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Poor Mr Romney. Everyone is on his case. He can’t run a campaign. He can’t stay ‘on message’. He doesn’t even have a message.
We usually rise to the defence of hopeless schmucks, but today we will make an exception. We’ll get on Mr Romney’s case too.
But our beef is different than all those kibitzers fulminating about his ‘gaffe’. We checked the transcript. We didn’t see any gaffes. The mistake we see is that he came dangerously close to the truth, something which is strictly forbidden in political circles.
Our beef is that he didn’t know a good talking point when he had it in his mouth. And then, when he’d gotten it out, and everybody got huffy about it, rather than stand up and defend himself, he hemmed... hawed... he said his remarks were ‘out of context’ or misunderstood.
The man had an opportunity to stand up for something. He had an opportunity to open a real discussion of how the country could avoid disgrace, dysfunction and bankruptcy.
He should have seized it. Instead, he ducked and dodged.
It’s too bad. He should have ditched the phoney war on terrorists and declared war on zombies.
How come the federal government runs such big deficits? Too much money goes to zombies.
How come the average, working-class fellow can’t get ahead? Too many zombies have their hands in his pocket.
How come the economy is dead in the water instead of steaming ahead? Because it is over-laden with zombie programmes, zombie banks, zombie ideas and zombie organisations.
How come people aren’t starting new businesses the way they used to and hiring new people? Too many zombies telling them what to do and how to do it.
It could have turned into a real debate on the virtues of democracy versus zombocracy for example. We believe we have a real democracy, but practically every important spending programme has a ghoulish look to it.
Most of the spending - social security and health care - goes to take care of shuffling old people. And nearly a third of it is covered by borrowing and money printing. These are bills – from beyond the grave – that future generations will have to pay.
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We don’t claim to have all the answers. But that would have been a conversation worth having. Mr Romney had a chance to pose an essential question: how do we stop the zombies destroying America? Too bad he didn’t want the answer.
Trouble is, the zombies vote and there are a lot of them. Many of Romney’s top supporters are zombies too.
Raytheon, General Dynamics, General Electric, Boeing and Blackwater – take away the zombie ‘War on Terror’ and you take away a big part of their revenues.
And what about all those farmers in the Midwest? They’re in Romney’s pocket too. But take away the cornpone legislation requiring ethanol to gum up your engine and what happens to the price of corn?
What we want to know is how many live on what is, in effect, stolen money? How many work for the feds regulating, controlling, pestering, bothering? How many get disability? How many get food stamps? How many produce bombs and boondoggles?
We don’t know. We don’t even think it is possible to calculate. Because a lot of decent work is done by government employees – even federal employees. Well, we can’t think of any right now... But we’ve seen Baltimore City workers occasionally filling potholes. And the cops can be useful from time to time.
For every three people getting money from the feds two are probably zombies. We don’t know.
There are the makers and the moochers... Mr Romney should have come back fighting, declaring himself firmly for the makers.
That would have left Mr Obama with the moochers. And probably with the White House.
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