“French screenwriter Michel Audiard, noted for snappy dialogue,
once wrote, ‘An idiot will try anything. That is how you know he is an idiot.’
The same can be said of demagogues. Last Sunday on Fox News - where else? - Romney
that soaring gas prices
are actually the result of a plot by the president. Why not also hold Obama
responsible for the tsunami in Japan, the financial crisis, the disappearance of
whales and global warming?”
Mitt
Romney has done all he can to pull ahead in the Republican primaries and
challenge Obama next November. His adviser may declare, ingeniously, that the
post-primary situation can be compared to an Etch A Sketch - it will be enough
to shake it up and start all over, consigning Romney’s demagogic remarks made
only to appeal to the most extremist fringe of the electorate to oblivion - but
it is far from certain that Americans will forget. The latest example of
demagogic paranoia is the suggestion that soaring gas prices are part of a
“plot” by Barack Obama.
French
screenwriter Michel
Audiard, noted for snappy dialogue, once wrote, “An idiot will try anything.
That is how you know he is an idiot.” The same can be said of demagogues. Last
Sunday on Fox News - where else? -
Romney explained that soaring gas prices are actually the result of a plot by
the president. Why not also hold Obama responsible for the tsunami in Japan,
the financial crisis, the disappearance of whales and global warming?
Correction: global warming is a hoax invented by Democrats as a form of
mind-control. And why, according to Romney, has Obama devised such a plot? Of
course, to undermine the American way of life and the individualism symbolised
by the automobile. (Although, doesn’t this make Romney, who wanted Detroit to
go bankrupt, the real adversary of the American way of life?)
What’s
so alarming about these crazy assertions is that, repeated all day long, they
end up becoming reality for millions of Americans. And scarier still: until
recently, such statements were the exclusive territory of the country’s most extreme
conspiracy theorists, who believed that fluoridated water was a communist plot
to control American minds, or that the government had planted chips under the
skin of citizens in order to spy on them. Today, the GOP
is the conduit for such opinions, and not a single one of its leading figures
has strayed from this message.
If
the memory of the electorate holds, it will be difficult for Romney to explain
next November that all the lies and paranoia were just a joke. It may well be
Obama who gets the last laugh.
