BINOY KAMPMARK — The Art of Political Suicide: The Fast Slide of Mitt Romney
Electoral suicide is a skill, mastered through the ages with a degree of diligence one can admire. Monarchical states had it right without perhaps knowing it – one doesn’t take a regime to an election for fear of finding something worse. The politics of the vote is the politics of the knife – candidates fed by party machines, stumbling into the abyss, not realising they have made a blunder until it is too late. Did you watch that capacious mouth of yours, dear candidate? Hopefuls flounder only to perish because they misread the shrivelled tea leaves.
Mitt Romney, amusing political creation that he is, is demonstrating why he is making the venerable Japanese ceremony of seppuku more attractive by the day. Not liked within his own ranks, endorsed by anti-Obama necessity, he is fast moving towards the deadly ravine. “God, this guy is a loser,” claimed an unnamed GOP strategist onCapitol Hill Blue (Sep 18). “We just lurch from one disaster to another.” Inner sniping is beginning to gather pace with tribal force, and the sounds of the cutting can be heard from across the country.
There is much one can forgive a running candidate for, provided he is blind, oblivious and lost. Romney’s spectacular effort of not caring “about 47 percent of voters” was a confession that power is something that he would wish other people to have. Yes, it wasn’t vetted with the GOP wizards and maladjusted astrologists, but shot by a hidden camera at a session where he was caught off guard. Shockingly, the professional mendacity of the GOP is starting to rust. If one is to lie, one better well be damn good at it.
The resumes of these unfortunates are, for Romney, inglorious, spanning those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… These are people who pay no income tax.” Electoral death, it seems, by video, is something of an entitlement.
Read more.. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/the-art-of-political-suicide/
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