The Real Romney Fraud

As president, I'll fix everything. Really.

I'm afraid sometimes what's really true about a situation or a process can be right in front of your face without your grasping it at all. I've just come to a point like that. Only this time I figured it out. There is a real fraudulent core to Mitt Romney's campaign for president. And it's a doozy.

I don't want to fix anything, and I've succeeded.

People who are for limited government, like Grove Norquist, for example, have always confounded me. Norquist famously wants to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. Okay, I get that. He's not in government, he only wants to influence it, or, taking him at his word, completely kill it. Fine.

I fixed everything but good.

But I've always marveled at politicians who hate government while wanting to run it anyway. They're either frauds or misguided incompetents who want to grab the reins of power but inevitably fail at destroying it. (I say that because I've never seen a limited government advocate actually shrink government.) Take Ronald Reagan, for example. He said that government was the problem, not the solution. Then he turned around and ran up astounding deficits, swelling the Department of Defense and its budget to astronomical sizes. The only thing he limited about government was the hope that we'd ever get out of debt. Oh, and he raised taxes.

Remember me? Didn't think so.

George W. Bush claimed to be a fiscal conservative and gave the tax surplus back to the people. He said that the people knew how to spend it better than the government did. He then proceeded to get us into two unfunded wars, a Fed-assisted housing bubble, an unfunded Medicare drug program, and after yet another tax cut, ended up doubling the national debt. Well done, fiscal conservative.

Okay, back to the present. What is Mitt Romney's central fraud? He's promising, if elected to head the federal government, to fix America's economic problems and create 12 million jobs. What's so wrong with that?

Well, maybe it's because government doesn't build that, individual people do. It's the whole premise to his campaign, and it's based on something he claims not to believe in. Because, you see, the government can't build that. If it's the problem, it can't be the solution.

Go figure. I can't.

Update. Mitt Romney does believe the government can create jobs, but only in the military. Wait. He probably also believes government has a role in creating jobs such as police officers, firemen, corrections officers, border patrol, CIA spies, FBI agents, ah, you know, ad infinitum. He's even a bigger fraud than I thought.