Mitt's Kampaign Klown Kar

[WilliamPitt]

(the pic at the article is pretty great...)

Mitt's Kampaign Klown Kar
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 19 July 2012

I do not like clowns. Never have. To be blunt, they frighten me.

It all goes back to my childhood, when I would visit my grandfather in Alabama. The guest room I stayed in when visiting Grandad's home was perfectly comfortable, nicely air conditioned, with a soft bed and plenty of pillows...but above the bed hung a portrait of a young boy whose face was lathered in clown paint. The boy's mouth was half-open, as if he was preparing to scream, and his eyes were focused off in the distance...towards the foot of the bed, where, I assumed at the time, more clowns lurked, waiting to pounce.

Sounds crazy? You didn't see this painting. Sleep and Alabama were not boon companions in my youth.

The circus was another un-fun scene for me as a kid. The lions, tigers and bears (oh my!) were entertaining enough, but when the clown car rolled in and vomited out a mob of gibbering, multicolored horrors, it was time to make for the door. The intervening years have leavened the atavistic dread I feel for all things clown-related thanks to that gruesome little painting above the Alabama bed of my youth, to the point that I am now able to watch the Romney campaign without covering my eyes.

Man o man o man o man...did anyone see this coming? I certainly did not. Months and months ago, when arguing the finer points of the GOP primary field with my conservative friends, I would constantly make the point that Romney was the GOP's best possible option. He's a non-doctrinaire Republican with the kind of business experience that independent voters can cleave to, I said back then, and he's got all the money in the world. Given the batpoop-craziness infesting the rest of the Republican field at the time, I felt pretty confident in my pronouncements.

Whoops.

"Non-doctrinaire" has translated into abject flip-floppery on a scale that beggars comparison. He was for his own health care plan before he was against it, and believed the mandate he created was a tax before he didn't; he was for stem cell research before he was against it; he was for a woman's right to choose before he was against it; he believed humans bear responsibility for climate change before he didn't; he was for giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship before he wasn't; he wasn't the biggest NRA fan before he was, and said he owned a gun before saying he didn't; he was for the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" until he was asked again, at which point he decided he was against it; and he was against Grover Norquist's no-taxes pledge until - you guessed it - he signed the pledge after declaring his intention to seek the presidency.

"Business experience"...where to begin? This has been the lynchpin of Romney's 293-month presidential campaign, until the Obama re-election crew went ju-jitsu on him, and in a matter of minutes turned his seemingly greatest strength into a water-kneed weakness that has sent his entire operation into a tailspin of nonsense that makes the McCain '08 campaign look like a collection of steely-eyed ninjas by comparison.

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10383-mitts-kampaign-klown-kar