BEWARE THE MORPHING MITT!!

I was watching a news report on TV, last night (September 26, 2012) when a Romney TV add appeared during the commercial break.  Old familiar Mitt Romney looked so different.  The lighting was warm and glowing, like that in a technicolor romantic movie.  Mitt's face was slightly out of focus--like a close up of Greta Garbo in "Camille" or "Ninotchka".   His eyes looked as soft and moist as those of my old Lab " Sandy".  As he spoke he tilted his head to the side and mouthed his words, gently and soothingly, like a mother pleading with her children to come in from the cold for some warm milk and cookies.   He continued speaking. "There are millions of people out there hurting, during these hard times. I want to help them. I care." I shook my head and checked the settings on the TV.   They were OK.

  

Was this the Mitt Romney we have gotten to know so well over the awful, boring last year, with all those debates among the less than "prime time" Republican field?  Is he not the rich-guy candidate who proposed a $10,000 dollar bet with Rick Perry in front of the Nation?   Is he not the hard-nosed "businessman", "vulture"-capitalist, who picked up companies in trouble, boosted up their debt, fired employees to cut expenses, off-shored their employee contracts, cut outlays, then with better-looking books, raised money with bank loans so as to retrieve his investor's raiding capital and take a big chunk of cash, then let the company and its remaining employees sink or swim, as he went on to raid another target?  

The man on the screen was  transformed, yet he looked the same.  The sturdy well tanned handsome face, the dark eyes, the flashing smile, were all there.   Even that little touch of gray at his temples which he never darkens up with black so as to underscore to voters his maturity and experience. 

But the  gray matter in my frontal lobe, kept resisting messages my occipital lobe was receiving from my eyes.  I shook my head again, just like lovable old Sandy used to flap his ears violently when a fly entered one of his soft, brown, floppy auricles.  But the image didn't disappear.  Mitt continued on speaking as if he loved everyone, even those 47 percent "takers" he called out in Boca Raton in May.

Was this new "I care" candidate, the same Mitt Romney who wanted to let GM go down the tubes?  Who picked frighteningly radical conservative Paul Ryan (co-author of "legitimate rape" legislation with wing-nut Representative Todd Akin, and modern-day advocate and spokesperson for radical libertarian conservative Ayn Rand) as his running mate?   The same guy who claimed that 47% of Americans were moochers, on the government dole and were not responsible for themselves?  Or as Robert Reich tabulated so well in: "Repackaging Mitt", HUFFINGTON POST(9-26-12), and who therein reminds us that Mitt is the candidate who "cares" so much that he is against "extending unemployment  benefits. Or providing food stamps or housing benefits for families that have fallen into poverty. Or medical benefits."    

I blinked my eyes.  Yeah, wait, isn't this the very person who wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and as Robert Reich points out, wants to "save" Medicare by turning it into a voucher system, then hand that voucher system over to the "cash-starved states". That is a plan to destroy Medicare not save it. Just imagine what would happen to health care in the hands of the elected officials in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Arizona.  Wasn't this the Mitt who just a few days ago on "Meet the Press", when challenged on what he would do about health care for the fifty million without coverage, responded that "the US does have universal health care!"  He reminded the questioner--with a straight face that indicated how far away from the real world he was--that in the US anyone who gets sick enough ("to be collected from their 'apartment' with an ambulance") can be taken to  the emergency room of "any" hospital and get treatment.  Yes, the professional ER staff will stop the bleeding and patch over your open wounds, but then with no prospect of being paid, they will quickly send you on your way, perhaps if you are lucky, with a small packet of aspirin to stop the pain.  But they can not and will not treat the cause of your condition.  That's not the new caring Mitt I was seeing on my TV screen today!  

In a wink of the eye, right before you, Mitt was transforming himself yet again, like an amoeba changing its shape to fit through a tiny confluence of air bubbles on a microscope slide, he was morphing over again into a new and different Mitt. He is truly amorphous.  As I watched the old Mitt's hard image was fading away, as his etch-a-sketch was being vigorously shaken by someone off screen, perhaps, a Sheldon Adelson or Dan Senor, or some other neocon advisor. 

Beware the Morphing Mitt!

Get the (changing) picture?

rjk