A Terrible Person

There are few things in this world more frightening than the thought of a Romney presidency. Throughout this campaign, Willard has shown himself to be completely devoid of any hard-core beliefs (other than cutting his own taxes), honesty (his lying has been numerous and continuous), ethics (having committed both voter fraud and tax fraud), or compassion (supporting policies that would hurt the poor, the elderly, women, unemployed people, children, veterans, immigrants, minorities, gays/lesbians, etc.). A Romney presidency would be even more disastrous for most Americans than the Bush presidency was.

The blogger over at the excellent site called The Rude Pundit sums up Willard's candidacy pretty well (and I agree with every word he wrote). Here is just some of what he had to say:

On some level, it seems as if the campaign of Mitt Romney is a mad sociologist's experiment in seeing how many lies people are willing to either believe or let pass and still vote for a candidate. The Rude Pundit wouldn't be surprised if on next Wednesday morning, Romney was revealed to be the robot we all suspected he was and the scientist controlling the levers and buttons gave a press conference where he said that he was using the machine to try to gauge just how racist and stupid the nation actually is.

"People call me 'mad,'" the no-doubt crazy-haired sociologist would say. "But I programmed the Romney 5000 to say, with a straight face, things that objective truth demonstrated otherwise. And nearly half of you didn't care. So ask yourself: Are you racist? Stupid? Or both? Because my research shows that there are no other options, even for you rich people." Of course, he'd have to disable the robot because it had been set on self-destruct all along and nothing happened. 

Look, the Rude Pundit is used to lying Republicans, especially ones running for President. We went through two campaigns with George W. Bush, and that bastard wouldn't have told a truth to Americans if Facts and Reality had held a knife to his nuts and screamed at him to tell the world he believed in them. 

But there is something so deeply galling, so disturbing in how Romney lies. The post-primary campaign began on a lie, that Obama was dissing "job creators," and it now ends with a lie, that those "job creators" are moving their jobs to China because Obama failed them, a lie so ludicrous that the CEO of Chrysler has had to refute it. In between, Romney has unleashed a stream of lies, each one easily proven false, but he has been relentless and, c'mon, there's only so many hours in a day. The lies about the President and his policies are of a piece with Romney's lies about himself.

See, we use the cute phrase "flip-flop" to describe Romney's change in positions. But they're not mere shifts in position. They're lies that get to the core of the man's beliefs, such as they aren't. And we could ask if Romney was lying in the past, when he was very moderate, then intensely conservative, or now, when he's somewhat more moderate again. But, except for abortion, Romney refuses to admit that he's changed his position. That's the big lie, the one he has gotten away with more than any other, the one that's winked at as if "That's just Mitt." It's not that Mitt Romney has terrible policies. It's that he's a terrible human being.