It’s all so bad I don’t know where to even start, but it reads like something that could have been written by Bachmann, Palin, or Joe the Plumber. This is the so-called “moderate” in the GOP race.
At some point, the media is going to have to recognize they are all crazy.
beltane
How was this man ever elected governor of Massachusetts?
The media is paid handsomely to ignore the fact that these people are all crazy, get used to it. One of them could stand upside down, naked, while speaking in tongues and the media would praise them for the depth of their religious faith.
Lolis
John, you have a lot of misguided faith in the media.
Amanda in the South Bay
@beltane:
I think his views are very malleable.
kdaug
No. No, they won’t.
Don’t get me wrong – they know.
Just ain’t gonna say it.
M. Bouffant
@beltane:
He was only elected once. I read somewhere yesterday that he didn’t even try for a second term because he knew he’d lose.
Kobie
I honestly cannot make heads or tails out of what the hell Mittens is talking about here.
Just Some Fuckhead
Shorter Romney: Hire us to protect your business or it burns down again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
See Ruth Marcus’ column from the other day, in which she has devout Randian Paul Ryan say to Obama that of course he’s willing to raise taxes, he just can’t say so out loud. It is, to me, the underlying bedrock of Broderism: All Republicans are really sensible, Eisenhower moderates, they just play loonies to appease their base, and it’s up to Democrats to help them play that game without harming the country. And even if Democrats pull this off, they’re still “interest group” pandering demagogues.
Personally, I don’t think the Plastic Man could win the GOP primary if he came out full metal birther, but if he did, Ruth Marcus and David Gregory would cover it with a knowing wink and smirk.
Maxwel
Mitt und Mittout.
lamh34
Personally, I like how the both Grifter Palin and Drag Queen Rudy both essentially took a 2×4 up against Mittens psuedo-announcement. Seriously, dude is supposed to be the frontrunner. He’s like the GOP’s version of Rodney “I Don’t Get No Respect” Dangerfield!
Dude can’t get a break and I LOVE IT!!!
ETA: BTW, as much salivating as Tweety seems to do anytime Sarah Palin in shown in her hot leather “F:*& me” boots he seems to truly have a disdain for Romney.
bkny
At some point, the media is going to have to recognize they are all crazy.
wanna bet?
Dave
@M. Bouffant: To be fair to Massachusetts, that was his first run at office and he ran like a Weld Republican. But yeah, once everyone realized what a dick he was he called it quits on a second term.
Charlie Dodgson
@beltane:
You can’t assume he believes everything he’s saying. In this speech, there’s one thing I’m sure he believes: that he wants to get elected. Everything else is a means to that end, and if it differs from what he had to say to win a different election for a different electorate, well, so be it.
I’m not sure that General Election Mitt would run away from the positions he took in the primary the same way he’s running away from his record as governor right now, but I’d hardly be shocked…
Dave
I love how every Republican likes to pretend the debt, housing crisis and everything else somehow started in January of 2009. Selective amnesia must be fun…
PeakVT
At some point, the media is going to have to recognize they are all crazy.
No, they’ll just fixate on one or the other as moderate du jour.
Turgidson
Yeah, no. They never once recognized/admitted Bush and his crew of insane asylum escapees were crazy and they had almost a goddamn decade to do so.
Chuck Butcher
Now that’s just crazy…
(late to that game, I see)
zach
I’m I the only one who thinks it’s hilarious that Mitt’s aping the Obama-For-America-2008 style precisely — same colors, very similar font choice & scheme, same layout in his presentations (check out the PowerPoint presentation he had to prove that Romneycare is somehow different from Obamacare). His biggest liability is that his record is too similar to Obama’s, yet he thinks it’ll help to make his campaign look the same?
On the plus side, whoever figured out how to make the letter R simultaneously look like an American flag and/or two humping seagulls should be promoted.
Cat Lady
@beltane:
At one point in his career, he tried running to the left of Ted Kennedy. Mitt won against the hand picked machine hack Shannon O’Brien and a couple of earnest third party candidates. I’ll tell you why I voted for the green candidate – I couldn’t stand O’Brien, and a vote for Stein was a vote for Mitt, who wouldn’t ever be able to do anything with a Democratic House and Senate.
Shameless doesn’t even begin to describe him.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@lamh34: I was thinking today that if Grifterella is Dumbya in a skirt, Mitts is Poppy Bush in the body of a mid-market anchorman. I remember George Will saying Poppy only wanted to be president because of a vague notion that people like him should be running the country. I genuinely can’t figure out why, besides a massive ego, Romney is running for President.
geg6
Well, of course magical underwear Mitt is crazy. You can’t be a true believer Mormon and not be just a little nuts. But Mitt is not as crazy as the rest of the GOP field. Anyone like Mitt, who has no real political beliefs and no idea who he really is as a person, is bound to sound crazy. All he knows is he’s supposed to be president and he’ll say or do absolutely anything to get there. Even if it sounds like a Glenn Beck monologue.
Just Some Fuckhead
Mitt Romney: It’s Morphing in America
zach
“First their neighbors started losing their jobs…and then their homes.”
Does he realize that the Tea Party was supposedly founded by calling these people deadbeats?
Cat Lady
@Just Some Fuckhead:
OK, yeah, that’s pretty fucking good.
soonergrunt
You are one funny motherfucker, Cole.
Tsulagi
A feature, not a bug. MC Mitty is just trying to fit in with the nuts. He knows the R-base that’ll come out in the primaries.
Funny thing is watching the reverse, Crazy Eyes Bachmann trying to sane up before she announces. Like not having anything to do with birtherism almost calling them crazy. Go Bachmann!
cathyx
He can’t come off as a smart person if he wants republican votes. They want a candidate who is like themselves.
opal
It’s a horse race. It’s a referendum.
Violet
@zach:
That R reminds me of the Aquafresh logo. I’m not the only one who noticed.
Mitt’s aged since last election cycle too. While he’s still a reasonably attractive man, he looks a little less like a man in the tub in those need-help-to-bone ads and a little more like a grandfather.
zach
“Twenty-seven years ago, I left a steady job to join with some friends to start a business. Like many of you, it had been a dream of mine to try and build a business from the ground up.”
I think someone else covered this already: “But still you’ll never get it right, ’cause when you’re laid in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your Dad he could stop it all.”
Edit: I’m also really curious to find out how Romney’s business specializing in telling companies who to fire can be spun as “Sometimes I was successful and helped create jobs.”
Suffern ACE
@zach: Yep. I believe there was dancing to kick things off by Nick Santelli hollering about not helping the deadbeats. “LOSERS” I believe was their rallying cry.
freelancer
Rule #1: Don’t say something in your first paragraph that induces your audience contemplate the head-scratching paradox you just dropped. That is, unless you don’t want them to pay any attention to the next part of your speech. “Hey, wait, wasn’t he the governor of Massach…?”
Tell us about your father before you leave. Who was he again?
Eight percent you say? And what was the unemployment rate on January 20, 2009?
Dude, stop cribbing off of the undertaker’s monologue from the opening scene of The Godfather. I know you’re not better than that, but just…just stop.
Yup. “Sorry, Ireland. Merka’s bad, MmKay?”
Really? And you know this because how? I wonder if Mitt and Mullah Omar have the same Far Side day calender.
Not going with Africa right out of the gate? That’s some patient shit there, Mitt.
screw it, I give up.
quaint irene
Do you remember his concession speech during the 2008 campaign? A strange rambling word salad of bitterness.
beltane
@freelancer: Why doesn’t the Taliban have watches? How are they able to coordinate their attacks so well if they don’t know what time it is? If the Taliban can function without watches why are we so dependent on them? And their calendars are different. Do Mormons have their own calendar like the Muslims, Jews and Eastern Orthodox do? Why not?
What are European answers? Is Obama a secret Norwegian, Barack Baracksson?
Bokonon
A sack of dog waste.
Both the speech and the man delivering it.
Ghanima Atreides
my very favorite part.
wallah.
boss bitch
The media is going to go soft on Romney because they will eventually start to feel sorry for him.
Turgidson
@freelancer:
On this one, the new meme is going to be that unemployment is higher, or at least not-lower-enough, than it was the DAY Obama took office. Because, you know, we kept losing jobs for a few more months after he took office and that is of course all his fault and shows that the stimulus was a big Kenyanazi failure.
I got this earful from a friend of mine who is of the “every dime of taxes I pay is tyranny, and government can’t do anything correctly, ever” persuasion. He also quoted what I’m sure is a wingnut think tank number that every job the stimulus created cost $800,000 or some shit, and that it was a myth that there were any shovel-ready projects. He didn’t believe me when I rattled off no less than 3 road/bridge repair projects, funded by the stimulus, that happened within about 2 miles of my house and began within weeks (2-3 months tops) of the stimulus being passed.
Fucker is smart as hell and should know better, but what are you gonna do – he wants his tax cuts and he wants them now and is willing to believe whatever he wants to make that seem less selfish and irresponsible. Nice guy when we don’t talk politics.
oh and Romney is a tool, also too.
FlipYrWhig
@zach:
Wasn’t this business he built from the ground up with some friends some sort of capital-investing firm whereby already-rich people pooled their surplus riches in order to parlay them into more? It’s not like he was putting up drywall or mowing lawns or inventing a felt blanket with sleeves or something.
jl
“I took it [health care in MA] on and hammered out a solution that took a bad situation and made it better. Not perfect but it was a state solution for a state problem.”
Looks like ‘state solution for state problem’ will be Mitt’s approach to explaining away his MA health care reform.
Not sure what the subtext is, though. Try to sell problems with nationwide inter state insurance and health care provider markets into a states right issue? Or is it that MA was such a dysfunctional collapsing liberal dystopia, that Mitt had to go Maoist, and destroy it in order to save it?
4jkb4ia
Palin wouldn’t have written the part about giving Obama a chance in the beginning. That would be too ludicrous even for her.
What is Mitt trying to say? That the United States is Greece, or because of taking power away from states we are too bound together, the supposedly healthy economies and the supposedly sick ones?
I read Sargent first, so I got the applause lines, but that was about what I expected. Mitt can’t talk about his principles, he hasn’t any. But he can talk about “The economy is in the toilet and I was a businessman and I created jobs and I made solutions for real businesses and AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM (to take away from Palin/Bachmann who will talk about nothing else)”. And he can use code when he is talking about his father to say that he can honor old-line Republicans. Nice try, Mitt, trying to say that the mandate was better than wasting money on public health programs. I do not think anyone who cares about TYRANNY will buy it.
Most of it was coded so that the media will say he sounds like a grownup. That doesn’t mean smart, the way Huntsman clearly is. All it means in this context is not too fascist. The thing is, Palin is so dangerous that anyone is going to look smart and sane next to her, especially when she is hogging all the attention.
4jkb4ia
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes. It’s Bain Capital, a consulting firm.
shortstop
I have no doubt Willard brings the crazy here, but I couldn’t get past the first two paragraphs. He is the boringest insane guy I’ve ever seen. When I see his face on the TV I’m struck by a tidal wave of narcolepsy.
DonkeyKong
Best part of the speech is when Mitt said “I wash born here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an no sidewindin’ bushwackin’, hornswagglin’ cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter.”
4jkb4ia
@jl:
At least part of the subtext is that commerce is being regulated within a state. The Federal commerce clause isn’t being stretched to force you to buy anything.
AAA Bonds
This is just normal Republican primary bullshit.
I mean, just think back on all the Republican primaries you’ve seen in your life. You remember riding to the sound of the guns? Yeahhh you do.
Or Steve Forbes, all acting like he’s going to send tanks somewhere. They all give speeches like this.
Cacti
Massachusetts seems to have a blind spot for Ken Doll repuke politicians.
To be fair though, if Mitt is the wingnuts’ chosen one, he’ll lose Mass by double digits in 2012.
AAA Bonds
Obama is clearly running on bombing the shit out of Libya.
Mike in NC
The last time Mitt bailed, The Colbert Report did a devastating piece on his withdrawal from the race. Maybe it’s out there on YouTube. They really showed what a pandering hack and empty suit the guy is.
fasteddie9318
Mitt Romney once pandered to a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
TooManyJens
If you have a single piece of evidence that leads you to this conclusion, I’d love to hear it. They’ve had ample opportunity to recognize it before now.
AAA Bonds
THIS WAR IN LIBYA IS AWESOME.
I’M SO GLAD WE’RE AT WAR WITH MOAMMAR QADDAFI RIGHT NOW.
JonF
As 538 tweeted today, the GOP voters don’t want a moderate at all in 2012. Romney is seen as the mod candidate, so no matter how many Villagers or Institutional GOPers jiggle his taint, he’ll have to pander to the right to have any hope of winning the nomination.
The problem with this is that its hard to think of an insurgent candidate who beat an incumbent(or even came relatively close) by pandering to their base.
Cacti
Unlike many of you, I’m the son of a former governor and president of a large corporation, which granted me connections in business and politics, the likes of which you could only dream.
TooManyJens
Religious pluralism, GOP style.
“We’ve got both kinds — country *and* western!”
…wait. What?
Davis X. Machina
40% of the electorate will vote for a bale of peat moss if it has received the Republican nomination, but the remaining 11% has to come from somewhere, and you don’t win without it.
Mr & Mrs. Low-information “Independent” “I-vote-the-man-not-the-party” won’t turn out for anything other than some white guy in a suit. The white is important. The guy is important. The suit is important. The rest is negotiable. What they say doesn’t matter.
This is a nation of chain restaurants.
Pawlenty. Romney. Applebee’s. Chili’s.
NR
You could say exactly the same thing about the Democrats.
Carl Nyberg
The NYC & DC corporate media seems to have an obligation to keep the Republicans competitive.
Since the media is obligated to present the eventual nominee as reasonable and moderate, the Republicans are free to go further to the Right to excite the base.
Probably it helps persuade the media to soften the edges of the GOP that the people who own the media and make big bucks in the media will benefit from an extremist GOP agenda.
But maybe it’s just co-inky-dink.
inthewoods
Europe are the ones going the austerity rout in terms of economic solutions – and they are failing worse than the US. So Mitt is against austerity, and therefore for the Obama stimulus approach? My head hurts.
I get that he could be talking about health care, but who would ever say that the ACA is anywhere close to a European style healthcare system? Oh yeah, dumbass Republicans who never leave the US.
Mitt is clearly running on the “America, fuck yeah!” platform.
Davis X. Machina
@inthewoods: Sounds good. Don’t worry too much about understanding the lyrics. It’s like listening to Steely Dan.
inthewoods
Oh and if he is referring to the ACA, which is the same plan, basically, that he advocated for Massachusetts, then is he arguing that his approach to healthcare is a European approach?
Gus
@shortstop: Agreed. As interesting as I find politics, I find political rhetoric deathly dull. This is boilerplate American exceptionalism bullshit. His speechwriter could have written it in his sleep. And probably did.
Suffern ACE
@TooManyJens: I don’t get the watch thing. I think it’s supposed to be that We have the fancy watches, but the Taliban have the time. But whatever.
Bin Laden wearing a watch
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=48716
Taliban Commander wearing a watch
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/19/taliban-leaders-brother-killed-pakistan
So both al Quaeda and the Taliban do wear watches.
Chris
Fuck the media. At some point, the people will have to recognize they’re all crazy. Either that, or we’re in for a replay of the nineteenth century.
opal
@AAA Bonds:
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973
Just in case.
Marc McKenzie
“At some point, the media is going to have to recognize they are all crazy.”
(Stares at this quote for a few seconds before bursting into hysterical laughter)
Marc McKenzie
@freelancer:
Good points there…of course, it seemed that all throughout the speech the bull$#^t was flying out faster than beets through a baby’s backside.
Man…and people here still bitch about Obama? I mean, for Christ’s sake, everyone–only a diseased mind could think that Obama would be worse than the Republican prospects!
Cliff in NH
That’s a Fucking Lie, I saw Obama Live on Bloomberg tv saying that unemployment would most likely peak at 10%
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=auTTvgeN294Y
PanAmerican
So he was against sozilized medicine before he was against it… or, do I have that wrong way around? Whatever. He was a terrible candidate in ’08 and hasn’t improved with age.
Veritas78
As I recall, George Romney got famous as CEO of American Motors, which was eventually bought by Chrysler, which was just successfully bailed out by Barack Obama. Did Mitt thank Barack for saving his dad’s old company?
Also, NO mention of Mitt’s signature accomplishment here in Massachusetts — the only thing anyone appreciates or remembers from his one term as Governor, which has already saved thousands of lives, including my own.
Ghanima Atreides
my head hurts. what does that even mean?
Calouste
@fasteddie9318:
The man died of boredom, I assume?
amk
The rethug machine is betting on huntsman as the white knight.
John
I must say, as an inhabitant of the Old Country, that it’s a bit bloody much for Romney to take a swipe at countries with ‘aristocacies’ and a House of Lords. Our aristocracy wander about in nice clothes looking borderline decorative, yours run the country. Last president was son of a president? Hello? Can I also please draw his attention to the election to succeed that one where three of the four leading candidates were the wife of a president, a man who was the son and grandson of 4-star admirals, and of course Mr Romney, son of CEO/Governor/Cabinet Secretary Romney. If this is not an aristocracy, what the hell is? How could he say that without dissolving in a puff of hypocrisy?
bob h
Mitt has a Harvard MBA, ran a private equity shop, etc., so he knows that the current economic feebleness is a hangover from the financial panic and housing meltdowns engineered by Bush. Yet he claims Obama has “failed”.
My guess is that Romney cannot take the sort of punch that is being readied for him in Chicago, and that watching him disintegrate under attack will be the one compensating pleasure of 2012.
MarkJ
NPR Morning Edition this morning did a glowing segment on his announcement and on how he’s much more comfortable positioning himself as the “moderate” in the race than last time when he pandered to the right wing. So no, they won’t notice that he’s gone off the deep end with the rest of the party.
Judas Escargot
@Marc McKenzie:
There are MILLIONS of us, I tell ya. GAZILLIONZ !!!