Here’s a stormy, relevant and current reason to not vote for Mitt Romney. He wants to decentralize America’s disaster management and throw senior responsibilities to the states.
Essentially, he wants to gut FEMA-which of course worked so well for President Bush.
Bush neglected FEMA, put a horse-guy in charge and then Hurricane Katrina happened. In the words of another Republican from Texas-oops.
So now we have Mitt Romney attempting to backpedal from comments he made during one of those numerous Republican primary debates this year.
Here’s what he said:
“Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” ~ Gov. Mitt Romney
This is like a child talking. And it shows a completely sophomoric understanding of what real governing entails. Successful governing involves reacting to specific conditions each problem and/or opportunity presents-not using a one-size fits all, I got a hammer-and-the-world’s-full-of-nails approach. This inflexible ideological attitude toward things, like “always cut taxes,” or, “always deregulate”, is what brought to you other things, like the Great Recession.
Eugene Robinson in a Washington Post op-ed shared how Romney further explained his position on disaster management to CNN’s John King:
“King gave him a chance to back off: “Including disaster relief, though?”
Romney didn’t blink. “We cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids,” he said, adding that “it is simply immoral . . . to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids.”
If Romney got his way, FEMA would be gone, or at least drowning in a bathtub somewhere. Social Security would be ravaged by the recession having been privatized during Bush. The American auto industry would have been totally parted out… but wait-a-sec, he’s the son of a car-guy, right?
Yeah, he might be, but as secret tax returns prove, Mitt R is not your father’s George R.
And that being the case, Mitt wanted to part-out Detroit. So he’s not the kind of car guy that builds cars, he’s more like the junkyard car-guy.
Kind of like outsourcing-he sees-no, he knows- the financial benefits to be accrued at the top when breaking apart something into small pieces, selling them off. So now he’s affixed this one-size-fits-all philosophy onto his political palette.
White canvass, one color; splash goes the economy. Trickle-down.
Everything gets parted-out to the states, or “even better,” to the private sector.
Problem is, national disasters are exactly that-national. So breaking FEMA down into individual state programs would invite a logistics catastrophe while our nation attempts to metabolize a multi-state superstorm like Sandy, or Katrina. It’s ridiculous thinking to privatize emergency management, or part-out FEMA. But this kind of moronic, elitist B.S. has come from his mouth and mind before, hasn’t it?
“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”
Romney is desperately trying to distance himself from the New York Times op-ed he wrote in 2008, entitled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” His campaign has Google ads in place ready to capture any online reconnoiter about what he meant. His campaign would like you to know he didn’t actually say that in the body of the article and that the Times had purposely conjured an inartful rubric and slapped it on his sage business advice for the hemorrhaging U.S. auto industry.
But what he did say was totally wrong:
“IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”
Oops. But bottom line, even if the Times wrote the “Detroit Go Bankrupt” headline, Romney agreed to put his name on it. Just like the President agrees to put his name on the product of many of the administration’s collaborators-the buck stops there.
And here’s the point, regardless of the detail in the op-ed, allowing that kind of message to go out as representative of a former Presidential candidate’s (Romney’s 2008 run) position shows how completely tone-deaf, callous and irresponsible the man really is. It also foreshadows his political ineptitude and naiveté with several other campaign-road debacles. Like when he went to London and insulted their Olympics. Or the things he said about the irresponsible 47% (half of America) or how Republicans should be very worried that Latinos and African-Americans are gaining more political power with each progressing day. He said something like, “that would be bad for our nation and party.” Un-huh.
As Colin Powell intimated in his recent endorsement for President Obama, Romney is unstable, inconsistent and has zee-row political core or backbone. He’s a wind-sock. Don’t vote for a wind-sock. Vote for the skinny guy with the weird name.
