As the gaffes keep coming, accompanied by smirks, inappropriate chuckling, noisy lip-smacking, and strangely stiff body language, I find myself pitying Mitt Romney's handlers. They must be sweating every time they see his mouth open, wondering what bizarre notion they're going to have to spin. I imagine that in the runup to the debates, when Romney will be off-script for an hour at a time, his handlers will be changing shirts several times an hour to deal with the stench of flop sweat. I feel sorry for them, because they're pros who have been hired to make a totally unsympathetic character likeable, and you have to sympathize with someone who has been given an impossble job.
I don't feel sorry for Mitt, though. I used to, a little bit - in his pathetic fumbling he reminded me of the weird derelict who sometimes goes down our block on trash day looking for recyclable bottles in the bins that contain yard clippings. (He hasn't figured out yet that it's the blue bin, not the green one, or maybe he's color-blind.) That level of cluelessness doesn't make you want to vote for somebody as commander-in-chief, though you might want to help in some small way like directing him to a shelter or letting him know that he's wearing two left shoes, and the wingtip doesn't go with his sweatpants as well as the sneaker.
I have gone past feeling sorry for Romney because that empathy is what I feel for fellow humans, and it has become increasingly obvious that The Willard Mechanism isn't.
I will elucidate below the silhouette of Republican dreams going up in smoke.
Several people here at DKos have advanced the plausible theory that Mitt is actually a space alien, possibly part of the advance team for an interstellar invasion, and were he to win the office of President he might begin preparations for their conquest. This might include relaxing immigration standards for those whose arrival in the US was vertical rather than horizontal or on an angle, putting diving boards next to the acid pits left by careless mining, and regulating the height of trees so that operators of flying saucers do not have to deal with hazards. As you may note, Romney and his surrogates have already started preparing this agenda by careful use of certain phrases during his campaign.
An alternative theory, that Romney is actually a zombie, has some traction based on the fact that his stiff, awkward hand movements and monotonous groan of a voice resemble certain 1950's horror movies. It is notable that his spokesmen are increasingly shrill when they correct anyone who refers to him as Mitt Zombie, but we can not regard this as conclusive.
The Robot-Controlled-By-A-Mad-Scientist theory is also intriguing, with most informed speculation centering on Dick Chaney or Karl Rove. Those who object to this theory point out that if either man was the evil mastermind, the Willard Mechanism would be doing a better job of both promulgating their beliefs and appearing to be human. Proponents counter that given the ideology of both men, it is likely that the contact to construct Romney was given to the lowest bidder, and this was all that could be done on a Republican budget.
I find the space alien theory most plausible, and suggest that Romney's strange, jerky movements might be a consequence of having never previously dealt with bipedal locomotion or having only two arms. It's the equivalent of a student driver who has just passed the DMV test in a Ford Focus and has just been given the keys to a moving van. It's huge, there are all these extra knobs and levers and sixteen gears, a clutch and transaxle, and by the way, it's parallel parked on a steep hill. The poor kid might be able to make it through traffic without killing anybody, but he sure isn't going to look like they ought to be behind the wheel.
It has also been argued that Romney may be human, but there is no plausible evidence for this supposition. Humans, even those warped by mental illness or psychopathic tendencies, usually can at least momentarily mimic normal interactions and show and evoke empathy and compassion, and there is no evidence that Romney has ever done any of these.
As a cautionary note, one must mention that the proponents of all these these theories spent a lot of time watching old bad horror and science fiction films while doing bong hits, but this alone does not disqualify them because their opponents, as well as most of Romney's consultants, did the same thing. The most implausible science fictional aspect, and the one that also evokes the most horror, is that some people want to elect him anyway.