"...he will sell your ass out to the highest bidder..."

The incomparable Charlie Pierce, writing for Esquire, tells us about "The Well-Oiled Weathervane," otherwise known as Willard Romney:


"You have to give Romney and his campaign credit. They said they were going to do it. They telegraphed the punch five months ago. They told the entire nation that there would come a day in which everything Willard Romney had said about anything in his entire seven-year quest to be president would be rendered, in the memorable word of Nixon White House flack Ron Ziegler, "inoperative." They told us quite honestly that their entire campaign was going to be based on an ongoing argument between the Willard Romney who ran for the Republican nomination and the Willard Romney who thereupon would run for president. They told us he would renege on his previous positions, and he has. They told us he would reverse his field over and over again, and he has. They told us that the only real principle to which the man will ever hold firm is that he will be utterly unprincipled."

They told us that, sooner or later, everybody who supported him through the primaries because he
was the only Republican candidate who didn't sound like he belonged in a padded chapel would find themselves under the bus. And nowhere in his campaign was Romney firmer in his resolve than he was to a modernized version of the neoconservative agenda that so thrilled the world under the leadership of C-Plus Augustus. A full 17 of his 25 primary foreign-policy advisers had been deckhands on that particular plague ship, Sailing Master Bolton chief among them. And, at the end of the day, they all just turned out to be the last people to go sliding under the wheels. For the full 90 minutes of the foreign-policy debate at Lynn University here on Monday night, whether it was the president speaking or Romney, neoconservatism's breath barely clouded the mirror."

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"Romney was for bilateral diplomatic solutions. Romney was for comprehensive reform packages for the entire Middle East. Romney likes what the president did in Libya (at first), in Syria, in Egypt, and what the president is doing with his flying killer robots in a dozen places. In fact, the president drew clearer foreign-policy differences between himself and Beau Biden's father than Romney did between himself in the president. The most spectacular reversal came on Afghanistan, when Romney appeared to commit himself to the same 2014 withdrawal date over which he has been belaboring the president in practically every speech since he left for Iowa a year ago.

It was purely surreal, and it was not made any less so by the fact that Romney was clearly uncomfortable with his new moderate foreign-policy programming. (That was plain early on, when he completely took a pass on the opening question, which concerned the events in Benghazi.) Romney was sweating and stumbling through enough passages to reinforce the fact that he and his running mate, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, are going to have to leave anything that happens overseas to their coterie of advisers — if, of course, any of them are still speaking to Romney after he sold them out so egregiously just now.

That is what history always has told us about the career of Willard Romney: sooner or later, he will sell your ass out to the highest bidder and walk away whistling in the general direction of anything to which he feels entitled. In this case, that would be the leadership of the Free World."