But What If Mummy Mao Wins the Nomination?
Doug Mataconis just put up one of those “Hey, that’s what I was thinking but hadn’t written it down yet posts.” The penultimate graf tells the tale:
The Mitt Romney of 2012 is essentially the same Mitt Romney who was endorsed by National Review and lauded at CPAC 2008 when he stood in a ballroom and announced that he was withdrawing from the Presidential race. There are, no doubt, plenty of regular non-activist conservatives out there who are wondering how they guy everyone loved in 2008 has suddenly turned into Public Enemy No. 1 (or maybe No.2, after Obama). The main reason, of course, his health care reform, but it seems odd to punish Romney for something he did many years ago when he was Governor of a state where the legislature was controlled by a large enough Democratic majority to override any veto he would make. Yes, Romney embraced the plan but what else does one expect a politician to do, especially when it contained elements that had been advanced by groups like the Heritage Foundation only a few years previously? I’m not really much of a Romney fan personally, but when I hear some conservatives say that there’s no difference between him and the President, I just roll my eyes. That statement is not only wrong, it’s ridiculously wrong.
Like I said to Tony Katz Friday afternoon. The GOP could raise Hitler from the dead and run Zombie Hitler at the top of the ticket, running on a platform of “BRAAAAAAAAINS!” and I would vote for Zombie Hitler before I would vote for President Obama to take another term.
I never stopped to think, what if the GOP ran someone worse than Zombie Hitler, which, knowing the GOP, is entirely possible. But I know Zombie Hitler. Zombie Hitler is a friend of mine. And Mitt Romney is no Zombie Hitler.
I wouldn’t do it with much enthusiasm, but I would vote for Romney — and hope and pray that a Tea-infused Congress would keep him from acting on his worst instincts.
Amen.
Personally, I’d like to see Cthulhu for President – Why choose the lesser evil? But if the Big ‘C’ is unavailable, Zombie Hitler will do as an alternative.
I won’t vote for Romney. He’s a technocratic statist in Republican clothing and I have zero interest in supporting such creatures. As far as I can tell the only thing Romney genuinely believes is that he should be President. If he gets the nomination I will do what I did in 2008 — leave the ‘President’ slot blank on my ballot. My financial support will go to Congressional candidates who better reflect my political values.
Of course, since I live in California my vote is utterly irrelevant to the outcome. Even if I and everybody I have ever met in my life were to vote for the GOP candidate Obama would still get California’s electoral college votes. Any scenario where the Republican had a shot at winning California would be such a landslide that it wouldn’t matter.
+1
Congratulations, Kyle, you just voted for 4 more years of Obama. Every vote not cast for the Republican candidate becomes in effect a vote for Teh Won.
You remind me of the people who refused to vote for McCain because of McCain-Feingold. Yes, it’s a terrible law, but it’s already been passed. Not voting for McCain won’t change that.
So a lot of otherwise sensible folks voted for Obama, because McCain sucked.
How’s that hope’n'change workin’ for ya?
While I hope he doesn’t get the nomination, I just may have to vote for
the syphilitic camelRomney. Just hope he doesn’t something truly dumb, like pick the GOP-equivalent of Joe Biden as his running mate.No, Casey, I didn’t, as you would understand if you read my comment and grasped how the electoral college works. My vote is irrelevant to the outcome of the Presidential election because my state of residence is not in play. My vote is therefore simply an endorsement with no practical electoral utility, and I will not give my endorsement to a candidate who does not significantly reflect my political values.
How’s the hope-and-change working for me? Pretty well, actually. Do you honestly think we’d have a Tea Party movement if McCain had won? Voting for crap candidates because they’re ‘still better than the other guy’ just leads to a constant increase in the crap/candidate ratio.
How about Frankenstein Stalin?
The Republican party generally needs to get off of the economic fence. They’ve currently got one leg hanging on the socialist side and one leg hanging on the free-market side. You simply can’t have it both ways. You can’t have social programs and wars without paying for them. They want low taxes, but they don’t have the gumption to fight the spending. Look at the slate of candidates that Republicans favor right now – Romney, Perry, Gingrich, and Cain. None of them are willing to make the systematic attacks on Washington’s structure necessary to cut spending to a sustainable level. All they talk about (for what the talk is worth) is tweaking and fiddling and somehow making government work efficiently. Government does not work efficiently and will not work efficiently because it cannot work efficiently. To believe otherwise is to indulge in the Utopian fantasy that an endless stream of human beings will somehow overcome the nature of the incentives around them. Heck, if that was possible socialism would work. But human beings just aren’t wired that way, so it doesn’t.
It sucks, but in this next GOP primary the voters need to choose whether or not to commit national economic suicide. Obama is a faster economic death. The Romney, Perry, Gingrich, and Cain crowd offer a somewhat slower economic death. There is a fairly narrow window of opportunity to minimize the pain of this recession / depression and get the economy working again, but in order to do it you need a radical like Ron Paul or Gary Johnson (despite whatever other objectionable issues there are with them). Half-measures will no longer get it done.
Here’s the really scary thing – I think we’re approaching a point where tax cuts alone will only be marginally stimulative because of the massive Federal Government borrowing from the Federal Reserve. This is effectively a massive tax through currency devaluation, vastly complicating economic calculations for everyone. Basically, we need to cut Federal spending by at least 50% very, very quickly and, preferably, allow for competing currencies to soften the blow of the dollar’s eventual crash. What’s worse is what might happen if a tax cut is enacted and fails to stimulate – the superficial analysis (do you expect anything else from the media) will be that capitalism is dead and socialism is the only way forward. Pretty nightmarish stuff, but the way things are heading it’s going from “crazy horror story” to “hmmm… plausible.”
+1.
Tax cuts are no longer the issue. The issue is government looting of the economy — whether by taxation, borrowing or counterfeiting. Cutting taxes and increasing borrowing, which is what the Republicans have traditionally done, has effects on the margin but we’ve reached the point where the sheer scale of the looting is overwhelming such marginal effects. The path to economic recovery is paved with spending cuts and regulatory repeal. Those are important enough that it would even be worth trading tax increases for them as part of an overall reform package, as in my tongue-in-cheek “21st Century Do-Over Act”.
The danger in such proposals is that the tax increases are always immediate and real while the spending cuts and regulatory repeal are delayed and illusory. I sometimes wonder what would happen if someone proposed a tax increase/spending cut plan that made the tax increases conditional on the spending cuts actually happening.
After all, everyone’s so happy with the Tea-infused Congress we elected last November.
The thing about Congress, Stephen — and why I remain adamantly in favor of term limits — is that D.C. isn’t just corruption, it’s contagion.
87 members — just 87 out of 535 in just one-half of one-third of the federal government — are wielding influence beyond their numbers.
If not for the Tea Party, Obama’s atrocious “jobs” act wouldn’t be DOA in Harry Reid’s Senate.
You get 87 members in a single cycle, and you expect miracles? Their election was the miracle. They can — and have — act as a brake on the worst the rest in the Congress and the White House have to offer. And they’ve done that.
In 2012, we can either build on that and change this country’s course. Or we can continue to sink.
And, frankly, complaints like yours are both ill-informed and counter-productive.
Hoping and praying for another miracle doesn’t strike me as all that useful a plan. Preventing Romney from winning the nomination reduces the need for a miracle by a non-trivial amount.
If the Beltway types continue to believe we’ll keep holding our noses and voting for the POS candidates they keep foisting on us, they will keep foisting POS candidates on us. They’re not concerned with your dignity and relieving you of the need to hold your nose, as long as you vote for their guy.
This doesn’t end until they understand that their POS candidates cannot get elected.
We can only elect someone who actually runs.
I have no enthusiasm for Romney, but if he’s the nominee I’ll pull the lever for him the same way I did with McCain, with a bucket handy. It took us a century to fully make this mess (I consider the election of T. Roosevelt the beginning of the progressive era)and it will probably take as long to extricate our country from it, if we ever do.