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There is a hackneyed saying on the right side of American politics that we have two parties: the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.
The Evil Party, the Democrats, hate everything that America stands for and seek to destroy it; as the bumper stickers erroneously attributed to President Obama so pithily put it, "We live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it."
The Republicans, of course, are the Stupid Party. While standing for time-tested American values, the party as a whole is lucky if it can get its pants on the right way in the morning. At every turn, our Republican leaders are out-foxed, out-fought, out-organized, out-maneuvered, and just plain out-thought by their opponents. As a result, regardless of who's in office, the power, cost, intrusiveness, and unresponsiveness of government has done nothing but grow for a lifetime.
The Evil/Stupid Party comparison is a joke, but it's a joke with a foundation of truth. The Democrats have a long history of condemning Republicans as not merely wrong, but as evil incarnate. How many variations on "Bushitler" have we heard over the years? What about that preposterous Democrat ad showing Rep. Paul Ryan throwing an aged granny off a cliff?
Republicans never do such things; they would rather lose like gentlemen than break a nail or muddy their natty trousers, whether they're on the right way or not. We pray there will never be a better example of this than John McCain, who nobly and idiotically refused to hit Obama for his ties to the racist Rev. Wright, terrorist Bill Ayers, or a host of other unsavory and un-American positions. Nobody was surprised when he lost.
Only on the rarest of occasions have we seen a Republican actually stand up and fight. That was why Newt Gingrich's debate performances were so electrifying: he took the fight to the enemy and hit him hard with everything he had. Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker has done even better: he didn't give electrifying speeches, but he actually kneecapped the forces of the Left in a way we haven't seen for a century.
While Mitt Romney is not without virtue, can anyone imagine him messing up his perfect hair down in the mud-puddles of all-out political warfare?
Apparently, Mitt himself can and did - for to our shock and astonishment, he recently came out with an accusation against President Obama that is staggering in equal measure for its harshness, its implications, and its potential effectiveness.
Everybody in America knows that Mr. Obama has utterly failed to fix our economy; that's not news. The far left claims that's because our Republican Congress has blocked Mr. Obama's attempts to implement the full-on socialism that's worked so very well of late in bankrupt Europe. Much of the middle seems to feel that, oh well, Mr. Obama's a nice guy and he did his best.
In an appearance in Texas Wednesday, Mitt Romney charged that President Obama "knowingly slowed down the recovery in this country…in order to put in place Obamacare." The president's action, Romney said, "deserves a lot of explaining."
Mr. Romney is citing a book by the liberal journalist Noam Scheiber. Scheiber, being both liberal and a journalist, naturally loves all things Obama and hates to see The One criticized, but he grudgingly admitted that the core of Romney's accusation was, in fact, true:
On some level, Obama was prepared to accept (and I'm making up these numbers for argument's sake) three years of painfully high unemployment with health care reform rather than 30 months of painfully high unemployment without it. And the reason is the one Summers alluded to (before disputing): Health care was simply more historically important than avoiding those extra six months of pain.
Do the people whose unemployment benefits have now run out after 99 weeks think that the disastrous mess of Obamacare was more important than creating a good economy where they might hope to find work? Do the half of recent college graduates who can't find jobs think that that's a price worth paying in order to stay on Dad's health insurance for a few more years, assuming that Dad even still has a job himself?
If so, they are welcome to vote for Mr. Obama in November. But Mr. Romney is plainly putting the question to them in a way that we can't recall seeing a Republican Presidential candidate ever do.
Because intentionally sacrificing the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans in order to push forward a twisted political agenda is nothing less than evil. We've long wrestled with this concept, not really wanting to condemn our political opponents as evil like the Left so routinely does.
Some while back, though, we reluctantly were forced to the conclusion that Obama and his cronies do, in fact, actively desire to destroy America's economy. He's not merely a well-meaning ignoramus like Jimmy Carter; he truly does know which end is up, and is taking us down on purpose.
That wasn't an easy or welcome thing to say, much less to believe. We're floored to discover that Mitt Romney has reached the same conclusion and is saying so in public.
About time! Maybe there's hope for the man yet, and for America. First call your enemy for what he is, then you might have a hope of beating him.