However horrible we thought Willard Inc. might be as president, it looks like he's going to be WORSE

It will undoubtedly be seen as an insult to garbage to describe the Incorporated Willard as a stinking pile of worthless garbage. I'll just have to live with it.

"He's a very accomplished spokesperson, and we select people not based upon their ethnicity or their sexual preference or their gender but upon their capability,"

-- Willard Inc., about Richard Grenell, the foreign policy
"spokesman" his campaign was too scared to let speak

by Ken

Now let's be clear: "Ric" Grenell is a horror show. At least according to what I've read and heard, he seems to be a near-clone of the scumbag he served at the U.N., the inexcusable John Bolton, in both foreign policy ideology (primeval crackpot) and personal style (bullying scumbag). But those are qualities that should have endeared him to the people who froze him off the Willard Campaign Bandwagon -- the neanderthal homophobes of the Toxic Right. It turns out that when they make scary noises, Willard wilts like soggy lettuce.

Howie just wrote about the WCB cave-in "Glass Closet . . . On Capitol Hill," focusing on the Giant Tent that is the DC GOP Closet. Man, it's getting crowded in there! And all that self-loathing packed into the one enclosed space, all sublimated in wackadoodle Far Right ideology and viciousness. Whew!

I want to focus for a moment on what it tells us about what we can expect from Willard if -- heaven help us -- he winds up in a position of authority over us. What it says to me, in combination with the "Willard on China" episode we'll come to in a moment, is: However bad we thought the schlub would be as president, we didn't know the half of it.

Here's how the NYT's Michael Barbaro, Helen Cooper, and Ashley Parker reported it in a "Politics" blogpost, "Romney Camp Stirred Storm Over Gay Aide":

On one level, Mr. Grenell’s short-lived and rocky tenure as Mr. Romney’s foreign policy spokesman is the story of how halting attempts by the campaign to manage its relationship with the most conservative quarter of the Republican Party left an aide feeling badly marginalized and ostracized.

But according to interviews with more than a dozen aides and advisers, it is also about how a fast-growing campaign, operating under the sharp glare of a general election, failed to spot the potential hazards of a high-profile appointment.

Sorry, that second graf is spin. The level we should be concerned with is the one in the first graf. Faced with ugliness from people who are known to produce nothing but ugliness, the campaign folded like a cheap suitcase.

The Willard Bandwagonmasters are in damage-control mode, naturally, in the face of dreadful publicity like the NYT post, which includes this from them:

Aides to Mr. Romney insist they did everything they could to keep Mr. Grenell from resigning, sending the campaign’s highest-level officials to try to persuade him that they valued his expertise and that the matter would soon die down. In the end, they said, he chafed at the limitations of a disciplined presidential campaign.

But, as the NYT team reports in the very next grafs,

those close to Mr. Grenell, known as Ric, insist that when he had sought forceful support from those who had entrusted him with a major role, the campaign seemed to be focused, instead, on quieting a political storm that could detract from Mr. Romney’s message and his appeal to a crucial constituency.

"It's not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay," one Republican adviser said. "They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn't want to confront the religious right." Like many interviewed, this adviser insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

We had to wait till Barack Obama was elected president and began making appointments to learn that he wouldn't stand behind them. This could have been nipped in the bud if Willard and his people, instead of deploying their brilliant strategy of simply waiting for the flap to die down (because we know how easily the wackos of the Far Right let go of red-meat issues), word had been sent out that Mr. Grenell's foreign-policy credentials had not been in any way challenged by his party detractors and he continued to enjoy the full confidence of the candidate, end of story. Instead the campaign geniuses decided to stuff their guy in the Official Willard Inc. Campaign Closet.

I imagine they're still waiting for the matter to die down.

Meanwhile, we have the Man Who Dreamed of Becoming a Corporation mouthing off about the Obama administration's handling of the mess surrounding the fate of beleaguered Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. Oh, it is a mess, no doubt (see today's report by the NYT's Michael Wines, Sharon La Franiere, and Jane Perlez, "Nascent Deal Would Let Dissident From China Study in U.S."), but the notion of the Incorporated Willard opening his yap on the subject is grotesque beyond imagining. On a scale of zero to a zillion, this sack of garbage's understanding of the situation -- and I mean and and every aspect of the situation, with the sole exception of its possible political exploitability --is the usual zilch, the Willard camp's proprietary number.

Oh, Willard has been making noises about how he wants to be "tough" with the Chinese. Yeah, right. Anybody want to wait till the first time President Willard utters a cross word about official China and gets a prompt reminder of how much of this country the Chinese own? Now that's something Willard knows a little something about -- owning stuff.

Was it regrettable that the U.S. negotiators allowed Chen to be removed from the U.S. embassy in Beijing, where he had apparently unofficial asylum, to be removed to a hospital, presumably to received needed medical treatment? Yes, it was regrettable. Could clown-brained right-wing Republicans have negotiated "tougher" with the Chinese authorities? Anyone who says so is a moron, or maybe just a garden-variety liar.

The U.S. negotiators thought they had "iron-clad guarantees" for Chen's safety. Given the degree to which the Chinese authorities are dug in on his fate, those "guarantees" turn out to have been meaningless, but to suggest that a powder puff like Willard, who poops in his pants at the ravings of loons in his own political party, could stand up to the Chinese is, to put the kindest face on it, delusional. Which doesn't, of course, in any way deter the gutless wimp from running off his mouth.

It's true that for arrant right-wing gutlessness Willard will always have to contend with that other tough-talking born coward, "Chimpy the Deserter" Bush. But this is one challenge I'm betting Willard can rise, or rather sink, to.

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