Romney Descending: Fact vs Belief in 2012

Mitt won’t win. That is a strong belief I’ll be carrying every day until the election.
 
I’m writing this at the apex of Romney’s well-earned polling bounce. He performed admirably at the Denver debates. With very little accountability, and absolutely no sense of natural human progression, the hardline conservative that systematically dismantled his rivals in 20 grueling contests had instantaneously transformed himself into a bleeding-heart, just right-of-center Champion of the Middle Class. Obama made the mistake of lazily discoursing against the real Mitt Romney and his actual platform instead of taking passionate issue with the 12 trillion tons of festering bullshit that Mitt was spilling onto the stage. 
 
I’m a lover of truth in all its forms, so I won’t candy coat it. Obama lost that battle.
 
But as Romney enjoys his temporary boost, as he blissfully soars on a gust of his own hot air, I’ll be watching patiently and reveling with ugly glee as the gravity of the candidate’s abysmally incompetent campaign resumes its hold, and the weight of his alien, characterless, shameless, valueless persona drags him screaming back to earth, where he’ll finally know–in the hardened world of unforgivable certainty, that even in victory, Romney was always losing.
 
I have no real beef with faith. I was raised Roman Catholic. My beliefs evolved from innocence, and unquestioning certitude. I believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. I believed the world was flat. I believed that if I was a good boy, I would some day die and be with all my friends and family and dead pets on a fluffy cloud where I could snap my fingers and eat whatever I wanted. I believed that not only was America the greatest country in the world, it was also the most honorable–conducting its affairs amongst other nations as an unparalleled beacon of righteousness.
 
This was before I learned about the Crusades, the payment of indulgences, the Inquisition, the hoarding of immeasurable wealth in the name of piousness, and the seemingly unstoppable cycle of child rape as it is perpetuated by a trusted institution’s knee-jerk instinct to cover it up. This was before I learned about slavery, the rapacious slaughter of Native Americans, and my own country’s indefatigable tendency to impose its militarized will on weaker nations, merely to further the business interests of a few wealthy citizens.
 
At the cost of simplicity and possibly happiness, I allowed my beliefs to evolve as a natural response to observable truths. So my problem with true believers isn’t that they’ve retained their faith, but that they’ve used their faith as an excuse to be manipulated by people in power and have in turn blinded themselves to demonstrable history and science.
 
Romney, for instance, is a follower of Mormonism–a religion that unabashedly professes the divinely inspired claim that Native Americans were descendants of a Jewish tribe cursed with "blackness of skin" by an angry God for not excepting Jesus Christ into their hearts. Amongst a sea of equally ludicrous claims, I always harp on this one, not just because it can so easily be debunked by historical, genetic and archeological evidence, or because it’s simultaneously racist on at least three levels… I harp on it because it literally makes me laugh almost every time I think about it.
 
Unsubstantiated beliefs plague every aspect of politics, but none have been more destructive to the middle class as the undying faith in trickle-down economics. We’ve had plenty of time for this social experiment to rain a windfall of wealth on every hard working American. The result has been a series of staggering economic trends you couldn’t climb without a ladder. In the last fifty years income equality between the average working stiff and the top one percent had more than doubled. As of 2010, the mega-rich have 288 times more wealth than the average household. The top-earning 10,000th of the United States makes five percent of the nation’s income (up from one percent 40 years ago). Economic mobility, being able to rise from the lower ranks–the whole basis of the American Dream–is stronger in Canada and about half of Western Europe (including several socialist countries).
 
Which is why it’s somewhat astounding that Romney would even be considered for the highest office in the nation, because he doesn’t just represent the problem, he actually is the problem. He was born into opportunity–the son of a wealthy, well-connected car magnate and politician. While he went to college, he lived off his father’s stock; when he got his first home, he paid for it with his father’s loan. Since then Romney became a founding partner of Bain Capital, where he–we are told–fixed, created, and expanded companies. But at a cursory glance of the business model, it’s fairly obvious that Bain’s sole ambition was to make as much money as fast as possible with the least amount of risk, regardless of whether or not the acquisition would survive the deal, regardless of how many workers needed to be sacrificed for the sake of sociopathic greed.
 
Bain would descend upon a distressed company, make a comparatively small investment of a few million dollars, and secure a gargantuan loan from a giant bank, usually for hundreds of millions of dollars (the leverage in the leveraged buy out) . That debt was immediately transferred to the already burdened company’s books, and people would have to be fired just to keep up with the interest payments. From there, the restructuring would continue, and the acquisition would either flourish or burn to cinders in bankruptcy court. Either way, Bain got its cut–a return as high as twenty times their initial investment–a sultry blank check written to themselves in red ink.
 
Mitt Romney’s job was easier back then. He didn’t have to convince everyone that worked at a corporation that he’d do what was best, just the people at the top, and they were each paid off with millions of dollars in bonuses. Now he has to convince an entire nation that he’s fiscally responsible and vehemently dedicated to all demographics, even though his entire fortune was created by leveraging avalanches of debt and throwing thousands of people under the bus.
 
He needs the country to see something that’s not there, he needs to be all things to all people. He needs belief to supersede reality.
 
So he softens his voice with practiced empathy, rearranges his face to approximate compassion, and croons a delightful lullaby… If he is elected, he will lower income tax 20% across the board, repealing the estate and capital gains tax. He will increase the military budget. He will end Obamacare, keeping only that part about pre-existing conditions (or, for those of us paying attention, the whole point of Obamacare). He won’t touch the medicare or social security benefits of seniors and near-retirees. He will "make sure our people have the skills they need to succeed and the best schools in the world." He will create twelve million new jobs. He’ll do that and more… "debt neutral."
 
He offers no specifics, he doesn’t say which tax loopholes he would close. He points to a box with the answer to all things in it, promising to open it up on election day. Mitt just needs your faith, and your vote.
 
But he hasn’t earned our faith. You can close every single one of those loopholes, and you can shut down PBS and a hundred more commie-pinko educational stations just like it. Romney’s plan is, as Clinton so elegantly put it at the convention, a mathematical impossibility. And given his record of schizophrenic contradiction, you’d have to be cognitively dissonant, willfully ignorant or completely insane to take Willard at his word.
 
Romney is a liar. His running mate, Mr. I-Can’t-Even-Tell-the-Truth-About-My-Marathon-Time, is a liar. There is no pleasant compatibility between the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the undeniably socialist teachings of the former governor’s personal Lord and Savior. Something had to be sacrificed, something essential. The candidate has flipped and flopped on so many issues that not even the barest residue of integrity can shine above his senseless, mechanical, win-at-all-costs ambition.
 
I support President Barack Obama, not because he has made promises that are pleasing to my ear, but because I can look at the actual accomplishments of his presidency and know that he is the better man for the job. He saw this country through the worst economic disaster since the Crash of ’29, and in spite of whatever you’ve been told, he did it with the slowest yearly increase in the federal budget since the Eisenhower administration. The Dow Jones Industrial Average doubled, restoring countless IRAs and 401Ks. The unemployment rate lowered from 9.7% to 7.8%. On his watch, we saw the end of the Iraq War, a drawing down to Afghanistan, the assassination of Bin Laden, and the overthrow of Gaddafi. He pushed through the repeal of "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" and was the first president to acknowledge a gay couple’s right to marry. He successfully passed the largest healthcare reform legislation of our time, extending coverage to at least 30 million more Americans. He saved the American auto industry. He reversed Bush’s torture policies. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act so women could get the same pay as men for the same work.
 
He acted with consistent, cool, thoughtful decorum wherever he was, both at home and abroad. And his every action was dedicated to representing the whole of the nation, not just that freeloading 47% of us.
 
And I am better off now than I was four years ago. 

Once again, Obama has my vote. You can count on it.