Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is kind of like a professional football game with replacement officials. Romney doesn’t know the rulebook; he makes the wrong call time after time; and if he’s that bad as a candidate, imagine what kind of a President he would make.

Every American politician knows that when our country is attacked you don’t try to score points off whoever is president at the time.  In the wake of 9/11, both Republicans and Democrats rallied behind George Bush, serving notice that we were united in our outrage and determined as an entire nation to strike back at our foes. Only after we had mobilized to retaliate did Democrats begin questioning the intelligence failures that led to the disaster, and even then the criticism was largely nonpartisan in tone, focusing on the endemic structural weaknesses in our security system.  Romney’s unseemly attempt to blame the

Libyan tragedy on President Obama’s foreign policies, and attack his State Department only hours after the tragic death of a courageous ambassador, set an all-time low in American politicking.    

Republican attempts to portray President Obama as weak on terrorism should have ended with the death of Osama bin Laden and our accelerated use of drones to kill the terrorist leadership in their former safe haven in Pakistan – in fact, the Democrats would not have been out of bounds asking why President Bush called off our pursuit of Osama so quickly, in light of the Bush family’s longstanding business ties with the bin Laden clan – but Romney has never showed much interest in the truth, whether it pertains to global warming,  women’s rights or the economy.

Calling Obama soft on terror makes no more sense than blaming the budget deficit on the Democrats, when we had a hefty budget surplus at the end of Clinton’s reign and the biggest shortfall in history when Bush left office.

But Romney’s most egregious scrapping of the rulebook is his attempt to win the election by resurrecting the evil old days of Jim Crow and keeping minority voters from going to the polls. With our nation in such desperate straits thanks to the Bush Administration’s legacy of financial ruin and the Republican Congress’s cynical attempts to sabotage the Obama Administration’s economic recovery programs, you would think Romney and company would finally realize that the fate of our country outweighs their partisan political ambitions and at the very least run a campaign that will unite us all when the election is over.  What if Romney manages to squeak by and win the presidency by denying hundreds of thousands of Americans the right to vote?  What kind of America would Romney and his cohorts inherit?  The answer: a Brave New Orwellian world, where money buys power and the will and welfare of the people count for nothing.  Republicans used to be much better than this; men like Eisenhower, Ford, and yes, Richard Nixon believed deeply in political compromise for the common good; they were patriots first and Republicans second.

Romney, Rove and company would destroy the very heart of our society, the belief in government by and for the people, in order to accrue still more power and wealth, and damn the consequences.

If this isn’t treason in the true sense of the word, I’ll eat my entire collection of vintage ski lids.   These Republicans should make every good American very, very angry, and very, very afraid.