It was only yesterday that I wrote, in a post discussing the newly revealed court transcripts that show Shoeless Joe Jackson lying his head off under oath, “Don’t you love it when new evidence is discovered that casts new light old historical controversies, or better yet, show that the popular version of history is dead wrong?” Well, I don’t love it when such evidence reveals me to be a gullible dupe. That’s what the new evidence of Mitt Romney’s new tell-all book has done.
I would buy a book about organizing sock drawers before I’d purchase “Romney: A Reckoning,” the retiring Utah Senator’s even-all-scores tell-all book written with Mitt’s full cooperation by a friendly pro-Mitt journalist. The book’s existence shows Romney to be an Ethics Dunce: it is unprofessional and a betrayal of trust for government officials to participate in the creation of such books while their colleagues and associates are still active, as Ethics Alarms has explained repeatedly. Bill Barr recently did the same thing; I’m sure Donald Trump will, if he ever ends his public career before Hades comes out of the ground in his iron chariot pulled by fire-breathing stallions and pulls him into the Underworld forever.
This revelation, however, is especially disgusting. The Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway has read the book (she got paid to: Pay me my price and I might read it also) and found, as she describes it, Romney’s account of a phone call Mitt had with Sean Hannity of Fox News, in which he confronted Hannity with his harsh criticism, which Romney felt was unfair:
Romney spent the fall of 2019 giving public interviews to left-wing media, in which he complained about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and telegraphing [Romney’s] eventual vote in favor of [President Trump’s] impeachment…
Romney was hurt by Hannity’s remarks, according to the book, since the host had been a staunch supporter of Romney’s presidential campaign. Romney called up the man described as his “old buddy,” but the call did not go well. Hannity accused Romney of just trying to be liked by left-wing media. Then he asked why Romney wasn’t more outraged by the Burisma scandal, the entire issue that was at the heart of the Ukraine impeachment scandal.
When Joe Biden was vice president and in charge of looking into Ukrainian corruption, his son and his son’s business partner took extremely lucrative board positions with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy concern that was fighting off corruption investigations. The whole arrangement reeked to high heaven, and Trump was impeached for asking about Burisma in a phone call with Zelensky….Romney admits to Hannity that even though he’s been signaling his support of the Democrat impeachment efforts, he actually has no idea what Burisma is. “How do you not know what Burisma is?” Hannity reportedly asks.
How? Because Romney, as he reveals in his own book, is a petty, irresponsible, untrustworthy ego-driven asshole.
This made my head explode, which is a lousy way to begin a Saturday morning. His vote for the first Trump impeachment technically made that purely partisan and constitutionally destructive impeachment effort “bi-partisan” in the U.S. Senate, which legitimate impeachments must be to meet the standards set by the Founders and to serve the measure’s crucial purpose: to remove objectively corrupt Chief Executives, not to let an opposing party defy an election because it finds the public’s choice objectionable.
Romney didn’t vote to impeach Trump because of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He just didn’t like him, as the book relates, primarily because he’s “boorish and insults people.” Romney cast a vote to convict a President in an impeachment trial, as important a decision as a Senator can make, while ignoring the evidence and not considering the facts. A juror who defied his or her duties that way would be interfering with a fair trail and the administration of justice while violating a solemn oath.
And I voted for this jerk twice.
Ethics Alarms 
Heh.
There is a bit of irony in damning the publication of a book and then making use of the contents. A quite large difference of degree (and of substance), but there has been substantial controversy over the use of medical knowledge gained from Nazi experiments on concentration camp inmates. Should we reject knowledge gained through that which we consider unethical?
Personally, I found Barr’s book to be informative and thus useful. He may have betrayed confidences, but, did that serve a greater good? Does the Romney biography?
“… while their colleagues are still active” seems to be exactly the time best suited to revealing information useful to voters.
I don’t know if this is even worth talking about very much, since Romney is headed toward the door and will exit as an also ran. In his day, he amassed quite the impressive resume, certainly much more impressive than Obama’s. He did a reasonably good job as governor of Massachusetts. That’s why it strikes me as odd that he did not run that great of a presidential campaign, nor did he seem to grasp that campaigning on the national stage in 2012 was very different than campaigning 20, 10, or even 5 years before that.
The other side had one goal and they stuck relentlessly to it: destroy Mitt Romney, by all means fair or foul. Positive campaigning has been pretty much dead since the days of Bush the elder. It’s negative campaigning that moves the numbers, and he didn’t seem to grasp that. He tried to run a gentlemanly campaign when the other side and the media were prepared to fight as dirty as possible. This country didn’t give a damn about his resume or his plan for fixing the economy, at least not that much. They wanted things to be better, but Mitt ust couldn’t put that across.
He also handled Obama with kid gloves. Maybe he was hoping people would see him as the accomplished businessman and politician he was compared to Obama who really didn’t have much going for him except his color. Maybe he was afraid that if he tried to attack Obama in any way, he would be slimed as a racist, and, should he lose, that could be a potential career ender. He actually did have one opening, after he bested Obama in the first debate, but he never capitalized on it, for reasons that are not entirely clear. It’s also fairly obvious that he came away from the campaign embittered by his unfair treatment by the media, who not only targeted him, not only threw insults at his religion and other attacks below the belt, but attacked his family as well, poking fun at his oldest son and implying that his wife was heartless because she owned a horse which she rode partly to help her multiple sclerosis, which is a lousy condition to have. No, none of that was fair, but, he never seemed to come up with an effective way to counter these attacks. You would think that someone who was well aware of the way that Robert Bork had failed as a supreme court nominee by simply maintaining a dignified silence and how Thomas had succeeded by attacking back would get the idea that you have to attack back and you have to come up with effective ways to attack back, or you’re just not going to get elected.
I think it stuck in his craw that another successful businessman, arguably a less classy businessman than him, did manage to win the White House, as much by fighting as dirty as the other side would as by anything else. I think it also stuck in his craw that he was never tapped to be a cabinet member in that administration, where he could hopefully influence Trump in the more gentlemanly direction he thought was the way to go.
Instead he had to settle for the consolation prize of being a senator. He knew he had arrived at an age where he would not be running again, he simply did not have it in him to try again. Like John mccain, however he never forgave Trump for succeeding where he had failed, and he disliked him personally. Personal dislike is why we are still dealing with Obamacare, because John McCain, who did not vote for it the first time around, voted against its repeal because he knew he was on his way out of the Senate and into the grave soon and decided to take the opportunity to do that as one last great big middle finger to Trump, not giving a damn whether it was good policy for the nation or not. Mitt knew he had reached the point in his career in which he really did not have to care about anything. His state was certainly not going to vote him out of the Senate, and apparently he was not planning to run again after he was elected last time out. At this point he could afford to pretty much do whatever he wanted to do. The one thing he might have been concerned about is that his legacy would be tainted and that might possibly affect his children and grandchildren going forward. So, he decided to take the chance to vote against trump, twice, in successive impeachment trials, thereby granting bipartisan cover to the Democratic party and hoping that the legacy media would cast him as one of the last honest Republicans who was not tainted by association with Trump. However, apparently it was as much about his personal dislike for Trump and his opportunity to flip him off while in office and kick him in the butt on the way out the door. Interestingly, he did not vote against any of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Any one Republican senator could have tanked Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. There is a good possibility he could have tanked Amy Barrett’s nomination. Yet he chose not to do so, even though that would have stuck it to Trump much more than a vote in favor of an impeachment that was guaranteed to fail anyway and would have had little practical effect in any case.
I think that paints soon to be former senator and former a lot of things Mitt as two things. First, it paints him as petty. He would rather vote against a president he didn’t like for doing something he himself did not understand and didn’t care to get to understand. It would be one thing if he had actually looked at what the president was supposed to have done and what the issues with it were and said that despite all of that he believed what Trump did was wrong enough to merit his removal. He admits he didn’t even bother and cast the vote purely out of spite. Spite is not a way to run a government.
Second, it paints him as a coward. He was willing to cast a vote in favor of an impeachment that would have absolutely zero practical effect other than to enable him to strut around and say that he voted for impeachment and therefore should be treated as the last honest Republican, when that was about to mean very little. He was not willing to cast a vote against a supreme court nominee or two Supreme Court nominees that could have had decisive practical effect. Had he voted no for either of the last two Republican nominated judges, there’s a good chance that Trump would have had to go back to the drawing board with regard to Kennedy’s successor, and a very good chance that Trump would have had to leave office without appointing Ginsburg’s successor.
That could well have had a very decisive effect on last year’s slate of conservative opinions. We could very well still be living in a nation where abortion was the one area of policy not a constitutionally guaranteed right and not subject to the Democratic process and where racial discrimination against whites and Asians for higher education was just fine and dandy. Apparently he wasn’t willing to take that step and really do lasting damage to this President he hated so much.
I’m not going to read this autobiography, it sounds like I already know all I need to know, and I am not interested in reading a couple hundred pages of self justification by a failure and a has been who is going to exit the scene soon politically and may exit the world fairly soon. The chance for his opinions to matter has passed him by. The only difference between the time his opinions ceased to matter and the time John McCain’s opinions ceased to matter is that Romney will get however long God gives him after he leaves the Senate to enjoy free of almost any obligations, while McCain hung on in the Senate until the grim reaper finally came for him. There is a chance, although I don’t know statistically where it stands, that by the time Romney’s time in this world comes to an end, Trump will no longer be a factor in American politics, either because he got his second term and is legally done, or because he ran that third time, failed, and decided not to run again when he would be 80. Then his family will have the advantage of the funeral being a relatively quiet affair and not an anti-Trump rant, and we the American people will have already decided he no longer matters and we won’t have to wait for the crowd from the funeral to walk away before we reach that conclusion.
I posted this is a stand alone guest piece.
Romney’s fall deserves attention. As you point out, correctly, he didn’t figure out, as Trump did, how ruthless and unethical Democrats and the media would be, and was unwilling to fight. So was Paul Ryan, who made me so furious allowing Joe Biden to keep interrupting him and making noises that I threw something at the TV. Both of them were “squishes,” and they are the type of Republican and conservatives that sat back and, for instance, allowed the education system to become a woke indoctrination machine. Mitt would have been a better President than Obama, and I’d still vote for him over Trump, but that’s faint praise. The problem with technocrats is that because they don’t have strong core beliefs, they’ll shift with the wind. That’s not good enough in 2023. Or in 2012.
Say back? You mean sat back, correct?
Let’s see…the t and y are next to each other on the keyboard so…yeah, SAT. I’ll fix it.