CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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What I Think of Mitt Romney

Sunday, October 28, 2012

this entry brought to you by motorhead, "ace of spades"





By this time, four years ago, I'd written quite a lot of political posts during the Obama V. McCain election, and for some reason, this time around, I've written almost nothing about Obama V. Romney. There's something about this election that is much more disgusting than it was the last time around, where it's almost seemed pointless to talk about it. For one thing, they're pulling the same tricks they always pull, but the political environment has just gotten so much more rancid that none of it seems particularly surprising or shocking, and all of it just seems, frankly, soul crushing.

When McCain was running, and I've read my old entries to make sure, I never said that McCain was a bad person. My opinion of McCain was that he opened a Pandora's Box and was quickly in over his head. He hired the same people that Bush had hired, those same monsters, and once he let them loose, he didn't really have any choice but to go along. I don't think McCain made any of the decisions that was made for him during the campaign. Which of course doesn't mean he was innocent in anythingl-- he hired the same people that ran the Bush campaigns for a reason. Still, with McCain it just seemed sad and pathetic.

Romney, on the other hand, doesn't seem like a helpless sad sack in over his head, he seems like a bad person. Moreover, he seems like a sociopath, incapable of empathizing with other people. And I don't just say that in an insulting way, I mean it literally. Every thing we know about this man seems to point at someone who completely and utterly does not relate to other people, and furthermore cannot relate to other people. He was born into privilege, and while I do not necessarily hate a person just for being born into privilege, he seems to have grown up the classic rich white bully. Full of father issues, not understanding why it's weird that he claims to not remember pushing a gay kid down and cutting his hair rather than taking the opportunity to apologize publicly to him now that he has a chance, not being able to see that his sons are weird bullies as well.

But, more than anything else, he seems to think that he has contributed something to society simply by making money for himself. He seems to honestly think that somehow society at large is better because he made money. His wife seems to think that the 47% hate him because he has money, but nobody cares about his money-- its that he somehow thinks he's helped everyone else just by making his bank account bigger.

I'm not the first person to think that Romney is a sociopath. There have been several studies that posit that the richest, most powerful people in the world, the people at the top of the food chain, are all sociopaths, and must be so by necessity. Most people do not have the ambition and utter disregard for those around them to rise to the top. Most people actually do not want to disregard everything for the acquisition of a little more money. This should be a surprise to no one. You can't be in the work force for longer than a few years before you start to notice the people who get promoted in corporations tends to be the same kind of people, and they're usually assholes who are rarely the best, hardest workers.

On a related note, I've come to notice over the past four years, with the collapse of the economy and subsequent slow recovery, with the stock market healthy and better than ever, with investors sitting on ten trillion dollars but somehow see the market as being "uncertain", something that I've suspected since I've started in the work force: CEOs are spectacularly stupid people.

Somehow this country has created a weird reverence towards business people, as if the very act of making money makes them smart, but I'm not sure why this is. I've long suspected that it's the people in upper management, but below the people in the highest echelon, that really drive companies, that really put in the hours, that really care because if things fall apart it's their job, and the higher ups just take the credit while having little clue as to what actually makes their companies work.

Let me make an analogy. Athletes don't need to be the smartest people in the world. I'm not saying that athletes are stupid, I'm saying that smarts aren't necessary. They train their bodies and their abilities to do one specific thing, and they do it over and over, and they do it to perfection, to the point that they can do those things better than anyone they know. And if they're not supervised or governed or monitored, they will do whatever it takes to win their game. For example, the defensive end in football are better at one specific thing than anyone you know-- tackling the shit out of dudes. And if there are no eyes watching them, they will do things to the guys that are being tackled that are way out of bounds in order to insure that they win the game.

This does not make them smart, it makes them very capable of doing one specific thing. CEOs and chairmen of enormous corporations do not seem very smart at all. They seem like money athletes. They are capable of doing one thing, and one thing only-- wring every single dollar out of everything they do. And let me say that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being a money athlete. But they don't seem to have jobs that require smarts, or, really, deference. And some of them seem spectacularly stupid despite how good they are at their jobs.

And yet, somehow, over the past few weeks, polls keep showing the same thing-- Obama is way ahead electorally, but on national polling, Romney is slightly ahead. Even when you take into account the margin of error, that still means Obama and Romney are neck-and-neck. And I am utterly baffled as to why, Jesus Christ, America is this fucking stupid.

From a conservative point of view, there seems to be no reason to vote for Romney. He's changed his position on abortion three times during the last week alone. He's against Obamacare despite basically being the author of it, saying that the mandate is unconstitutional on a national basis, but perfectly reasonable by the state, which is an incredible semantic argument. His company, Bane Capital, never made jobs, he personally benefited from bail outs, he was against the auto bail-out before claiming it was his idea, yadda yadda yadda.

At least George W. Bush had the Christian thing going for him-- Romney is a Mormon, yet never has to answer for the weird things Mormonism has been up to for just the past 30 years.

Of course, I do know why Romney is ahead of Obama nationally. Obama has been a divisive president, but it hasn't had anything to do with what he's done. He's been divisive because of a concerted right wing effort, said publicly by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to make Obama a one-term president. The Republicans have Fox News, which has a pronounced agenda. People say that Democrats have MSNBC, which is a joke. MSNBC has Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Congressman from Florida (hardly a non-partisan state), for three hours a day, which is the same as Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnel combined. And every major news network is owned by a giant corporation, many of them with parent companies that are archly conservative.

The people who do not directly watch Fox News believe that both parties lie equally, and when one of them lies saying that the other is giving out welfare checks, wants your kids to be gay, and is a socialist who apologizes for America, while the other apparently lies about, uh, well, I don't know what the average American think the democrats lie about, but the mainstream media is constantly saying "both sides do it"-- when the average person thinks both sides lie equally when that is not true, one side's lie is bound to get into the national consciousness over the other. Otherwise, why would someone who has lost their job and is afraid they're not going to be able to afford insurance-- someone you probably know right now-- say they're going to vote for Romney?

And of course, there's the apathetic voter, who will say things like, "I don't care, we're screwed either way". In a way, he's right, of course. But in a bigger way, we have one candidate who will undoubtedly put in a Supreme Court Justice that will overturn Roe V. Wade, and the other will not. We have a candidate who hasn't said he won't undo the Lilly Ledbetter act. And we have a candidate who has suggested we need a bigger military presence, we need to be more firm in the middle east, and withdrawing from Afghanistan, as long of a time line as that is currently, is a mistake. This affects people's lives. This isn't just some election about abstract ideas about abstract numbers that won't effect anyone you know, this shit effects people in real life. In some cases, we're talking about lives.

Yet somehow, Obama and Romney are neck and neck in the polls. Despite Romney being unabashedly, nakedly wrong, and completely, disgustingly spineless, so obviously without any principle, so utterly a bad person.
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with love from CRS @ 2:37 PM 

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