Ready For Tonight? The First (Yawn) Debate

Romney's been practicing zingers for the last two weeks. Obama's been governing. And both their teams have been running election campaigns. Obama's really well; Romney's ... well, just look at how he's been tumbling in the polls in every state he and Ryan wander into and start talking. Romney and Scott Brown share a chief campaign strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom... maybe Eric tossed Brown the zinger about not being Elizabeth Warren's pupil Monday night in their debate. You know Brown was just sitting there waiting for the appropriate moment-- appropriate to the right-wing lizard brain at least-- to throw that one out. It didn't win him the debate. Instead it helped cement a picture in viewers' minds that he's a heavy-handed bully without respect for women or the people Santorum said "will never be on our side" (i.e., "the smart people"). And tomorrow's the big day... for everyone to see how amusing and effective Romney's zingers  turn out to be-- for everyone to watch and see how effectively Obama turns them around and makes him look more like a fool than he's already made himself look.

Keep in mind that the non-Confederate/non-Fox voters have already made up their minds that the policy agenda Romney and Ryan are offering is nothing they want in their lives. Everyone but the Republican base understands that the Republican plans would hurt the middle class to benefit the very wealthy who Romney and Ryan have diligently served throughout their political careers, Romney because he doesn't know any better and Ryan because he's a worm-like little striver who is arriving.

Watch the newest Romney video, released just before the first debate. How phony and hopeless is that

? In fact, go right to the end of the clip, to where Romney says he approves the message. How bogus is that tone? How many times did Fehrnstrom or some other handler make him do it until it sounded that phony, that soothing and full of shit? Like the message, his latest flip flop. Romney and Ryan are going to close loopholes on the middle class? They should name a few. Or would that take too long too?

And speaking of closing loopholes, Harry Reid chimed in about how bogus everything Romney and Ryan says on the matter appears:

“Today’s report proves that nothing Mitt Romney says about taxes can be taken at face value. Instead of owning up to his use of secret offshore tax havens in places like Bermuda and Switzerland to enrich himself, Mitt Romney parsed words to try and convince the American people that he did not benefit from these havens-- when in fact, he appears to have made millions from them over the course of his career.

“This is the same pattern we have seen from Mitt Romney when it comes to his tax plan: instead of respecting the American people’s intelligence by offering facts and straight answers, he and Paul Ryan have offered nothing but evasion, dissembling and half-answers.

“Congressman Ryan even went so far as to claim that he couldn’t provide details about their tax plan because he didn’t have the time. With the fiscal cliff fast approaching, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had better find the time to provide some real answers to the American people about how they would approach tax reform.

“Mitt Romney could clear up these issues tomorrow if he would simply release his tax returns and release the details of his tax plan. Instead, he's asking the American people to just trust him. Mitt Romney does not seem to understand that trust is earned-- and not by playing shell games with the American people.”

You might remember that during the primary debates, Romney never let any of the Know Nothings and racists he was debating get to the right of him on xenophobia and immigrant-bashing. Romney, who had, 4 years earlier, been eviscerated with the story of having hired undocumented workers to work on some of his estates, wound up attacking Rick Perry in a way that left viewers thinking Perry was running an underground railroad to give sanctuary to half the population of Latin America. Romney clearly wanted GOP primary voters to know he'd learned his lesson and that NO ONE was going to be more of a racist and bigot than he was. Right after the convention he went out of his way to publicly embrace one of the country's most deranged and hateful anti-Latino sociopaths, Steve King (R-IA). So, now, just before the first debate, someone may have mentioned to Romney that joking about how much better off he'd be if he was Mexican isn't going to win over Latino voters. It's not? Let's change the message, then-- and hope the morons in the base don't notice.

Young illegal immigrants who receive temporary work permits to stay in the United States under an executive order issued by President Barack Obama would not be deported under a Mitt Romney administration, the GOP presidential hopeful told the Denver Post Monday.

“The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid. I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,” Romney said. “Before those visas have expired we will have the full immigration reform plan that I’ve proposed.”

I wonder if his vagueness about what happens after two years will be enough for the far right so that they don't force him to walk this one back, like everything else he's had to walk back that strays from whatever Limbaugh and Bryan Fischer say is kosher.