Time and cynicism

I posted previously on the jaw-dropping level of cynicism in the romney campaign. This news from Paul Krugman really cements it into place even further.

"Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended.
First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?"

Krugman points out the strange alchemy of trying to convince American voters that all bad things happened after Jan 20, 2009 and that all will be fine if we just go back to exactly the way things were before that date.

"Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall."

In the previous post on Romney's cynicism, Cesca pointed out that a certain number of republican voters really are this stupid. But most will simply use the magical alchemy of doublethink to both know and not know at the same time, allowing them to fully believe that all economic woes are the black guy's fault. Romney just banks on the tribalist phenomenon, that bring the teabagger crowd along with whatever nonsense du jour, while knowing that there are some Americans so busy trying to keep their lives together that they will buy whatever the opposition candidate says. No matter how contrary to real experience that yapping actually is.

Thomas Frank also wrote about the extreme cynicism of campaigning on how badly government works to get into power, and then proceeding to make government work very badly once in to make the prediction true. The most cynical angle is pretending that government is broken because ideology on the right says it must be broken, without also recognizing that those conservatives are the reason it is broken.

In a way, Romney is representing the gop when he says to the President "why haven't you fixed everything we have broken in the last 30 years already?" And, he'll probably get away with it too.