Just when you think a certain presidential candidate is so awful he can't possibly survive, he's back and he's worse. For all the horrors of George W. Bush's presidency, it's nothing compared to the steely-hard nastiness of Mitt Romney. This guy is bad, really bad.
Matt Taibbi pulls out all the stops in his depiction of the candidate over the past several days.
Wow. If you live long enough, you’ll see some truly gross things in politics, but Mitt Romney’s work this past week "courting black support" was enough to turn even the strongest stomach.
Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting "free stuff" post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob. ...Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
There's more...
Without accepting blame or admitting guilt, he could have talked about the increasingly strident tone of the national debate over racially charged issues, and wondered aloud if politicians on both sides perhaps needed to find a new way to talk about these things without fearmongering, stereotyping, or trading accusations. He could have met the racial-tension issue head on, in other words, just by saying out loud the simple truth that white and nonwhite Americans, and Democrats and Republicans both, need to find more civilized ways to talk about their political concerns. If he had owned the problem, that would have been a big step forward, for all of us.
Of course, that’s expecting a lot. But even if he had just come up with a fresh, earnest new way to articulate the conservative argument, something beyond the usual sloganeering, that would have been really interesting.
But he didn’t. He came out with the same half-assed, platitude-filled stump speech he usually doles out at campaign stops, literally the same exact speech, only he added quotes from Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Hooks, and Dr. King. As he told a mostly white audience in Montana the next night: “I gave them the same speech I am giving you.” He seemed almost proud of the fact that he didn’t put any extra thought into what he was going to say in his first big address to black America. If some speeches feel like a verbal embrace, Romney’s felt like a stack of cardboard emptied from the bay of a dump truck. ...Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Oh, g0 on over there and read the whole thing. As Taibbi points out, even some liberals would have enjoyed Bush's company at, say, a football game. But Romney's narcissism and boorishness is so hard and so cold you don't want to go near the guy.
His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy. ...Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
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