The Case Against Mitt Romney: K-Lo Demonstrates the Delusion

Note: This post was revised on July 20, when I added several additional links and some clarifying and enhancing language.

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What is it with the so-called “conservative” establishment’s support of Mitt Romney?

Given what is known about the guy, it’s utterly amazing — and, as I’ll demonstrate in the coming days, disgusting.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has had a hankering for Mitt Romney ascending to national office since the primaries. She’s got it real bad.

Her most recent column at Townhall should be an embarrassment to her bosses at National Review, but unfortunately, I’m fairly confident that it isn’t.

Behold one of the most disgraceful exercises in excuse-making — ever (see the notes below):

….. The “flip-flop” accusation label hit former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney hard during the Republican primary earlier this year. By the end of the cycle, most citizens knew only two things about Romney: that he was good looking and used to believe things he no longer does. What most folks didn’t consider was the narrative. Did Mitt Romney change his position on gay marriage? He sure did. (1) Did Mitt Romney go from defending legal abortion to opposing it? Absolutely. (2) But consider how it happened:

Successful multimillionaire businessman Mitt Romney runs for governor of the Bay State to fix the economy there, a job he knows something about. Other issues, at the time, paled in comparison for him. (3) Fast forward, he’s in the statehouse. The legislature decides it’s going to fund an unprecedented human cloning effort with Harvard University, his alma mater. So he seriously studies what’s going on, he brings in experts. He didn’t let himself get swept up by the snake oil salesmen (remember John Edwards announcing that Christopher Reeve would be alive if not for George Bush’s refusal to fund embryonic stem-cell research?). He realizes that “Brave New World” is not just a novel, but something his state is about to budget for in a whole new way. When Romney actually took the time to figure this out, he changed his mind about abortion, cloning and other destruction of innocent human life. (4) Ditto for gay marriage. Once forced to confront the issue, once realizing the lengths activists will go to make sanctified same-sex unions legal, once the supreme court of Massachusetts instituted same-sex marriage there, he changed his mind. (5)

Good for him. They say it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Well, it’s even harder for a grown man in public life to say “I was wrong.” He has. (6) Good for him.

It’s not a disingenuous flip-flop for me to take that point of view ….. (7)

Some “flip-flops” aren’t, in other words. As long as your core is clear — as long as you have one — a mature leader can learn. (8) Both presidential candidates would be wise to do so here and there. At least one of them isn’t going to take the beating Romney did during the primaries. And it helps that the other one’s middle name with them is “maverick.” (9)

(1) - Mitt Romney promised the Log Cabin Republicans before the 2002 gubernatorial election that he would not get in the way of what everyone pretty much knew was an imminent ruling in favor of same-sex “marriage” by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court — specifically that “I’ll keep my head low.” It’s right here in the New York Times, in an article that was complimentary towards him about his former Log Cabin Republican-supporting stance, and critical of his alleged move towards being again same-sex “marriage.” I blogged on it here in December.

(2) - Mitt Romney claims to have experienced a prolife “epiphany.” Oddly enough, the person in front of whom he supposedly had his “epiphany” doesn’t recall it occurring that way. It’s dishonest, bordering on libelous, that Romney tried to make his prolife flip-flop more palatable by asserting that Ronald Reagan was “adamantly” pro-abortion while he was California governor, and that Henry Hyde had once been proaboration. Both claims are demonstrably false; this was proven beyond doubt here back in December. Where has everybody who gets their jollies by invoking and defending the Gipper daily been?

(3) - Mitt Romney’s stewardship of Massachusetts’s economy was singularly unimpressive, and he was originally against the 2003 Bush tax cuts. See here, here, and here.

(4) - If he “changed his mind,” Mitt Romney had a strange way of demonstrating it. AFTER his “epiphany,” he signed into law Massachusetts’s state-run health-care law, aka CommonwealthCare, aka RomneyCare. That law enshrined the statutory right to $50 state-subsidized abortions in the Bay State for the first time.

(5) - See (1). I’ve yet to see an explanation as to how someone who “changed his mind” on gay marriage nevertheless responded to a court opinion he did not have to obey (because the court had no constitutional jurisdiction to even take he case), and in the absence of required enabling legislation, nonetheless mandated that gender-neutral “marriage certificates” be issued and that town clerks and justices of the peace issue them. The fact is, as has been explained many times, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts did NOT institute same-sex “marriage” in the Bay State. Same-sex marriage is still illegal there.

(6) - It’s not just “I was wrong.” It also requires “I am sorry.” First, I don’t think he is sorry, and second, I don’t know how anyone can be confident that Romney, after all those years of seeing things otherwise believes in anything he claims. The right has justifiably piled on Barack Obama for changing his mind about certain things after 20 years. Mitt Romney, an allegedly thoughtful, religious man, somehow took 40 years to get a grip on the sanctity of life and the societal importance of one-man, one-woman marriage.

(7) - K-Lo, your picture is next to the term “disingenuous flip-flop” in my dictionary.

(8) - Mitt Romney has no core.

(9) - If the “maverick” picks Romney as his running mate, he negates all of the advantage he has built up over Barack Obama for steadfastness and consistency, and creates all kinds of other problems for himself — problems that will be covered in future posts.