Some folks (here and here) are directing attention to a post by David Frum about the speech Grover Norquist gave to CPAC last weekend. In his annual address to the Mavens and acolytes of Wingnutopia, Norquist celebrated Mitt Romney’s emptiness and cravenness as virtues:
“All we have to do is replace Obama. … We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. […]
Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”
Grover has Mitt Romney’s number. Romney has proven during his five-year run for the White House that he will say and/or do anything to please the potentates, money-men, gasbags and self-appointed leaders of the modern CONservative movement. He has a complete inability to tell any of these weasels “NO” to any request. Romney is spineless, but for Grover that is a virtue. At CPAC Grover made the case that conservatives shouldn’t worry about voting for Mittens because he will do what he is told to do and will not make waves. According to Grover, Mitt and the other clown car race contestants are trained monkeys who will view signing their names–when order to do so–as their only duty of office. As I said, Grover has Mitt’s number and he made the strongest CONservative case yet to support the well oiled weather vane from Massachusetts.
I’ve been reading a lot about George Romney, Mitt’s father. He was an impressive guy with core values, beliefs and principles that he had the courage to fight for throughout his life. George Romney fought his Party and his Church over Civil Rights and he was on the side of justice. As I learn more about George Romney, I wonder, “Why was such a good man cursed with a son like Mitt?”
Where the father was strong, the son is weak. Where the father had beliefs, the son has none. Where the father focused on the needs of others, the son focused on his selfish wants. And when the crazies of his day said “Follow us and do what we say”, George Romney said “NO” and stood his ground. And when the crazies of today bark orders to Mitt, he just grovels, falls in line and says “tell me what to say and do”.
George Romney deserved a better son.
Cheers
Scott
The Republicans don’t want a President. They want a puppet so Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh can run the government.
Baud
None of this would be a problem if they just let corporations run for president as God and the framers intended.
maya
Perhaps someone should check the geneology of his iceman.
dmsilev
Well, if Grover Norquist wants a President who will do exactly as Grover Norquist requests, then perhaps Grover Norquist should run for President.
fourlegsgood
Good god, are you kidding me???? Grover wants a president to be a rubber stamp of the insane Congress? why not just nominate a magic 8-ball? Oh, right. No hands to hold a pen.
Well, it doesn’t matter. The clown car that is the republican primary process has exposed the entire party for the assholes that they are. They’re on their way to nominating Santorum.
HAHAHHAHAHA. I wish them luck with that.
fourlegsgood
@dmsilev:
I’m pretty sure he tried that to universal jeers.
marcopolo
I think from now on I will be calling conservatives conseverlatives, following the Luntz playbook.
gogol's wife
@maya:
Sorry, they look very much alike. He’s George’s son, all right.
kdaug
No, kids, what we need is a President like this.
ETA: I believe this is an historically accurate documentary.
Capri
Frum is my guilty pleasure. Always enjoy reading him.
BGinCHI
The asshole fell pretty far from the tree.
Chuck Butcher
@Baud:
Mitt isn’t? I thought a corporation was a collection of different individuals with a business goal…
Mark S.
If Grover says the Republican platform is the Ryan Plan, I’m not going to argue. That was wildly popular.
I hope future historians don’t forget about Grover when they write about the demise of the GOP.
fourlegsgood
@BGinCHI:
I’m pretty sure you just won teh internets for today!!
Satanicpanic
You would think that having $200 million in the bank would be enough money to keep someone from feeling the need to constantly debase themselves.
Michael W
My take is the lesson he learned was if you stand up for what you believe. You’re not going to be President. So the only thing that he really believes in is being President and how you get there is superfluous. It really is sad and telling but I don’t think he even gives it a thought. Selling your soul is the cost of doing business and from what I have seen of his history he did that long ago.
Xecky Gilchrist
According to Grover, Mitt and the other clown car race contestants are trained monkeys who will view signing their names—when order to do so—as their only duty of office.
Indeed, and it’s nothing new. Consider that the guy who is now the Republican God may have been unaware he was President for the last year he was in office.
jheartney
I seem to recall some ads a few years back where the question was, “Who do you want picking up the phone when that 3 a.m. emergency call comes in?” If it was up to Grover, President Autopen would be the one.
Didn’t we try this already? Isn’t this why we had a POTUS responding to “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.” with “OK, you covered your ass now,” and then leading the country into two losing wars after the attack came?
Shawn in ShowMe
When a father befriends bigots and capitalist bloodsuckers, he shouldn’t be surprised when his son sees his empathy with the unwashed as a sign of weakness.
As for Norquist trying to convince the base to vote for a heretical Replicant for strategic reasons, good luck on that. Dubya at least had the God-bothering and good ‘ol boy credentials to sell to the rubes.
dmsilev
@Satanicpanic: All I ask is for the opportunity to personally test that theory.
Villago Delenda Est
@maya:
The thing is, OvenMitt’s mother was, by all accounts, as decent as her husband was.
So there’s no telling what went wrong with OvenMitt. Lenore Romney was no Barbara Bush, and a Mormon to boot, so fetal alcohol syndrome doesn’t seem to be a culprit. Dropped too many times on his head? Again, does not seem likely.
Perhaps it’s just a case of “the boy ain’t right” and we’ll leave it at that.
greylocks
Norquist just handed Obama a great campaign slogan (“Mitt Romney is Grover Norquist’s butt-boy”) which of course he won’t use.
suzanne
Courage: no longer a virtue to the GOP.
These guys just really could not be worse people. Every time I think of any of them, they all look like Boris Badenov in my mind.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think the Ryan plan is actually the closest thing Willard has to a political soul. I don’t think he gives a shit about foreign policy or “values”, but 1st term Willard will want a second term, so he’ll let Jim DeMint pick his nominees and John McCain, or someone very like him, decide FP.
PST
“George Romney deserved a better son.”
So did George H.W. Bush. I certainly didn’t vote for him, but he was an impressive guy in his way. A naval officer at age 18, shot down at sea, Phi Beta Kappa, made a fortune by 40, then devoted many years to important but unglamorous government jobs. It is comical to compare him to his offspring.
MosesZD
:sigh: It really is that sad…
Linnaeus
Norquist is, interestingly enough, advocating for the parliamentarization of American government.
Killjoy
The devolution of conservative legal theory: from the unitary executive to the prehensile executive.
AT
One thing i don’t understand is how in the world Mitt made $200 million dollars. He seems incapable of intelligent thought.
Ruckus
@Satanicpanic:
And spend a good chunk of it for a job that pays $400k/year.
Me thinks mittens may have an ulterior motive, what with him being a church elder, with no scruples whatsoever.
Linnaeus
@AT:
It helps to have a father who was a business executive and a state governor. Opens a few doors for you.
Felanius Kootea
@Villago Delenda Est: As someone said above, the lesson Mitt appears to have learned from his parents’ decency is that standing up for what you believe is right will likely cost you the presidency. So now we have weathervane Mitt, ready to espouse any and all views that will lead him to win the Republican primaries, whether or not he personally believes them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Linnaeus: Though Willard apparently was good at vulture capitalism. The Bain of Bain capital seems to have seen him as the
Tom BradyEli Manning of corporate raiding.PTirebiter
Apparently Grover isn’t worried about all the trappings going to Mitt’s head, giving him ideas of his own. A rogue Romney avenging all the slights his father endured back in the day could be a dangerous thing for Grover Inc.
gnomedad
Depicting Romney as a chimp? Libruls are the real racists!
WereBear (itouch)
I don’t think Romney is allowed any personal beliefs. Maybe that’s why the lying doesn’t bother him?
Violet
@Linnaeus:
Exactly. If Romney had been born poor and without connections, he’d be a middle manager at an insurance firm or maybe a project manager at a financial services firm, but he’d be in way over his head.
suzanne
@Villago Delenda Est:
Or maybe they just weren’t the people of character y’all think they were. Or, even if they were, maybe they weren’t involved enough I their children’s lives.
ABL 2.0
awesome post.
Spaghetti Lee
@greylocks:
Now now, there’s no need for rude language like “butt-boy” and “Norquist.”
Baud
@AT:
I disagree. He probably has a good head for business. He is just out of his element dealing with politics and … humans.
Brandon
I think this post missed the point. What Grover is saying is that Congress is cheap to buy, but Presidents are expensive. Therefore, they know they cannot elect a President who’ll be 100% beholden to Koch Bros, but it is really easy to get a small cohort of Congressmembers who are in their hip pocket. And through Gerrymandering, are difficult to beat for any reason. Therefore, of course their main objective is to elect a President who is merely an empty vessel for the special interests who control the 1st Dist. of WI, a +15 R district (just making it up) where $200k (again, another guess) can allow carpet bomb the airwaves with negative ads for months.
General Stuck
Grover Norquist is one uppity white guy. Agree with ABL. Great Post!!!
Shawn in ShowMe
@suzanne:
The George Romney we’ve read about is basically Jon Huntsman. Would you really be surprised if Jon Hunstman III decided to embrace the Dark Side of the Force to further his political career? All his father got for his trouble was a ticket to Palookaville.
burnspbesq
So did Mr. & Mrs. Norquist.
Maybe it’s because I do tax for a living, but Norquist ticks me off in ways that no other wingnut can approach.
If God gave me one free shot to take out anyone on this planet with no consequences, I’d go for Norquist. He really is evil.
SuperHrefna
@suzanne: Didn’t Mittens recently make a speech (the one when he said only rich people should run for office) where he said that his father told him not to run for office until his children were old enough not to have their heads turned by it? It sounded to me like Romney the Elder was all too aware that something had gone wrong with the raising of his son, that his running for office with an impressionable son had done something bad to Mitten’s morals.
Suffern ACE
@burnspbesq: Excuse me, but if you remember the ice cream cone story, the norquists got the son at least the father wanted.
suzanne
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Absolutely not.
I grew up in Mesa, AZ, the second-largest LDS community in the world, and had literally hundreds of classmates from families of seven or more children. It was very common in those families for at least one of the kids to become a total loser or drug addict or criminal, all without the parents having even the slightest idea. I think there’s something about that culture that gives parents the idea that taking your kid to church is the only parenting they need. And even with a stay-at-home parent, those are big families and there’s only so much time and involvement and love to go around. My ten-year high school reunion was lke a funeral, we’ve lost so many already.
Villago Delenda Est
@suzanne:
Always possible. My memories of George Romney are basically the “brainwashed” thing and not much else.
ChrisNYC
I watched this speech live. Fascinating. He was talking about more than just Romney. ANY President, was what he was telling them, has to simply follow orders, not bring any ideas. And it’s really all they require of their candidates — parroting whatever nonsense Erick Erickson (on behalf of his backers) thinks up. Too too pitiful that they are there in 1776 garb, hooting and hollering in favor of figurehead government.
Laertes
Romney was, by all accounts, very good at his job. He may have been born on third base, but he made a great run for home plate. He’s an extremely savvy business analyst and if I had money and I could afford him I’d hire him in a second to manage it.
I think he’d make a rotten President because he’s got no basic human empathy, no feeling of solidarity with the bulk of his countrymen, and no evident principles. But none of those things are required to be an excellent vulture capitalist, and they’d probably hurt.
Your point is a good one. Everything I’ve read about George Romney makes me wish we had more like him today. He definitely deserved a better son.
Libby
Great post. Oddly, I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. I could conceivably have voted for the father under the right circumstances. I did vote Republican once in my life. Ironically for a Massachusetts governor. It wasn’t Willard.
JCT
Wow, if that speech doesn’t make you physically ill, I don’t know what would. I am having trouble finding the appropriate adjective for Norquist. Odious seems so weak.
Talk about a blueprint. “Hi, I’m Grover — elect my puppet boy so we can destroy your country.
Mark S.
Jesus, even the best parents can have kids who turn out to be assholes, drug addicts, what have you. I also know a lot of wonderful people who had, in retrospect, pretty shitty parents.
batgirl
Norquist makes the same argument I make to my so-called moderate Republican family members who think GOP Senate and (more so) House members have gone off the deep end — that a vote for Romney, whom these family members see as a sane moderate, is really a vote for the crazy GOP that has overtaken Congress. Who knows if they will come to that realization. Probably not.
patrick II
@burnspbesq:
Rupert
Norquist
Ailes
In that order.
Dennis G.
@ABL 2.0: Thanks
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Villago Delenda Est: Lenore Romney ran for Senate from MI in (IIRC) 1980 as a pro-choice Republican. In his MA campaigns, Willard would cast his pro-choice stance as a tribute to her. Maybe it’s just me, but that strikes me as hard evidence of just what a weaselly fuck he is.
pseudonymous in nc
And since Grover tells the congressional GOP what to do with his pinky pledges…
He’s probably the creepiest and most malevolent fucker in American politics now that Bill Kristol is busy eating bags of salted dicks: a wingnut welfare whore since his days as a college Republlcan, and totally unaccountable. Even the worst fucking wingnuts in the House have an electorate. Grover has his paymasters.
pseudonymous in nc
@Villago Delenda Est:
The answer is ‘management consultancy’.
Shawn in ShowMe
@JCT:
Norquist, unlike the poutrage lobby, is keenly aware that there are three branches of government. He’s telling us right to our face that he plans to put a permanent lock on one of those three branches and use the presidency to rubber stamp their decisions.
Meanwhile, the poutrage lobby spends 90% of their energy on concern trolling the President and 10% getting Congresscritters elected. It’s suicide.
RossInDetroit
We do. Just not in the Republican Party. Climate change in the GOP has driven them out of their historical range.
Libby
@efgoldman: Didn’t live in MA in 72. Voted for Weld because, Silber was such a nutcase. Really wanted to join the None of the Above movement that year, but the polling too close. Couldn’t take the chance. Silber would’ve been a worse disaster. Literally had to use one hand to force the other to mark the ballot. Stood there for a long time before I did it.
muddy
I have never liked Romney, but in reading these posts about how his father deserved a better son, I feel sorry for him. Actually I think it is a common occurrence that the son does not measure up to a towering figure of a father, how many conquerors in history have not established a dynasty on account of this.
But the reason it makes me feel sorry for him on a personal level is that everyone always said to me what a wonderful woman my mother was. All I could say to that was, “Everybody says so.”
But really nothing could have been further from the truth. I prefer to disdain Romney for other reasons I guess.
SRW1
Shorter Norquist: In 1980 we went with the guy who starred with Bonzo, in 2012 Bonzo will do.
muddy
@burnspbesq: I don’t know why Norquist is the king anyway? What has he ever actually done to hold this power of his magical “pledge”?
chrome agnomen
pardon if this repeats someone.
GHWB deserved a better son; prescott deserved a better son; samuel prescott bush deserved a better son; james smith bush…well you get the idea. america deserves better sons.
David Koch
Why are you guys ragging on Grover? Jane Hamsher vouches for him. If Grover is good enough for our progressive better, then he should be good enough for the proletariat.
pluege
George Romney deserved a better son.
No he doesn’t. Raise your kids as rich pompous asses, and what you get is Mitts. Nothing could be worse than raising your kids rich. The only possible outcome is garbage.
cthulhu
@pluege:
I wouldn’t go this far as there are certainly quite a few really great people out there raised under upper class circumstances. BUT, I do think you are on to something. Being largely insulated from the challenges that most people/families face often leaves children to grow up with little sense of the random effects of fate and to assume that people not doing as well must be personally deficient somehow.
I’m certainly not in the 1% but I am definitely well within in the 10% and could afford for me and my family to live somewhere far nicer than we do (especially if I was willing to commute a greater distance). But my kids feel sorry for the homeless because they see the homeless all the time (though, oddly, they refer to them as hobos?!) and they see my wife and I give them money, food, etc., and not via some high-end charity party event. They also are surrounded by all ethnicities (though far less so at their schools) and seem pretty color-blind so far. My daughter’s Black History Month project was somewhat confusing for her in the sense that skin color to her is far less relevant than gender, hair color and even eye color.
So Mitt wasn’t 100% destined to by an a-hole but it was more likely than for the average family.
TenguPhule
Some dark alley in New Jeresy is missing its trash.
If ever there was a need for a CIA hit job, Grover is it.
TenguPhule
For the want of a castration, the nation was lost…
rikryah
BWA HA HA HA HA HA
Willard would sell his mama if he thought it would get him a block of votes.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Problem with Gover’s wet dream is everyone wants a piece of the president and once Mittens is in officer, what exactly does he need the loony right for? The other part of Mitten’s he doesn’t like upsetting people and there is a lot of other outside the 27% of Grover’s tribe.
Rome Again
@burnspbesq:
You and me both (and I don’t even do tax law). The man is a traitor and under medieval powers would be locked tightly in a deep dark prison cell in a fortress somewhere awaiting execution.
Foggy
@Baud: Mitt has famously said corporations are people. Than would make a corporation eligible for the presidency.