"It's only a lie, if YOU don't believe it..." G. Costanza

I will have to give the republicans credit; they have firm control of their messaging.  While the obtuse yet vapid nominee-in-waiting, Mitt Romney, struggles to put a positive spin on what increasingly appears to be a personal financial plan based largely on dodging taxes with mysterious off shore accounts, his colleagues, minions and surrogates blast away at Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for all income up to $250,000 per year but to restore them for any income in excess of that.  The democrats should be so coherent.   Instead we have the spectacle of 17 members of the House lining up with the crypto-fascists calling for the attorney general’s head on a platter and several cowardly members shamefully voting with the republicans to repeal the ACA and now oppose even this fairly responsible action to meet the ostensibly critical goal of deficit reduction and tax fairness.  I mean, let's face it; if you're bringing in net income over 250k, you're doing OK.

Romney’s struggle is the more amusing of these developments.  Watching him attempt to convince voters that he really has no knowledge of the nature of his tax-sheltered investments, where they are, why they’re there and that, moreover, it’s OK because he hasn’t broken any laws, is like handing the democratic national committee and big stick and saying, “Hit me”.    And they seem to have been able to get their arms around the idea and are calling for him to release his tax returns and explain how his avoiding paying more than 15% tax is patriotically American and appropriate behavior for a presidential candidate.   Good for them; lord knows they have been maddeningly inept at getting a coherent message of their own out even as Mitt and his treacherous cronies have given them a target rich environment that Schwartzkopf would salivate over. 

Mitt still hasn’t given us a single new idea about anything.  He is the personification of the anti-Obama-at-all-costs interests in the country and seems to be against anything and everything that Obama favors.  But asked to lay out a plan for economic progress should he be elected he reverts like Pavlov’s dog to an inane script about cutting taxes and regulations and repealing the health care law; that’s about it.  David Brooks, of the New York Times, insists that Mitt has a health reform plan that he is not yet sharing but that begs the question; what the hell is he waiting for?  Was there ever a better time to offer an alternative to Obamacare than in the immediate aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding it?  Instead he simply reverted to a vow to repeal it at his first opportunity, offering nothing to replace it even as there is wide agreement among republicans on the need for real reform.  Well, Mitt? 

He, along with every republican talking head in the land, is in a sputtering indignant froth selling the toxic notion – put forth in Justice Roberts’ decision – that the individual mandate is a tax and therefore an Obama flip-flop and broken promise and the largest middle class tax increase every, etc., etc.   Of course it was obvious the minute Roberts upheld the law based on this somewhat twisted notion of a tax that it would be seized upon by the Norquistians and used as a bludgeon.   Even as they were sitting around swilling the good scotch and cursing the day that Roberts was ever confirmed they were plotting to try to turn the tax idea to their advantage.   They conveniently ignore the issue of personal responsibility for the scofflaws as it doesn’t conveniently fit their “Don’t Tread on Me” narrative.  So the party ostensibly committed to libertarian personal responsibility is forced to advocate for leaving the sick and dying in the street to fend for themselves or letting them rip off the rest of us, getting sick on our dime – anything to oppose the POTUS on his main legislative achievement. 

Now that Obama has bitch-slapped them with a new glove – the extension of the Bush tax cuts on income up to $250,000 – the volume of tortured howling from the right has become deafening, with bug-eyed hyperbole and predictions of doom coming from all of the usual suspects.   The irony apparently escapes them, as it often does; Romney is hiding his money in secretive havens more often used by the drug dealers and the BeBe Rebozzo’s of the world than a normal presidential candidate while his party is doing its best to stir up the rabble with over-amped blather about gigantic tax increases and their imminent danger to the economy of the republic – the same economy that they have been blatantly trying to sabotage since 2008.  Statistics show that all of the loudly proclaimed concern for “small businesses” is a complete falsehood – estimates are that only 3% of small business owners will be significantly impacted by the tax and – very important – only on that portion of their net income that exceeds $250,000 per year.  

The level of toxic, treasonous bile coming from the right these days is a clear reflection of the losing streak they are currently on; the ACA, Arizona’s immigration law and now Obama hammers them with this tax issue.  There is a high degree of difficulty associated with their attempt to wiggle free of the pin and despite the millions and millions of dollars they have available, they may not be up to the task.

Now we have the photos of a wet and grinning Mitt, posed Dukakis-like on the back of a wave runner operated by his wife and presumably somewhere off the Hamptons or La Jolla or somewhere else that he has one of his auxiliary homes.  This is the single worst presidential candidate of my life time and the picture of him looking like a duffus clinging to his wife is an apt metaphor for his whole political life.   This is a guy who is running - terrified – from his one and only good idea like it’s a horde of zombies.  His campaign is based on distortion, fear, hatred and a whole series of noxious lies supported by a relative handful of billionaires and abetted by slimy money-grubbing allies in congress who are fighting desperately to carry out their four year-old marching orders; a systematic betrayal of their fellow citizens for the benefit of corporate sponsors and a racist tea party rabble clinging to the hope that things can go back to the way they imagine they used to be.   What a country.