There’s something about Mitt Romney... I get uncomfortable in the presence of Mitt. It’s hard to pin down. He’s a good-looking guy with nice hair, a full set of teeth, and perfect posture. He’s not an empty suit like Tim Pawlenty or Al Gore. Maybe the problem is that he wears several different suits over his sacred underwear at the same time. Although stiffly upright at all times, he seems to have the most supple political spine in the history of our republic. Before his most recent campaign for the presidency, I heard a reporter say there was something different about Mitt: “Even Mitt’s friends don’t like him!” Isn’t that strange?
    There is that old expression about the sexes used by shrinks to counsel patients: “Women are from Venus, men are from Mars.” My problem is I know some men from Mars. Mitt isn’t one of them. He acts like he hasn’t lived in our culture. If he has spent considerable time on some other planet, it wasn’t Mars.
   I’m beginning to think that Mitt may have lived on the planet Pluto until it was downgraded by scientists and astronomers to a plutoid. He decided to come to earth because humans were abandoning a planet in 2006 that had only been identified for 70 years. Remember that good Mormons who are promoted to Heaven may become Big God—and God can create other planets such as Earth, Mars, and Venus. But that’s another column after Mitt is elected. Since Pluto was put into the sub-class of a plutoid, another one named Eris has been discovered beyond Pluto in a cold region known as the Kuiper Belt. Eris may become more important than Pluto because it is larger and heavier. Maybe Mitt will choose his plutoid after his sacred underwear is removed.

As Dan Quayle Was No
Jack Kennedy, Mitt
Romney Is No Spock

   We have had visitors from other planets before. Spock of Star Trek was born of Amanda Grayson and the Vulcan Ambassador Sarek on the planet Vulcan. I won’t go into his childhood on Vulcan, but as an adolescent he experienced farr, the powerful Vulcan mating drive that demands that Vulcans mate or die every seven years. Spock was a young cadet assigned to the U.S.S. Enterprise. Although from another planet, Spock was no Mitt Romney. Spock was charismatic, fun-loving, and had certain, well-grounded beliefs.
    Although Mitt has been educated at several of the finest private schools in the country, including Cranbrook School, Stanford University, Brigham Young University, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that he learned much when one examines his public pronouncements. No doubt he assimilated some info in getting an MBA, because he has assembled over $250 million in what has been called “vulture capitalism” by his fellow candidates. But this country has proven time and time again you don’t have to be brilliant to get rich. You only have to have money as your prime goal in life. It also helps to have a rich and prominent family and Trump luck. Perhaps this observer has described Mitt better than most: “Romney is polished, impenetrable—and possibly a cyborg [maybe from Pluto...]. Though constantly metamorphosing, he somehow also manages to remain blandly familiar, a combination that long sustained him as something of a de facto Michael Jackson King of Pop among the nominees.” Since Mormons don’t drink alcohol or coffee, one cannot have a beer with Mitt. No one has really pushed that anyway. Remember when people said one could enjoy having a beer with George W. Bush? Being a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, it was never a goal of mine. I think George would be a very dull drinking companion. Poor George isn’t dumb. He just never made an effort to know anything.

What Has Happened To
Community-Minded,
Moderate Country
Club Republicans?

   What does Romney believe in this moment of history? Only a Vulcan as brilliant as Spock could know. He says he supports the following policies: He would empower the states to recriminalize abortion. He would attempt to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriages. He would require two-thirds congressional majorities for tax increases. He would repeal Obamacare, thus increasing dramatically the number of untreated and uninsured. He would replace unemployment insurance benefits with unemployment “savings accounts.” He would give the One Percent more tax cuts to “spur” job creation. He would repeal all financial regulations for Wall Street such as Dodd-Frank. He would double the size of Guantanamo and bring back Dubya’s torture policies (or was it the heartless Dick Cheney?). He would deport all undocumented aliens as quickly as possible.
    Doesn’t that sound like a Tea Party nutcase? But within the last decade, Mitt supported liberal and moderate policies, so what Armani suit is he wearing today? As Massachusetts governor, he developed a cap-and-trade pact for Northeast states. Geez, that’s recognizing global warming and climate change, isn’t it? As early as 1994, he supported full equality for gays in the military. At the same time, he supported the assault weapons ban and longer waiting periods for the purchase of guns. He supported and passed Romneycare in Massachusetts, the first state to really promote universal health coverage. He ran for the Senate against Ted Kennedy as a pro-choice candidate and supported Planned Parenthood. After he lost to Kennedy, he said he would not accept the pro-life or pro-choice label! He banned assault weapons as governor, but just a few years later at age 59 joined the National Rifle Association as a lifetime member and opposed any new assault weapons bans.
   Now he believes that life begins at conception and is “firmly” pro-life. This guy doesn’t only come from the culture on the plutoid Pluto, he has spent considerable time in the land of Oz. A joke on the campaign trail says it all about Mitt’s waffles and flip-flops: “A liberal, a conservative, and a moderate walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Hi Mitt!’” Other observers have called him the man with a thousand faces. If he wouldn’t lie so much about his positions...



Mitt Has An English
Major, But I Don’t
Believe He Has Ever
Read A Classic

   The fact that I have never spotted a literary allusion or metaphor in any of Mitt’s speeches or written opinion pieces just reinforces my idea this guy is from Pluto. No references to classical literature at all to help make a point or embellish meaning. I expected that from Dubya, who also has an MBA but couldn’t find any oil in Texas. But I would expect Mitt to use a phrase from literature on occasion. This makes him curiouser and curiouser. An English major and he can’t come up with even a lousy metaphor? What makes this guy tick? Money? Two Cadillacs for the wife?
   As a manager of Bain Capital, Mitt learned a number of things. The most important thing is that only profits matter, people be damned. He learned how to create a few jobs, but that an owner makes larger profits from firing hordes of workers. In 2008 after the Lurch disaster, Mitt wrote this when our auto companies were in trouble: “If General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler get the bailout...you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” Not a word about the hundreds of thousands of workers who would lose their jobs to European and Asian manufacturers. Mitt wanted them all to go through bankruptcy—the favorite trick of our hedge fund managers and airline companies—so wages, pensions, and jobs could be slashed, and unions destroyed. Mitt has said over and over, “I love to fire people.” Remember, this is a guy who said corporations were people and should have the same rights.  
   Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, who is twice as smart as Mitt and four times more articulate, put it bluntly: “If this had gone the way Mitt Romney had wanted it to go and there was no rescue of the auto industry, then we would have seen 1.4 million people unemployed in Michigan alone. It would have been a 20 percent unemployment rate. The guy is shameless.” By the way, General Motors just took over the number-one sales spot in the car industry from the Japanese giant Toyota.



Has Mitt Ever
Really Talked To A
99 Percenter?

   Mitt has probably put in a couple of decades campaigning for this or that. He campaigned for the U.S. Senate and for governor of Massachusetts. He has campaigned for the presidency twice. He has even campaigned in France for the Mormon religion. But he makes more serious gaffes than any other candidate after all that experience, even including the irrepressible, close-to-Russia Sarah Palin. He does seem as if he comes from another culture. Sometimes he is just weirdo-bizarro. During a campaign trip to Michigan, Mitt waxed poetic: “This feels good, being back in Michigan. You know the trees are just the right height and the streets are just right. And I love cars.” Wha...? He added this political gem: “I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs.” She must be ambidextrous. Maybe Mitt is from the new plutoid Eris instead of Pluto. He seems to put a dog on the top of his car every time he travels to a campaign stop. Even Fidel Castro, who has survived ten of our presidents, thought that the nine Republican candidates were really weird: “The greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”
   Sometimes Mitt tries to give the impression that he came from 99 Percenters. He tried to pull this off a few months ago. He said his father once trained to be a carpenter and was able to “take a handful of nails, stick them in his mouth and then, you know, spit them out, pointy end forward.” George Romney must have had this carpenter training in between his gigs as the $2 million-a-year president of American Motors and his work in Richard Nixon’s cabinet. Maybe Mitt thought he was raised in the ghettos of Detroit—instead of Bloomfield Hills.
    Mitt evidently inherited some of the gaffe ability from his father. An early supporter of the Vietnam War (where Mitt got two deferments), George made the statement when he was running for president that he had been “brainwashed” by generals. Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy owned an acid tongue when it came to Republicans: “All that was needed in the case of George Romney was a light rinse.” That’s an “Ouch!” in any language.

Does Mitt Have Tin Ears
And Three Pounds Of
Mush Between Them?

    What other superrich One Percenter would try to win votes from the poor and the middle class while remodeling his 3,000 sq. ft. beach house in La Jolla, California to 11,000 sq. ft? It features a 3,600 sq. ft. trophy basement and has an automobile elevator so the Mustang, Chevy pickup, and two Cadillacs can be raised to the level of the front door. Doesn’t everyone on this planet have an auto elevator? It must be a big hit with his NASCAR-owner friends. But he evidently doesn’t understand money or people. Remember when he said the $374,000 earned for speeches in one year more or less represented pocket change?
   New Hampshire is not exactly a wealthy state, so when Mitt talked about his health care plan and said he would allow people to dismiss insurers and providers, he added these comments: “If you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” He certainly has proved that. That’s how he made millions buying and selling 70 businesses for Bain Capital.
   Mitt has five sons and has tightly bonded with them with $1 million trusts. I thought it was interesting that Mitt has never changed a diaper in his life because “they gave me the dry heaves.” Maybe Mitt would have been a more authentic personality if he had been pissed on occasionally by one of his sons while performing that function. A president does not need to be a veteran to understand war. But a president needs to have changed a messy diaper to understand 99 Percenters. It would have done Mitt a world of good to change a good one once in a while. Then, as Maureen Dowd wrote, “He might be the same guy on Thursday that he was on Wednesday.” So far, every time he sets foot on a campaign stage, he sets his pants on fire.