L'Etat C'est Mitt

Campaiging for Governor in this notoriously and proudly blue state of Massachusetts, Willard "the Mitthead" Romney pledged support for Roe v. Wade (despite having declared repeatedly, when home in reddish Utah, that he was staunchly "pro-life") and promised to support widening access to post-coital contraception. Now that the man has virtually abdicated any semblance of Governing for his unspoken presidential-campaign-based attempt to reformulate Massachusetts as a right-wing social experiment, things have changed. Ah, what naked ambition will do to a person !

The Massachusetts legislature just passed a bill allowing some non-prescription access to the morning after pill, and mandating that it be offered to rape victims. The Mitthead has interrupted his vacation to rush back to Massachusetts to veto that bill, bringing to mind other great right-wing vacation interruptions such as Mr Bush rushing back from Texas to legislatively affirm one brain dead woman's right to life even as his policies piled up and continue to pile up the corpses in Iraq and elsewhere. (And bringing to my mind his failure to interrupt his August 2001 Texas Brush-clearing fest to pay mind to a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Attack In United States.")

Mitt's was, of course, was a "deepening" and evolving stance on on these matters, not a "flip-flop" -- an accusation he simply loved to hurl at John Kerry during the last presidential race --

He also criticized what he described as Kerry's policy flip-flops, calling him 'conflicted.' On the war in Iraq, Romney said, 'Kerry is trying to be on both sides . . . and as a result, he ends up sounding like he can't take a position on one side or the other

In fact he went on to claim his veto of this bill was simply his way of cleaving faithfully to his left-wooing campaign "promise" to keep Massachusetts abortion laws intact --

I promised the people of Massachusetts that as governor I would not change the laws of the Commonwealth as they relate to abortion," Romney wrote in a veto letter to lawmakers. ''If taken soon enough, the so-called 'morning after' pill performs as a contraceptive. But in some cases, it can also act to prevent the implantation of the embryo. To those who believe that life begins at conception, the morning-after pill can destroy the human life that was created at the moment of fertilization.

-- attaining heretofore unplumbed depths of pandering disingenuousness in a Republican political landscape in which these depths are repeatedly and prodigiously plumbed on an hourly basis. That's saying a lot.

But there's more to his nuanced stance. He proceeded to lament the very existence of Roe v. Wade as a federal emanation, stating he would prefer the states to have local control over this issue.

But when the people of the state speak, as they did through the elected legislature in the case of the morning after pill, he silences their voice with his veto to further his own narrowly religious/sectarian and blatantly personal political agenda.

L'Etat, I guess, c'est Mitt. At least in his own fevered, ambitious dreams.