Until he started running for President, no one worthy of the name “conservative” would have been willing to apply the term to Mitt Romney. The record of his actions was unequivocally leftist/liberal. So were his words and speeches as he ran for office. This is not unusual for so-called Republicans in Massachusetts. The State’s GOP is at least as infected with the liberal ethos as the one in Illinois.
Probably because New Hampshire and its much touted primary are right next door, the GOP liberal/leftists elected to the top statewide office in Massachusetts have been prone to contract the Presidential bug. Mostly they try to run as if there’s a serious chance that an out and out leftist/liberal can present himself as such and somehow get pass the GOP’s largely conservative base.
With the shrewd acumen of an accomplished takeover artist, Mitt Romney knew better. Well before he actually gave the goal of his ambition a come hither stare, he started to talk like a changed man. He invented a plausible pro-life conversion story. Then went about salting the mines of some well known pro-life organizations and leaders. A little nugget here, a little nugget there, and before you know it, the word was out that he was pro-life and, you bet ya, pro-“traditional marriage” too.
Romney is close to an archetype of the political con man. The problem with being a con man in public life, though, is that the people who’ve been fleeced by your scams talk loudly and often to the folks you’re trying to con. So authentically pro-life defenders of the natural family’s rights and prerogatives organized to get the word out. Like the town criers of near ancient times, they raised their voices to decry the fact that the record of Romney’s actions, financial backers, and close advisors all put the lie to his claims of conversion from leftist/liberal to competent, good looking “conservative”.
I throw in good looking because one conservative who endorsed him in 2008 said he did so because Romney “looked presidential”. (I , at least, thank God this wasn’t a prohibitive criteria at critical times in America’s past. Lincoln was mercilessly ridiculed because he looked like what he originally was- an ungainly backwoodsman. Even in his day, snarky elitists thought that was “un-presidential”.) I also allude to it because appearance and perception are in fact what Romney’s supposedly “conservative” politics have always been about. Looking like something you’re not in order to get something you shouldn’t have- that’s the essence of a good con.
All this is by way of introduction to a comment inspire by the report that Laura Ingraham started her show Friday (August 10) with the following “tough, tough riff on the Romney campaign…”
I might be the skunk at the picnic but I’m going to say it clear. Romney’s losing….I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I know one thing: conservatism wins. When you are debating the other side on substance, when you are attacking on substance, when you are laying out a vision with passion , that marries conservative ideals to the problems of the day, you will win.
Ingraham then proceeds to offer Romney some lessons on how to come across with a winning conservative line. The fellow who wrote the report about her show was obviously impressed with her “toughness”. I was more impressed with her shrewd mastery of the con artist’s craft. It’s often part of the routine to introduce elements of apparently adversarial repartee among those who are in on the con. The point at issue is chosen and articulated in a way that re-enforces the authenticity of the point man in the scheme. Let’s say you want to sell shares in a gold mine that doesn’t exist. So you stage an argument with the man who supposedly speaks for the mine owners questioning the effectiveness of the presentation he’s been making to potential investors. You might, for instance, claim the mine’s richer than he makes it sound. This focuses the mark’s attention on the man’s competence, while reenforcing the (false) assumption about the existence of the mine itself.
So Ingraham (and I assume others) line up to get tough on Romney’s presentation of his conservative views. They’ll make like tough critics, and before you know it, he’ll do this or that which corresponds (they’ll say) to their advice. Watching all this unfold the mark (in this case the conservative voters the GOP’s leftist/liberal elitists are exploiting) get drawn into focusing on how Romney talks about conservatism.
Meanwhile, the pink elephant in the room (pun intended) goes unexamined. Romney’s leftist/liberal persona; his leftist/liberal advisers; his leftist/liberal backers; the leftist/liberal tenor of his actions; all evaporate from the conscious perception of the voting public.
All this says less about Romney (since anyone who looks at his career and sincerely declares him a “conservative” must a) have a very sinister notion of conservatism; or b) be blind, deaf, dumb and brain dead;) than it does about the supposedly “conservative” pundits, activists etc. who are apparently willing to play their part in this penultimate stage of the set-up for the take-down. (The ultimate stage is the GOP convention, where enough supposedly conservative blather will be permitted to justify gushing commentaries about how well Mitt has learned to get across his “conservative” views.)
But, like the gold mine in the stock swindle, Mitt’s conservative talk is just that. There’s nothing real to back it up. His recent problems (stiff arming the Chick-fil-A surge, beating up on the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexuals, letting Michele Bachmann twist in the wind re Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the Obama faction national security team) are not failures to communicate. As I make clear in my WND column this week, they’re the behaviors of a liberal/leftist repudiator of America’s founding principles, reverting to type.
In November the fraternal twin-party sham is poised to offer a choice between a pseud0-American socialist who happens to be black, and a pseudo-conservative so-called Republican who happens to be a socialist, just like the other guy. (Surprise, Surprise.) Some think Obama’s worse because he wants to push us vengefully hard and fast into the socialist abyss. Some think Romney’s better because he’ll con us into casting our vote in that direction, then pied piper us more gently into throwing ourselves in after it.
They’re all forgetting God. By helping our nation to abjure the God acknowledging principles on which it was founded, what witness do they leave of their good faith? On battlefields where patriots fell not knowing freedom’s fate, at least they knew they gave their all for God-acknowledging right. The faithless capitulators stand on a political battlefield whining that they are offered no choice that does not mean its surrender. But that’s because they never look beyond what’s offered them.
They do now what they have done continually for nearly twenty years. They pretend that we are losing liberty all at once and suddenly. But they have brought us to this supposedly choice-less moment of loss one craven back-step at a time, at each turn muttering ‘at least we avoid the worse’. Obviously, we haven’t avoided it at all. According to their present excuse, it has become inevitable. That’s learning the hard way what they should have known all along: The choice against God is always the worse, no matter which way you make it.
