? for President...

I'm not sure whether this says more about McCain, Palin or Romney. Or whether it shows yet again how dumb so many Americans, and particularly Republicans, can be.

Romney & Ryan 2012

What, Me Worry?

The Republican party is nominating Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for President and Paul Ryan, a Catholic, for Vice President. I'm all for inclusivity but these guys make strange bedfellows given their fundamentally different concepts of 'God'. Moreover, each considers the other 'unbaptised'. What are we to think if either should announce that 'God' told them to do it?

Romney has tended to 'flip-flop' on a number of issues over the years but Ryan seems somewhat more steadfast in his (questionable) views. Americans should be alarmed that Ryan might gain real power over economic policy, however. He is a devotee of Friedman and Hayek whose neo-liberalist doctrinal approach to capitalism, which was adopted by Reagan and Thatcher and pursued thereafter by their successors, brought about the financial collapse of 2007/8. I don't think Romney has any particular intellectual commitment to economics - he just likes making money and he doesn't care how ruthless he has to be to make a profit.

Ryan likes shooting things for a hobby so you can forget about any reform of gun control, or of bows and arrows for that matter. Romney just shoots at rabbits with his son's .22 so he's a bit of a namby-pamby by comparison.

Neither is fit to be in charge of America's foreign policy, both being entirely ignorant in this respect.

What they both seem to want seriously is to make health care more expensive for more people, and to enable people with money to make more money and pay less tax. And to hell with the rest of you (whatever their particular idea of 'hell' might be).

Mitt Romney: Dangerous Nutcase

It has been my view for some time now that everyone in the world over the age of 18 shold have a vote in the American Presidential elections. Let's face it, America produces some right cretins as candidates and some of these dolts actually get elected. They are thus in a position to cause total mayhem all over the world according to their own lunatic ideas or whatever their paymasters might consider profitable.  Reagan had a wonderful time expanding the military to fight pointless wars in central America, for example. Dubya Bush gave us Afghanistan and Iraq. And let's not forget Vietnam.

Besides all the killing, there's the economics of neo-liberalism and globalisation. Mind you, in that respect, American Presidents have had plenty of assistance from British leaders such as Thatcher and Blair.

So it is with some alarm that I see that Mitt Romney is currently in with a 50% chance of becoming the next President of the USA. He's been touring Europe and the Middle East in the hope of gaining publicity for his campaign in the USA, demonstrating how ill-informed he is and that he has a somewhat simplistic view of how to get along with people who are not right-wing Americans. But leaving aside his questionable business practises and his ignorance of foreign affairs (amongst other things), the reasons we should worry about Mitt Romney are well summarised in a letter to The Independent today:

I don't care what Mitt Romney thinks about the arrangements for the London Olympics. What worries me is that, as a Mormon, he believes the golden plates allegedly dug up by the illiterate roughneck Joseph Smith, and then taken back by the angel Moroni, were inscribed with the Word of God; that Jesus appeared in America; that the dead of all nations, regardless of their religious beliefs while on earth, must be baptised before they can enter the specially reserved Mormon heaven; that women can play only a subservient role in the life of the Church of Latter-day Saints; that God lives, with his wife and children, on a planet called Kolub; that the spilling of blood is to be avenged by more spilling of blood; and that his Church should be ruled by a bunch of nonagenarians who receive "divine revelations" from time to time. And even then, none of this would worry me except that this is the fella who wants to be President of the United States!

Dr Meic Stephens

Cardiff