President Obama spent his formative years in academia, so he's no doubt familiar with postmodernism, the literary theory that rejects objective reality and insists instead that everything is a matter of interpretation and relative "truth." At any rate he's running the first postmodern Presidential campaign, now organized almost exclusively around allegations about his opponent that bear no relation to the observable universe.
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The most important document of this new approach to politics may be this week's now famous TV commercial in which a man on camera accuses Mitt Romney of killing his wife. (The man's late wife, not Ann.) The spot features a Missouri steelworker called Joe Soptic, who recounts how Bain Capital bought his plant and eventually closed it, costing him his job and health benefits. "A short time after that," he says, Ilyona Soptic was diagnosed with cancer. "I don't know how long she was sick and I think maybe she didn't say anything because she knew we couldn't afford the insurance."
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Bain bought the struggling company GST Steel in 1993 and held the investment in a turnaround bid throughout Mr. Romney's tenure as CEO, which ended in 1999. He had been gone from Bain for two years when the mill went bankrupt, in 2001, amid a larger competitive upheaval that reshaped the U.S. steel industry. Mr. Soptic's wife died five years later, in 2006.
Mr. Soptic also revealed to CNN that when he worked at GST, his wife had her own health insurance policy through a thrift store job, which she lost after an injury in 2002 or 2003. By then he'd been hired somewhere else, but that plan didn't cover spouses.
So Mr. Romney is to blame because of decisions he didn't make at a business he didn't run that may or may not have set in train a series of random unconnected events many years apart that included Ilyona Soptic's illness. Even more culpable is the butterfly in Peking that flapped its wings and forever altered the course of history.
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The other day Nancy Pelosi said the GOP believes there should be "no government role" in food safety and "They do not want to spend money to do that." Therefore the Republican Party is "the E. coli club" that Ms. Pelosi implied wants to poison children.
Riffing as only the postmodernists can, the House Minority Leader sat for a separate session with the Huffington Post to declare that "Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact." What she means by "fact" is that the Senate Majority Leader asserts with zero proof that Mr. Romney got away with paying no taxes for a decade, which is "true" because he says an anonymous investor called to say so. If the food inspectors ever went by Reid-Pelosi evidentiary standards, we'd all be dead.
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Democrats make dishonest attacks to get the idea out there and then get Republicans to deny the charges so they can keep the story alive. It reflects their amoral approach to politics particularly when it looks like they might lose. They are totally without shame and have no ethical core. in their 2012 campaign.
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