Fair's Unfair

Just because Mitt Romney lies the way the rest of humanity urinates (freely, standing, sitting, asleep, awake, in dribbles, in great geysers), and just because he famously takes Obama's words out of context the way other people take out the papers and the trash, it doesn't mean it's okay when lefties take Romney's words out of context -- Romnification is bad no matter who does it.

So let me say that this sudden ecstasy over Mitt's saying "I like to be able to fire people" is pretty pathetic. Fact is, when he said it he was making a point about competitiveness, about choice in health care; fact is, when he said it, I thought it was a decent argument against single-payer. Unconvincing.* But, given the power of sound bite over complexity, potentially effective. (To be fair to lefties, they're not the only ones doing the piling on.) I also thought it was a dumb way to put it, since he ought to know better than anyone how words get used against people: he's the Platonic ideal of doing so. (And, like diarrhea follows salmonella ingestion, he complained that "Obama people" like to take things out of context. The man has no shame.)

Nevertheless, I hate it when it's done, no matter by whom or to whom. It speaks ill of the distorters, and it speaks ill of our "system," wherein such manipulations are expected (because it's true) to be effective: voters nowadays, most of them anyway, can't be bothered to look behind the rhetoric.

Meanwhile, it's nice to see the message of "Occupy Wall Street" is finally getting through:

"Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful or rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? Or is that, in fact, somehow, a little bit of a flawed system," he said to a packed audience of reporters in Manchester. "So I do draw a distinction between looting a company, leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods and leaving behind a factory that should be there."

Quoth .... wait for it .... Newt "I will BE the nóminy" Friggin' Gingrich, abandoning conservative principles (while inadvertently acknowledging what OWS has been all about) to criticize Mitt.

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* Here's a few responses from people who gave it more thought than I did.