It’s exceedingly rare that I agree with any part of a Peggy Noonan column, but the following is indisputably true:
“There was something known as Reaganism. It was a real movement within the party and then the nation. Reaganism had meaning. You knew what you were voting for. It was a philosophy that people understood. Philosophies are powerful. They carry you, and if they are right and pertinent to the moment they make you inevitable.”
“There is no such thing as Romneyism and there never will be. Mr. Romney has never encompassed a philosophical world. He has never become the symbol of an attitude toward government, or an approach to freedom or fairness. ‘Romneyism’ is just ‘Mitt should be president.’ That is not enough.”
Another thing that I feel compelled to mention is that Ronald Reagan had some problems with the truth, particularly the truth of what happened in real life and what happened only in some movie he had seen. But he was a pillar of honesty compared to Mitt Romney, who lies with a shamelessness I have never encountered in any other human being outside of a Saturday Night Live parody sketch.
Simply put, Mitt Romney is the biggest liar that I know about currently living and breathing on this planet. I’ve written about this over and over and over again, but I had sincerely hoped that I would never have to point it out again. The most dispiriting thing about another Romney campaign is that it will continue this pathological assault on any semblance of civil political discourse based on at least some mutually agreed upon facts.
Yet again, it appears that we are going to have to point out that this piece of crap made millions destroying the jobs of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans. Yet he is considered an honorable “capitalist”. John D. Rockefeller, a predatory capitalist, built an industry. Carnegie, ditto. But vampire squid like Romney destroyed industries to make millions. The two approaches are not the same.
Correct. He’s not a capitalist but a stock-jobber. An important distinction.
A very profitable grift.
Please, get this straight for once. You are committing a category error and are thereby minimizing the true nature of the situation and blocking yourself from understanding anything that is going on around you.
Romney does not lie. He tells stories. Stories are neither true nor false; they are evocative, symbolic, allegorical. They resemble rational discourse only insofar as they are expressed in words, but the words have no objective meaning, only contextual, intersubjective meaning.
(Compare this year’s 47%, viz. Sen. Paul’s remarks on disability.)
To call Romney (or any politician) a liar is to stipulate that what is going on is rational discourse. It’s not, and that is why the problem is of a completely different and vastly worse kind than you diagnose. We are beyond truth and falsehood. We are in the realm of the applied criticism of busking.
So for a rational person, what then can be the purpose of politics, circa 2015?
Am I to associate myself (knowingly) to an allegory? Simply because I happen to “like” the particular story being told? Should politics be “beyond true and falsehood”? If not, what is one to do?
Knowing what we know about Romney, why bother reading even one word written about him? Why bother even writing words about him? He’s the Noun. Verb. 911. of liars. He won’t change, so getting worked up about him is an exercise in futility. I accept he’s a liar the same way I accept the President is smart. It’s simply a fact of life. If you have to write about Romney, the headline will be all you’ll ever need: Romney Lies. Doesn’t matter about what he lied, only that he opened his mouth again. And tomorrow he’ll say something else that contradicts the lie he told today. What’s the point? Correcting his lies doesn’t change whether or not he gets delegates for the convention to vote for him or not. All we do when we spend time correcting his lies is prove how well acquainted with the facts we are, and how foolish he is. Again.
The most dispiriting thing about another Romney campaign is that it will continue this pathological assault on any semblance of civil political discourse based on at least some mutually agreed upon facts.
At least with Romney the corporate lapdog media has at least kinda-sorta admitted that the guy is noticeably more shady and dishonest than most politicians. If any other Republican won the U.S. Presidential nomination our media lickspittles would immediately start treating their outrageous lies and elisions as gospel truths and the non-morons would be faced with the Sisyphean task of exposing the deceit of the latest bagman of the plutocrats.
I mean, sure, Romney is definitely the biggest liar, but how much of more of a liar is he than the average Republican?
Romney just isn’t as slick a liar as the Clintons and Reagan. GWB and Obama aren’t pikers on the lying dimension either.
Noonan is like a stopped clock. She nailed Palin and Romney but otherwise remains in the GOP lalaland.
“Mitt Romney is the biggest liar that I know”
When it comes to lying, Boehner, McConnell and Gingrich have all proven they are world class fabricators – it is rare when they actually say something truthful. I think Romney has more work to do to get to their level. To me it seems he just makes stuff up which comes off as ignorant, unconnected to reality and quite frankly lazy. The 3 above willfully lie and have gotten so good at it that they are rarely capable of being honest – at least publicly. That is true art.
The most dispiriting thing to me is that for Romney and the Republicans in general, there doesn’t seem to be any downside to lying about everything.
spink
Campaign 2012 already seems so long ago that I can’t remember details, but I have to say that Romney just seemed to repeat lies and misrepresentations that the Coaches of Team Conservative had already vomited out—Romney wasn’t enough of a “leader” even to fabricate his own lies. Hence, “You didn’t build that!” “Dems cut social security!”, etc.
As Racer points out, lying and intentional deception isn’t some new political feature called “Romneyism”; it’s a critical component of “conservatism”. Today’s Repubs simply cannot accurately describe reality or factual matters, and they certainly cannot accept cause and effect, as it invalidates literally all their policy prescriptions—tax cuts raise revenue, etc. If an American politician describes himself as a “conservative”, then his discourse MUST be filled with factual inaccuracies which he will categorically refuse to correct–ultimately these are lies, and all “conservatives” have no choice but to lie. They cannot speak about policy without lying about the current reality.
Barefaced lying is part of their “story”, their “allegory”, to pick up on the language Frank used (although not to use his meaning). And if you are a conserva-cog, you cheer the lies and falsehoods, indeed, you demand them. You certainly do not accept any supposed referee that tries to say your Team lied. No member of Team Conservative will listen.
As for the “philosophy” of Reaganism, supposedly so rock solid, what did it consist of? Tax cuts raise revenue. Ballooning deficits are a sublime mystery. Gub’mint is the enemy and incompetent, except rampant ever-escalating militarism, which is America’s destiny. The exceptional shining nation on some fucking hill. Gub’mint regulation undermines the economy without exception. Fuck the environment, why worry? As policy prescriptions, every single item has failed spectacularly. And this rotting tripe is still presented by the team’s coaches as the animating spirit of “conservatism”.
Hence the utter inescapable need for “conservatives” to lie, without cessation, if you are Mitt or any other Repub. Mitt is just the latest iteration of Repub “conservative” prez nominee. I guarantee that their 2016 model will lie and dissemble just as much if not moreso—as the “conservative” story deviates ever further from reality and understood causation, the lying and deception must escalate commensurately.
Personally, I don’t think that Reaganism is when conservatism became permanently steeped in lies. Sure, I think that’s when the lies became organized and synthesized, but that ugly chicken was hatched a few cycles prior.
The point where conservatism started being forced to lie to itself and to voters was with the rise of the New Left. Prior to this point, conservatism didn’t have to routinely apologize for its policy stances. Oh, sure, as Eisenhower famously noted they had to shut up about the despised New Deal, but conservatives could openly say that they believed in an America that tortured and murdered foreigners for international power, that gays deserved to be castrated and imprisoned, that you had the right to force sex and motherhood on your wife and confine her to your house, and that non-WASPs were barely domesticated animals who only existed to serve their betters.
They used to believe and say those things openly. That is, until the New Left came and made America realize ‘hey, that’s fucked up and that’s not who we want to be’. But those things were the heart and soul of conservatism aimed at the non-plutocracy. To survive, conservatism had to build a new maze of doublethink for itself. And once the maze was built, the plutocrats found it piss-easy to staple Reaganism on top of it. After all, once someone has willfully accepted their first major delusion, new ones are significantly easier to get.
On the subject of lies, the kid upon whom the “the boy who came back from heaven” book was based has now admitted he made it all up to get attention. The kicker: his last name is Malarky.
http://www.today.com/news/alex-malarkey-boy-who-came-back-heaven-says-he-made-1D80430626
I love that his name is Malarkey
God works in mysterious ways.
I do like the fact that the most dispiriting thing about another Romney campaign is not that you fear he might win.
Yes he’s a world-class liar, slick, quick and glib. But when I hear the term “Romneyism” it speaks to me of an abnormally ambitious pol — almost in the same class as Nixon and Lyndon — who’s willing to brazenly shift his entire set of political beliefs to suit the office he’s seeking. So, he goes left-moderate to win in MA, then goes back to the center-right in the 2008 run, then as he sees the rise of the Right and the TP in the GOP, he runs Hard Right to pander to that trend.
Previously held firm beliefs are discarded routinely like yesterday’s newspaper. And his slickness and quickness help him bamboozle the public that any shift at all has occurred.
Yet, as a Dem, I hope he survives long enough in the GOP primaries (tho I doubt he will) to siphon off some of that big money that Jeb normally would take, as well as draw some blood from the Jebster such that Yet Another Bush goes into the general a wounded nominee from a divided party in turmoil.
As with the racism deal, Romney is a worst-case-scenario of the overall party – who in the GOP is a truth-teller when it comes to their policies and intents? I can’t name one, not even the Pauls before A.G. chimes in, although I’ll give Ron Paul credit for speaking the truth about North Korea in the GOP debates (alluding to how Khadafi disarmed and then we killed him, so what motivation do the Kims have?). That, of course is the exception that proves the rule.
No one’s pointed out how great this is gonna be. Romney is back to provide endless comedy throughout the primary season. Imagine the scene when Christy or Ryan challenges Romney’s veracity, completely pinning the irony meter. Last time around, there were times Romney went ape-shit as a debater against losers like the Newt or the Idiot. Imagine him standing up to Christy or Ryan or the Idiot with his smart glasses. The overstuffed empty suit, a guy who looks like satan minus horns and tail, the guy who can’t remember his own name, and old dufus all on the same stage. The possibilities are endless.
Hunter’s “Mr. Bus” series was comedic gold. Miss it, but not enough to pine for another Mittens run for the WH.
Well, Molly Ivins used to call him Gov Goodhair. But with his stage glasses intended to make him seem bookish and all intylekshul, I now refer to him as Perfesser.
And unless there’s another Ryan running in 2016, like Nolan, we won’t have to tolerate listening to that other liar, the number-crunching-fudging Eddie Munster look alike whose first name escapes me, on accounta just the other day he took hisself out of the running.
Finally, actually I think Romney’s about the only one smart enough to deliver some frequent smack-downs to Yet Another Bush. Like Poppy, he’s very underestimated as a debater. Darn near won the presidency against the Big O on debate performance — but for O waking up to deliver in Round #2, that outcome nearly came about.
Rmoney never had a chance.
I believe that the polling even shows that regardless of debate 1, Rmoney was peaking.
Democrats are horrible at getting out to vote, although we’re somewhat better in Presidential elections…so far.
I remember when Steve Benen first began the Lies of Mitt Romney. I don’t really think he thought he’d have to do it for the entire campaign. I don’t think he thought he’d have material to do a weekly column.
But, he did.