Mitt Romney is a really smart guy. He's also a master con artist. He proved both yesterday on "Meet the Press."
He also provided some of the funniest, most entertaining television I've seen in some time. On each occasion in which Tim Russert had him pinned to the mat over yet another curious "evolution" of his political thinking -- Russert even hauled out a pair of flip-flops at one point -- Mitt squirmed for but a nanosecond, and then retaliated with beautifully crafted, flawlessly delivered, overwhelming b.s.
On every issue dear to the hearts of gullible conservatives, from faith in politics to taxes to gun rights to immigration to abortion to stem cells, he managed to clarify that he had both profoundly changed his thinking, while not changing his thinking at all. This was a tour de force in comical ooze.
I knew it was going to be great TV when, early on, Mitt dramatically commenced his response to Russert's question about the Mormon church taking so long (1978) to open the priesthood to blacks. "I can remember when I heard about the change being made," Mitt solemnly began. "I was driving home from -- I think it was law school, but I was driving home -- going through the Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I heard it on the radio and ... "
... I was just sure it was coming ... it was one of those slow-motion moments of expectation ... I had the words mentally fixed before he proceeded ... and bingo! ... there they were ... "I pulled over and literally wept."
"Even to this day, it’s emotional," continued Mitt, demonstrating there is no theatrical corniness or transparent insincerity he is unwilling to commit.
I never did, however, decipher his answer to Russert's question about his recent, "freedom requires religion" proposition. The man played mental badminton with himself, bouncing from defensive ambiguity to offensive vagueness, and generally making an incomprehensible muddle of the whole faith-and-freedom issue that he himself had inaugurated.
The only thing I did make out was this: If you're puzzled by his position -- assuming you can find it -- on faith and politics and all that murky Constitutional jazz, blame it on John Adams. In his "Faith in America" speech, Mitt lifted a lot from John, without thoroughly vetting him.
On the difference between taxes and fees and the ones he could now choke himself for having raised as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt treated budding public administrators everywhere to a truly novel tutorial. "These," he explained, "were not broad-based fees" that he signed into law. "If they are broad-based," you see, well, then "they have a sense -- a feeling like a tax." But, he further explained, "A fee is different than a tax in that it is for a purpose" -- the tax's difference being that it's imposed willy-nilly and earmarked for nothing whatsoever.
Mitt catered many a splendid moments of some of the most confounding but creatively entertaining evasiveness I've ever witnessed on "Meet the Press," but there was one moment in particular that outdid them all, that was the mother of all laughable inconsistencies, the absolute granddaddy of desperate, I'll-say-anything-to-become-president moments ever captured on tape.
After countless and increasingly grueling sessions of Russert pointing out something Mitt had said then, versus what he's saying now, and after all the point-by-point and thundering denials from Mitt that he has changed his thinking whatsoever (except on abortion) to meet the contemporary political exigencies of medieval Republican primaries, Russert, on this theme, had just one more question for him: Would Mitt assure voters that he won't ever, ever flip-flop again?
"Of course," he bellowed.
Whoops.
But this time, he seemed sincere.
If you missed it, you really should watch it. For I guarantee it'll be the most entertaining 49 minutes of television you've seen since, well, since Rudy Giuliani appeared last week on "Meet the Press" and giggled his way through explanations of secure, taxpayer-supported blow jobs in the Hamptons.
After your laughter dies down, the only thing you'll be left wondering is, Where do Republicans get these guys?