The press wet its small-clothes over Mitt Romney’s ebullience in last Thursday’s so-called debate, as these joint interview contests are styled these days. What a jaunty fellow Mitt came off as, compared to poor Mr. Obama, cloaked in presidential gloom, the wearisome woes of high office and all that – or perhaps just some indigestible tidbit served out of Air Force One’s galley, an infected cocktail weenie, a shrimp with attitude, or an empanada with the E coli blues, who knows….
To be sure, Mr. Romney’s ebullience had a crafted tang to it, like one of those pumpkin-flavored beers made for the season, especially since all that verve was employed in the service of ebullient lying, statistical confabulation, and self-contradiction. At times his sheer manic zest veered in the direction of what used to be called hebephrenia in the old clinical sense of someone euphorically out-of-touch with reality.
Alienation from reality being at the very core of the current zeitgeist, the American public can only admire somebody who displays such a buoyant disregard for what is actually happening in the universe. To me, Mr. Romney just gave off the odor of someone who will do anything to get elected while Mr. Obama evinced the dejection of someone doubting it was worth it.
Of course, the issues this time around are framed with the presumption that all the current rackets of political economy can be kept running – everything from Fannie Mae to Medicare to suburbia to the systematic looting of the future by the Federal Reserve’s shell-game operations with every loser bond instrument lately fobbed off on hopelessly rigged markets – which is exactly the opposite of what reality has in store for us. In fact, the salient feature of these times is the remorseless running down of all these rackets to their entropic end points.
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