A Filthy End to the Filthy Campaign of a Filthy Liar:
This election has lasted roughly four years, from the moment it became clear that Barack Obama was going to use John McCain as a dildo to roughly fuck Sarah Palin and take the presidency for the briefly empowered forces of sanity. The cruel pummeling of ads and coverage and rallies and debates that the nation has endured, especially since the end of the midterms in 2010 and especially in swing states, ought to be banned under some treaty or other. Now, here in the Eastern United States, however sick we may have thought we were of the 2012 presidential campaign, we just want the goddamned thing over with.
The Rude Pundit winces, in a Pavlovian way, whenever he sees news about Mitt Romney's fake concern for storm sufferers. He twitches at the commentators wondering when Obama will head back onto the trail. We have no time for it anymore. We have no time to entertain whether or not the Republican charlatan's long con will work. We have no patience for a press that's unwilling to call a lie a "lie" unless it's done in quotation marks or with fact-checkers' long-nosed Pinocchios with their pants on fire.
On some level, it seems as if the campaign of Mitt Romney is a mad sociologist's experiment in seeing how many lies people are willing to either believe or let pass and still vote for a candidate. The Rude Pundit wouldn't be surprised if on next Wednesday morning, Romney was revealed to be the robot we all suspected he was and the scientist controlling the levers and buttons gave a press conference where he said that he was using the machine to try to gauge just how racist and stupid the nation actually is.
"People call me 'mad,'" the no-doubt crazy-haired sociologist would say. "But I programmed the Romney 5000 to say, with a straight face, things that objective truth demonstrated otherwise. And nearly half of you didn't care. So ask yourself: Are you racist? Stupid? Or both? Because my research shows that there are no other options, even for you rich people." Of course, he'd have to disable the robot because it had been set on self-destruct all along and nothing happened.
Look, the Rude Pundit is used to lying Republicans, especially ones running for President. We went through two campaigns with George W. Bush, and that bastard wouldn't have told a truth to Americans if Facts and Reality had held a knife to his nuts and screamed at him to tell the world he believed in them.
But there is something so deeply galling, so disturbing in how Romney lies. The post-primary campaign began on a lie, that Obama was dissing "job creators," and it now ends with a lie, that those "job creators" are moving their jobs to China because Obama failed them, a lie so ludicrous that the CEO of Chrysler has had to refute it. In between, Romney has unleashed a stream of lies, each one easily proven false, but he has been relentless and, c'mon, there's only so many hours in a day. The lies about the President and his policies are of a piece with Romney's lies about himself.
See, we use the cute phrase "flip-flop" to describe Romney's change in positions. But they're not mere shifts in position. They're lies that get to the core of the man's beliefs, such as they aren't. And we could ask if Romney was lying in the past, when he was very moderate, then intensely conservative, or now, when he's somewhat more moderate again. But, except for abortion, Romney refuses to admit that he's changed his position. That's the big lie, the one he has gotten away with more than any other, the one that's winked at as if "That's just Mitt." It's not that Mitt Romney has terrible policies. It's that he's a terrible human being.
The Rude Pundit had intended to write this on Monday. He had intended to make this a series of questions posed to some mythical rational Romney voter, as in, "How would you feel about a Democrat who ran an ad saying something was factually wrong after being told it was factually wrong?" But if that kind of logic was going to work, it would have by this point. So fuck 'em. Write those assholes off. Their faith in lies is what wrecked us in the first eight years of this terrible century. And this storm is the final nail in Romney's coffin, the sealing of which was a long time coming. President Obama didn't fuck up the response to Sandy, as Romney might have hoped. He made Romney seem like the tiny, insignificant rich dick he is. And even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has decided he's sick of the effete poseur and tossed Romney under the number 2016 bus.
Right now, the Rude Pundit's power might not be back until the end of the day, Monday, November 5. If that happens, that means that he'll be spending Election Day cleaning out the refrigerator. Oh, he'll vote, even if he has to scrawl an X on a ballot, even if he's in a state that is deep in Obama's tank. Because liars shouldn't be rewarded.
He'll head into the filth left behind in some of the worst-hit areas to help get rid of the mud and muck, wreckage that's far worse than it should have been because Republicans have blocked anything to do with climate change and infrastructure improvement. Like the President, he'll try his best to clean up their mess. It's what we Democrats are damned to do.
