Still reeling from his failure to win the presidency and save the international plutocracy — despite having gone in front of the American electorte and told a whopping 917 documented lies in a desperate bid for election — Mitt Romney has been hanging out at his home in La Jolla, Calif. — the one with the car elevator, if you’re keeping track — and showing up in public looking decidedly disheveled, almost even human.
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In an appearance on Chuck Todd’s oddly named MSNBC show “The Daily Rundown” this morning, Mitt Romney’s top campaign adviser Eric “Etch-A-Sketch” Fehrnstrom admitted that Romney agrees with Pres. Obama on a fundamental issue of legal semantics about the Affordable Care Act. Fehrnstrom said that, in spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling otherwise, the penalty to be imposed on people who refuse to buy insurance under the Heritage Foundation-invented mandate in the Affordable Care Act is not a “tax.”
At minute 4:24, Todd finally gets a definitive answer:
It is verboten for Mitt Romney or his campaign surrogates to mention the most recent Republican president by name. Instead, George W. Bush — who left office as the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling — must be referred to in every reference as Pres. Obama’s “predecessor.”
Here is an example of Romney using the euphemism four times in one statement in mid-May:
ROMNEY: [Obama] was very critical of his predecessor for the debts his predecessor put in place. And sure it’s true you can’t blame one party or the other for all the debts this country has, because both parties in my opinion have spent too much and borrowed too much when they were in power. But he was very critical of his predecessor because the predecessor put together $4 trillion of debt over eight years. This president however — oh, by the way, he said that doing that was unpatriotic, irresponsible and unpatriotic. And he said he would cut the debt in half if he became president.Instead he doubled it, alright, he doubled it.”
And, of course, Romney is lying. Bush increased the national debt by nearly $5 trillion, and it has increased by almost exactly the same amount under Obama, in large part as a response to the financial collapse caused by the borrow-and-spend policies, anti-regulatory zeal and colossal incompetence of Bush and his Republican rubberstampers in Congress.
Well, this was predictable. The hate-group wing of Mitt Romney’s teavangelical base is not happy that Romney has hired Richard Grenell, who is openly gay, as his campaign spokesman on international relations. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, which is on the list of hate groups maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, responded on Twitter:
Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman. If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.
Shake, shake, shake.
For the past few weeks, Mitt Romney, his surrogates and primary opponents have been railing against the rise in gas prices and, of course, blaming the surge in crude oil prices in world markets on Pres. Obama. Here is a sampling of their spin from Elizabeth Kolbert writing in the New Yorker:
“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens.”
– Romney in 2010[Romney] called on President Barack Obama to fire three of his Cabinet members: the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu; the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar; and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. According to Romney, the three have spent the past few years carrying out a not-so-secret plan to raise the price of gasoline at the pump. Only by firing the “gas-tax trio,” Romney told Fox News, can the President demonstrate that he did not approve of this plan. “Time for them to go,” Romney said.
Romney’s remarks came just days after Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, also on Fox, accused the Administration of driving up the cost of gas in the service of its “radical” agenda. “The reality is, gasoline prices have doubled under this President—highest prices for oil and gasoline in a hundred and fifty years,” Jindal said. “People used to think it was because of incompetence from the Obama Administration on energy. I think it’s because of ideology.” (As far as “reality” goes, Jindal’s characterization of gas prices is inaccurate; they were higher in 2008, under President George W. Bush.) Romney and Jindal, meanwhile, were echoing comments made by Newt Gingrich, who accused the President of adhering to a “radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.” And Gingrich was following Rick Santorum, who, back in February, declared that Obama’s energy policies are based on a “phony theology” that “elevates the earth above man.
But in Romney’s ironically titled book, “No Apology,” published in 2010, he pushed the opposite approach. “Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” he wrote back then. “…It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”
The peninsula’s known for its palm trees and isles,
And sun-kissed sandy beaches that go on for miles.
But when the polar vortex hits Florida
You’ve got to beware of iguanas,
‘Cause when the temperature drops, it starts raining reptiles.
“Even though he will take office in just a few days, we have almost no idea. … That’s not because the Trump team is keeping its plans closely held, nor is it because there are […]