Willard in Wonderland

Source: Mike Luckovic, Atlanta Journal Constitution

Willard Mitt Romney’s biggest political vulnerability as a presidential candidate is that he passed Obamacare before President Obama did. After Romney passed the basic equivalent of Obamacare, the Republicans made a seismic shift to the right, making Romney’s golden child look like a shameful bastard child.

As a result, the Father of Romneycare and Grandfather of Obamacare has essentially three choices for managing the angry paternity claims:

MAN UP AND EMBRACE THE KID. Romney could explain why he and other Republicans were right to embrace the private sector health insurance reform model, which, by the way, is dramatically outperforming Rick Parry’s model (Massachusets has 4% uninsured, Texas is six times higher, with 24%).

CONFESS AND REPENT FOR FATHERING A BASTARD. Romney could admit the kid is his, and confess to the Tea Party that he made an unforgiveable error in fathering the reform model that is producing the best health coverage rate in the nation. (The shame!)

GO DEADBEAT AND MAKE SHIT UP. Or Romney could fabricate DNA evidence in an attempt to disprove any common lineage between Obamacare and Romneycare.

Romney has decided to go the fabrication route. In the debates this week and last, he trotted out a series of ridiculous Obamacare-Romneycare differentiators, such as:

And the critical thing is this, we dealt with 8 percent (of the Massachusetts population with Romneycare), Obama dealt with 100 percent of the American people (with Obamacare).”

Politifact gives Romney a “Pants On Fire” rating for this claim, noting “if you measure the comparable number of uninsured Americans at the time the federal law was enacted, it obviously was not anywhere close to the 100 percent Romney claims.” The true numbers are more like 9% uninsured under Romney, at the time of Massachusetts’ enactment, and 17% uninsured under Obama, at the time the national health reform bill was enacted.

The worst thing is not that Romney got caught in a big fat lie. The much worse thing — the utterly absurd thing — is that Romney’s choice of this particular lie exposes that he now believes that helping fewer American families get health coverage is preferable to helping more American families get health coverage. That speaks volumes about the current state of his values. Trapped in the modern Tea Party Wonderland, Mitt now seems to be turning to Alice for political advice about how to rewrite his political narrative:

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.”

Alice
Alice in Wonderland

Welcome to the Tea Party.

In related news, Tim Pawlenty, the sworn enemy of Obamacare who a few years ago spoke favorably about Obamacaresque Romneycare, before he later condemned Romneycare as Obamneycare, yesterday announced that he had mulled it all over, and decided to endorse the grandpappy of Obamacare after all.

…And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

Alice
Alice in Wonderland

Curiouser and curiouser.

- Loveland

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