This is from March, 2012. I’m reposting it today because everyone seems to think Mitt Romney is going to save the world from Donald Trump. Or something.
I had the blissful opportunity of enjoying exceptional hot wings, conversation, and bro time in Wayne, PA this week. One of the insights that emerged from this time of fellowship is offered here for your consideration.
Mitt Romney is so unpalatable because there’s absolutely no reason for him to be running for president. It’s great that he’s not an ideologue, but it would be nice if he had some ideology. It’s not the incessant flip-flopping so much as what that says about his real motives for running. He has no great beliefs and hence no great motives. He’s running because he wants to be President, pure and simple. He’s running because he wants the Office of Ultimate Upward Mobility. He’s running for power or prestige or from some deep-seated need to leave no opportunity untapped.
We’ve been saying things like this for a long time, but it wasn’t until this week that we’ve been able to put it in the most precise terms possible:
- Say want you want about the tenets of Obama’s socialism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos.
Does anyone really believe anything this man says?
Chris Cocca 
Couldn’t have said it better. That said, what does it say that the only one who could beat Obama’s socialism is someone with no ideology at all? Shouldn’t all “idea-oriented” people root for Santorum, because whether you like him or loathe him, at least we’d be talking about ideas?
Well, that’s the thing. Santorum has ideas and beliefs and there’s really no mystery as to what they are. He tells you, whether it’s good for him politically or not. I’m probably one of the few people who thinks Gingrich isn’t a nihilist, so I’d add him to the discussion. But would I rather have Obama vs. Someone With Beliefs than Obama vs. an Empty Suit? Yes.
Now, of course, in the context of The Big Lebowski, I think Walter’s dead wrong when he compares Nazism favorably to nihilism. He’s wrong for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that Hitler wasn’t a believer in any ethos. He, too, was a nihilist, and the Nazi “ethos” was no such thing…it was nihilism (and it was evil).
If take all of this out to logical conclusions, though, I can’t say that I’d rather have Obama vs. Someone With an Evil Ethos (jihad, racism, genocide, etc) than Obama vs. Nihilist.
This would all be so much easier if Romney didn’t have a bazillion dollars to spend convincing us that there’s something to him.