by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY
Romney’s choice of the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan, as his running mate mirrors John McCain’s disastrous choice of Sarah Palin four years ago, although Ryan is probably a more able politician. Being smarter than Palin, Ryan’s plutocracy-enriching budget proposals suggest he is also a more hypocritical politician, although such a distinction in Versailles on the Potomac during the summer of 2012 may be a case of splitting hairs.
It is a well known fact that like his predecessor candidate for President, John McCain, Romney will never be trusted by hard-right populists energizing the looney base of the Republican Party. So, like McCain, Romney has picked a superficially attractive hard-right nutcase as a running mate in a forlorn attempt to energize his party’s crazy base. Once again the mainstream media is going gah gah over the brilliance of the choice. If you doubt this, google the choice of Palin and compare that gushing to today’s gushing. In so doing, Romney, like McCain, is setting himself up for a slaughter by Mr. Obama, whose historical role is rapidly becoming one of being the Great Enabler of the oligarchy that is taking over the United States.
Obama, if nothing else, has proven himself to be a brilliant exploiter of his opponent’s political weaknesses. Barring some unforeseen exogenous disaster, like a terrorist attack or another Wall Street collapse, Mr. Obama’s looming slaughter of Romney is almost a certainty.
I am not saying that Obama deserves to be elected, only that he will be elected. Why do I say this? Consider please the following:
In a moral sense, Romney is far slimier than McCain: McCain, for all his political warts, did distinguish himself under torture as a POW. On the other hand, Romney, unlike those who avoided Vietnam for moral reasons, is just another creepy Chickenhawk draft dodger who professed warlike support for Vietnam, while using his religion (rather than graduate school or marriage with children) to the avoid the pain and inconvenience of that war. Whereas McCain spent his entire life in what he can legitimately view as patriotic (if sometimes misguided, IMO) national public service, Romney can only view himself as a patriot in the shallowest, most opportunistic sense of the term. It is a well established fact that Romney is really a member of the unpatriotic global plutocratic elite who worked assiduously to enrich himself at America’s expense by doing his bit to destroy the American job machine while protecting his ill begotten gains in offshore tax havens. Therefore, at the moral level of political conflict, Romney is far more vulnerable than McCain, and as I explained in November of 2008 in The M&M Strategy: How Obama Won, Mr. Obama waged a brilliant political campaign to maneuver Mr. McCain into destroying himself at the moral level of political combat. Obama has proven he intuitively understands the moral game. Yet, by pandering to his base, and repeating McCain’s strategic mistake, Romney has pitted his own weakness against Obama’s demonstrated strength. The last thing we need is a warmongering President who does not understand Sun Tzu.
If Romney is such bad news, would an Obama landslide 2012 be good news for America? Consider please the following:
As I suggested in the The Enablers, my review of Mike Logren’s important new book, The Party’s Over, Mr. Obama is just another enabler of the plutocratic power that is destroying America. An Obama landslide will work also to shore up the ongoing entrenchment of that power. At the same time, an Obama landslide will fuel the mistrust, alienation, and racist anger of the Right, and therefore work to increase its control of the Republican base during Obama’s second term. This dynamic will very likely set the stage for a repeat performance by some other Democratic enabler in 2016.
Counterpunch for more