Quote of the Day (Mitt Romney, on Trump’s ‘Extreme and Egregious’ Violation of His Oath of Office)

“The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a ‘high crime and misdemeanor.’

“Yes, he did.

“The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

“The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

“The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

“The President’s purpose was personal and political.

“Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

“What he did was not ‘perfect’— No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”—Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), “Romney Delivers Remarks on Impeachment Vote,” Feb. 5, 2019

Over the last several weeks, I have despaired over what I will call, after their most prominent House and Senate exemplars, the “(Will) Hurd-(Lisa) Murkowski Defens
e” of Donald Trump—that, yes, his conduct might be “inappropriate,” even “shameful and wrong,” but it did not warrant his removal from office. 

Springing from fear of either retaliation by this most vindictive of men or of being “primaried,” their objections to impeachment, when not legally irrelevant, were constitutionally inadequate and morally incoherent.

Few figures in positions of high authority exit public life completely uncompromised, and over the years I often disagreed with Romney’s vision of America’s future. 

Particularly in the last few weeks, I wondered what was taking him so long to speak out, as one Republican Senate colleague after another turned out to be as morally abject about the President's rank offenses as what Winston Churchill scathingly called "the Boneless Wonder" of Barnum and Bailey Circus. 

But his explanation today of his vote to impeach the President leaves him far more than one of the “footnotes at best in the annals of history” that he evoked in his closing lines. With admirable concision, he cut through the fog of cant, excuses, insults and lies spread by the President and his accomplices in his latest brazen assault on the Constitution and on the dignity of the office once occupied by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.

The odds are long, given his age and the current parlous state of his own party, that Romney will ever achieve his dream of the Presidency. 

But today—when history was watching and weighing what was happening, and when the Constitution itself was riding on the results—he looked more Presidential than anyone now on the hustings. He proved that sometimes, a politician really can stand as tall as the occasion demands.

Quote of the Day (John Heilemann, on the Chance of a ‘Nerve-Jangling’ Election)

“[N]ext Tuesday night is likely gonna be the emotional equivalent of riding the Cyclone at Coney Island: a nerve-jangling, empty-out-the-liquor-cabinet-and-stash-box sort of affair.”—John Heilemann, “The Zombie Election: Four Ways the Campaign May Be Undead on November 7,” New York Magazine, November 5, 2012

Heilemann spells out four nightmare scenarios this Tuesday:

  

                    1) The Romney Squeaker Scenario, in which the GOP candidate takes the Electoral College vote with    a   razor-thin 271-276 total, raising all kinds of suspicions among the left (already going on, even) about voter-suppression schemes in close states; 

2) The Reverse Gore Scenario (i.e., this time the Republican wins the popular vote and the Democrat, the Electoral College); 

3) The Recount (or Recounts) Scenario, in which the lawyered-up campaigns take each other to court—at just the time when the federal government will be facing “the fiscal cliff,” expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and another squabble over the debt ceiling; and 

4) The Tie-Goes-to-the-Romney Scenario, in which, astonishingly, the Electoral College vote ends up tied, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, where state delegations are given a single vote—and Romney wins. 

Heilemann doesn’t mention what might be the most insane scenario of them all, voiced by NBC’s Chuck Todd: that failure to win an Electoral College vote throws the election into the hands of Congress, where the Republican-controlled House of Representatives elects Romney President, but the Democratic-controlled Senate re-elects Joe Biden V-P, thereby giving full employment for stand-up comics in the next four years in the form of a gaffe-prone President and Vice-President, from opposing parties. (I'm not sure this is what people had in mind by "bipartisanship"!)

On Facebook over the last several days, I’ve seen more than a few posts of liquor bottles used by friends unnerved by, or celebrating the end of, Hurricane Sandy. We all might need this multiplied if any of the above comes to pass.

(The political caricature accompanying this post comes from DonkeyHotey.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ on Obama Disengaged in Debate)

Mitt Romney (played by Jason Sudeikis) (Droning on about his platform): “Number 20…”

Jim Lehrer (played by Chris Parnell): (Interrupting): “Excuse me, Governor.  Mr. President?”

Barack Obama (played by Jay Pharoah) (Startled out of a reverie over how to make up to Michelle over forgetting her anniversary gift): “Uh, uh, yeah, I’m sorry—what’s up?”

Lehrer: “Mr. President, Governor Romney has just said that he killed Osama bin Laden.  Would you care to respond?"

Obama: “Uh, no. You two go ahead.”—Saturday Night Live, October 6, 2012, “Debate Cold Open” Skit

As hard as I laughed at this exchange, I howled even harder at Sudeikis’ imitation of Romney’s profoundly weird stare. Even the image here doesn’t do justice to the SNL star's dead-still, bug-eyed original.

Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, for a Guy in 'Deep Mitt')

“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller (1764)

The top strategist for Mitt Romney, Stuart Stevens, has copped to trying steroids to see what they were all about. Perhaps his candidate wanted something like the same feeling of strength and rush without actually taking the performance-enhancing drug, because earlier this year—now known in a video that’s gone insanely viral--he went before a bunch of Florida fat cats—his people—to talk about the other guy’s people: the now-infamous 47 percent.

Mitt Romney was so in the moment that he dropped his mask and became hyperaggressive: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

For years, Romney and his advisers have thought obsessively about one number—270—the amount of Electoral College votes they’ll need to win. From now on, they may be thinking of 47—the number that, bandied about to a friendly audience, might now prevent victory.

The reaction to the video was swift—and not just from the usual suspects. The candidate, a New York Daily News wag wrote in a headline, was “In Deep Mitt,” or in “A Mitt Storm.” Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and Ronald Reagan speechwriter, opined that it was finally time to recognize that the Romney campaign was incompetent. David Brooks, The New York Times’ token op-ed conservative, encapsulated it perfectly for a baby-boom generation who gloried in Gilligan’s Island reruns: the headline THURSTON HOWELL ROMNEY.

(Oh, yes—lost in the hullabaloo was Romney’s remark that it would have been beneficial to him if his father, who was born in a Mormon colony in Mexico, had actually been of Mexican descent. Many Hispanics are probably wishing now that the candidate had followed the same remedy—“self-deportation”—he had urged to solve the problem with undocumented aliens. If he doesn’t want to self-deport, I’m sure they’ll be happy to lend him a hand, for free—even if, by his own definition, that would make him a “victim.”)

There are all kinds of reasons why the reactions to Romney’s remarks have proven so toxic, but one has gone unnoticed and even unarticulated, except for the 18^th-century writer Oliver Goldsmith, anticipating events by more than two centuries in the quote above: i.e., so many people already sense that governmental laws and regulations are tilted outrageously in favor of the 1%--Romney’s natural habitat. Put another way: Romney’s rank hypocrisy galls as much as his blithe condescension.

I’m not talking about the tax shelters that so many at Romney’s fundraiser in Florida surely enjoy. Nor am I talking about the disproportionate influence that their money gets the well-heeled in Washington as well as state capitals all across the nation. Nor am I talking about the host of the event, Marc Leder, who, as co-CEO of the private-equity firm Sun Capital Partners, according to the blogger Legal Schnauzer, “does exactly what Mitt Romney did years ago at Bain Capital”: i.e., revive some companies, dismantle quite a few.

No, I mean how the candidate himself has benefited, personally and professionally, from a different form of the entrenched privilege he criticizes:

*His wealthy father was able to keep him in college during the late 1960s, when Mitt received draft deferments for religious-service and academic reasons that allowed him to stay out of Vietnam—this at a time when many of the “47%” had no such options;

* His reputation as the managerial wizard who saved the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics was secured with the help of $1.5 billion supplied by the federal government—much of which was, as noted in the blog Democurmudgeon, given over to wealthy donors to the games;

* Without a massive bailout from banks and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bain & Co., the firm that launched Romney on his career as a vulture—sorry, venture—capitalist, would have gone under. Even more outrageous, as outlined by a Tim Dickinson article in the September 13 issue of Rolling Stone, he threatened to distribute bonuses to executives at the financially troubled firm unless Bain were allowed to pay off its debt at a deep discount.

Right now, Democrats might have only one cause for complaint with the Almighty on the Romney gaffe: Why couldn’t it have occurred closer to Election Day? Such was the fate of an earlier Republican with a well-deserved reputation as a stiff, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. In the final days of his whistle-stop campaign, on a train with the premature title of Victory Special,” the locomotive gave a sudden lurch. “What’s the matter with that idiot engineer?” Dewey barked. That comment aroused the ire of the labor movement, who came out in big numbers to help Truman beat Dewey.

Quote of the Day (Matt Taibbi on Mitt Romney, ‘Apostle’ of Greed and Debt)

“Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.”-- Matt Taibbi, “Greed and Debt: How Mitt Romney and Bain Capital Staged an Epic Wealth Grab, Destroyed Jobs – and Stuck Others With the Bill,” Rolling Stone, September 13, 2012