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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKatrina vanden Heuvel: An Extremist With A Moderate Pivot
from Katrina vanden Heuvel: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/extremist-in-pinstripes/2012/01/09/gIQAl0eKoP_print.html
Tuesday, January 10
Extremist in pinstripes
Mitt Romneys dead heat with Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses bolstered the media narrative that Mitt Romney may not be conservative enough for Republican primary voters. This characterization serves Romney well. His rivals carve up each other, hoping to emerge as the conservative alternative to Romney. And vast swaths of the media discount his reactionary views, anticipating his pivot to more moderate positions once the nomination is secured. In reality, Romney is a remarkably reactionary candidate, camouflaged in corporate pinstripes.
On social issues, Romney embraces all of the rights litmus tests. He pledges to repeal President Obamas health-care reform, even though it was modeled on the plan Romney signed as Massachusetts governor. He favors repealing Roe v. Wade, outlawing womens right to choose. He supports an amendment to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Hes for building a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border, opposes any path to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country and rails against the Texas policy to offer in-state college tuition for the children of undocumented workers. Advised on legal matters by the reactionary crank Robert Bork, he repeatedly calls for more judges in the activist right-wing tradition of the gang of four Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.
On national security, he is far more bellicose than former ambassador Jon Huntsman and somewhat to the right of Newt Gingrich. He says hed add 100,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to the military budget. He promises war with Iran if it proceeds toward a nuclear weapon. He joins George W. Bush in claiming that waterboarding is not torture . . .
Romney calls for returning to the same conservative policies deregulation, financialization, corporate trade that generated Gilded Age inequality and a declining middle class even before driving the economy over a cliff. He supports repealing Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform act. He favored the Republican effort to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board by blocking Obamas nominations to those agencies. He wants a weaker Environmental Protection Agency, calling regulation the invisible boot of the state. Not surprisingly, he agrees with Rick Perry that anti-union right-to-work legislation makes a lot of sense for New Hampshire and for the nation.
. . . Romney would savage programs that serve the vulnerable. Hes been more specific about supporting various parts of the infamous Paul Ryan budget than his rivals. Thats the budget House Republicans passed that ended Medicare as we know it while cutting funds from education, food stamps and other programs. Romney proposes restructuring Medicaid and food stamps as block-grant programs while slashing overall spending. Hed cut funding for Pell grants, which provide (inadequate) scholarships to poor students. And hed trim funding for Head Start, the Childrens Health Insurance Program and programs that support the disabled . . .
read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/extremist-in-pinstripes/2012/01/09/gIQAl0eKoP_print.html
emulatorloo
(44,245 posts)One of my favorite writers.
katsy
(4,246 posts)Romney is an extremist and so is every other gop candidate including huntsman.
There are only varying degrees of frothing at the mouth that divide these lunatics.
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)My husband and I were talking about this last night. His attacks on Mitt would appear to necessitate a repudiation of the R policies of the past 30 years yet he tries to beat the conservative horse too. Newt is no liberal but he is an opportunistic blowhard and his populist nattering now ring empty.
LiberalAndProud
(12,799 posts)"Conservative" has entirely lost any semblance of meaning previously attached to it. I don't know when the word came to mean radical and regressive, but that *is* the meaning if read in context.
Quantess
(27,630 posts)What used to be the center is now considered far left.
"Conservative" certainly has nothing to do with government spending! Look at how much so-called conservatives are willing to pour into defense & wars, prisons, the "war on drugs", etc. They are very wasteful with money. Not conservative at all with money.
Conservative has gradually come to mean willfully ignorant, backwards, authoritarian, and crazy.