Garter Snake Mitt speaks

Mitt Romney trashed Donald Trump again, which gave the media another opportunity to pretend Republicans are abandoning President Trump. Romney never supported President Trump.

WMMS reported, “Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said he won’t support former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election due to ‘a matter of personal character.’

“Romney, 77, was among several politicians within the party to condemn Trump during his presidency and said the presumptive GOP candidate's recent meeting with Republicans on Capitol Hill last week did nothing to change his perspective.”

I chose to quote WMMS over other outlets because it is the Home of the Buzzard. The Buzzard refers to the bankers who were circling the city of Cleveland during its Great Default to see what parts of the city they could consume. Legend has it that a buzzard inspired a song by Kansas when the bird answered his kid’s question about what was for dinner: “Carrion, my wayward son.”

No one should take Romney seriously.

It has been a dozen years since he blew a presidential election that should have been a gimme. I did not realize it at the time but when it comes to character, few are as ignorant as he is.

In 2012, he begged Trump to endorse him. When Trump did, Time reported:

He [Romney] took a potential critic with a huge megaphone off the field. He deprived his rivals of any national media attention. And he saw his strategy of staying above the political circus vindicated: In the end, it did not take any clowning around on the candidate’s part to win over the Republican party’s great jester.

The endorsement has been a long time in coming. As far back as December, the discussion in Trump circles has focused less on whether to endorse Romney than on when to do it. “Mr. Trump has been speaking with the governor for several months now on a regular basis,” Trump’s political adviser Michael Cohen told Time on Thursday afternoon. “Mr. Trump has truly gotten to know the governor.”

Trump got to know Mitt — and still endorsed him.

Romney said at the time, “Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works. It means a great deal to me to have the endorsement of Mr. Trump.”

4 years later, Romney showed his loyalty and the content of his character in a speech in Salt Lake City in which he lambasted Trump. High on either a rating rise or glue, CNN gleefully reported, “10 colorful Donald Trump insults from Mitt Romney’s speech.”

Romney offered insults, not policy disagreements or even proof of character flaws that make him a bad choice for president. In doing so, guess who displayed his own hypocrisy.

Among the 10 were “There is dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War while at the same time John McCain, whom he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured.”

Romney (and Biden) avoided the Vietnam War with the same number of draft deferments as President Trump. My draft deferment was being in high school. I was 19 when the draft ended.

That 2016 speech would not be the dumbest utterance by a Romney. His dad as governor of Michigan sought the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. His quest for the highest office died in an interview that aired on September 4, 1967.

Dad said, “When I came back from Vietnam [in 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get. And since returning from Vietnam, I’ve gone into the history of Vietnam, all the way back into World War II and before. And as a result, I have changed my mind. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop communist aggression.”

Having your brain washed is the worst thing to brag about when running for president. Heck, Pedo Joe has proved you really don’t need much of a brain to be president.

Mittens — who is not, repeat not, named for the shape of Michigan on a map — said, “Having a president who is so defaulted of character would have an enormous impact on the character of America. And for me, that’s the primary consideration.”

Romney is OK with having a president who showered with his prepubescent daughter, sold the nation out to foreigners, and bequeathed billions in armaments to the very Taliban that American soldiers died fighting for 20 years.

Maybe Mitt, too, was brainwashed. At any rate, like father, like son, he’ll never be president. And I believe he resents it.

Then there is Mitt’s running mate, Paul “Whinin’” Ryan. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported last month:

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan this week doubled down on his claim that he will not vote for Donald Trump this November, reasserting his opposition to the former president just two months before he's set to accept the Republican nomination in Milwaukee.

"Not from me," Ryan told Yahoo Finance Tuesday when asked if he'd vote for Trump in November. "Character is too important to me, and it's a job that requires the kind of character he just doesn't have."

Ryan said he'd write-in another Republican's name, as he said he did in 2020.

The newspaper did not mention whom Ryan voted for in 2016 instead of Donald Trump — whom Ryan announced every few months he was not voting for ever. Despite the lack of an endorsement from Ryan, Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Ryan’s home state in 28 years.

If Wisconsin didn’t listen to Old Whiny, why should any of the rest of us?