Rick Perry seems to be adjusting his meds with some success. After sleeping through a couple debates and partying through a couple more his native cunning produced a good, if limited result, assuming the goal was to let some air out of Mitt Romney. Maybe there is real benefit to these bi-weekly debates since there is only ever one or two highlights that make it out into the wider world. The Massachusetts Princeling is wishing he had skipped this one after boldly betting Rick Perry ten thousand dollars that his book says one thing and not another.

One question that no one is addressing is the simple legality of Mitt’s proposal. As I understand it, outside of Nevada and a few other locales, wagering is explicitly illegal. Sporting events? Card games? Shell games? If an ordinary citizen bets on such things he is breaking any number of statutes. Is the disputed content of a piece of paper different? This doesn’t qualify as a state lottery, does it? Recall Michael Moore, advocate of metaphysically strict campaign finance rules dishing out cash, in public but without accounting to his candidate. Picking nits is for The Little People. That ain’t Moore and that ain’t Mitt.

The amount; a cool ten large, has been tagged as the revealing nub by the predictable and well-seasoned detractors on the Left. Throwing a Salmon on the table demonstrates that Mitt is a One Percenter, ’nuff said. Only those contesting Romney’s presumed coronation will bring up the real core of this disgusting little episode; Who is right? And if it is Rick (and it is) what is going on here?

Jon Huntsman couldn’t cut the polling mustard for this round but if he is fading out, he is fighting it, and fighting Mitt. The most forceful pushback came from his campaign. After the lights were out and cold but not long after that, his crew put up a website with all the details, going back years documenting Romney’s approval of the “individual mandate”; compulsory participation in medical reforms and his application of it in Massachusetts. The crux of Mitt’s bet is the subtle revision between the original print of his campaign manifesto, “No Apologies” and subsequent editions. Mitt reads from the latter. Rick from the former.

Whether Romney’s revision amounts to a full-throated denunciation of his now burdensome position or a new nuance to go with new facts is not the question. Not at all. That is because he does not admit that he has changed his position in the least. He did however alter his book and also do as expert an internet scrub as one can accomplish. Huntsman still has the goods to which Perry alludes but Mitt will have none of that. He seems to lay claim to his own private memory hole and assumes that the obsolete copies have been recovered and pulped. Rick misses out on true stardom here, sadly. If he had produced the troublesome tome he would have had Mitt sputtering and red faced on live TV, perhaps carried out in wraparound couture muttering, “No, it’s not what I said. It’s what I’m saying….” but instead the Texas cowhand declines to bet, possibly on religious grounds, revealing that he is as ignorant of what the damn book said as is Romney, having rehearsed this interchange with his handlers rather than ever forming his objections for himself.

So, as is often the case, Rick blows a big debate opportunity. Very well. But Romney’s actions are far worse than a flub. What he wants is not a pass on rhetorical incompetence or ordinary political exaggerations or even outright lies. He intends to re-write his words and deeds, live, on camera, without concealment of any sort to suit his momentary requirements. And anyone who notices has no standing to complain if they are not fixed well enough to drop ten grand on a spa weekend. This should be a revelation but for reasons well understood by the gunslingers who are really calling the shots, the self-interest of the involved parties are contradictory enough to keep a full reckoning at bay. Romney has already revealed how calamitous he fears this might prove by going nuclear in his defense. He has brought in the wife, in an obviously contrived scenario, and she has admonished him, No more bets! That is supposed to end the matter. How? By invoking the perpetually abused Spouse Clause Mitt has now declared that he has taken a hiding for this from the REAL boss and further chatter is either piling on a man who can’t defend himself for fear of a blow up with the missus or intrusion in a private, family matter. See how easy this stuff is?

But it has NOT ended the matter, nor should it. Newt is on the hunt denouncing Romney as a silk-stocking bankster. He sees his opportunities well. After Romney and others have pulled HIS finances front and center Newt sees an opening for a crippling counter. Mitt has exposed his throat, will Newt decline to take a bite? Why? From shame at his own double and self-dealing? From fear that his own tactical wafting from this position to that will be re-scrutinized? Oh, perish the thought! What we see from both men is a petty scale version of Big Lie Theory in action. Mitt makes his declarations; abandoning that old centrist compromiser from way up north and in a snarl DARES anyone to say different while declaring just as firmly that he has never changed his positions a whit! His recruitment of Chris Christie to do this dirty work is another black mark on his ledger (and Christie’s as well). Newt takes blank denial and slick one-off rationalizations to an art so fully developed that even the most cynical citizen can only gape and grudgingly admit that anyone with a glib answer to everything must be “smart” and frank. Lies so baroque could not be relied upon.

That is the world we inhabit and more important issues than Mitt or Newt’s relative consistency have been brushed away by such maneuvering. No one… and that is NO ONE ever questions Mitt’s assertion that, whatever the Constitutional or ideological problems with Masscare if brought to the nation at large, the result in his state has been good. No, it has not. Costs are UP, not down. Results are WORSE, not better. The hard numbers say that. The polling also says that. And even Mitt’s carefully revised book pukes up an abhorrent lie when he claims that his program did not amount to a government takeover of medicine. Apparently only a government appointed Star Chamber can satisfy that definition which is all that awaits the doctors and hospitals of Massachusetts. Still less remarked is that Masscare relies heavily on one-time financing from a federal windfall that was a use-it-or-lose-it Medicare fluke that poured cash into the state from federal coffers; the exact malady that all healthcare reform is supposed to address.

The bluster amounts to little, though, even if one of these dreadful men attains his aspiration. If Medicare is to be “saved” the payments OUT must be curtailed and the payments IN expanded which was the state of affairs in ’08 and in ’10 and will be in ’12. It is the goal of the Doc Fix which forcibly cuts payments to doctors as it is for the hikes in taxes or cuts in therapies like the recent scrapping of Avastin treatment for breast cancers. Yes, this is also what Obamacare claims to do and it is what all “solutions” have done over forty years while the costs of the program only escalate. Anyone who wants to preserve a leading federal roll in healthcare (and this is not me) has only one viable option; radical means testing which would in essence end Medicare, intended to cover “seniors” and expand Medicaid, coverage for the indigent. Who proposes that? Not even the allegedly voracious Paul Ryan proposes anything so dire but the alternative is not some lumbering behemoth that delivers our necessities without charm. It is collapse; that is the checks bounce. And if you don’t want the checks to bounce, as no one does on their shift, they are backed with printed money with all that implies. Are either of these men or Obama going to resist such temptation? Only now does that strange transmission gain coherence….

Resist we much.

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