Open thread for night owls: Mitt Romney the ideologue, or Mitt Romney the liar?

Yes, we've talked about this a lot over the last few days. But I still find it remarkable. It's the sort of statement, coming from Mitt Romney, that you can't even make fun of. It's just too odd.

Romney said of Obama, "he wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back on government and help the American people."

He said that last Friday. From then until now, I've been scratching my head, trying to determine what that small pile of word dung even means, when fully parsed out. I'm not too sure the "message of Wisconsin" was that the American people felt like screwing firemen, policemen and teachers. I'm not sure the American people feel like they would be "helped" by having less firefighters, less police and fewer schoolteachers. Mitt Romney and his crowd might be the only people in America who look at the problems facing the nation and say, "You know what would help this? Fewer teachers." Yikes.

But it's also perhaps one of the most nakedly ideological things Mitt Romney has ever said. Romney has been known for three things, in this campaign. The first is his negative campaigning; any rival who threatened him could count on a tsunami of negative advertisements directed against them, some from the Mitt campaign, even more via "non-coordinated" Super PACs that nevertheless always knew just who to target, and just how Mitt would be targeting them. Second, a series of egregious lies that managed to elevate him to most dishonest status even when in direct competition for that title with the likes of Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich. Make no mistake, that takes serious doing, and Romney's technique is the Rove-like big lie, the outrageous thing ("Obama apology tour," etc.) repeated unapologetically long, long after every news source has already debunked it ten ways from Sunday, apparently under the premise that it doesn't matter whether something is true or false so long as you can stand in front of a podium and say it often enough.

The third Romney characteristic, though, is the most obvious. Mitt Romney is a guy who, in general, would rather gouge his own eyes out with his thumbs rather than give a concrete answer about anything. In the debates, he was a lion on the attack, but as quiet as a mouse when it came to actual policy questions. His campaign speeches are a tapioca-like mush of generalities, mainly revolving around how Obama can be blamed for this or that, rather than how to make this or that better. If his deficit-reduction plan actually might reduce the deficit, as opposed to ballooning it unsustainably, he hasn't explained how. His tax reform plans are hazy at best. His foreign policy is all but nonexistent (I remember when foreign policy experience was a big deal, in campaigns. Apparently we're dropping that again, for Mitt's benefit). Whether you're a hardnosed conservative or a Mitt-despising liberal, nobody has much faith that Mitt Romney, if elected, would do anything like what he says he would do now. Social conservatives don't trust him. Economic conservatives (whatever those are, at this point) don't much trust him. People who were present during his governorship of Massachusetts don't trust him. God knows the rest of us can't even parse out what he thinks he says he stands for, much less whether any of it is true.

I do not remember many news cycles in which a national candidate for office sneered that his opponent "says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers" and means it as a bad thing. Even the staunchest anti-government types usually try to blur the difference between government (bad) and those most essential, most visible services of government (good). And even if you were to suppose that the lesson of Wisconsin is that people are just fine with treating their policemen, firemen and school teachers like dirt (a supposition not in evidence, when polled directly), it takes Mitt "I like to fire people" Romney to parse that into them wanting less of them around at all.

There's a few different ways to take this. It could be that Mitt Romney honestly believes that America needs to start gutting government services, even at the basic, local level of firefighting. I'd say that letting more stuff burn down to save a little money counts as a pretty radical approach, making Mitt Romney a nutcase easily of the Scott Walker caliber. That would definitely count as big, campaign-changing news, right?

Or, perhaps equally likely, Mitt Romney was attempting to make a dull, stupid Obama-hating statement along the lines of what he thought the base would want to hear, got flummoxed by the details, and botched it, ending up with something along the lines of firefighters are bad because Wisconsin proved that. The evidence of this would be ... well, everything else Mitt Romney has ever done in his life.

So far, it seems we're supposed to take the radical interpretation. Campaign surrogate John Sununu says that the reason America needs fewer police, firefighters and teachers is because so much of America is in decay, and also because of robots, I guess?

"There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population, and as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers. As technology contributes to community security and dealing with issues that firefighters have to issue, you would hope that you can as a taxpayer see the benefits of the efficiency in personnel you can get out of that."

Wait, what? I'll grant you that for those economically ravaged places in America that are seeing a declining population, you won't need teachers for the kids that aren't there anymore. But the rest of it is ... well, it's certainly Romneyesque, I'll grant him that.

I think the primary lesson I can glean from all of this, personally, is that I am hard pressed to even translate, anymore, hardcore conservatism to a language the rest of us might understand. John Sununu thinks we don't need as many firefighters anymore because "technology" dealing with the issues they issue(?), and Mitt Romney thinks we don't need as many of any of the groups anymore because Wisconsin told their policemen, firefighters and teachers go to to hell.

Maybe Mitt's truly a hardcore Ayn Rand acolyte who let his mask slip a little. Maybe he's an out-of-touch mega-millionaire who doesn't give a flying damn about those things, but will tell happily tell you that dogs poop ice cream if it means he gets to be president one day. Maybe, as outlined by Salon, Mitt Romney has a special loathing for firefighters in particular, and Wisconsin just pushes his buttons in that regard'his history in Massachusetts was marked by outright hostilities against them, including union-busting proposals and vetoes of much-needed equipment. His reasons for targeting firefighters in particular were unclear; perhaps he asked them for his very own uniform and was pissed off they didn't give him one?

I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I think I preferred the days when angrily accusing your opponent of wanting more policemen on the streets, and more firefighters to protect your homes, and more school teachers for your kids as if all those were obviously bad and ridiculous things was considered a campaign gaffe.

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