“Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops. As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending,” contends Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) in a July 4 Atlantic piece headlined “America Is in Denial,” with the subhead, “too many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic.”
For example, “As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice. When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel.” And so on. But the author quickly tips his hand.
“A classic example of denial comes from Donald Trump,” who claims he won the 2020 election. As Romney wonders, “Perhaps this is a branch of the same delusion that leads people to feed money into slot machines: Because I really want to win, I believe that I will win.”
If Romney conducted any audits of the 2020 vote in key states, compared overall voter fraud to past elections, or took a peek at Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules,” no evidence of that appears in his essay. Like Sir Bedevere, embattled Americans might wonder, who is this who is so wise in the ways of climate science and elections? As it turns out, the 2012 presidential loser is the son of another wealthy presidential loser.
George Romney headed up American Motors and went on to become governor of Michigan. Romney senior thought that qualified him to be president of the United States but his 1968 bid went nowhere and he wound up as secretary of housing and urban development from 1969 until 1973.
According to Romney fils, daddy left him no money but it turned out that he “inherited some funds.” As a college student, Mitt had cash to burn and stocks that eliminated the need for work. As Mitt imagined, being wealthy, having famous relatives and looking down your nose at working people qualifies him as a conservative.
After raking in big bucks at Bain Capital, Mitt served as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. Like daddy, he thought he had the chops to become president. But he was clueless from the start.
In a January 2012 Republican primary debate, Tampa Bay Times political editor Adam Smith asked, “Governor Romney, there is one thing I’m confused about. You say you don’t want to go and round up people and deport them, but you also say that they would have to go back to their home countries and then apply for citizenship. So, if you don’t deport them, how do you send them home?”
“The answer is self-deportation,” Romney responded, “which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so we’re not going to round people up.”
That may have been the stupidest statement since Gerald Ford, in his second debate with Jimmy Carter, proclaimed, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” Then, when Romney got the nomination, he failed to use the most devastating independent research against his opponent.
In 2012, Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengor published The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. The man portrayed as the happy-drunk poet “Frank” in Dreams from My Father was in fact a Stalinist and Communist Party member who spent his life trashing the United States and defending all-white Soviet dictatorships. Kengor unearthed Davis’ 600-page FBI file, which designated him a security risk, and found “remarkable similarities” between the writings of Davis and the policies of the president, who was soft on Islamic terrorism.
In 2009, when self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah” Major Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood, the Obama Administration called it “workplace violence.” The dashing Mitt Romney made nothing of it and went on to lose to the incumbent whose biographer, Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow, calls Dreams from My Father a “novel” and the author a “composite character.” For details, see Garrow’s massive Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Romney duly lost to the composite character president, who deployed the upper reaches of the FBI and Justice Department against candidate Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton. That year, Romney charged that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was “a phony, a fraud.” Voters didn’t think so and put Trump in the White House. The Democrat-deep state-media axis immediately mobilized for Trump’s for impeachment and removal.
“I was sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the president,” Romney said after the Mueller report found no collusion with Russia on the part of the president. The Utah Republican wasn’t done. “Reading the report,” he explained, “is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.”
After the Mueller report, the Democratic impeachers shifted to Ukraine and staged Stalinist show-trials headed by Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.). Nancy Pelosi sent two bogus articles of impeachment to the Senate and before the February 5 vote, Mitt Romney went on the record.
“I believe that the act he took, an effort to corrupt an election, is as destructive an attack on the oath of office and our Constitution as I can imagine,” Romney said. “It is a high crime and misdemeanor within the meaning of the Constitution, and that is not a decision I take lightly. It is the last decision I want to take.” That is hard to top, but the 2012 loser wasn’t done.
“Yeah, again, I can’t let personal considerations, if you will, overwhelm my conscience and overwhelm my oath to God.” So for the impeachment mob it was God and Romney mit uns.
In his statement on the events of January 6, 2021, Romney said “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States. Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.” And so on, with the annoying italics in the original.
“Today, we call to mind the memory of those who were tragically lost on the 6th and in the following days,” wrote Romney in his anniversary statement, which failed to name Trump supporter and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, the only person “lost” to gunfire that day. “We reflect with gratitude on the heroic efforts of those who protected the U.S. Capitol and all of us inside the building,” perhaps a veiled reference to Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd, who gunned down the unarmed Babbitt and faced no charges.
For Romney, “the best way we can show respect for voters who are upset is by telling them the truth.” The Utah Republican revealed no results of any investigation he might have conducted. It was all about “ensuring that our democracy endures.” On July 4, the 2012 loser picked up the theme.
“President Joe Biden is a genuinely good man,” Romney wrote, “but he has yet been unable to break through our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust. A return of Donald Trump would feed the sickness, probably rendering it incurable.” The Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is predictable, but readers might wonder about Mitt’s take on the Delaware Democrat.
Biden bragged about the Ukrainian “son of a bitch” who got fired and called a reporter a “stupid son of bitch” over a question about inflation. In a discussion of the Second Amendment, Biden told an autoworker, “you’re full of shit,” and African Americans who failed to support him “ain’t black.”
For Biden, the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks,” and Biden has financial entanglements with the regime through his son Hunter. No word from the sanctimonious Romney how all that squares with the “genuinely good man” description. There’s also policy to consider.
On July 4, Romney passed over Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. The genuinely good man has essentially eliminated the southern border and ships illegals around the country in secret flights. The Utah Senator says it’s important to tell voters the truth, but no word how many illegals are in the country, what they might be doing, or how many have “self-deported” since Romney’s 2012 loss.
In similar style, the Utah Republican is silent on President Trump’s secure border, strong economy, high rates of employment, energy independence, and the Abraham Accords. President Trump achieved all this while facing fire from hoaxes that Mitt Romney supported as part of his oath to God.
Romney had it right that denial, deceit and distrust continue. Truth is, Joe Biden is doing his best to make it all incurable, and that could prove cataclysmic.