Mitt Romney is a deceptive man. And he’s running an election campaign on bullshit. For his latest serving of horse’s toes, the local auto workers were surely appreciative:

DEFIANCE, Ohio — Mitt Romney attacked his opponent, President Obama, in this rural and manufacturing city, on education and trade, passing along a report that Chrysler might move all of its Jeep manufacturing to China, which the company has denied.

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America, I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair,” Mr. Romney said.

One thing you can count on. Rank lying, okay, two things. Chrysler employees didn’t mind it being “owned by the Italians.” If it weren’t for the swarthies, their jobs wouldn’t exist. As for Romney telling Jeep workers they’d be canned tomorrow, or the day after, Chrysler didn’t thank the Governor.

There are times when the reading of a newswire report generates storms originated by a biased or predisposed approach . .

Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China . . A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.

Accusing a Mormon elder of extravagance would normally be a proper shaming. But Mitt’s naked ambition far outweighs his conscience. Now there’s this:

“Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. And sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job. I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”

You can remind him he wrote the famous op-ed “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”, but his campaign now depends upon Ohio. So he’s got to be the opposite of his actual self. Therefore, he’s worried about the auto industry. He’s been sitting at home, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth. Someone has to fight for your jobs, dammit. Somebody has got to care. I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this mythology.

It’s shocking to see a grown man operating blithely as a living breathing lie. The only satisfaction you can take from this farce is the instant karma delivered Mittens via the unconscionable celebrity of Meat Loaf. The humble candidate got yearrgghhed by Mr. Loaf like he’d been possessed by demon honesty. And this season’s best campaign highlight was born:

Mitt Romney. Still losing. Strange that he seems to be the only person who has no idea how to win an election. Everybody else thinks it must be easy to do.

So what I’m suggesting is that Romney puts together specific examples of lower family tax rates and higher take-home pay . . It’s really that simple. Talk up tax cuts and connect them to Main Street families in terms of the after-tax dollars and cents they understand. Higher take-home pay. More financial security. More jobs. Repeat these over and over.

Mitt should talk up his tax cuts.

. . Romney needs to move beyond the controversies of the Bush era. To do that, he has to alter his critique of Obama. What Romney should say is that our country has problems that have been building since long before Obama took office, and that what’s wrong with Obama is that he has either left them unaddressed or made them worse.

And he should be straight with people.

In the end, righting his campaign depends entirely on Romney himself. He is not a natural ideologue, nor — obviously — a natural backslapper. But he is a data-obsessed salesman. He should be pitching his program with all the zeal and airtight attention to detail of a presentation for a Bain Capital business deal.

Also, bring the zest. Business-like zest. Can do!

“Go to a location where the Keystone pipeline was to be built, and with unemployed workers as part of the event, look into the camera and say, ‘Mr. Obama, build this pipeline,’” said Republican strategist Greg Mueller said. “This hits the jobs issue and directly connects Obama to blocking jobs, preventing economic growth and holding back energy independence.”

And talk to the camera. Tell the camera about the pipeline.

“Forget the fear, forget the fundraisers, forget the polls, get out there and really run for president,” advised another GOP strategist, who didn’t want to give their name because of the sensitivity of the matter. “Get rid of all that staging. Be real. … something dramatically real.”

Then run real hard. And be really real. Crazy real.

He rode his campaign bus for more than 330 miles, but he didn’t pull over once for a single unannounced stop at a dinner or popular small-town spot.

It’s the kind of retail campaigning that produces the human interactions that feed news coverage and humanize the candidate . . “Instead of you building an event and making them come to you, every local community has a place,” said Chip Saltsman, Mike Huckabee former campaign manager. “You can go to the town square and get a cheeseburger where everyone goes to lunch.”

Also, eat a cheeseburger, somewhere.

Romney has to make an unrelenting case for his program, pitched particularly to the practical concerns of middle-class voters. He has to give the public compelling reasons to pick him in an election that will be a choice, not a referendum.

And give people a choice.

Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.

Then give them a few debate zingers. Memorable ones.

His strategy includes luring the president into appearing smug or evasive about his responsibility for the economy. . . “He’s got to do a better job of making the case that President Obama’s directly responsible for that. That’s got to be his focus.”

And there’s always the economy. He should talk about that.

Mother Jones posts a video from a big-money Mitt Romney fundraiser where the bajillionaire talks candidly amongst My People, the zillionaires. Can you believe it? He thinks anyone who votes against him, the most organically inspirational and trustworthy American who ever lived, is a lying, shiftless jobless parasite. How does he know this to be true? How in the world did he manage to figure this out? It’s all in the numbers behind You People that pay no taxes.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

The magical statistic, that there are always 47% who pay zero, who knows if that’s real? Or why? Who cares. Anybody, anyone at all who would vote for Obama, who is considering voting for Obama, who is wondering if maybe voting for Obama this time around isn’t a pretty good idea, who is maybe not-right-wing, who is maybe brown-skinned, or maybe a working stiff, or a disabled veteran, or a pensioner who now pays less for her prescriptions (damned Obamacare), and now her life is a little better because of it, every one of these people is a bath salt smoking Afro-Snooki — sure the bazongas but I’m also talking actual head-to-toe black skin, or at least welfare — with an axe to grind because she’s too lazy and stupid, and frankly taken with pointing and laughing at the Humble White Christian Wretches of Labor Corporata Dolorosa, to work, ever.

“. . my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

So you retirees with no income and little reason, however perfectly job-creating and pro-Republican, to break open your savings accounts and pay whatever taxes on zero, Mitt should give a damn about you? You’re going to vote for Obama anyways, stoners.

Some of you geniuses will read this and take a prurient interest in the candidate’s willingness to ‘care for his own life’ by way of federal levies and the like. For You People (this is wildly abusive and none of your fucking business, bastards), 65 year-old Mitt Romney pays thirteen percent tops, but maybe only five, and it could be zero, of his annual retirement millions and millions in taxes. This makes him a paragon of fiscally foxy and personally responsible. You do the math.

Here is the not-so-good Byron York:

Mitt Romney and his top aides are running an essentially faith-based campaign. Whatever the polls say at the moment, whatever the pundits say, whatever some nervous Republicans say, Team Romney simply does not believe President Obama can win re-election in today’s terrible economy. The president may appear to be defying gravity now, but he can’t keep it up through Nov. 6.

That’s true, about the Mittens campaign. Whaddyaknow.

The next few days are going to try Romney’s patience and determination. The media is focusing incessantly on Obama’s relatively small move upward in the polls, with some of the coverage bordering on outright celebration. That, in turn, is spooking some already anxious Romney supporters who fear that Romney is going about it all wrong. They’ll offer lots of advice: Be tougher about this, more assertive about that, showcase this issue, downplay that one. Romney’s belief in the wisdom of his course will be put to the test.

For sure. And he will not know what to do, and it will become comical. Should be fun.

But what to do about a campaign crisis like this. What should you do? My thinking is that you should focus your message. Go with what you believe is your most effective issue and wield it like a hammer. Swing it at your opponent as hard as you can everyday.

My reading of Romney is that he’ll do the exact opposite. He will start grasping at anything to keep him afloat. He will try whatever. He’s recently been flogging the issue of keeping god on our coins. Now there’s an issue that will really help Americans over the next four years. I expect to see even more of this kind of ridiculousness.

Mitt Romney, The Candidate Who Wasn’t There, defied conventional wisdom and common sense — beggared belief, really, given his dislike for African Americans — and appeared yesterday before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. What he thought he might get out of this is anyone’s silly guess. Given the two centuries where NAACP members’ forebears were charged with keeping entire plantations up and running without electricity, or money, or human dignity or the least of respect, maybe he figured they’d take some pity upon him and overhaul the Romneybot 2.0 clusterfuck. By the looks of their faces, he was betting they could do it in their sleep.

This was a good move: telling the assembled he’d destroy Obamacare.

I can’t remember a presidential candidate getting booed for 15 seconds by a well-dressed, respectable crowd. So congratulations, Governor, you’ve produced your first perhaps historic moment in this election.

Why try this? It makes no sense. Unless, of course, he’s some sort of ass with an ulterior motive.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday suggested that that the 103rd convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had booed GOP hopeful Mitt Romney just because he was a white man.

This is yer discourse. Rush was happy to reward the gambit. Slowly rolling Limbaugh aside, we see white people you may know have actually spoken to the NAACP before. The venerated civil rights organization ain’t exactly the Ku Klux Klan. President Clinton has addressed them many times, but they never firebombed his house.

“So Romney takes advantage of the occasion. He goes there and makes a speech that is really, I think, is over these people’s heads, in the sense that his audience was much larger than just inside the conventional hall.”

The Dittoheads get that going ‘big’ and ‘smart’ are the same thing. Which is to say the Kardashians’ pockets are cramped with Nobel Prizes because they can’t climb stairs or eat with utensils. If there were any more millions of people enthralled with the K-clan’s doings, the bunch would grow those pulsating Star Trek samovar brains and project videos of drunken sex directly into your cortex. Lucky, lucky. It is amusing that a guy named ‘Rusty’ who got as far as high school figures the NAACP for stupid. Which brings us back to Willard, just a few hours later. Mittens ain’t really dumb:

“When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren’t happy, I didn’t get the same response. That’s ok, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy-more free stuff.”

This is post-modern politics, wingnut style. When you’ve got a problem with a particular constituency, you don’t play straight with them. No, you use them. Like this: Gee I tried to be nice, you all saw it. But just screw those civil rights people. They’re a bunch of dumb ole’ racists looking for government cheese.

This is absurd. Mitt Romney’s dancing. That’s sure to literally be true, but to call the Obamacare mandate a ‘tax,’ then a ‘penalty,’ then a ‘tax’ again? When his own Romneycare mandate does the identical thing to your tax return?

Romney’s original position was that the individual mandate he imposed through his state-based reform law was a “tax penalty,” which he strongly favored. This week, however, the Republican’s campaign switched gears, saying the policy is a “penalty,” but not a “tax.”

Then yesterday. On Obamacare:

“The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax,” Mr. Romney told CBS News. “They have spoken. There’s no way around that.”

Then Romneycare:

“The chief justice in his opinion made it very clear that at the state level, states have the power to put in place mandates,” he said. “And as a result, Massachusetts’s mandate was a mandate, was a penalty, was described that way by the legislature and by me, and so it stays as it was.”

What a silly man. Deeply confused. Thoroughly disingenuous, really, the lying-est candidate since Richard Nixon. Here’s the wiki on Romneycare, under ‘Individual Taxes’:

If a resident does not have coverage and does not have a waiver, the Department of Revenue will enforce the insurance requirement by imposing a penalty. In 2007, the penalty was the loss of the personal exemption. Beginning in 2008, the penalty is half the cost of the lowest available yearly premium which will be enforced as an assessed addition to the individual’s income tax.

And here was Romney touting his ‘mandate’:

In 2008, when Romney was running for president for the first time, ABC News host Charlie Gibson asked him during a New Hampshire debate, “Governor … you imposed tax penalties in Massachusetts?” Romney replied, “Yes, we said, look, if people can afford to buy it, either buy the insurance or pay your own way; don’t be free riders.”

Again:

In a 2009 op-ed in USA Today, Romney laid out some suggestions for President Obama to follow on health care. “First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others,” Romney wrote.

This is pathetic. Just say it: ‘They’re identical.’ Except for . .

. . the penalties under Romneycare are bigger than under Obamacare. According to a study from the Center for Health Law and Economics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, forwarded to Salon by the Obama campaign, the differences are huge. An adult over the age of 27 who makes more than 300 percent of the poverty line (about $37,000 a year) and chooses not to purchase health insurance would pay at least $695 in penalties under Obamcare. Under Romneycare, that same person would pay at least $1,530 in penalties.

Obamacare is less punitive. Got that Mitt?

The Romney campaign releases a video where a former VP of that damned Kansas City steel mill, GS Technologies, essentially thanks Romney and Bain Capital for buying and bankrupting it. Hours later, they take the video down. Maybe talking about the loss of 750 jobs during a recession is a bad idea.

It’s another indication that the Romney team are confused. They very badly want to pound away at the “I’m a great businessman who will find you a job” message. But Romney the actual person isn’t that guy.

My reading of the facts (here, here) behind Bain’s handling of GST Steel is that they were very aggressive in manipulating the company for gain while the business environment was volatile. This included charging the company (which they owned) $900,000 a year to manage it. Bain’s typical behavior was a bad fit for a troubled company in difficult times.

The first thing they did was raise money by selling $125 million worth of bonds. What did they do to justify all that new debt? Gave almost all of the cash away in dividends to stockholders. Bain was the biggest stockholder of course, so it was paying itself handsomely for buying the business. The sizable dividend also sent a strategic message to the other well-off owners and potential investors, hedge and mutual funds: we are looking out for the rich guys. We will take care of the bottom line.

“Paying distributions with debt is not uncommon,” Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University, told Reuters. “The only thing that strikes me as a bit unusual is the size of the dividend. There would be logic in them saving some cash for a downturn.”

The grand scheme failed. They ran the business poorly, later saddled it with even more debt, and had no cash to survive the upheavals in energy costs and foreign competition. When the company went belly up, the management reneged on severance, pension and health insurance promises. You-know-who had to come in and bailout the workers, and only a little bit.

Seeing that, the Obama team pounced: “After purchasing the company, Mitt Romney and his partners loaded it with debt, closed the Kansas City plant and walked away with a healthy profit, leaving hundreds of employees out of work with their pensions in jeopardy.” Cue Politifact:

We found, through corporate filings, interviews and investigations by other news organizations, that the statement is accurate but needs some clarification. First, it’s true that Bain added significantly to GST’s debt load while paying dividends to itself. The plant’s closure, however, happened after Romney had left daily operations at Bain, though he led Bain during six years of its majority investment in the plant. And other, outside factors were at work, making the steel industry a tough business. Steel prices were low and electricity costs were high, and those forces drove other steel mills out of business around the same time.

The statement’s last two claims are solid: Bain (and Romney) made a profit from taking over GST, and the employees lost many benefits their union had negotiated, including supplemental pension payments. The federal government had to step in to shore up the fund.

We rate the claim Mostly True.

I find it odd that the Romney people would get anywhere near the GST Steel story. They’re either incompetent or deaf to the howls of pain coming from the working and middle classes. Bain was a very aggressive business even in the worst of situations, and this reminds us of so many other businesses, bankers and investment entities in particular, whose habits ended up decimating the economy.

Knowing the ease with which The Candidate Who Wasn’t There can disappear, you can guess his take:

“I take personal responsibility for making the investment,” Romney said in a statement at the time of the plant closure, according to the Globe. “But I didn’t manage these companies. Our philosophy at Bain Capital was to support management teams in companies where we saw potential for growth, or in companies that were in financial distress that we thought we might be able to save.”

And isn’t that odd? He’s running as a business wizard who’d like to personally find you a job, or a career. But all he’s ever been is a profit-driven mega-manager, a remote and reliable source of worker misery. His record puts the lie to his promises.

How do ghosts handle great responsibility? How would a specter lead a nation? What was Casper’s management style?

Does anyone know what the hell Mitt Romney’s doing? The Candidate Who Wasn’t There retreats further into oblivion. Nobody, but no one, has any idea where the Republican contender stands on virtually any issue. In response to all questions, on everything that matters to today’s voters, Mitt grows more invisible with every word. It’s amazing some voter hasn’t broken down and started screaming at him: “YOU HAVE TO HAVE A POSITION! ON SOMETHING!”

Remember when he sat down with someone other than a Fox News hack? May 24th, he granted an interview to Time magazine’s Mark Halperin. Candidate Mitt put up a wall 10 feet thick. We got a load of this:

Halperin: . . For people out there, for voters who want to know what you’re about in terms of job creation, is there some new idea, some original idea, that hasn’t been part of the debate in American politics before, that you have that you think would lead to a lot of new jobs?

Romney: Well the wonderful thing about the economy is that there’s not just one element that somehow makes the whole economy turn around, or everybody in the world would have figured that out and said there’s just one little thing we have to do – you know, Greece is settled, and France and Italy are all back and well again. No, it’s a whole series of things . .

Halperin: But you’d still need more than you’ve been specific about; you just made that quite clear. Again I’ll just say…

Romney: There will be a long list of things.

Romney then served up a melange of chicken lips and hen’s teeth in response to the president’s executive privilege maneuver bringing ’round part of the Dream Act. The federal government will no longer deport the children of illegal immigrants who wish to stay. Romney’s response:

“I will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the president’s temporary measure,” he told the group about President Barack Obama’s hotly debated directive regarding the DREAM Act.

But on the question of what exactly such a long-term solution would be, the GOP nominee isn’t saying.

And I, dudes, will replace and supersede whoever is married to Rebecca Romijn. I think the details matter. It’s not enough for some slick politician to promise to “replace and supersede” everything that came before him. A minimal promise comes in the form of details you can hold a candidate accountable for. It’s unlikely that a professional liars will hold true to even those. But it’s still better than “I’ll just do everything great.”

The latest latest bucket of warm water came yesterday after SCOTUS’ release of the ruling on Arizona’s immigration law. Here are true-to-the-marrow Romney mouth Rick Gorka’s responses to reporters’ puzzlements and wonderings. Can you imagine how hard it must be to channel a personality that doesn’t exist? Poor li’l Rick:

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