Dear Mitt Romney: Have You No Shame, Sir?
An AP story on the Republican Convention in today’s paper puts it this way:
Mitt Romney conceded Sunday that fresh controversy over rape and abortion is harming his party and he accused Democrats of trying to exploit it for political gain.
“It really is sad, isn’t it, with all the issues that America faces, for the Obama campaign to continue to stoop to such a low level,” said Romney, struggling to sharpen the presidential election focus instead on a weak economy and 8.3 percent national unemployment.
Let me see if I get this straight:
- Mitt Romney has spent the entire campaign trying to distance himself from the moderate stances on social issues he embraced as recently as 2008, embracing a hard-right radical ideology that would attack women and gays, increase economic disparity, and stack the Supreme Court with more radical-right ideologues.
- Mitt Romney chose as his running mate Paul Ryan, whose budget proposals are akin to a hit-man attack on the poor, and whose environmental record makes me worry a great deal about the future of the planet (Paul Ryan gets a miserable 3% rating from the League of Conservation Voters)—and who co-authored extreme anti-choice legislation with none other than the notorious Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, yes, the same one who made the ridiculous remark about pregnancy being nearly impossible in cases of “legitimate rape.”
- Mitt Romney is content to stand behind a Republican party platform that contains a full-blown assault on women’s reproductive rights.
- As an example of taking the high road, I suppose, Romney made a joke that essentially endorsed the discredited birther movement that claims Obama was not born in the US, just last week. Talk about focusing on the important issues!
And please, finally, let’s not forget that the Republicans have no legitimate claim to run on economic issues. Not only did George W. Bush turn the largest surplus in history—that he inherited from Bill Clinton, who built a remarkable ecnomic recovery after the disaster of the Reagan-Bush years—into a raging deficit, not only did the economy crumple under years of deregulation and defanging the watchdogs, but the Republicans have sabotaged Obama’s recovery efforts over and over again, with the expressly stated goal of making him a one-term president. Even so, housing starts are up, private-sector jobs are up, and the stock market is waaaay up.
And let’s not forget Romney has made it quite clear he will be the president of the 1%. Those of us in the 99% will not find a friend in Romney-Ryanomics.
Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” He’s often misquoted as asking “have you no shame, sir?” That second question is the one I pose today to Mitt Romney.
