Seven or eight hours is a virtual eternity in this day and age, and I see that a goodly amount has already be written here today regarding Romney’s speech this morning. I recognize that I’m late to the party. But I feel like saying a little something about what Mitt Romney said today.
I don’t begin to know who prompted Romney to do what he did today. I find it difficult to believe that he came up with the idea to make this statement on his own. We all know that the GOP is reeling right now, and seemingly lacking a personality that can articulate whatever-the-hell-it-is they might want to say to prevent Donald Trump from becoming their nominee this summer.
That said, if what Mitt Romney did and said today about Donald Trump was of his own accord, I salute him. And in so far as I can tell, it’d be a new and different thing under the sun in modern American politics.
Two-hundred years ago, something like this would’ve been settled with single-shot pistols at twenty paces.
I was unable to hear/watch Romney’s comments in real time. I caught quotes here and there on my phone during the occasional smoke break. Reading those words — phony, fraud, con-man…. was startling. But when I heard excerpts of the speech on my drive home from work, and when I listened to the speech after arriving home, I was astonished. Again, I can not recall a speech like this having been made before. He seemed to speak without obvious vitriol, even as he described Trump in terms that would generally lend themselves to vitriol. To my ear, Romney sounded not unlike a moderately-skilled prosecutor delivering what might be a convincing closing argument, if only he was before a reasonable and unbiased jury.
He is, of course, not speaking to an unbiased jury. He’s speaking to a jury with a plethora of biases that he in some measure helped create. Still-and-all, what Romney said today was, I think, important. I don’t like or trust Mitt Romney. Or George W. Bush. Or (for fuck’s sake) Dick Cheney.
But an opposing party with Donald Trump as their standard-bearer is simultaneously hilarious and disconcerting. And if what Mitt Romney did today lessened — even a little bit — the likelihood of that, well — more power to him.
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My great hope is a brokered GOP convention. I will take days off from work. It’ll be excellent television.
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Friday, Mar 4, 2016 · 1:24:28 AM +00:00
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turnover
Judging from the few comments that have been posted, I apparently didn’t do a good enough job of pointing out that what happened today was, in so far as I remember , virtually unprecedented. The previous nominee of a major party verbally eviscerating the current front-runner for that same party’s presidential nomination? This is something new and different.