Romney is phoney but not funny
Lots of people are amused by Mitt Romney's denunciation of Obamacare, close cousin to Romneycare. Joe Klein finds it hilarious. And there is something Onionesque in the consistency with which Romney denounces everything he said and did before 2006.
But look at what Romney said. It's not funny:
America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation — rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better.
This is beyond disgusting and into dangerous. Betrayed his oath - that's incitement, in effect an accusation of treason against the President for effecting the passage of legislation fulfilling his signature campaign promise. It's an attempt to cast legislation that will pass through our Constitution's "triple veto" -- with a 60-vote Senate majority for the main bill, no less -- not as ill-considered but as illegitimate.
We've grown accustomed to the lies and cries of "treason" and "death panels" from the Bachmanns and Palins in our midst -- a bad sign in itself. But Romney is supposed to be a relative adult, smart, informed, competent --- notwithstanding that he displayed to the world in the last election that he has no principles. This kind of incendiary rhetoric has become the norm for Republicans.
On the plus side, perhaps the Republicans and the Tea Party know-nothing nihilists to whom they pander have jumped the shark. Americans may turn against protesters spitting on Congressmen and calling them 'nigger' and 'faggot' as they turned against southerners heaping garbage on civil rights demonstrators. At the same time, Republicans have defined political discourse down to the point where demagoguery has gone mainstream -- it's the daily fare of party stalwarts as well as incendiary upstarts. Maybe my perspective's too short -- maybe the screams in decades past against Social Security and Medicare (not to mention communists under the bed) were just as shrill. But the fact that one of two major parties is showing all the characteristics of a radical fringe party seems like a blinking red alert on the democra-meter to me.