{"id":3496,"date":"2012-03-27T07:56:36","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T12:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=3496"},"modified":"2012-03-27T07:56:36","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T12:56:36","slug":"romney-wont-say-anything-to-get-elected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=3496","title":{"rendered":"Romney won&#8217;t say anything to get elected"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mitt Romney has learned a thing or two about electoral politics.&nbsp; He&#39;s learned, for instance, that if you say anything specific about anything, people will challenge it.&nbsp; What he takes away from this is that if you make an argument, people will <strong>distort<\/strong> it.&nbsp; He <a href=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/articles\/risk-averse-romney_634427.html\">says<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, <strong>that was used to suggest I don&rsquo;t care about education<\/strong>,&rdquo; Romney recalled. &ldquo;So I think it&rsquo;s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we&rsquo;ll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I&rsquo;m not going to give you a list right now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Sadly, this has been reported this way by the &quot;liberal&quot;&nbsp;media (in this case, Jonathan Chait): &quot;<a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intel\/2012\/03\/mitt-i-wont-detail-plans-because-then-id-lose.html\">Mitt: I Won&rsquo;t Detail Plans, Because Then I&rsquo;d Lose<\/a>&quot;.&nbsp; This is not really what it says, but it kind of makes his point.&nbsp; His point is that if he says anything, people will attack a distorted version of it.&nbsp; And this is exactly what Jonathan Chait has done with this one.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, Romney is&nbsp;clueless as to&nbsp;how the &quot;liberal&quot; media works.&nbsp; You see, when Republican Paul Ryan outlined a plan undoing the single-payer health system called &quot;medicare,&quot;&nbsp;replacing it with a voucher-based Obama\/Romney model called by the same name, Democrats <a href=\"http:\/\/mediamatters.org\/blog\/201112200016\">rightly pointed out<\/a> that such a move amounted to eliminating medicare.&nbsp; This correct observation earned the Democrats, not the Republicans, the &quot;lie of the year&quot; award from politifact.<\/p>\n<p>Doubly ironically, Romney&#39;s failure to offer any kind of plan at all for fear of having is plan misrepresented forces everyone to do what he fears: make them up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mitt Romney has learned a thing or two about electoral politics.&nbsp; He&#39;s learned, for instance, that if you say anything specific about anything, people will challenge it.&nbsp; What he takes away from this is that if you make an argument, people will distort it.&nbsp; He says: One of the things I found in a short &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=3496\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Romney won&#8217;t say anything to get elected<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1345,1344,295,1964,1346],"class_list":["post-3496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-distortion","tag-jonathan-chait","tag-mitt-romney","tag-straw-man","tag-wrenching-from-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3498,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3496\/revisions\/3498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}