This is really well written: Dan Harmon on the presidential race

[foolsguinea.livejournal.com]

Dan Harmon (formerly of NBC-TV's Community) has a tumblr.

http://danharmon.tumblr.com/post/33234881965/i-think-romney-doesnt-actually-want-to-be-president

He offers up a relatively meaningless, certainly familiar, dare I say traditional squirt of political diarrhea that all of his kind squirt three times a term, something about not being in anyone’s pocket, specifying that his campaign “isn’t run by lobbyists.”

Then you hear an exasperated, high pitched voice from off camera say, “come on, that’s not true, Governor.”
...
What’s weird is Romney’s reaction. Or maybe it’s not weird at all, maybe it’s uncomfortable how normal it is, having watched clips of this guy for six months acting like a puppet on a Canadian kids’ show about the metric system. The second he hears someone accuse him of lying, Romney lowers himself to the reporter’s status and just boldly whines right back at him. They instantly become a couple bickering in a grocery aisle. Lots of “can I finish” and “is that what I said, Eric? Did I say that?” kind of stuff. We’ve all been there. Perfectly relatable and therefore forgivable on both sides.

Until you remember, with embarrassment and horror, that this guy that sounds like he’s being given a hard time by his girlfriend about Grape Nuts after a long day at work is, in reality, a billionaire being given a not-so-hard time by a subordinate pseudo-reporter about a run-of-the-mill lie he’s telling while running for Motherfucking President of the God Damn United Fucking Nuclear Armed Fucking States. He’s running for Abraham fucking Lincoln’s job. He wants us to pay him to oversee the fucking planet and he’s breaking a sweat going toe to toe with a kid that I’m pretty sure interviewed me at Comic-Con.
...
If you saw how I talk to my partner when I’m not getting what I want, you wouldn’t want me to be your friend, let alone your partner.

But here’s two really important things about me: I don’t do it in public and I DON’T WANT TO BE FUCKING PRESIDENT. And if Romney says he does, he’s either lying or he’s an even more twisted mind than all my politically invested friends would have me believe. Because I know a person that knows they’re bad for a job when I see one talking, and he is one. And darn-tootin’ he can hear himself, and knows a shitty, dangerous employee when he hears one talking. So if he truly “wants” to be President, knowing what he knows about himself, then he “wants” America to suffer. And that would KIND OF MAKE HIM A TERRORIST, an accusation which I’m proud to take incredibly lightly as an American.

But honestly, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think Romney hates America. I just think he’s lying when he says he wants to run it at this point.... I submit that he’s not allowed to say: “Folks, it seems very unlikely I’m going to win, and I have to say, I don’t think I fully want to win, because I am learning that it’s hard to even ask for the job without getting very irritated and told I’m fucking up a lot, so it seems like a huge waste of a lot of people’s money and the President’s time to follow through on this, and we’ve got a deeply troubled nation to get out of a real bind together, so I suggest we skip the remainder of the circus and I concede.”

Maybe Romney should concede, and then we can talk about the multitude of other races that are going on at the same time.

Anyway, the post goes on to deplore the two parties as really being One Thing in their power-sharing arrangement, and that's kind of interesting. But the point that Romney is going on, and the media are pretending his candidacy makes sense because it's the expected thing, that's really cutting. I suppose that really the GOP is going on with its passel of bad candidates, and the media is pretending that a) they're a reasonable alternative and that b) the Democrats are an effective counterweight, because it's the expected thing.

Maybe this is the prelude to a realignment, if we're smart enough to take it.