Reasons Not to Vote for Romney

There are a number of reasons not to vote for Mitt Romney. First, he is a world class liar. The longstanding affair between lying and politics is hardly a revelation. In fact I have speculated that there is a symbiosis between the two which is not unlike the relationship between some fungi and some trees that benefit from one another’s life force within the same ecosystem. Having said all of this, Romney is a weird and creepy liar. It is almost like he is a multiple personality with a number of entities living in his psyche. Often times one comes out and speaks without the knowledge of the others. This explains the deer in the headlights stare and the stammering when an alternate personality is question about something they didn’t hear. That begs the question, should Romney win the Oval Office do you really want the twelve-year-old sociopath who strapped the dog to the roof of the car emerging during time of national crisis or challenge – say the killing of a Bin Laden for example?

Another reason not to vote for Romney is the general societal superstition that rich means smart. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are many brilliant people roaming the land who haven’t, as my mother would say, a pot to piss in. While by the same token, there are many rich people haunting the halls of power whose gray cells are so necrotized by greed or avarice that they should be placed in restraints and tossed in a cell for the good of the public. I give you Jamie Dimon, their poster child.

There is a fundamental difference between smart and cunning; just as there is a fundamental difference between commanding and ruthless. Romney is cunning and ruthless. He proved it at Bain Capital. In my estimation that is not a qualification for the exercise of pure, almost absolute, power. Particularly, when one remembers that the power arises from the people and flows through the conduit of the Whitehouse. To the extent that the sitting president is stupid, fraudulent even ill the power is lost to the people.

To me the most persuasive reason not to vote for Romney is that he has identified himself with some of the most malignant, destructive, vicious and cruel people ever to emerge on the national stage. I am referring now to the Neoconservatives, those dark and sinister little men, in expensive but shapeless suits, who populate the shadows of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense like the specters of every death-scented tyrant who ever lived. These men would have us believe that war is a noble and natural state of human existence. When in fact, it is as unnatural as terminal illness because it is a death sentence.

Chris Carter notes through a character in the X-files that, “The business of America is not business, but War. Since Antietam nothing has driven the engine of the economy faster.” Thus the Military Industrial Complex with all of its twisted tentacles embedded in the brothel that is our government could, and probably has, made the case that war is a job creator. Like all the other con artists in this false argument – from Wall Street to the Koch brothers – the abuses of the war industry and war profiteering were taken to a new level by the Bush Administration. It requires a very special kind of myopia to overlook the fact that these monsters fed not just on the enemy but upon the citizens they were supposed to be defending.

In considering this next election it may behoove the electorate to ask how many times the Wolfowitzes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Dimons and the Kochs can return to our collective neck and suck blood before this country collapses like a brittle shell. This isn’t about Capitalism, Socialism, Jobs, Unemployment or the economy – all that is just the lure of the vampire. This really is about the fact that we could elect another empty cloak where Dracula hides, and that is perhaps the best reason not to vote for Romney.