You've heard people say it. Whenever the discussion over the dinner table turns to Romney's lies, someone will remark, "Why, he'll just say ANYTHING to win!"
After a good segment about right-wing unscrupulousness on Rachel Maddow's show, someone will often reflect, "Those people will just do ANYTHING to win, won't they?"
We've indeed borne witness to some ugly conservative political campaigns in recent decades, with everything from race-baiting ads based on Big Lies to tinfoil-hat conspiracies made to cause rumor-panics to outright illegal gerrymandering & voter suppression.
But then, that's just the thing — for Republicans, it's not just about winning elections.
The problem with merely saying that Republicans will "do anything to win" is the underlying assumption, spoken or unspoken, that Republicans haven't planned further than Election Day — or worse, that they will be satisfied merely with gaining office, contenting themselves with "business as usual" once they have it.
Our recent history makes clear just how far this lies from the truth.
The Bush Gang stole the 2000 election not just to have the White House, but to use the presidency to raid the Clinton surplus, give it all (& much more) away to their oil cronies & mercenary buddies, & launch a horrifying 8-year orgy of war, torture, racism, & dishonor in our name.
The 2010 Congressional election — the 1st after the Citizens United decision — brought not just another bunch of "good-ol'-boys", but a contingent of hard-core reactionaries who have not only wasted time & money on sham "investigations" of bogus conspiracy theories about the President, but have also thrown a more massive & rancid slurry of misogynistic forced-birther bills at the public than have ever been excreted at once by a single Congress.
In the same year, while a new wave of governors across the "Rust Belt" concerned mainly with passing personal pork would have been bad enough, Scott Walker, Rick Snyder, John Kasich, & others have spent all of the last 2 years converting the states of our heartland into corporate fascist colonies of the Koch brothers.
Now, we have the heads of the RNC Class Of 2012: Willard Mitt "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" Romney & Paul "Path To Poverty" Ryan — not only a man trumpeting the Chainsaw Al variety of "business experience" as his main asset (in addition to promising to start more wars on credit to enrich Big Oil), but another man bent on privatizing Social Security, killing Medicare, & making sure that no woman living in this country can obtain family planning services even to save her life. Given the destructive agenda of these men & their party, we as activists simply cannot let the idea persist that the stakes in this campaign go no further than one election cycle.
We cannot spare any chance to remind people just who Romney & Ryan are: Not only a "couple of jerks", but unscrupulous shysters who plan on doing to America what Romney himself did to businesses while working at Bain — dismantle & sell off everything that makes America great, give away the proceeds to his 1-percenter chums, & leave the country a hollow, poverty-ridden husk.