John Wayne Never Rode Dressage

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Stephen's Dressage Training Pt. 2
www.colbertnation.com

The GOP used to be John Wayne on a horse and the party that ridiculed arugula as liberal elitism. 

Now it's a tax-doging Swiss-banker with an Irish Setter strapped to the roof who cheers on a dressage horse named Rafalca. 

Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.

Newsweek's The Daily Beast calls it like it is:

It should be the easiest thing in the world for a presidential nominee: a trip to England. The mother country, the shared tongue, our firmest ally.... And yet, Mitt Romney managed to alienate just about every living Briton. He didn’t merely criticize the organizers or bureaucrats—he questioned the people of Britain themselves: “Do [the people] come together and celebrate the Olympic moment?” He wasn’t sure. The Sun even went so far as to dub him “Mitt the Twit.”

It was an astonishing faux pas—one of many packed into his brief visit. And it makes one wonder... What unintended offenses are going to tumble out of his mouth then, when he’s representing our nation on the world stage?

The episode highlights what’s really wrong with Romney. He’s kind of lame, and he’s really ... annoying. He keeps saying these ... things, these incredibly off-key things. Then he apologizes immediately—with all the sincerity of a hostage. Or maybe he doesn’t: sometimes he whines about the subsequent attacks on him. But the one thing he never does? Man up, double down, take his lumps....

...Romney, who spent [the Vietnam-era] in —- ready? --Paris. Where he learned ... French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?

... Romney is the genuine article: a true wimp....In some respects, he’s more weenie than wimp—socially inept; at times awkwardy ingratiating, at other times mocking those “below” him, but almost always getting the situation a little wrong, and never in a sympathetic way. The evidence resonates across too many years to deny. What kind of teenager beats up on the misfit, sissy kid, pinning him down and violently cutting his hair with a pair of school scissors—the incident from Romney’s youth that The Washington Post famously reported (and Romney famously didn’t really deny) back in May?

...Which ties directly to his biggest wimp problem. He still, after five years and two presidential campaigns, has yet to take one real stand on any issue... The catalog of Romney flip-flops is lengthy and by now famous: abortion rights; support for Planned Parenthood, to which he and his wife once wrote checks, now in his gun sights; Grover Norquist’s “no tax increases” pledge, which he admirably refused to sign as a gubernatorial candidate but since 2007 has taken up with gusto; on immigration, where he once supported a path to citizenship; on guns (he supported the Brady Bill in the 1990s); on “don’t ask, don’t tell”; and, most famously of all, on health care...

Compounding matters, when pressed to the slightest degree about his inconsistencies, he can get nasty and whiny. No one talks anymore about his encounter with Bret Baier of Fox News last December, but it was a Moment. When Baier had the nerve to challenge him on his health-care and immigration views, Romney complained—told Baier his questions were “uncalled for!” Of course it was Fox, which is supposed to be his on-air public-relations firm, so Romney was shocked. But even so, you don’t say it. A politician complaining about a journalist just doing his job is ... weenie-ish.

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