How Much Does Romney Love Guns Now?

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

15 April 12

have come to a conclusion that the key to understanding Willard Romney, foof-dauphin of the Republican party, is to understand an old vaudeville joke. (This is the key to understanding many things, as Woody Allen demonstrated in Annie Hall.) Two women are sitting at a bar. One talks like the young Lauren Bacall. The other one talks like a duck. When the bartender talks to the former, he sounds like Clark Gable. When he talks to the latter, he talks like a duck. The second woman gets fed up. "Are you making fun of me?" she quacks at the bartender.

"No, ma'am," he quacks in reply. "I'm making fun of her."

Having lived in the Commonwealth (God Save it!) under the barely perceptible leadership of Governor Willard, I have spent the campaign wondering if the Governor Willard is the sham or Candidate Willard is the sham. I wonder no longer. He wasn't making fun of them. He was making fun of us.

He's gone so fully wingnut that the only conclusion that any of we veteran Romneybot watchers can come to is that his whole governorship here was a riff. He's shucked off all the "moderate" camouflage that so fooled us that it can never have been stuck to him that solidly. Take today, for example. He went and spoke to the National Rifle Association and he vigorously stroked that group's most deeply masturbatory fantasies:

"In a second term, he would be unrestrained by the demands of re-election," Romney told a crowd estimated at 6,000 in the cavernous Edward Jones Dome. "As he told the Russian president last month when he thought no one else was listening, after a re-election he'll have a lot more, quote, 'flexibility' to do what he wants. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but looking at his first three years, I have a very good idea." Referring specifically to the right to bear arms, Romney said: "If we are going to safeguard our Second Amendment, it is time to elect a president who will defend the rights President Obama ignores or minimizes. I will."

Let us begin briefly by noting, as we always must do after every Romney oration, what a whopping big lie this is. There is nothing in the first three years of the Obama Administration that indicates that he's going to embark on a wildassed gun-grabbing spree as soon as they put away the Bible next January. (Romney can ask some liberals, if he doesn't want to believe me.) What gun rights, precisely, has the president ignored or minimized? And, if all he does is ignore them or minimize them, isn't that what these people want, as long as he doesn't curtail the fundamental American freedom to open up with an AK if the gardener looks at you crosswise? He's given up on having his lies make sense.

Moreover, as he damn well knows, this is the phony monster story that the NRA has been peddling for three years in order to fatten its war chest so it can go around the country and bribe state legislators into creating more and more George Zimmermans. This is something that concerned Governor Willard when he was at our end of the bar, making fun of us. How much of a paranoid delusion is this that he's adopting as his own? Check out the official response from the White House which, in addition to calling Romney out as the fraud he is, also, spectacularly, seems to be trying to get around to the right of Romney on gun control....

"The President's record makes clear the he supports and respects the second amendment, and we'll fight back against any attempts to mislead voters," said campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt. "Mitt Romney is going to have difficulty explaining why he quadrupled fees on gun owners in Massachusetts then lied about being a lifelong hunter in an act of shameless pandering. That varmint won't hunt."

That's where the reality of gun control lies in this election: Romney pretends he was born politically in 2009, and the White House reminds people what a gun control fanatic he was in Massachusetts. And it doesn't matter if the bartender is making fun of us, we all need a drink.