What's not to like about Willard Romney?

"Grrrrrr, I can't stand that boy."

The fact that Mitt Romney is a dedicated liar is well established by the fact checkers. The Washington Post Fact-Checker keeps track of his falsehoods.  Post columnist Richard Cohen summarizes them up to this point.  The Annenberg FactCheck monitors both party's handling of the truth and provides some correctives to Romney's wrong statements.  Others have commented at length and in detail about Romney's inability to handle true facts.   However, his misrepresentations of facts is just one ingredient in a campaign that is based upon a tactic that the GOP takes directly out of the George Orwell playbook of totalitarian rule.


The GOP has discovered that many people develop mush-brain syndrome from the constant hammering of messaging through the media.  They discovered that constant repetition of the most blatant lie can establish it as fact in the minds of many.  They discovered further that many people have become dependent upon media and have let it replace their native cognitive abilities.  In effect their brains are like tape recorders and each morning they record what they are going to say for the day--no cognition required.  They never check their own bodies, their own environment, their communities for the facts.   If they wake up after a blizzard in the night and see a landscape covered in snow, they will believe it is not there if their media source of the day denies its existence.  These thoroughly brain-flushed media minds are the constituents that the GOP calls its base.  They aren't stupid.  They are simply mindless.  They live in a world of fabrications and denials. 

The GOP keeps contriving massive insults to knowledge and intelligence.  There are policies and actions of Obama's administration that can be legitimately questioned and criticized.  But Mitt Romney and the GOP have decided not to go that route.  They never criticize Obama's policies with specific and detailed evidence of where they are wrong.  Instead, they choose the ad hominem ploy of denouncing his policies, in Mitt Romney's words, as  "a campaign of diversions and distractions and distortions.”  Their only ploy in dealing with what successes Obama has had is to deny them, hoping that their media-pummeling has created enough dolts out there too mindless to confront the actual facts, so that they have to rely upon the talking points of denial as their only contact with reality.  


There is no doubt that the recovery from the Bush-corporate induced recession is disappointing.  And there are many people on the left who think that it would have been better to let the financial companies and the auto corporations die and to be rid of their noxious economic hold on America.  According to that wing of the left,  it would have meant deep pain and unrest, but it is better to endure a quick and sudden purging of the enforcers of exploitation and inequality  than to accommodate the vectors of a malignant moral and social disease.  Obama chose to keep the economic foundations in place and  try to rebuild on them.  It is his attempts to work with those forces that are the focus of the GOP denial.



The GOP's furious obstruction of absolutely anything Obama proposes because Obama is the one proposing is a reptilian appeal to a lingering and persistent racism.  Nobody has embraced this tack with the fervor of Willard Mitt Romney.

Romney portrayal of dat Obama boy.

The ploy is to deny that Obama can do anything competently or effectively.  It is embodied in Romney's patronizing acknowledgment that Obama is a good family man and a likable person to a degree, but he is in over his head.  The underlying message is that that n***er is an amiable houseboy, but see what happens when you put him in charge?  And to prove Obama's n***erhood, they follow with that litany of denials that anything Obama has done is incompetent.  The latest version of that ploy is to focus on his "coolness," his ability to sing without causing dogs to howl, his easy rapport with college students, his articulateness and verbal facility.  You know, that boy can sing and dance and entertain--perform in the minstrel show--but he can't do anything serious.  

Romney and the GOP portrayal and obstinate denials of Obama's ability to engage in higher order thinking is a diversion from the displays of ignorance and near-retarded obtuseness of the Republican presidential primary campaign roster that provided so much entertainment of the bumbling sort.  Romney's doltish performances, such as his paean to the height of trees, were a large part of the ludicrous ineptitude that dominated the "national dialogue."  Romney's hope is that his denigration of Obama as a person will make public forget his constant ventures into gaffe land.  The press is trying to be charitable with the insistence that Romney is a fairly intelligent man who just happens to lapse into verbal foolery at times.  But  a person who is not a fool does not say clumsy and foolish things day after day.  Or depend upon personal denigrations as a platform for a campaign.

This attack on personhood is also designed to fend off examinations of Romney's personal history.  In his obsequious courting of the medieval conservatives, he has put himself in the position of denying some accomplishments he participated in, such as the health care law in Massachusetts.  And he obviously wants to avoid explaining the degree of exploitation and destruction on which the alleged successes of Bain Capital were based.  He has much he wants to deny in his own past,and his greatest hope is to build that constituency of the brain-flushed media minds who are willing to let his denials be their acts of cognition.  


Romney's clumsy affability and verbal crudity might be parlayed into a contention that he is at heart a regular guy who just happens to be rich.   So, what is there not to like about him?


For that segment of the population that hasn't let its brain cells be flushed through the GOP sewer of denials, Romney poses a huge challenge with his personal history as recorded over the years.  


Just what is there to like?  Do you really want a man of this petty, mean, and bumbling disposition to run the country? 

He will say much about the country.  How many people will be diverted and duped by that false affability and that inane litany of denial?