One of the many strikes against Mitt Romney's candidacy has been a regular drumbeat of complaint by movement conservatives like Redstate's Erick Erickson that Romney isn't sufficiently ideologically conservative, that he's wishy-washy on their issues, that his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts shows he's too liberal, etc. During the primary season, each of the Non-Romneys du jour took a crack at undermining the Mittster based on this critique.
Sorry, right-wing nutcases, but I've got news for you: Mitt Romney is precisely what your party stands for.
In fact, he is a carbon-copy of what your party has nominated in each of the four past Presidential cycles: a privileged, spoiled, morally blank, mean-spirited person driven solely by desire for self-aggrandizement.
Why does it surprise you that Romney will tell you what you want to hear, gainsay it ten minutes later and then deny the contradiction? Republican Presidents have been doing that since Ronald Reagan. At least he had the excuse of dementia (which was denied, of course), but that hardly extends to his many handlers and flaks, who lied cheerfully and liberally, daring the worshiping press to contradict them. Romney is no more mendacious than Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Dana Perino or Scott McClellan were on behalf of Dubya, or than John McCain is when throwing his supposedly stellar principles under the bus for political expediency (this week, it was Our Veteran Hero voting against the Veterans' Job Act).
The current nominee's only innovation in this regard is in having shortened the intervals between flip and flop, and not bothering to try some tortured rationalization for why the contradictions are somehow consistent.
This is what you get. This is the natural culmination of having steadily moved your end of the political spectrum away from facts and towards faith, away from thinking and towards ideology, away from public interest and towards self-interest, away from a pluralistic understanding that those who disagree must nonetheless work together to govern, and towards the idea of winning by any means necessary...and if you can't, making sure the other guys lose.
Mitt Romney is the concentrated essence of what conservatism has become: a no-rules angler for his own interests, all other concerns secondary. A man who cares about nothing but himself.
He doesn't care about your social issues. Neither did Reagan, or either Bush, or McCain. They mouthed the words and made occasional policy gestures while in office because they figured you were dumb enough for that to keep you on a string, and because they didn't care about the people that got hurt in the process. There's no commitment to values there: just Machiavellian pragmatism.
He doesn't care about your economic philosophy. All he cares about is gaming the system to the greatest degree possible to personally benefit himself and his family. If that means raising taxes on the middle class so the wealthy pay even less, well, hell, let's tee that right up. There's no economic philosophy there: just greed.
He doesn't care about integrity. If making appeals to racial prejudice, campaigning on obvious falsehoods cobbled from out-of-context edited quotes, and working to make it harder for some people to vote will raise his chances of success, he will of course pursue these strategies. There is no core sense of human decency there; Mitt Romney knows to his cold little core that he is The Only Person In The Universe.
There is a word for people like that. They're called sociopaths. And your movement, your party, your articulated philosophies, your campaign tactics and, yes, your candidates all fit that label nicely.
Mitt hasn't failed you. Mitt is the absolute essence of you. The mistake you make is in thinking he was supposed to stand for what YOU want, but you have missed the punchline of your own joke: he's not there for you. He's there for himself, and himself only.
Which is exactly the direction you have been trying to push the politics of the country for more than thirty years.
You were just too dumb to understand that you could be tossed out in the cold just like the blacks and the gays and the poor and the women and all the other people you don't care about.
In a world run by sociopaths, you get betrayed just like everyone else. You're not immune. You're non-human non-factors whose feelings, interests and aspirations are non-relevant, too.
Welcome to Mitt's world, suckers.
Reposted from Green Dragon
9:04 PM PT: Rec list! Thanks so much, everyone. Pass the word: selling out your erstwhile allies isn't a bug of modern conservatism...it's a feature! Ayn would have approved!
10:06 PM PT: Wow, oh wow! TOP of the rec list. Thank you so very much, everyone!