The Rominee
He’s Just So Perfect

BY JUSTIN CASE

In case you’ve been in Bolivia, there’s a presidential election taking place this year and the GOP is  fielding a candidate to take on BHO—that’s what we call him here, in order to accord him the respect he seems not always to command by likening him to other greats known by their initials—FDR, JFK, BTO (Bachman Turner Overdrive).

We’re a little concerned, though, here at the corporate media complex that houses Montana Pioneer Publishing (the publisher’s office alone takes up the entire 52nd floor), and it’s Mitt Romney that has us worried. No matter what’s actually happened on the ground, Romney has always seemed to be the nominee (his name even has that ring to it‚ the Rominee). It’s because he’s just so perfect in every way, so much so that there’s something unsettling about the guy, and it’s not that he’s a Mormon. He can always, after all, simply crank up the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic at a campaign appearance and there you have it, instant respect among the masses. So being Mormon is not his problem. It’s something else you can’t quite put your finger on, unless you’ve seen the The Stepford Wives. Call me crazy, but there’s a great case to be made for Mitt being, well, a Stepford candidate, not all that unlike a Manchurian candidate (with someone pulling a string from his back that makes him talk like a Chatty Cathy doll). I mean the guy is so groomed in every sense of the word (including the literal sense) that it’s scary. Now, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s about time we had a good-looking business savvy Republican in office (if he wins) who resembles a movie star more than, say, Alfred E. Newman. But Mitt Romney makes you wish that just once in a while he would let his hair down, kick off his shoes, slug down a shot of bad tequila, and tell a few off color jokes. But he won’t, and that’s the reason he’s the Rominee—he’s perfect. And it’s why BHO’s Chicago-style hit squad has been running anti-Romney ads since the Iowa primary. He scares the Tony Rezko out of them, and so they would have much rather run against one of the flawed Republicans—flaws, by the way, that Romney’s hit squad magnified and distorted as if using a fun house mirror.

For many, the reasoning goes like this: give us somebody with warts, somebody with facial moles (spun as beauty marks) and a greasy cowlick. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind, or a no-nonsense fat guy like Chris Christie, a belligerent genius like Newt Gingrich, or a wiry liber-tarian crank like Ron Paul. Stepford candidates? No way. Yet that’s all academic at this point. Mitt’s the man.

Romney is also the safe candidate if you’re a Republican, and feared if you’re a Democrat. Yet he’s Stepford through and through, all good looks and no feeling (that’s the rap anyway—we’re sure he has his moments, like when he fails to break par). You get the eerie feeling that he has somehow been taken over by body snatchers, that long ago Mitt, as a child, ran through fields of summer clover and skinny dipped on the shores of Mackinac Island, spontaneous and free, until he was abducted in his sleep and beamed up to a mothership, then whisked away to a planet where aliens commandeered his soon-to-be-perfect persona. He was then implanted with a secret alien agenda, control of the Oval Office. And you know why it’s oval—it’s shaped like that mothership.

Now all that is only theory of course (though well reasoned), but observe Mitt Romney next time you see him speak. He will say all the right things, that Obama has driven the economy into the hopper, that he’s an academic community organ-izer without real life experience or economic instincts, and that we can’t take four more years of national decline, and so on, but notice how it seems as though someone is pulling a string on his back (that Chatty Cathy doll thing). His manicured delivery though (and nails), endears him to the staid GOP estab-lishment, but if my theory is correct, before 2016 rolls around we’ll all be fodder for experiments conducted in petrie dishes with the aim of supplanting the failing genetic stock of aliens whose heads are shaped like the guy on the Planters Peanut jar. And you don’t want that.

Either that or we’ll be slaving in mines like little worker bees at the behest of extraterrestrial overlords intent on harvesting Earth’s precious natural resources—you don’t want that either.

There could be far worse things though. What, you ask, could be worse than domination by rulers with no understanding of human nature, of slaving your life away with no hope of reward for your honest efforts? What we’ve got now comes to mind. It’s hard to justify more of the same, but if I had my druthers (what are druthers?), I’d vote for someone who leads in a practical sense, with an understanding of how the world works, instead of someone imposing an artificial ideology upon the natural dynamics of things. It seems so elementary—maybe I’m the one from another planet. Maybe I’m the one, along with so many others, who is the problem in this country. Have you, after all, ever heard such  cynicism? Romney may be a square, a rich square, a guy who doesn’t drink tequila or swear, who is well groomed, continually cheerful, and so rich and successful that the only line of attack against him is that he is rich and successful, but we could do a lot worse. And so maybe what we just described here, rather than him being some Ward Cleaver-like automa-ton, is a guy who presents well, works hard, doesn’t spit on the sidewalk, and who could be a credible chief executive.

Editor’s note: Druther: (New Oxford American Dictionary), informal noun, a person's preference in a matter. ORIGIN: late 19th century—from a U.S. regional pronunciation of I'd rather, contraction of would rather.