Charlie Pierce is not impressed by the mas macho talk about/from Romney’s campaign:
… Willard Romney has made a great effort over the past two days, butching himself up in spiked shoulder pads and hollering for mead and slave women, in order to “get back” what he’d never truly lost in the first place. Yes, he looked like a jackass in South Carolina. In any sane political party, he’d be allowed to brag about that. Now, though, he’s back running in a state that he can carpet-bomb with money, which he will use to explain again how he’s the only one of this troupe of buffoons who even halfway looks like a president. He’s outspent Newt Gingrich five-to-one in a state where all campaigning is done tarmac-to-tarmac. He’s always been the candidate best suited to take advantage of the twisted new landscape of campaign finance, and to take advantage of the fact the most of his party is out of its mind. He’s always been the only one of them operating within the fundamentally overlooked twin realities of this campaign.
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The test comes afterwards, though. I fear we’re now in for a fearsome period of reality-detached spin. The Republican “Establishment” — although having bottom-feeding slugs like Matt Drudge, indicted crooks like Tom DeLay, superannuated media harpies like Ann Coulter, and Bob Dole, The Vengeful Undead, for your “establishment” illustrates another story about Republicans that’s worth a second look, but won’t get it — has lined up impressively behind Willard Romney, who has abnegated himself impressively enough just to make that happen.
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Do we see a Romney victory as a triumph of tactics, as a victory for those tough-as-nails Ostrogoths who hired on from such fallen juggernauts as the Bachmann campaign? Or do we understand that there is nothing important about Willard Romney as a candidate that has changed at all. He is still an unprincipled opportunist, incapable of telling the truth about his own record, and utterly without conscience when it comes to lying about someone else. Almost everything he says about the incumbent president is just as much a lie as it was when he said it in Iowa, or in New Hampshire, or in South Carolina, or 10 goddamn minutes ago. He still so represents the kind of capitalism that nearly wrecked this country that Thomas Nast might come back from the dead just to draw “GREED” with his face. All of this was true a week ago. All of this will be true next week. And next month. And in November, when the threadbare puppet theater finally comes down.
Monday Night Open Thread: Willard the BarbarianPost + Comments (67)