Why is there a Republican primary this year? Don't we know the outcome already? It's Mitt Romney. If for some reason any other person wins, Republicans will surely lose. We all lose if Romney wins it all next November, especially because he has some experience running a government health care program with a public mandate and is the one most motivated to dismantle it, if only to disprove charges of flip-flopping (thereby proving them right, when you think about it). Speaking of Mitt, have you noticed that like his dog, Kim Jong Il was lashed to the top of an American car and taken to a very cold place? I leave it to others to explain the significance of this.
As you can probably gather, I am not actually in favor of Romney, nor the Republican field for president for that matter. The entire season of G.O.P. debates is debasing the electoral process, what with Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul all vying for what I like to call the "Anybody But a Black President Unless He's Coulter's Better Kind of Black" vote. Whatever happened to statesmenship and honor in the party of Lincoln? Whatever happened to honesty?
Then there is the Iowa Republican electorate itself, who profess to base their choices on such superficial impressions as the sound of a candidate's voice or the way he holds himself, if we can believe a New York Times front-page article titled, "Voters Examining Candidates, Often to a Fault." Times writers Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker chalk this up to voters falling back on gut reactions in times of uncertainty with ''whimsical judgments and serendipitous connection." I blame it on an electoral system overtaken by too much money, an addiction to political pandering and too little intellectual honesty. Even Jon Huntsman, the party's least attention-crazed offering, is now questioning manmade climate change.
It's a wonder any serious coverage has been afforded to this cabal of Ayn Rand acolytes. What we basically have now in the G.O.P. is a bunch of three card monte players whose success relies on their ability to divert voters' attention with slick, entertaining moves on stage that cover up their behind-the-curtain transfer of wealth to the 1% who need it least. Their best trick of all? They convince you the Democrats are the ones who are tax-and-spenders in favor of income redistribution.
There is sociological a term for this slight-of-hand tactic. Inoculation. Whatever Republicans want to get away with, they accuse Democrats of. Class warfare is a perfect example. They practiced and perfected class warfare from Reagan's trickle-down days through W's two terms, selling tax breaks for the wealthy as job creation policy (during which W created one of the most paltry job expansion records in modern history), then accused progressives who voiced support for the Occupy movement's calls for economic fairness for provoking class warfare.
The ad hominem attacks targeted at Democrats by the media swarm of G.O.P. apologists are designed to inoculate the right from being held accountable in the court of pubIic opinion. History has shown they can get away with it, and this year should be no exception. The main stream media plays along with a longstanding policy of promoting false equivalence between the occasional misrepresentations of Democrats and the outright lies that emanate from within the right's well funded program of mass deception.
Republican voters in Iowa on Tuesday can be forgiven for their political diffidence, simply because they face a Hobson's choice: many brands on offer, but all the same flavor of right-wing extremism masquerading as populist outrage. With the exception of Paul, who as president would try to dismantle most of the progress of the 20th century, Republicans have only one choice at the polls -- economic royalists who are primarily to blame for the last three decades of declining wages and a morally bankrupt financial system that gambled away their life's savings by turning their home equity into casino chips.
That is why I say to all Republican primary voters: Save yourselves a lot of trouble and crown Romney sooner than later. He is your man. You can rationalize your choice of a former moderate Massachusetts governor by saying he looks presidential. If elected president, Romney should fit right in with the Tea Party types in Congress already sharpening the knives that will eviscerate those intrusive federal programs and departments so many of you seem willing to forgo to receive a pittance in tax breaks. Also, Romney already has the most experience killing jobs, off-shoring manufacturing jobs, and destroying entire companies while running Bain Capital. You already knew that, right?
This race was over long ago. It doesn't matter how flawed a candidate Mitt Romney is. The fact is he is the only viable candidate among the weakest primary field in the history of American politics. The rest of the field looks like a skit from Saturday Night Live, only funnier.
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