Mitt on Netflicks, a deeply disturbing documentary [View all]

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It may have been thoroughly discussed here, don't have the time I used to keep up, but I suspect many folks are avoiding watching it because many Republican commentators have commented that it humanizes him and people will have a better impression of him.

The documentary did humanize Mrs. Romney, in my opinion because she talks of the fear she faces with the heavy travelling and how it will affect her delicate routine that she needs to maintain to effectively fight MS, a terrible disease. The fact that Romney never addresses that issue is just one of the many disturbing aspects of what is a very disturbing portrait of Romney.

The first and most lasting image is just how delusional this guy was that he was preparing for an acceptance speech and hadn't even thought that losing was possible.

But much more disturbing to me is how he manipulates his sons and daughters in law to be a constant greek chorus always cheering him on with a level of critical thinking that reminded me of my junior high church group 45 years ago.

They talk blandly of wide spread unhappiness with the President (everyone they know is voting for Dad). Never during the entire documentary do any of these intellectually stunted children ever speak to the issue of the Electoral College and the brutal reality that any Republican is going to have to face to try and get 271 electoral votes, the critical issues of war, the suffering of tens of millions of people. Really the only issue to be discussed is the terrible burden of losing privacy that each of them will have to bear, they really have suffered so much already that you expect them to pass out crying hankies.

One of the great myths about Romney is that he is some great CEO businessman. It is completely untrue. He was a paper/finance guy leveraging and exploiting. He never had a bricks and mortar business that had to please customers and keep them coming back. He didn't have to balance cash flow and suppliers and all of that. At one point he talks about watching the companies that he invested in and how hard they had to personally struggle to keep a business going. You can see the fear in his eyes, he could never take on such a personal challenge.

There are many astonishing moments that show a deeply disturbing level of self awareness. At one point he talks about his father, who I believe was a very great man and had he defeated Nixon would have had a very beneficial impact on the country (not the least of which was he was sceptical of the mission in Vietnam).

He talks about how he stands on the shoulders of his father. His father had a foreign background, came to the USA as an adult in poverty and built himself up. He became a real leader and people really liked him. He states clearly, "I could not do what he did". All the time he is completely unaware that everything he says about George Romney could be applied to Barack Obama.

Over and over again he goes to his family council with a painfully immature "aw shucks" shtick. Over and over again he makes his sons come up to the plate and make the case that he has to run because he is "a really swell guy". There is a revealing moment when he is playing in the snow and he loses the "aw shucks" shtick and tells the grandkids to not worry so much, don't be afraid if the sled goes to fast or to close to the pole, just jump off, it was one of the few really authentic moments in the whole hour and a half.

He is painfully aware that he has been permanently tagged as a "Northern Mormon flip flopper" and exudes the idea that both elements were fixed at birth, apparently unaware that many people reflect on the roots of Mormonism and move away from it, and that many people run for office without establishing completely contrarian policy issues on almost every important issue.

The documentary ends where it started with a tearful Romney trying to scratch out a noble concession speech. But even in that he fails to understand that these concessions speeches are a critical part of the democratic process and are essential for establishing legitimacy, and that if Republicans want Democrats to do it then it is up to him to make a magnanimous speech on the last night when something he says is going to give a damn.

Its going to be polite but he is determined not to give the President legitimacy. Up until now we have watch Romney talk earnestly about how important it is that he becomes President, but he never says why. Not to stop a war or help folks suffering in the economy. He has to become the President because Obama is taking the country into such deep debt.

Now this is both comical and again disturbing. This is the same juvenile type of 'happy talk' that he has been using on his rather stunted offspring, but Romney knows that it is neither true nor very compelling. The real irony is that Mitt was able to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth by exploiting companies and saddling them with enormous debt, in many cases, like KB Toys, driving healthy companies into bankruptcy with their enormous unnecessary debt load all the while he was taking equity out the back dollars in the tens of millions.

Romney takes delusion to a new level, and among the evidence of it is the fact that he would allow film makers this kind of access while he played the role a very un-presidential hapless victim of such great misunderstanding by so many meanies. All they had to do is to talk to his sons and daughters in law to find out how swell a guy he is.