Mitt Romney: Flip, flop, and fail

By Richard K. Barry

I know the pundits are still talking like there is some doubt about who the GOP presidential nominee is going to be. Of course, there isn't. Republicans are stuck with Mitt Romney and the funny thing is that the majority of them probably know they're stuck.

But whatever your politics, how could you possibly vote for a guy who has taken such well documented public positions on both sides of so many key issues?

Somebody went through the trouble of stringing together a bunch of clips of Romney contradicting himself on climate change, abortion, and health care - three issues fairly important to the conservative base, I'd say.

Again, left vs. right aside, how could anyone want to vote for this guy? How could anyone trust a word?

Mitt Romney stands for nothing but getting elected. Jon Huntsman was right. Romney is a well-lubricated weather vane shifting in the wind depending on the needs of the moment.

I know this is nothing new, but it's kind of jarring now that we know Romney is the one.

This is the best you've got? I don't imagine the GOP brain trust is getting a lot of sleep these days.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up, please stand up?

By Michael J.W. Stickings (@mjwstickings)

Via twitter: 

"Weird that Romney uses climate change to hit Newt. As MA gov, Mitt boasted that his climate plan was 'one of the nation's strongest.'"

-- David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod)

Sure, but back then he was just foolin'. You know, saying what he had to say and doing what he had to do to get elected in a crazy left-wing state. Or so he tells us.

(It was all just an act of necessary political contortion. Or maybe he really was something of a moderate progressive and then changed, either genuinely or calculatedly, when he went national. He can't quite get his story straight.)

There's no way he's doing the same thing now to suck up to the base of a truly crazy right-wing party in hopes of foolin' it into trusting him with its presidential nomination.

Right?

Jon Huntsman, sensing an opening and trying to show some Republican bona fides, suddenly becomes a climate change skeptic

Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) has shared a Tweet with you:

"joshtpm: Huntsman gets wobbly on climate change -- now says scientists need to provide more evidence" (link)

Et tu, Jon? But of course.

And why is he doing this, why is he destroying whatever shred of integrity and credibility he had left (after saying nice things about Cain reduced him to basically zero on both counts anyway)?

Because he thinks it may be his turn for a surge, because Romney appears to be on the decline and because Newt is, well, Newt (with the party "establishment" against him and with his history of self-destructive buffoonery), and because he actually has a shot, however remote, to do surprisingly well in New Hampshire.

And because this -- being a climate change denialist (or at least skeptic) and otherwise embracing the right-wing denial of reality -- is what you have to do to get anywhere in the Republican Party.

Just ask Mitt.