talked to my sister the other day and she said she was having a hard time with Ambassador Stevens' death. She had worked with him on something a while back, and said he was "the best of the best"--someone who believed in his work, who was willing to risk his safety to get out of the embassy and actually meet people, someone who understood the human cost of these political situations that seem so abstract to us, someone who was popular with the people he worked with and with the people of Benghazi. I said, I'm sorry that you lost a good colleague, and that we lost a good ambassador.
Romney, of course, is not sorry about any of this. The smirk that photographer captured as he walked away from the podium would tell you that, but of course the fact of that press conference, and its content, would do that anyway. So would the media response, which basically portrayed him as dancing on the grave of an American diplomat because he thought it was going to score him some political points.
But that smirk takes me back. It takes me back to George W. and his smirk, which I could never stand. Under W, and with the help of his minion Karl Rove (or was W Karl Rove's minion? Perhaps we will never know), we reached a new low in this country in terms of basic human decency. You remember the whole thing about how Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts? And how there were people wearing band-aids with purple hearts on them on the Republican convention floor in 2004? And how W's entire re-election campaign was based on smearing a veteran with the foulest lies they could craft? I do.
The fact that Romney's response to the Benghazi attacks has provoked media criticism is in itself evidence that we are better off now than we were four years ago. Because four years ago, that would have been covered as just plain par for the course. Now, it appears, it is becoming common for journalists to object to the fact that the Romney/Ryan campaign tells lies in public. It would also appear that trying to turn a political profit from the deaths of Americans abroad is now considered beyond the pale. Whereas in W's world...do you guys remember the "trifecta" joke? And how round about the 2004 campaign, his advisors were always going on the record about how much the threat of terror attacks increased their guy's chances?
Both smirks, though, appear to me to come from the same place and to say the same thing about both of these men. And that thing is: It is all about me.
Just after the Republican Convention, as my father the formerly lifetime Republican (until he voted Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, and most likely Obama again in 2012) and I were discussing the Empty Chair Incident, he said, "Romney's like Nixon; his problem is that he wants it too much." Nixon? I said. He said look at Watergate; all that happened because being President again was more important to him than anything else. I said, "Maybe that's why Romney's having so much trouble coming up with a vision. 'My vision of the future is a vision of an America in which I am president.'" Exactly, my dad said. And that obviously inspires Mitt Romney, but it's not gonna do much for anyone else.
Our latest evidence that it's All About Mitt is the now-infamous "47%" speech. It's a veritable smorgasbord of offense, but it all more or less comes back to the same idea: the people who will not help me become President do not matter. In fact, people who will not help me realize my vision of an America in which I am president are not really people. They are parasites feasting on the body politic and they need to be burned off like the bloated ticks they are. Sure, he's putting it all in the context of the campaign and how he needs to reach the undecided independent voters (good luck with that). But this speech tells you that just as he's "not going to worry" about the 47% during the campaign, he's sure as hell not going to give a shit about them afterward.
You know what, though? Elect a guy for whom it is always all about me, and you find out who the real parasites are. Because that guy will think your country belongs to him; and that guy will suck out its resources faster than you would believe. That's what happened under Bush. He had all his buddies feeding at the government trough, shoveling public money into their gullets as fast as they could. The private military contractors, the "faith-based" organizations, the tax cut beneficiaries, the bailout--there was a lot of redistribution of wealth under W; it just went up instead of down. But I guess when you actually <i>run</i> the government, hoovering money out of it makes the government your bitch, instead of making you its.
Other people have been working pretty hard to take apart what's factually wrong with his comments about the 47% and I don't need to reiterate it. All I want to say is that we had this kind of narcisissm, selfishness, and greed in the White House for eight years, and it broke the country. We don't need to go there again.
I can hope, I suppose, that after having had four years to recover from the public depravity engineered by Rove, the spectacle of Romney's selfishness may repel more voters than it attracts. Because it makes a difference whether the government is made up of people like Ambassador Stevens, or whether it is made up of people like Romney. It makes a difference whether the public face of America is wearing that self-satisfied smirk.
The Plaid Adder
= new reply since forum marked as read
Apparently you're not the first one to have that *good* idea. 
