"He could not manage his spirit of vengeance."

In American Greatness, Conrad Black shares with us his thoughts about Mitt Romney.

...This odd man, so overbrimming with conscience and full of consultation with the Almighty, has finally revealed his purpose in returning to public life. His incandescent conscience managed to be a self-enriching asset-stripper at Bain and Company. He possessed a near-Olympian talent for flipping in all four directions on practically every public policy question from abortion and healthcare to taxes. But he could not manage his spirit of vengeance.

As an authentically scriptural man, Mitt Romney would know that it is the “God of Vengeance, God to whom vengeance belongs.” In cobbling together the righteous fairy tale previously utterable only by chronically dishonest people such as Representatives Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Speaker Pelosi (doubtless resuming her famous prayers for the president after ripping up the text of his speech in front of 40 million viewers), Romney descended from the prophet’s chair in the Mormon Tabernacle to the gutter of American public life.

Though we are all unlicensed psychiatrists, I will not try to read Romney’s mind on this one. He may have managed the complicated procedure of convincing himself that an innocuous conversation with the president of Ukraine was a breach of President Trump’s constitutional duties on a scale that justified his removal from office. If so, he is a mentally disturbed person doubtfully qualified even to sit alone as a pariah in the Senate, like Joseph R. McCarthy after he was censured in 1954.

From February 5, 2020, onward, Romney is a political outcast—a briefly useful idiot for the defeated Democrats and a traitor to the party he once led in a presidential election.

Romney now claims to have had a long and cordial relationship with Trump, but the public account is that he asked Trump for his financial assistance when he was a presidential candidate, publicly reviled Trump as a dishonest and unqualified charlatan when Trump was the candidate, happily auditioned for the post of secretary of state when Trump was president-elect, and when no offer was forthcoming, was a sullen bearer of his grievances until, as an afterthought to an impeachment effort unfounded in law and fact, and certain of rejection, he crossed a personal Rubicon and stabbed the president in the back (ineffectually).

...Awkward and embarrassing, and even undiplomatic statements by public people are frequent and excusable. But Romney’s vote to convict President Trump is falsely reasoned, ignobly motivated, and finishes his useful political career on a tragically discreditable note.

Read more here.

"He's got the Hunger...You can never get rid of the hunger!"

Recently, Ace of Spades speculated that Mitt Romney may be positioning himself to be nominated as the democratic vice president. He writes more today.

I don't think that any Democrat would actually offer the slot to Romeny. The one candidate who might do it -- Michael Bloomberg -- cannot do it, because he is already viewed with deep suspicion as Racist Sexist Billionaire.

See, liberals have this delusion that Mitt Romney is a conservative Republican. So they wouldn't find a Romney veepship added "balance" to the ticket, but just strengthened Michael Bloomberg's own "Republican conservatism."

Obviously Bernie Sanders would never offer. Someone like the Fiercely Heterosexual Cory Booker might, but he dropped out last month.

The leftwingers would not offer the job to Romney, and the people posing as "centrists" can't offer them the job, as the left already thinks they're Too Conservative.

But...

Do I think Romney himself has scams and schemes along these lines?

I do in fact.

He's got The Hunger.

Once you get a taste for the idea that you are special and Great enough to be President -- and that you might even be the literally Prophesied One sent by God Himself to save the Constitution -- you can never get rid of The Hunger.

You think, Maybe?

The plot thickens

In the Federalist, Erielle Davidson shows how there is a Romney connection to the latest Biden scandal.

According to web archives, top Mitt Romney adviser Joseph Cofer Black, who publicly goes by “Cofer Black,” joined Burisma’s board of directors while Hunter Biden was also serving on the board.

According to The New Yorker, Hunter joined Burisma’s board in April of 2014 and remained on it until he declined to renew his position this past May. Meanwhile, according to Burisma’s website, Black was appointed in February of 2017 and continues to serve on its board.

...Black joined the CIA in 1974 and eventually climbed the ranks to become director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed him ambassador at large and coordinator for counterterrorism. He later worked at Blackwater as a vice-chairman before joining Romney’s campaign as a “special adviser” on Romney’s Foreign Policy and National Security Advisory Team in October of 2011. In 2017, Black joined the board of Burisma.

It’s looking increasingly probable that Burisma, the subject of a series of corruption allegations in the past, has been smartly buying Western complacency by slapping a few famous names on its board.

Read more here.

Romney fails to win the GOP Senate nomination in Utah. Faces runoff in the fall

KUTV2News in Utah reports,

BREAKING: There will be a #GOP primary. Final results:
Mitt Romney: 49.12
Mike Kennedy: 50.88

Schmucks!

Yesterday Nancy Pelosi did what Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Mitt Romney have not done: condemn AntiFa!
Read her statement here.

CZ455 replies on Twitter:
Hold on
Antifa would not have been there
If Nancy Pelosi had not called the Patriot Prayer Event/Organizers Nazi's & White Sumpremacist

"Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman."

Ann Coulter writes at Town Hall,

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

...Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman.

Read more here.

Trump meeting with Romney again today

Which one is an alpha male?

Trump is meeting again with Romney today. According to Breitbart,

The other meetings are with:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
CEO of Concerned Veterans for America Pete Hagseth
President and CEO of Rolls-Royce America Marion Blakey
Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN)
Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)
Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA)
President and COO of Goldman Sachs Gary Cohn
The President-elect and Vice President-elect have held a total of 68 meetings with people to discuss the administration and share ideas. They have also spoken with more than 41 world leaders.

Trump announced early on Tuesday morning that he tapped Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) to head the Department of Health and Human Service and Seema Verma for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.

Trump’s spokesman Jason Miller told reporters there will be another announcement later on Tuesday.

“We’ll have another cabinet level appointment coming later this afternoon,” Miller stated on Tuesday morning.

What was Trump saying to Romney?

Conway says there is huge resistance to Romney. Priebus says there is not a problem. Which is it?

Already we have public disagreement among top Trump advisers. Kelleyanne Conway told CNN's Dana Bash yesterday that Trump supporters would feel "betrayed," if Trump picked Romney as Secretary of State. She said "the volume & intensity of grassroots resistance to Romney is breathtaking.”
Read more here.

Meanwhile, on Fox News Sunday Trump's incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus denied there was “open warfare” between Trump advisers and loyalists.

“It’s not about warfare,” he continued. “Yes, there is a lot of opinion about this. This is sort of a team of rivals context if he does go with governor Romney, but that should tell Americans where President-elect Trump’s head is, which is a place that will put the best possible place together for all Americans, whatever your religion, whatever your opinion is. He wants to move forward looking through the windshield and not the rear view mirror, and that’s where the president-elect’s head is at. And I think it’s a great place for Americans.”

Why the comment about religion? Is romney's Mormonism part of the reason some are opposing him?
Read more here.

Andre Tanteros: Romney is the wrong messenger

The clock is ticking...

Will Mitt Romney hurry on over to Nevada to endorse Marco Rubio tomorrow now that Jeb Bush is out of the race?


CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Scott Conroy breaks the story at Huffington Puffington. The Nevada Republican caucuses are Tuesday in Nevada, which were won by Romney in both 2008 and 2012. Conroy writes,

Romney’s backing will provide Rubio with the highest-profile endorsement of the 2016 race and is the clearest signal yet that the party’s establishment is ready to coalesce around the Florida senator as its last best chance to defeat GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

Read more here.

Bush, Romney and Rubio criticize Trump

Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have now all spoken out against comments made by Donald Trump about criminal illegal immigrants. Ted Cruz was supportive of Trump. Read more here.

Romney vs. Holyfield?

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds

Please care about me!

American voters want to believe that their presidential candidates care about them. That was the main thing lacking in Mitt Romney's candidacy. Jonah Goldberg explains:

But the only poll you need to know about was the exit poll of voters in 2012, which asked, “Which one of these four candidate qualities mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?”

Romney won three out of four. On “shares my values,” Romney won 55 to 42. He won on “is a strong leader” 61 to 38. He took “has a vision for the future” 54 to 45.

But in the category “cares about people like me,” Romney lost by a staggering 63 points (81 to 18).

Read more here.

Catalist

J. Christian Adams explains how Democrats use something called Catalist, a microtargeting scheme to identify voters likely to support leftist policies.

The data feeding the central Catalist database are coming from a wide swath of sources. Public records, pollsters, campaigns, non-profits, activist groups, unions, parties, commercial data — scores and scores of sources are feeding the central database data.

For example, when an environmental group does neighborhood door knocking for cash, the results of those contacts are fed into Catalist.

You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. Whom you work for, what car you might drive, donations you have made, assumptions based on your neighborhood, anything in a public government database about you, consumer preferences, partisan preferences, what licenses you have, what you might have said to pollsters on the phone, memberships, how you treated the young left-wing activist knocking on your door a few years ago, and on and on and on.

Mitt Romney spent time and money trying to capture the contemplative middle while Obama used Catalist data to wring out more votes from the far-left base. Even worse, at the same time, Romney distanced himself from his easier-to-motivate (and cheaper to get) base.

Romney wouldn’t even go on conservative talk radio, for free.

Read more here.
Update: Ace of Spades has some thoughts on the subject:

I'm not sure if I like the Left's model of Complete Centralization of Command and Control of money, ideas, and data. It's a model that would naturally appeal to the Left, of course, which envisions the same model as the highest aspiration for society generally.

I think centralized control might have some advantages in some circumstances... until centralized control makes large errors, which it then infects all its inferior robots with.

But at the moment, it does seem to be working.

And certainly in the area of Borg-like cooperation and hierarchical command that Adams reports on -- in the area of data sharing -- they are kicking our asses up and down the quadrant. While every conservative group guards its data as if its data were money (which, actually, it is), our Friends on the Left have, per the socialist model, decided that all property and wealth belongs to the collective, to be dispensed by the collective as the Central Organizing Committee of The Collective sees fit.

I don't know what to do about this. I don't want to follow them down this creepy robot road, but on the other hand, I'm also tired of losing.

Read more here.

War mongering

Doug Ross's Quote of the Day at Larwyn's Linx is from James Taranto:

"Imagine that President Obama, immediately after his re-election, assembled a sort of reverse bucket list--an enumeration of the things he least wanted to do in his second term. What's on the list? By our reckoning the top two entries are obvious: 1. Sign legislation repealing ObamaCare. 2. Go to war in Iraq.

Now imagine that Lois Lerner had never been born and Obama narrowly lost in 2012. Fast-forward to the summer of 2014, and President Romney is facing the ISIS crisis. Romney announces U.S. air strikes in Iraq and demands that other countries cooperate: "From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread."

Is there any doubt this would be contentious as hell? Democrats would denounce Romney as a war monger and accuse him of squandering one of Obama's "great achievements," the successful withdrawal from Iraq, by allowing the situation there to deteriorate so as to provide a pretext for military intervention. War protesters would fill the streets of American and foreign cities. Prominent leftists would denounce Romney--who avoided the Vietnam-era draft thanks to student and ministerial deferments--as a "chicken hawk." Opposition to the new Iraq war would mobilize the left, creating the prospect of a Democratic wave in November."

Remember when Romney warned Obama about the increasing tumult in Iraq?

Thanks to The Right Pundit.

Looking for racists? Look in the mirror!

Here is the Romney family portrait that was singled out for mocking by the racists at MSNBC.

Gerard Vanderleun supplies us with the photo and this commentary:

That’s it. That’s the very best these professional race hustlers can manage at the beginning of 2014 as somehow “”proving” the racist nature of the United States. That’s it. That’s all they’ve got.

And if that is all they have they have, in short, NOTHING. The last vestiges of significant racism in the United States died with 2013 and a Christmas card from a large Mormon family.

In fact, if you want to look at the real truth about racism in the United States it would have to be that the only things keeping even the last smidgens of race hate alive in the United States are the MSNBC professional racism pecksniffs and their ilk and the current resident of the Oval Office. If they want to see the real racists among us, they need only raise their hand mirrors.

Media plays knockout game on Romney family

Charles Hurt gives us the details of the racist attack on the Romney family on MSNBC.

It culminated with the hideous display on MSNBC where a gang of nasty jabber-mouth panelists played the “knockout” game on Mitt Romney and his adopted black grandchild.

Now there has been a lot of this “knockout” game going around, where thugs sneak up on unsuspecting victims and cold-cock them to the pavement. The goal is for innocents to drop like sacks of potatoes, without even a defensive flinch. It has been done to young people, mothers, students, elderly men, and even elderly women.

But never before has such an attack been caught on video where it was performed so ruthlessly against a defenseless infant.

Since you, like most Americans, do not watch MSNBC and have never heard of any of these thuggish characters, I will describe what they did.

A silly woman who apparently hosts a show on the network produced a Christmas picture of Romney sitting proudly with his 22 grandchildren, including the black infant adopted by Romney’s son and daughter-in-law. This host asked her assembly of Neanderthal guests to offer a caption for the photo.

In America, of course, people would comment on what a blessing it is to have 22 grandchildren altogether and looking healthy. In America, if anyone were to comment on the one pigmented child, it would be to note what a beautiful thing adoption is.

But we are not talking America. We are talking about the racist media where true hatefulness lies.

The first Neanderthal guest began singing the Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the others.” You see, the primary weapon of a racist is to first see the differences among people and then separate out the minority to make them feel excluded.

Another guest who describes himself as a “comedian” said the picture “really sums up the diversity of the Republican Party.” Ha ha ha ha. This person also provides commentary for CNN.

Then the host tried to dabble a little in comedy herself, opining what it would be like if the baby grew up to marry the daughter of rapper Kanye West. The thought of Mitt Romney and the rapper from suburbia as in-laws apparently tickled the woman.

As disgusting as all of this is, perhaps the most despicable aspect of it is that while the media loves to fan the flames of racial discord, they blanch and run like screaming weenies at the sight of actual stories that raise serious and difficult questions about race, such as the shockingly high rates of criminal violence in black neighborhoods. Are they so racist that they simply do not care because in the vast majority of those cases the victims are black?