In fact, as Mitt Romney himself has proved, changing your mind is the surest path to the Republican nomination. Why do I no longer think Mitt Romney is the worst person to run for President? Well, I started thinking about that Jet Blue pilot who went off his nut a few weeks ago and had to be tackled by passengers. That dude would definitely be a worse person to run for President than Mitt Romney. Say what you will about Mitt Romney and how he made his fortune by putting thousands of people out of work and how he invented Obamacare before Obama did and all, he has never jeopardized the lives of people on an airplane that I know of.
That is probably because he flies everywhere on a private jet, staffed entirely by undocumented workers. Mike Lee voted to acquit while Sen. Mitt Romney voted to remove President Trump. Votes seeking to remove mentioning Romney in that resolution failed by large margins.
But Patrick Ketchum, a central committee member from Utah County, argued attacking Romney would divide a party that should seek unity. The originally proposed wording, provided to the news media earlier, would have formally censured Romney for his vote. Another resolution that was defeated sought to support HB in the Legislature, which would allow the recall of U. Legislative leaders have said that it likely will not advance this year. Rick Pruitt, a delegate from Sevier County was among members who opposed that.
We can take care of him at the polls. I think that ultimately, we have shifted as a party from sort of divisive rhetoric to more of an open approach to supporting the president and supporting his agenda and his reelection. The song represents an early attempt to pin down a phenomenon in order to better resist it: to point out that a particular number of bothersome individuals can be defined as a type , and that doing so can allow complaints against them to register not or not just as petulant sneers but also as assertions of competing values.
These folks had been around for years, unnamed, rendered invisible by their ubiquity, their social positions fortified by that invisibility.
Slick, eh? In exactly the same way that the hipster seeks to stand apart, the douchebag seeks to fit in; in exactly the same way that the hipster seeks to resist hegemonically-imposed common culture, the douchebag seeks to internalize and master it. The douchebag, above all else, seeks a kind of internal legibility, or in simpler terms, normalcy. When he succeeds in this task, he is free of stigma, not invisible so much as omnipresent. For that moment he is structurally centralized, an ever-widening nucleus, invisible to himself but projected everywhere he looks.
To be clear, the douchebag does not achieve this stability and centering the same way that your yoga instructor does: i. Instead, the douchebag surveys the social landscape, calculates the exact middle of it, and moves toward those coordinates as expeditiously as possible. The douchebag maintains a suspicion of interiority—his own, and that of others—that borders on revulsion. Skinny jeans now fill the racks at Target!
Every ex-sorority sales rep now sports a facial piercing and a tattoo! Grrrr , says the stereotypical hipster. The douchebag, by contrast, is blissful and confident in his conviction that his selfhood can always be assumed , and therefore need never be asserted or examined. He regards this not as a symptom of moral weakness but as a skill to take pride in. Well, with normal people, anyway. To the outside observer, however, he simply looks mediocre and smug.
And indeed, why should the douchebag be humble? He is at the center and apex of all things. The average American douchebag is a model citizen of our society: masculine, unaffected, well-rounded, concerned with his physical health, moral but not puritanical or prude , virile without being sleazy, funny without being clever or snide; he is at all times a faithful consumer, an eager participant, and a contributor to society.
To a great extent, every presidential election since at least has been a coolness contest , with the cooler major-party candidate consistently prevailing. We could conclude that the whole of American civic life adds up to a compulsive reiteration of the social dynamics of a high-school cafeteria, with every clique defined exclusively by its relationship to other cliques in a fixed hierarchy and otherwise devoid of significance or content.
All of that may indeed be the case. And you are hearing this from a guy who unapologetically voted for Ralph Nader in Calm down; I was in Texas. Instead, we should examine those reactions and try to figure out how we came by them, what emotions animate them, and what principles they endorse. My point, in a nutshell, is this: calling Mitt Romney a douchebag is not—or, okay, is not just —a coarse ad hominem attack.
Calling Mitt Romney a douchebag is, for instance, a way of saying that he displays a cavalier disregard for facts. Every bit of this is either demonstrably factually untrue or has been directly contradicted by the candidate himself. Candidates like Romney, for whom candidacy is a full-time job, incur little risk by treating facts with contempt: they occupy no elected office and therefore have none to lose, and if they win they can defend against attempts to hold them to statements they made during the campaign by citing occasions when they stated the exact opposite.
But presidents need facts to do their jobs; indeed, the job largely consists of weighing the quality and value of available information to determine a course of action. And this is a really big problem. Anybody with any genuine desire to see these problems addressed ought to be working to enable a public discourse in which these options can be put on the table and evaluated on their merits. There are worse places to begin the project of rehabilitating public discourse than making sure Mitt Romney is not only defeated but discredited on Tuesday, called out for his irresponsible rhetoric on the national stage.
Instead of adopting a bunch of transparently insane but laser-beam-consistent positions and refusing to budge from them—i. This is not a good thing. This is also pure, classic, peerless douchebag behavior. Dyed-in-the-wool douchebag that he is, he believes this to be utterly self-evident, almost not worth articulating.
I think what we hear in the Boca Raton video is a candidate whose comfort level is conspicuously inversely proportional to the number of people he thinks can hear him talking. He sounds kind of great , frankly.
I listen to these remarks and I think: damn, this guy should be in charge of something—something other than the executive branch of the federal government.
The problem with the popular caricature of Mitt Romney as Mr. If I do, I win. The job is to create value. That sometimes creates jobs, and sometimes not. Private equity is business on steroids: seek efficiency and economic return, not large social goals unless you think those are large social goals. If we can get a gigantic and one-hopes-obvious cavil out of the way right off the bat—i.
A new president, for instance, always takes over the management of an established organization; thanks to term limits rather than the need to repay debt he or she has limited time to get stuff done; replacing upper management is always the first order of business.
The most illuminating similarity may involve the fraught and contentious circumstances under which the president takes office, and the disproportional importance of this process: national election as leveraged buyout. A bunch of times! And on the outside chance that Romney does get himself elected next week— unlikely , but still, all hands on deck! The biggest piece of evidence that Romney is prepared to sit in the grandstands with a stopwatch while the Tea Party Caucus speeds around the track is, obviously, his selection of a running mate.
Cheney picked himself, of course. For while a great number of Americans do not seem to regard Paul Ryan as a douchebag, they do, unfortunately, regard him as an asshole.
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