Romney Seized by Paranoia

Mitt Romney would have done anything to come out on top of the Republican primaries and become Obama’s challenger next November. His adviser declared freely, candidly, that after the primaries, it was like a clean slate, that it will be enough to shake it up and hit reset and forget the popularity-seeking proposals launched uniquely to seduce the most extremist fringe of the electorate, that Americans aren’t sure to forget. The last example of the popularity-seeking paranoia is that the rocketing gas prices were a “conspiracy” from Barack Obama.

Michel Audiard wrote that a “moron will dare to do anything, that’s how you can recognize him.” One could say the same thing about a demagogue. With no shame, last Sunday, on Fox News — where else? — Romney explained that the soaring price of gas was in fact the result of a conspiracy on behalf of the president. Why not make him equally responsible for the tsunami in Japan, the financial crisis, the disappearance of whales and climate change? Correction: Climate change is a hoax invented by the Democrats to control minds. Why has Obama, according to Romney, started this conspiracy? To detract from the American Way of life, of course, and from the individualism symbolized by the car (and Romney, who wanted Detroit to go bankrupt, is it not he who is the real enemy of the American Way of Life?).

What is frightening about these delirious claims, is that repeated all day long, they end up becoming a reality for millions of Americans. More frightening still: Up until recently, these proposals were the exclusive property of the country’s most extreme fringe of paranoid individuals—those who believe that the fluoride in tap water was a Communist plot to control Americans minds or even that the government had implanted a chip under the skin of its citizens to spy on them. Today, the GOP is the bearer of this message and not a single one of its leaders has strayed from this message.

If the electorate has a good memory, it will be difficult for Romney, next November, to explain that all the lies and all the paranoia of these last months were just a big joke. It’s Obama who will really be able to laugh about it.