This is based on a
funny post by Conor Friedersdorf. He quotes Mitt saying:
"I love this state [Michigan]. It seems right here. Trees are the right height. I
like seeing the lakes - I love the lakes. ... I still know the American cars pretty well, and
drive a Mustang. I love cars. I love American cars. And long may they
rule the world, let me tell you."
It's not surprising that so many people wonder what Mitt stands for. I think I have a better sense, but I'm not sure. With the other GOP candidates, it was easier to tell:
- Gingrich - Big ideas, big ego, big rhetoric.
- Santorum - The right way to live, filtered through orthodox Catholicism and culture war ideals.
- Bachmann - Ditto to Santorum minus the Catholicism, but with less connection to any reality outside her own mind.
- Perry - A puppet for some unidentified sponsor.
- Paul - Shrink government down to a strict constitutional size.
I can't write a clear statement for Romney (or for Obama for that matter). The closest I've gotten is calling Mitt a "Mr. Fixit." He really wants to fix the tax code some, trim the government a bit, slow the growth of Medicare somehow, etc. There isn't an ideological pattern.
How much of a liability is this? We don't want a president guided by a single, strong idea because the issues he will face vary so widely. But we also don't trust someone who is without any anchor. Romney may win the nomination despite his lack of core convictions simply because the alternatives are so ghastly.
We may have to elect him before we find out what we've gotten. That's always true to some extent because no president has governed in 100% compliance to how he campaigned. But with Romney it's even harder to tell. Will he be the practical Mr. Fixit of the Olympics, the MA governorship, and his current position papers? The conservative "Obama is wrong" ideologue of his campaign? Or a hollow shell that bends to the winds and will sign everything that Congress sends him? I really don't know what he wants to do with the office he's trying so hard to win.
The prizes for media bias go to...
The biggest prize for lying belongs to Fox News, for advertising itself every second of every day as "Fair and Balanced" when they are completely in the tank for conservatives. Fox, you really think you'll going to lose credibility if you start calling yourself "conservative news" and change the tag line to "The other side you really need to hear?" Come on, you have the barest credibility anyhow, which is why the Obama administration could threaten to ban your reporters due your network constantly launching attacks on their officials in fall 2009.Yeah, I remember that.
Other prizes are for the mainstream media for pretending it's neutral just because it's not nearly as bad as Fox. If the mainstream media was so neutral, why is there so much space for Fox and conservative talk radio? The obvious answer, if you think about it or watch this media, is that it's riddled with a low to moderate level of liberal bias. A prime example is talking about social problems and social programs without talking about certain favorite conservative issues like personal responsibility and taxpayer costs. Of course we need a conservative media if that hardly ever happens in MSM. That kind of coverage should be right in those articles and reports, not something that only gets consideration in budget reporting. My credit card bill soars if I don't watch how much everything costs. There's a huge multiplier when government acts that way. (This is why I hate idiot bleeding heart liberals and the endless social programs they would create and how they would raise my taxes over and over. I lived through it in New York state, so I'm speaking from experience. I definitely have compassion fatigue. It's real, and it happens when we're asked to do too much. I feel no guilt about it. It's called not being a saint, something I shit-sure am not.)
Fucking Stupid Campaigns
As I've complained before, the presidential campaign coverage is focusing on miniscule, unimportant shit like misleading statistics about women's job losses, Ann Romney's spending habits, and ... (I've already forgotten what yesterday's stupidity was). This is partly the media's fault, but also the campaigns' because they send out their shills and surrogates to repeat this crap on TV.
In the meantime, we know what the important issues are: the size of government, the size of our debt, what programs we really want and what we don't what, how much it costs, tax reform, how much can we afford to spent on policing this unruly world, and trying to stay out of unnecessary, deadly, and expensive foreign messes.
Come on people. We know that what's important. So stop wasting all this bandwidth on other fucking shit.
Your reactions
So, was this too much? Should I return to civility, practice it and defend it, or give up? I'd like feedback, civil or not.