"I just talked about, about guns. I told you what my position was, and what I did as governor; the fact that I received the endorsement of the NRA." -- Mitt Romney, 12/16/07
"It was, if you will, a support phone bank, which is not an official endorsement." -- Mitt Romney, 12/17/07
"I was pleased that when I ran for Governor that I received the endorsement of the NRA and I hope to receive their support now." -- Mitt Romney, 2/3/08
The NRA didn't endorse a candidate in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election.
How can Mitt Romney quit now? The week was going so well.
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I don't know what's left to say about Mitt Romney. What greater love can a man have for his country, than to suspend his campaign because... wait, I want to get this exactly right...
"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."
How spooky is that, by the way? Capitulation, not just to Wahhabism, but to fear itself. We wake up the day after the election -- dead, probably -- but otherwise living in some kind of national Dean Koontz novel where we're all freaked out 24/7, forever, or until the midterms.
How do you even go about surrendering to terror?
Doesn't Surrender to Terror sound like the subtitle to a sequel? Tarantula House III: Surrender to Terror...
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can surrender all they want. That's not the way Mitt Romney rolls. He repudiates surrender. By giving up.
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On his way out the door -- well, halfway out the door -- Mitt treated the sputtering shut-ins at CPAC to a kind of Greatest Hits collection of chunks of his speeches from the last two years. Including:
"To battle this threat, we have sent the most courageous and brave soldiers in the world. But their numbers have been depleted by the Clinton years when troops were reduced by 500,000, when 80 ships were retired from the Navy, and when our human intelligence was slashed by 25%. We were told that we were getting a peace dividend. We got the dividend, but we didn't get the peace."
Romney started saying this last April:
"Following the end of the Cold War, President Clinton began to dismantle our military. He reduced our forces by 500,000. He retired almost 80 ships... He called it a "peace dividend." -- Mitt Romney, 4/18/07
And, pretty much since then, Factcheck.org has been pointing out that it isn't true:
"The peak in defense spending that Romney speaks of was in the Reagan administration. It is not correct to say that the Clinton administration began to cut U.S. military forces. No matter how you measure defense spending, President George H.W. Bush had significantly trimmed it by the time Clinton was sworn in. And it was Bush's administration, not Clinton's, that first boasted of a 'peace dividend'... That defense secretary, of course, was Dick Cheney." -- Factcheck.org, 7/9/07
Clinton may retire ships; Romney never retires a perfectly good lie.
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But that's all mendacity under the bridge. Mitt's main point, yesterday, was that our national security is much too important to jeopardize by providing citizens with more than two candidates in a free and open election.
Sure, he could keep living in some pre-9/11 fantasy where it's okay for people to "run for office" in "primaries" but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of a hundred million voters don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world.
The important thing is saving America.
How seriously does Mitt Romney take this threat? Saving America is so important to him, he's willing to suspend his campaign. Not drop out entirely, release his delegates, or endorse John McCain. But at least, you know, stop traveling.
Perfect Mitt Romney. He'll wrap his own failure in the flag of some hysterical higher purpose -- the end of life as we know it -- and his solution will be to meet it half way, and keep all his options open.
Will we miss him? Yes and no.
--WHEN THERE'S NO MORE ROOM IN HELL... YOU'LL SURRENDER TO TERROR!!!
Look, here's Hillary and Barack, running away instead of fighting the zombies at the end of Dawn of the Dead, just like Mitt Romney said they would.
At least I think that's Hillary and Barack. I'm a little like Maureen Dowd, talking to Michelle Henery and thinking she's Michelle Obama; black people all look alike to me.