Business as usual?

Well, it has been for Mitt Romney, to his shame.

I've taken a couple of days off from this blog to let the flood waters recede (literally) before I jumped back into partisan politics. President Obama apparently felt much the same way; he's suspended campaigning for the time being. What a shame that Mitt Romney didn't choose to stand on higher ground; he's been campaigning and campaigning hard, holding phony "relief" rallies that featured all the trappings of campaign rallies but including a drive for canned goods that proved to be just more cynical electioneering.

And I wouldn't make such an accusation without support; here's a page of my support. (I should point out that this is a page of nearly thirty links, a mixture of blog posts and news stories, but there are enough professional news stories there to offset the non-professional nature of the blog posts.)

But in case you don't want to follow the link, here's the story in a nutshell:

The Romney campaign had a "victory rally" (premature?) scheduled to go on in Ohio, but after the storm ravaged the east coast they decided to change it to a "relief event" centered around a food drive. Which would have been fine if that's all they had done. It wasn't. (If I sound cynical it's because of what they actually did and how they went about it.)

If it had been just a massive photo op designed to show that Mitt Romney cares, that wouldn't even be so bad. But the Romney people just couldn't help hedging their bets. Fearing that there wouldn't be enough donated canned goods to make the photo op worthwhile, and wanting to fend off the embarrassment that would cause, they took a truck to the local Wal-Mart and bought $5000 worth of Granola bars, canned food, diapers and the like and in many cases gave it to people to "donate."

Just how real is such an event? In my view, not very. Mitt could have just bought the stuff and donated it himself (he certainly can afford it) and he might have earned praise for it, but he didn't. Instead he chose to stage an event. He could have just donated the stuff openly and not looked silly, but he chose to make himself look like a chump.

Even more of a chump since the Red Cross and other agencies don't like to accept cans of food and boxes of Pampers; they'd rather have cash. Or blood; the Red Cross always needs blood, especially after a disaster like this one.

So Mitt could simply have opened his wallet, or opened a vein; either way, he would have avoided looking stupid. If just one campaign worker had bothered to look at the Red Cross' web site, Mitt could have avoided looking stupid. Not to mention all the extra work that someone is going to have to do sorting and distributing Mitt's largesse, which wastes precious manpower (not to be sexist, but "personpower" is just so cumbersome) which is, just now, desperately needed elsewhere. Which makes Mitt look stupid.

So do you think that I'm looking at Mitt through stupid-colored glasses? (Where can I get a pair of those, anyway?)

Mitt Romney, that's your own petard and you've just been hoist with it.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

By the way: "hoist with his own petar(d)" comes from Hamlet. You can find the actual meaning here.

And if you want to give something to the Red Cross, here's a link to their site.