I’m still stewing about two things I read some 30 hours ago, and the fact I read them back to back probably has something to do with it. One, in The Washington Post, said the combined net worth of our current presidential candidates is about a quarter-billion dollars. Think about that figure for a second. It’s nearly one-fifth of Andorra’s GNP in 2005. (Pete Seeger’s old song about Andorra was running through my mind, so I checked.)
The other, in The New York Times, focused on the candidates’ selective memory and their whitewashing of anything that might cost them a vote. No real surprise there; I might have been a New Yorker for a long time but before that I lived and worked in Washington, D.C. and went to college there. I am not naive about politics and hypocrisy.
This is what got me in the Times piece, available here thanks to the Times’ permalink feature: Mitt Romney, hoping to become the Republican nominee, is so afraid of upsetting even one conservative he is coy to the point of obfuscation when mentioning which state he was governor of. It was the Commonwealth of Massachussetts, aka the “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For McGovern” state. (It is on his Website, though, in plain English.)
That, coupled with his convenient shift on abortion rights — he’s against abortion now, doncha know, even though he says he was “effectively pro-choice” in 1994, when his wife donated $150 to Planned Parenthood and he was trying to win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat — has earned Romney the inaugural From Scratch Flip-flop Award, for politicians flip-flopping on an issue for the sake of expediency.
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I’d love to see a really good choreographer do a ballet called “Politicians.” It would probably look more like clowns doing a tumbling act than anything else. Between those that are life-long hunters (but who have never held a rifle) and those that Are Aren’t Are Aren’t we are going to need a whole lot of flip flops to keep them in dancing shoes.
Amen. And let’s not forget those (her) who grew up in Illinois, lived in Arkansas but was a lifelong NY Yankees fan when it was convenient.