Waking up, Republican: Moral hazard and Mitt Romney

And who would not, you may well ask, declare a Foul Weather Day under such awful circumstances? Even so, are there not others, similarly lost and in this very tourist haven, compelled to weather the same dys-topic symptoms, swathed in linens not their own? What's a Party stalwart to do?

It's not as if the Party were all packed up, with nowhere now to go. Of course not. They assert, they have somewhere quite specific to go - the Executive Branch, may we call it - without the foggiest concept of how to take themselves there, with a vessel of no content or direction. Now, this is embarrassing, and we shall be compassionate in noting the unprecedentedly puerile Rain Excuse, where very likely it was actually the Dog on the Roof that ate their homework. Or was it, that two News Cycles in a Row, of this Party's self-impugningly vulgar jests about the incumbent's birthplace, begun and lied about by The Candidate en route and climaxed in the hall by Donald Trump, the self, threatened to expose their Goth-ically demented grotesqueries too soon?

A shrewd play. One has to hand it to them: the less Republicanism, the fewer Republicans on view, the likelier our forgetfulness of their symptoms. We hear, Rove will spend 35 million for ads in the coming weeks, presumably to discover an impressionable voter. If it were up to us, we'd sink half of that into a dozen electric magenta speedos, and the rest into candidate development. But who knew, that the Party who thought to carry the election by suppressing voter turnout, would inspire itself to suppress its own visibility?

This is the meaning of Mitt Romney's witheringly cowardly claim of meaninglessness in his rabble-rousing wisecrack on the President's birthplace - the locus of consensus for purely racist rejection by this Party, ever since the election of 2008. To the lusty approbation of the leering mob he addressed on Friday, there was no "humor" in his boast of being born in Michigan; there isn't any humor in this man, but the schadenfreude of bullying a classmate. But he will claim his exemption from the moral hazard his sanctimonious Party demands of others, and invents for them - women who are raped illegitimately, for example - as a Reaganesque slur, where everyone is potentially a welfare queen.

Now let's see moral hazard upheld for this cynical association, as they convene for their Etch-a-Sketch novation on the cusp of a critical campaign. Let's see how courageous their fiscal policies are, which saturate themselves in greater emoluments as they subject society to the privations they deem to be Good for Us. Let's see them deny in Tampa everything immorally discriminatory they praised in New Hampshire, everything recklessly negligent they upheld in South Carolina, everything demonstrably stupid they extolled in Texas. Let's see if they have anything; is this not democracy's moral hazard?

v  Jeremy Young