Mitt Romney to Japan: You suck

An American "Lost Decade," seen here in progress. Fresh off his insult-the-nations-of-the-world tour, Mitt Romney has a special message for our friends in Japan: You suck. Sweet Jesus, how you suck.

"I know when things are tough as they have been for the last three-and-a-half, four years people begin to think it's always ' [inaudible] ' We are not Japan. We are not going to be a nation that suffers in decline and distress for a decade or a century. We're on the cusp of a very different economic future than the one people have seen over the past three years."

I'm fairly certain Romney is referring to Japan's "Lost Decade," a period of economic stagnation prolonged by political incompetence and unwillingness to do anything about it. All the governmental types over here laughed at them for it, saying that we would never let political incompetence get in the way of fixing our own economy when it needed fixing, and then our own recession happened and we proceeded to out-incompetent the Japanese economic response in such spectacular fashion as to never cause anyone to doubt, ever again, that our politicians are every bit as buffoonish, craven, self-centered, ideologically rigid, willfully stupid and yes, as incompetent as any other nation's government. The constant demands for poor-people-only "austerity" and the debt ceiling debacle'a debacle which continues to merrily churn forward, as an entire building full of people suddenly say that they would never have signed on to that thing they signed on to if they knew people were actually going to take it seriously, provide proof enough of that.

So there's two big problems with Mitt's attempt to invoke a bit of nationalistic superiority, here. Insofar as Mitt seems to think Japan has been in "decline and distress" for perhaps a century, however, I'm not sure what the hell he's going on about, and I imagine people in Japan are probably wondering what the hell he's going on about, too. The second problem is that there's absolutely no evidence that we're going to suddenly gain political competence, when it comes to unemployment, housing and the general economy, anytime soon. Especially not when Mitt's own, personal plan is to do that stuff Bush did, except with more tax cuts to the rich, which is pretty much the definition of staying the effing course.

So can we top Japan's "Lost Decade"? Well, we're not planning on doing anything about unemployment anytime soon. The banks aren't any more stable than they were before, unless you chalk up the renewed expectations that we'll bail them out of any future jam as "stable." And people like Paul Ryan, hailed as architects of a new American future in which we just plain do less, in terms of infrastructure, science, education, consumer protection, worker protection, social services, etc., etc., etc., have proven fiscally incompetent even when presenting these "planned stagnation" programs.

So taking a look at that chart up there, I'd say we have a great shot at stretching this period of economic misery out for a decade or longer. It'll take a deep commitment to legislative incompetence, absolute indifference to the unemployment numbers and other misery indexes, and more than a little creative bullshitting on the parts of the usual suspects, but we're America. We can do this.