mitt romney, or, when your speech writers are idiots and you don't know any better

I had thought that candidate Romney was merely a flip flopper to shame all flip floppers, but have discovered recently that he's got some pretty strange, and pretty scary, views on the role of government, the power of the executive branch, religion, and life in general.

In a Q&A sent to all the major presidential contenders and then published here in the Boston Globe last week, Romney had the following to say in response to a question concerning presidential powers and warrant-less surveillance: "Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive and the President should not hesitate to use every legal tool at his disposal to keep America safe."

Let me say that again, just slightly abridged. Our most basic civil liberty is to be kept alive. Liberty is to be kept alive. Not liberty includes the right to live, not liberty is life. We apparently, in Romney's world view, have the right to be kept alive. Something here just does not compute. Kept. Kept behind bars. Kept down. Kept in one's place. A kept woman. Kept alive. Possibly with a feeding tube.

This within a week or two of his so-called faith speech in which he claimed, apparently without irony, that "Americans do not respect believers of convenience." His speech writers might want to look into his track record on reproductive and gay rights, and the unmistakable shift in his so-called beliefs as governor of a blue state to his so-called beliefs as a presidential hopeful for the Republican nomination. Because he's right, and that makes it hard to respect him.

This also within a week or so of claiming, in that same speech, that "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Huh? The teenage girl in Canada who was recently beaten to death by her father for not wearing a hijab might not agree with this. And some of our great country's original founders would have cringed at this.

Romney, clearly a man with a vision.