Mitt Romney Done With You F*cking People

You suck, you suck, you suck, you're cool.

Mitt Romney getting ready for a speech in a 2013 Netflix documentary.

Willard Mittington Seamus McRoofdog Romney delivered his farewell speech in the US Senate Wednesday, urging fellow senators to do all that unity and bipartisanship stuff he’s repeatedly called for while voting mostly like any other rightwing Republican.

Romney managed to generate quite a few headlines for a couple of critical lines warning about the dangers of chaos and disunity, although he didn’t actually name Donald Trump as the chief practitioner. But like an evil Tom Joad, the spirit of Donald Trump haunted Romney’s frequent invocations of working together to make America a better place.

As Romney explained to McKay Coppins this fall, he’s got a planet’s worth of kids and grandkids, and he takes Donald Trump at his word that he will come after his enemies. And Romney has been Trump’s enemy since long before Romney voted to impeach Trump just for sending thousands of people to kill Congress, which happened to include Mitt Romney. Romney, who owns a lot of money, was reportedly spending $150,000 a month on security to protect himself and his family from the supporters of the president of his own party. You’d think that would be worth an unvague mention!

It is an unalloyed good that Romney voted to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. It is typical Romney that he’s both-sidesing it now.

In his farewell, Romney condemned the partisan nastiness that he wasn’t above deploying as a presidential candidate in 2012, so that’s worth acknowledging:

“There are some today who would tear at our unity, who would replace love with hate, who deride our foundation of virtue, or who debase the values upon which the blessings of heaven depend.”

That’s it, pretty much, and it’s okay as far as mild criticism of Donald Trump goes, but let’s maybe not canonize Romney just yet.

Here’s Romney’s full speech, which is mostly unremarkable, even the bits where he reminisces about how neat bipartisanship is, which before the current Hell Era would simply have been a routine nod to how the Senate is supposed to work.

As farewell orations go, it wasn’t terrible, with the usual praise of his staff and family, thanks for all the wonderful people he’s worked with on both sides of the aisle, and a gooey frosting of God Bless America.

Romney noted that “My life’s work has been a group affair,” and offered as examples his work with a bipartisan group of Senate “moderates” on COVID policy, modest gun safety legislation, and what eventually became the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. He also noted that when he was governor of Massachusetts, his team “helped craft the health plan that insured nearly every citizen in Massachusetts.”

Oh right, that bill! Did Romney go on to offer a generous nod of bipartisan acknowledgement to how that legislation became the model for the Affordable Care Act, the signature achievement of Barack Obama, whom he ran against in 2012? Heck no. In that campaign, he insisted that Obamacare was terrible and socialist and would endanger everyone, even if it shared the basic elements of Romney’s wonderful teamwork-built plan. Why would he acknowledge that the ACA has also been a success, resulting in record high percentages of Americans who have health coverage? It was only a good plan in Massachusetts, when he did it.

For that matter, Romney’s insistence that success is the result of collective efforts reflects wholesale amnesia about that 2012 campaign, in which Republicans couldn’t stop mocking Obama for a speech in which he too said nobody succeeds in America solely on their own efforts, because we’ve all had help along the way. Obama’s speech was about the social contract, which includes having a democratically elected government that makes sure the infrastructure stays together, we all play by the same rules, and the fire department shows up when there’s a fire.

In that speech, Obama pointed out, in a line that could have come from Romney’s farewell this week, that in America, “we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” Whole bunch of examples in the speech about how our teachers and others inspire us, and we all need mentors and colleagues and community, and also a stable government. We bet Mitt Romney could have included some of those in his farewell, too.

But instead, Romney and his party devoted the entire 2012 Republican National Convention to mocking a single example in the speech, when Obama said “If you've got a business. you didn't build that.” We’ll admit should have added the words “all alone,” since that was the point.

Heh. Remember how Romney and his buds held their “WE BUILT THAT” convention in a Tampa stadium that the government built?

Also, remember how Romney stoked division and class resentment that year by continually attacking the “47 percent” of Americans who don’t even pay any income tax? Shame on half the country for being so poor that their income is too low to tax! Even worse, the poorest Americans qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit, which Ronald Reagan considered the best anti-poverty measure ever. (And of course, poor folks are also subject to all the other federal, state, and local taxes, but shame on them anyway.)

Remember how Romney’s attack on poor people was too much even for ubercentrist David Brooks, who condemned it as “a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other”? We sure didn’t, at least until we searched the Wonkette archive and it worked for once.

A whole bunch of “respectable moderates” pointed out at the time that Romney was talking about veterans and retirees and children (who are all on the chopping block again under Trump). And for all his complaints that Barack Obama was “the most divisive” president ever, Romney had very literally divided Americans into good decent well-off taxpayers and lousy freeloading takers. Wait, what about corporations that rely on subsidies and an endless parade of tax cuts? Hush, you. That’s a topic that should only be discussed in “quiet rooms.” Besides, corporations are people, my friend.

But we digress. Or rather, we don’t digress one goddamn bit because that really is Mittens for you: talking up bipartisanship and unity that he happily abandoned when it was politically convenient for him.

Also in his valedictory, he promised that when he leaves the Senate, he will become an ordinary citizen again, and will “hope to be a voice of unity and virtue.” And he’ll be every bit as true to his principles as ever, because in reality they’re pretty flexible.

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[Sen. Mitt Romney (speech transcript) / The Hill / Idaho Capital Sun / Sen. Mitt Romney on YouTube]

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