![\"\"](\"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/mittens.jpg\" "\\"mittens\\"")
photo AP<\/p>\nphoto AP<\/p>\n
from The National Memo<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n In the clich\u00e9 of the season, Mitt Romney is supposed to be executing a graceful \u201cpivot\u201d away from the grating extremist stupidity of the Republican primaries, the better to persuade us that he really is a Massachusetts moderate, or a moderate conservative \u2013 or at least something less repellent to independent voters than a Tea Party yahoo. He stumbled in mid-pivot, however, when a woman posing a question to him at a Cleveland event on Monday\u00a0said President Obama \u201cshould be tried for treason,\u201d<\/a> and Romney acted as if he didn\u2019t hear her slur.\u00a0<\/p>\n The presumptive nominee\u00a0told reporters afterward <\/a>that \u201cof course\u201d he didn\u2019t agree with the woman\u2019s remark \u2014 as if he had failed to check a box on a form \u2014 but his alibi was too late and much too little. When someone slanders the President of the United States as a traitor, the responsible reaction is to respond loudly and forthrightly. Shrinking from the duty to correct the extremism of your own supporters, as Senator John McCain did without hesitation<\/a> four years ago, is yet another sign of weak character and poor judgment.<\/p>\n Romney\u2019s instinct is to appease the same far right forces that his father George and other conscientious Mormons broke with many years ago, although such fringe ideological obsessions held sway at the highest levels of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He is entirely familiar with the\u00a0John Birch Society paranoia <\/a>and\u00a0white supremacist bigotry<\/a> that notoriously defaced Mormonism in those times, both of which exert an unwholesome influence on Tea Party Republicans today. Somehow, he cannot bring himself to speak up when confronted with that old nightmare mentality.<\/p>\n Instead Romney consistently seeks to ingratiate himself with anyone who expresses a distaste for Obama, no matter how demented. The same scenario has recurred again and again, as it did in the town of Bexley, Ohio in early March, where a man who claimed to have a concealed-carry permit\u00a0asked<\/a> whether the former Massachusetts governor will \u201callow me to keep my gun and protect myself and my family and my home and not come and get my gun? Because I want to keep it to protect myself and my wife and my family \u2014 and against a tyrannical government, which I think we are approaching and we are in, very close.\u201d<\/p>\n