More Romney hilarity

It really is such a tragedy that the late-night comedians have been off the air during the weeks-long nightmare that the Romney campaign has become.  One can only hope against hope that he keeps it up once they hit the airwaves later this week.  Today’s update:

• WaPo awards Romney the “Whopper Of The Year” award for 2007 — the most dishonest statement made by any political candidate about anything in all of 2007.  Quite an honor!  This, of course, is about Romney’s now thoroughly discredited claim that his father “marched with” Martin Luther King, Jr., and that Mitt “saw” it happen.  Both untrue.  Here’s the WaPo’s explanation of why this particular four-Pinocchio whopper was the biggest of the year:
  

  (1) Romney was not speaking off the cuff. He had plenty of time to think about what he was saying and do his research…. (2) He continued to defend the statement after it was challenged, arguing about the meaning of the word “saw.” … Rather than acknowledge the mistake, the campaign put the Politico website in touch with eyewitnesses who claimed that they had seen George Romney “hand in hand.” Contemporaneous newspaper reports show that the two men were in different parts of the country on the date in question.
  

  Truly pathetic.  A hearty raspberry to Mitt Romney and his campaign for this well-deserved honor.

• Joe Klein chimes in, calling the Romney operation “the least honorable campaign of any major candidate.”  He continues:
  

  I’ve got to say, having covered a lot of campaigns, I’ve seen dirtier (Bush in South Carolina in 2000), angrier and far more extreme, but…
  
  I’ve never seen a candidate who showed such arrant disrespect for the public–and for himself. Indeed, Romney has performed a political self-lobotomy. Not just on his brain, which seemed an impressive instrument a year ago, but also on whatever nagging moral sense he might have had. He did this in order to conform–in the primaries, at least–to every last polling preference, no matter how skeevy, of his party’s base. Worse, he has chosen to demagogue on issues–like illegal immigration–where his own record shows a history of moderation…and an embarrassing tendency toward private hypocrisy (Those gardeners!)
  

  And here’s an amusing tidbit from behind the scenes:

  I’ve also never seen a candidate so loathed, privately, by his competitors.
  

  Ouch.

• Meanwhile, over at the NY Times, David Brooks has penned a column called “Road to Nowhere” declaring Romney “unelectable.”
  

  [A]s any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.

  And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.
  

  Brooks’s diagnosis: Romney is not only a fake, he’s the wrong kind of fake.

  When he set out to pursue his party’s nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms…. Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition. That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now…. If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.
  

  Brooks goes so far as to say that those “in the know” have already figured this out, but they don’t know what else to do.

  The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.

  [I]n this race, he has run like a manager, not an entrepreneur. His triumph this month would mean a Democratic victory in November.
  

  Interesting stuff.  Ask yourself this: why does David Brooks hate the National Review?

• Finally, word is that Romney’s fundraising isn’t keeping up with his campaign’s apparently insatiable appetite for cash, leading him to dump another heap of money into this peculiar effort.
  

  Mitt Romney said today that he donated more of his personal fortune to his campaign in the fourth quarter, which closed yesterday, but he refused to disclose the amount.

  “I’m sure I made additional contributions in the fourth quarter, but I don’t have any numbers for you,” Romney said in a news conference in the basement of a home, where he had just held a house party. “And we’re not going to get into the numbers probably until some time in the middle of the month. Right now, we’re focused on voters.”
  

  Translation might go something like this: “I’m not going to disclose how much of my own money I’m spending — on top of the $17 million I’ve already spent — before January 8, because doing so might make me look desperate.  Which I am, because it’s starting to look as though I might not win either Iowa or New Hampshire, at which point my campaign is down the crapper along with my 25 million bucks or however the hell much I spent on it.  Whoops, was that out loud?”

The fun starts the day after tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

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