1017 Mitt Fitt

1017 Mitt Fitt

It’s really hard for a parodist to come up with anything funny about Romney.  He leaves us no material.  And parody has to start with reality.

With Mitt, reality changes so often, there’s nothing to sink your teeth into.  

The other guys in the Republican primary were easy.  Some of you received our notes from Sick Rantorum as he campaigned for the US Championship in the more-Catholic-than-the-pope contest.

What’s his name from Texas... the other Rick... the guy with the craggy-faced good looks of a movie cowboy and had the brains of a rutabaga, but with a poorer memory was an easy target for verbal cartoonists.

Ron Paul?  All you have to say is he looks so much like Jack Kevorkian, they could have been cousins or maybe roommates at med school.

And the balloon man Gingrich is a treasure trove of marital, economic, nutty professor academic hot air so outrageous and off the charts he’s impossible to resist.

But Romney? Ken Doll but with less personality?  Prep school-nanny-raised rich kid who hoses down dogs which he’d previously tortured with that top of the car trip to Canada, and who writes off his cruel bullying as “pranking?”  How do you get funny about stuff like that?

How do you write off leading a roving band of nasty private school boys who cut off the blond-dyed long hair of a fellow student who likely was gay?  And how do you excuse provoking a blind teacher to walk into a glass door?

Taken as individual incidents, all of this stuff is relatively petty.  Taken as a pattern -- and it is a pattern -- the whole becomes more important than the sum of its parts.

Cruelty is cruelty.  Picking on the weak is picking on the weak.  And that was still going on with Romney as late as his days at that crumb-vacuuming, bottom feeding takeover firm.  Loot the weak.

The real issue is that America has allowed the Romney campaign to frame the conversation around his simplistic and unworkable and so far mostly secret economic plan.  

The real issue is character, character, character.

And it’s tough to make fun of something that doesn’t exist.


Shrapnel:

--Attention jurors in the John Edwards case.  His fate will soon be in your hands.  Check your mail each day for a little something from Bunny Mellon.

--Edwards has been quoted as saying he could be to poverty what Al Gore is to the environment.  What is that?  It’s a guy in a mansion with a bigger carbon footprint than his neighbor, Neyland Stadium and who chases grants instead of ambulances.

--The legal case against Edwards is iffy at best and it wouldn’t be surprising if the jury declares him not guilty, even without any encouragement from Bunny.  But as a public figure, he’s through. And like so many other politicians it isn’t what he did that got him in trouble -- we have high tolerance for guys who can’t keep their pants on and even those who embezzle or make secret tapes of their oval office meetings and phone calls.  It’s the coverup, stupid.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
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© WJR 2012