You Just Keep Being You, Donald. Please.

Opinion | thepilot.com

Dear Mr. Trump:

I know there are people around who are telling you that you’re blowing this election, that the tactics you’re using are ill-conceived and self-defeating. I know they’re urging you to stay off Twitter and to let the political professionals handle your message.

I can tell you that I only have your best interests and, even more important, the best interests of America, in mind when I say this: Don’t you believe them, Mr. Trump. You keep right on doing what you’re doing. In fact, I think you need to ramp it up. A lot.

Take Paul Ryan, for example. How dare he withdraw his support and tell down-ballot candidates to do whatever it takes to save their own political careers? That was a betrayal of you personally. Worse than that, it was disrespectful, and we all know you’re a man who doesn’t tolerate or forgive disrespect. It’s why your base loves you.

So you should totally keep going after the Republican speaker of the House, calling him “very weak” and “ineffective” on Twitter. You’re not going to need him when you take power.

In fact, you know what? You should do the same to each and every one of the 33 House members and 17 senators from your party who have shown you that same appalling level of disrespect.

You should do a nasty Tweet about each and every one of them individually. Space the tweets out over days. Take your time. Tell them they’re losers. Keep telling them their “poll numbers — and elections — are going down” in November. After all, you tweeted it yourself: “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary.” Show America you know who the real enemy is.

Hey, I’ve got an even better idea! Tell them that when you win, they’re going to jail! That’ll show them you’re not a candidate to be trifled with. It’ll purge the weaklings and cow the rest into silence. Let the Republicans hate, so long as they fear, right?

And how about those debate moderators? Boy, they sure rigged the thing for Hillary, didn’t they? You should spend lots and lots of time talking about them, and talking in general about how unfair the media is to you.

Tell them how you’re going to single-handedly “open up” the libel laws so you can sue and — dare we even hope? — put anyone in jail who criticizes you in a way you think is unfair. That’ll really show people what kind of leader you’ll be: a strong one. Like Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein.

Also, you should totally double down on bringing up the women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting them. You should bring them to every campaign event, just to remind people that it’s not necessary for anyone to be charged, let alone found guilty, of sexual assault.

The accusation is enough for the guy to be branded a “rapist,” right? Unless of course the person making the accusation is someone like Jill Harth, who’s sued you for allegedly trying to rape her in your own daughter’s bedroom. Or that woman who’s suing you for allegedly tying her to a bed, beating her and raping her at your good buddy and convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein’s house when she was only 13.

Or your ex-wife Ivana, who accused you of raping her while you were married but later, after being pressured by your lawyers, said she was only “violated.” Those gals have, in your words, “real problems,” am I right?

So you keep defending your bragging about sexually assaulting women as “locker room talk.” Keep bringing up Bill Clinton’s accusers and talk about how Hillary “attacked” them. I’m sure no other women from your past will come forward to accuse you of that same behavior.

(Oh, by the way, if you’re tempted to grab a strange woman by her private parts while you’re campaigning in North Carolina, don’t. It’s called “sexual battery” here, and being convicted of it would require you to register as a sex offender.)

In summation, Mr. Trump, I’m glad that, as you recently tweeted, “the shackles are finally off.” Let Trump be Trump. Lead the Republican party to its inevitable, God-ordained destruction — I mean its destiny. Please your base, and everyone else can go pound sand. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Stay the course, Mr. Trump. America depends on it.

Donald Trumps Himself

Opinion | thepilot.com

So the first presidential debate has come and gone, and pretty much everyone who’s not actually on Donald Trump’s payroll agrees, however grudgingly, that Hillary Clinton won the evening.

Trump’s been doing better lately in the polls, I suspect largely because campaign manager Kellyanne Conway has, against all odds, managed to keep him from doing things like attacking the families of dead war heroes and mocking the disabled.

We did get a taste of the Trump we all know and loathe when he responded to reports that Clinton was inviting fellow billionaire and frequent Trump critic Mark Cuban to the debate by tweeting that he might invite Bill Clinton’s former mistress, Gennifer Flowers, to sit in the front row as well.

Because attempting to humiliate a woman by rubbing her nose in an affair her husband had 25 years ago is completely justified by having someone who’s criticized your business acumen sit in at your debate. They’re exactly the same thing, can’t you see?

Fortunately, cooler heads in the campaign seem to have prevailed, and soon they were frantically denying that the candidate had said what he’d said, despite the evidence to the contrary in black and white. As we shall see, this has become a pattern for the Trump folks.

But there was no way to keep the real Trump under wraps for a full 90 minutes, especially since Hillary Clinton appears to have been devoting a good part of her debate prep into figuring ways to push The Donald’s buttons.

And push them she did. For a good chunk of the debate, Hillary Clinton played Donald Trump like a cheap banjo.

As the whole Mark Cuban thing revealed, the quickest way to make Donald Trump overreact is to question his business practices. So Clinton brought up the number of contractors that Trump has stiffed, including one in the audience, to which Trump, the candidate who claims to be on the side of working Americans, snarled “maybe he didn’t do a good job.”

She suggested that the reason Trump didn’t want to release his tax returns is because they showed that, unlike most Americans, he didn’t pay any taxes. “That makes me smart,” Trump shot back.

Here’s a tip: Suggesting that “smart people don’t pay taxes” is an opinion you should probably keep to yourself if you want the votes of those who do.

Then he responded to Clinton’s claim that Trump had publicly rooted for the housing crisis because he’d said that Americans losing their homes would be a great way for him to pick up cheap property. He didn’t try to deny it, but instead snapped “that’s called business.” I seem to remember the phrase “it’s just business” coming from the mouth of another character. It was Michael Corleone in “The Godfather.”

Clinton really managed to lead Trump down the garden path and into a flowerbed full of bear traps by forcing him to deny saying things that, as we previously noted, have been well-documented, such as the canard that he was against the Iraq War.

(“The record says otherwise,” observed moderator Lester Holt, thus enraging the Trumpkins as only someone telling the provable truth can do.)

He also denied saying that he thought climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China, at which point, copies of his tweet saying exactly that spread across the Internet faster than an Instagram of a naked Kardashian.

Finally, Clinton nailed Trump on his sexism and misogyny by bringing up the case of Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe who the then-50-year-old Trump publicly shamed by trotting the then-19-year-old to the gym to work out in front of reporters, telling them “she loves to eat” and calling her “Miss Piggy.”

Confronted with the story of his cruelty to a teenage girl, Trump was reduced to sputtering “where did you find this?” over and over like a husband in a divorce case being presented with his credit card receipts from the Midnight Bunny Ranch.

And since Donald Trump can never, ever, let anything go, he took to the airwaves the next day to insist that he was completely justified in humiliating a young woman less than half his age because she was, you know, really getting fat.

With the first debate behind him, Donald Trump has vowed to “hit harder” in his next meeting with Secretary Clinton. The man who’s been married three times, each time to the mistress he’d been carrying on an affair with while married to the previous spouse, the man who’s bragged in print about his dalliances with married women, is thinking maybe it’s time to bring up “Bill’s women.”

Yes, I’m sure being an even bigger creep, liar and hypocrite will win American hearts and minds. To quote another debate (and election) winning Democrat: Please proceed, Mr. Trump.

Careless, But At Least Not Crazy

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On July 5, FBI Director James Comey finally answered the question that’s been hanging out there for months: Will Hillary Clinton be criminally indicted for irregularities having to do with the private email server she used for official business as secretary of state?

In case you missed it, the answer was “no.” The reaction of Clinton’s critics shows another perfect example of the kind of overreaching that explains why they’re always angry and frustrated.

Some of us have been, to say the very least, skeptical of the confident assertions from the Raging Right that Clinton was going to be indicted over what Bernie Sanders called her “damn emails.”

Because let’s face it, we’ve been hearing “Hillary’s going to jail! Real soon now!” since 1992.

Unfortunately for the wingnuts, every investigation — Cattlegate, Travelgate, Whitewater, etc. — all the way up to the latest attempt to politicize the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi — has come up with a big fat zero as far as any criminal charges are concerned. Now it’s happened again.

Even Donald Trump knew it wasn’t going to happen.

On July 2, three days before the press conference, he took to Twitter to inform us that “sources” had announced that “no charges will be brought against Crooked Hillary Clinton. Like I said, the system is totally rigged!”

When the announcement was made confirming this, House Speaker Paul Ryan was equally outraged.

“This announcement defies explanation,” he said.

You know, the Trumpkins remind me of nothing so much as a bunch of spoiled little boys yelling “Cheater! Cheater!” every time they lose a ball game. Except little boys occasionally wait for the game to be over. The problem is, in their obsession with seeing Hillary Clinton in jail, they blow right past some legitimate criticisms in the report.

The director clearly said that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case” because the FBI never found any evidence of intent to violate the law or to hurt the United States and no intent to obstruct justice from the deletion of some emails.

He did say that “Secretary Clinton or her colleagues” were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Further, he went on to say that the State Department as a whole “was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.”

That’s actually worrisome, when you think about it.

Faced with a critical-but-not-criminal report, Trump could go one of two ways:

One, he could switch from his tiresome and unsupported “Crooked Hillary” mantra to “Careless Clinton” and use it to question Clinton’s judgment.

Two, he could screw his tinfoil hat on tighter and keep ranting that the FBI is corrupt because she’s not going to jail. As we’ve seen, Trump’s pre-emptively boxed himself into option one. He’s not very flexible when it comes to tactics, so this probably won’t change.

It’s exactly like the Benghazi mess.

There are serious questions that could and should have been asked about what happened there, including but not limited to whether we should have been intervening in Libya in the first place (something which, you may remember, I said was a ‘terrible idea.’ You can look it up).

Beyond that, you could legitimately question whether we should have had rapid response forces closer to Benghazi when we did, and soberly discuss whether that would have made a difference.

But noooooo. After all, how are you going to get eyeballs glued to the Fox News and CNN shoutfests if you talk about wonky policy stuff like that?

What draws the viewers are wild claims like the one that Secretary Clinton or President Obama told rescuers within striking distance to “stand down”; that Clinton personally denied security requests by the ambassador; or even that Clinton “faked a concussion” to avoid talking to one of the seemingly endless witch-hunts (sorry, congressional committees) investigating the murders.

And all of those committees, after spending months and millions of dollars, came up with the following that would lead to Hillary Clinton facing criminal sanctions: another big fat zero.

Come to think of it, though, there’s probably a reason why the Republicans don’t want to get into questions about something as mushy as a candidate’s “judgment.”

They are, after all, about to nominate Donald Trump, a man whose bad judgment in word and deed is truly breathtaking in both its breadth and depth.

So they’ll continue to hope for the criminal indictment that might knock their opponent out, and will once again find themselves fuming and clutching an empty bag while the woman they love to hate stumbles to the White House.

“Clinton 2016: She May Be Careless, But She’s Not Crazy.” Not the most compelling bumper sticker, but it’ll do in a pinch.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Commenter "melocal" had these tidbits of wisdom to impart:

 Hillary is absolutely useless. She needs to go back to doing dishes and keeping an eye on that player she has for a husband.

Hey, good luck with the women's vote there, Trumpkin. 

And of course, you can always count on perennial asshole "Francis" to provide us with a heaping bowl of word salad, with extra bullshit dressing on the side:

I believe Democrats were more surprised than any others, like this columnist/ lawyer/writer, l who is now jumping up and down like a jubilant school girl, clapping like a trained seal, I believe others in the Democratic party thought Hillary would face some type of disciplinary action, after all several had made the comment she was guilty, but they were quick to withdraw from those statements being pressured from within their party, corruption wins again. Hopefully a more qualified will come forward and explain the outcome. The expectations met the reality, so no surprise, just lacks understanding.

Okay, Fellows, Listen Up...

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Today, friends, I’d like to address my words to the men in the audience, specifically the young men.

See, some among you have developed some strange ideas about the way things are and how they ought to be — particularly as those things pertain to the female gender.

What drew my attention to this subject was the brutal rampage of young Elliot Rodger, who, fueled by rage and a sense of thwarted privilege, stabbed three people to death in his Southern California apartment before taking to the streets, shooting two young women outside a sorority house, then killing another young man in a deli before turning the gun on himself.

Often, when this sort of thing happens, people are left wondering, “What would cause someone to do a terrible thing like this?” In Rodger’s case, however, he left plenty of explanation, including a 140-page written screed and a video recorded from inside his BMW. In both, Rodger chillingly describes the upcoming “Day of Retribution.”

His grievance? Women didn’t want to have sex with him.

His was the cry we’ve heard for years from unfulfilled nerds and other guys whose interaction with the females in their lives exist in that tortured limbo known as the “Friend Zone.”

“I’m the perfect guy,” Rodger says, “and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.” But most don’t go as far into the darkness as young Elliot when he concludes with, “I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve. Utter annihilation.”

This horrifying manifesto apparently struck a chord with some males. Some even put up fan pages for Rodger on Facebook. Some, inevitably, tried to put the blame on women.

“More people will die unless you give men sexual options,” claimed the website ReturnofKings.com, a mainstay of what’s known as, God help us, the Pick-Up Artist community (PUA for short). The subscribers to the PUA philosophy claim to use the psychological principles of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) to manipulate unsuspecting women (called “targets”) into sex. The techniques are collectively known as “game,” and they’ll teach them to you for the price of an instructional DVD (or several).

If Elliot Rodger had only had better “game,” some PUA websites insist, none of this would have happened, and did we mention we have a DVD to sell?

PUA claims to be the answer for every guy who’s ever wailed, “I’m a nice guy. I’m a gentleman. Why do all the hot women I know just want to be friends?” I suppose the PUA solution of becoming a manipulative, scheming sociopath is better than Elliot Rodger’s answer of killing people, but that’s not saying much.

Perhaps I can offer an alternative. Understand, I’m not holding myself out as some kind of Love Guru, but my time on this Earth has taught me a few things about life that I’ll just lay on you right now:

First, being a “nice guy” and a “gentleman” is the least that’s expected of you by the world in general. It’s the baseline. It doesn’t entitle you to anything other than the knowledge that you’re not a jackass. It certainly doesn’t entitle you to a woman. You need to bring something else to the conversation other than that bare minimum and your raw need.

If you want people (and hey, guess what, women are people) to be interested in you, then you need to be interesting. Do something. Be something. And by “be something,” I mean something more than a desperate horn-dog who sees every aspect of his life through the lens of “will this get me into bed with a woman?”

Oh, and if you’re being a “nice guy” and a “perfect gentleman” for no other reason than because you think it’s going to get women in bed with you, then I have a bit of sad news: You’re not really a nice guy or a gentleman. You’re just acting like one for advantage. Like the PUA’s “game,” this is the sort of thing sociopaths do.

Years of movies, TV, even video games have taught us the wrong lesson: that if we’re just good enough, nice enough, or persistent enough, every guy can get the hot babe of his dreams. When it doesn’t work out that way (see “not really a nice guy,” above), some get bitter and fill a thousand Internet message boards with misogynistic bile. Some turn to the codified sociopathy peddled to them by the PUA snake-oil salesmen.

Tragically, some, like Elliot Rodger, become violent. That’s not going to change until our attitudes do and we start thinking of women as people, not “targets” or rewards.

This is Outreach?

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It’s pretty much accepted wisdom at this point that, in order to succeed on a national level, the Republican Party is going to have to broaden its appeal.

As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, “The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

So what are conservative Republicans doing to expand their appeal on the national level?

Well, you have Phyllis Schlafly of the right-wing Eagle Forum going on conservative radio and explaining that it’s useless to try to reach out to Latinos because they don’t “have any Republican inclinations at all,” and “they’re running an illegitimacy rate that’s just about the same as the blacks are.”

Further, she said, Latinos “come from a country where they have no experience with limited government. And the types of rights we have in the Bill of Rights, they don’t understand that at all. You can’t even talk to them about what the Republican principle is.”

Perhaps someone can explain to Mrs. Schlafly, first off, that Latinos don’t come from “a country.” There is no country called Latinostan. Also, they can explain to her that insulting, en masse, the fastest-growing voting group in the U.S. is the path to political extinction.

Meanwhile, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Off His Meds) defended his opposition to immigration reform and asserted that Latinos won’t punish the GOP at the ballot box with this gem: “I think you will see people start waking up and go, ‘Wow, I’m Hispanic and these Republicans really like me. … Wow, this Republican really does want me to do well. That’s the party I ought to be in!”



Yeah, Louie, let me know how that condescending and paternalistic attitude works out for you. Of course, this is the guy who once berated the attorney general for casting “aspersions on his asparagus,” much to the confusion of all in the hearing room, so maybe he’s jockeying for Michele Bachmann’s soon-to-be-vacant position as Head Loony of the Republican Caucus.



Don’t worry, ladies — the Republican Party hasn’t forgotten you! Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz., of course) recently demonstrated, once again, the GOP’s ignorance of female anatomy by confidently asserting that exceptions from abortion restrictions in case of rape are unnecessary because such pregnancies are “rare.” He apparently forgot that ignorant BS like that cost the GOP a Senate seat less than a year ago.

During the recent debacle in Texas, where the legislature came back especially to pass a restrictive abortion law, Republican legislator Jodie Lautenberg struck a blow for gender equality in the area of ignorance by claiming that emergency rooms have “rape kits” that “clean women out” (for the record, the rape kits are for collecting criminal evidence). Scottie Nell Hughes, director of the Tea Party News Network, went on TV saying that rape victims who end resulting pregnancies should serve the same jail time as their rapists. And the beat goes on.

Of course, there are some who say that there’s no need for outreach, that “angry white guys” are enough to carry them to the White House and control of the Senate. I invite those people to compare and contrast a pair of events that happened right here this past week in North Carolina. They are the latest “Moral Monday” protest on the Halifax Mall behind the General Assembly building and the “Thankful Tuesday” counter-demonstration the next evening.According to The News & Observer, the police estimated 2,000 attendees at the Moral Monday protest. Organizers pegged the number at closer to 5,000. The Tuesday protest, on the other hand, drew a mere 200 people, holding signs that said, “Stop Abortion Now,” and “Thank you [Gov. Pat] McCrory.”

So, even using the lowest estimate, 10 times as many people turned out to protest the General Assembly’s current path as turned out to support it. And the pictures from the event really tell the tale: The Moral Monday folks are a strikingly diverse group, of all ages and races. The TT’s … not so much. They are, shall we say, ethnically homogenous, and not one of them looks younger than 60.

Of course, the generally low turnout for TT may be because right now even a lot of sane Republicans are getting disgusted with the General Assembly’s full-steam-ahead efforts to enact a radical right-wing social agenda at the expense of little details like a state budget.

Maybe they’d get better turnout if they called for a “Stop Futzing Around and Pass a Budget Already Tuesday.” Granted, it doesn’t roll as trippingly off the tongue, but I think it accurately sums up the frustration I’m hearing from Republican friends of the non-insane variety.  I know the GOP isn’t listening to me, but maybe it could listen to them.

Thanks For the Reminder, Mr, Mourdock!

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I think we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock. No, really. I mean it. At a time when it was looking like people might start actually believing flimflam artist Mitt Romney's transparently false attempt to shake his Etch A Sketch and "tack to the center," someone like Mourdock comes along to remind us of what the Republican Party really stands for.

I've got to tell you, if I were Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, I'd have sent out a memo months ago telling every GOP candidate for every elected office, from president to prom king: "For God's sake, if anyone brings up rape, change the subject!" Because it seems that anytime the subject comes up, some far-right ideologue manages to say something (a) stupid; or (b) downright horrifying.

Problem is, the difficult topic of rape keeps coming up. It forces the right to face one of the thornier problems of its stance against a woman's right to choose: Would you force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest?

Different candidates have dealt with this question in different ways. A few weeks ago, you had Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who dealt with the question by denying scientific reality and essentially making up his own. He claimed that he'd heard from doctors that pregnancies from rape are "really rare" - that "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

This led to a firestorm of indignation and well-deserved derision. While some on the right, particularly Mike Huckabee and the Family Research Council, defended Akin, the bulk of the party decided to back away from defending the idea that you could separate sexual assault into "legitimate" and "illegitimate" categories, not to mention the completely bogus notion that a woman's body provides a magic shield against becoming pregnant by rape if it's "legitimate."

At least they did at first. Now, it seems, some conservative Super PACs, such as Sen. Jim DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund, are deciding to try to raise money for the guy who believes in "legitimate rape."

Just as the Akin furor was dying down and Mitt was playing at being a moderate once again by claiming, "There's no legislation with regard to abortion that I'm familiar with that would become part of my agenda" (after claiming he'd be a "proudly pro-life president" and promising to defund Planned Parenthood), along comes Mourdock.

Asked if there'd be any exception to his anti-choice stance, Mourdock allowed as how he'd graciously let a mother choose to live if her pregnancy might kill her. As for rape or incest, he said, "I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

Really? A woman gets raped, her rapist makes her pregnant, and that's all part of God's perfect plan?

In addition to "legitimate rape," we're now supposed to believe in "rape with pregnancy intended by God"? I'm glad that, while I do believe in God, he's not a God that thinks women being made pregnant against their will is just what he intended. Such a God would be some kind of sadistic cosmic psychopath.

Mourdock, however, isn't getting the Akin treatment. The party is still sending him cash. No doubt the leadership reasoned, "Hey, if we start throwing every nutball under the bus after he says something stupid or offensive to women, pretty soon we won't have any candidates left."

Honorable John McCain said Mourdock should apologize, but then walked the demand back the very next day. As for Romney, even though spokeswoman Andrea Sauls asserted that "Gov. Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock's comments, and they do not reflect his views," Lord Romney, the High Sheriff of Flip-Flopshire, has endorsed Mourdock.

He's even cut a campaign ad on his behalf that's running in Indiana right now. This is called "trying to have it both ways." It's also called "transparently cynical and unworthy of a man who claims he's a leader." Among other things.

So thank you, Mr. Mourdock. Thanks for reminding us, once again, of what the GOP really is: the home of right-wing religious crazies who try to parse and partition various "kinds" of rape, and the alleged moderates who have to grit their teeth and embrace them for political gain.

Meanwhile, I just voted for the president who says unequivocally, "Rape is rape," and that we don't want "politicians, mostly male, making decisions about women's health care decisions."

Bring Me Binders Full Of Women!

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It’s odd sometimes how the things you think are going to end up being a big deal aren’t, and the things that end up being a big deal are the ones you wouldn’t have suspected.

This was recently illustrated in the aftermath of the latest debate between President Barack Obama and Lord Mitt Romney, the Earl of Etch A Sketchington, and how a comment by His Lordship made “binders full of women” an Internet sensation.

When asked by a member of the audience how the candidates would deal with the issue of gender inequality in the workplace, in particular pay inequality between men and women, Obama noted that the first bill he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which increases the ability of women to seek recourse against discriminatory pay practices.

He mentioned education, particularly Pell grants, which allow both men and women better access to education. He promised enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

When it was Lord Mitt’s turn, he began with a recollection of how he’d hired a bunch of women for Cabinet positions when he became governor of Massachusetts:

“Well, gosh,” he said, “can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?” He went on to relate: “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Now, I confess, I didn’t pay much attention to that phrase when Romney said it. It went right by me, probably because I was too busy griping that Romney hadn’t done squat to answer the actual question. But hoo-boy, did some people, mainly women, notice it.

“Minutes after” the fateful phrase was uttered, it was “lighting up Twitter and had already spawned a new website,” according to the L.A. Times. The website  mocked Romney’s phrasing in typical online fashion, with references to various other Internet memes and sarcastic pictures.

It didn’t end there. Someone created a Facebook page that immediately garnered more than 200,000 positive votes (“Likes,” in Facebook parlance). USA Today dubbed “binders” its “Obama-Romney Word of the Day.” It seems a lot of people found the image of Mittens paging through “binders full of women” more than a little creepy.

You knew the phrase was really taking hold when conservative pundits started whining that the Obama campaign was “trivializing” the issue by bringing up the words their candidate actually used. Pro tip: When they’re whining, you’re winning.

Then people who were actually around in Massachusetts at the time Romney took office began to speak up, and — surprise! — it turns out that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. Again.

Romney’s former lieutenant governor noted that the “binders” were prepared by a group called the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, through a program they called MassGAP. In a statement from that group released Wednesday, spokesman Liz Levin noted that Romney hadn’t come to them after the election; they’d come to both him and his opponent, Shannon O’Brien, before the election even took place, and that “both campaigns made a commitment” to work with them on hiring more women.

And while they applauded Romney’s initial commitment, which resulted in women filling “42 percent of the new appointments made by the Romney administration,” they noted that “from 2004-2006 the percentage of newly appointed women in these senior appointed positions dropped to 25 percent.”

But the initial question, and the big issue, wasn’t about whether Romney’s a good guy for perusing “binders full of women” to find candidates for Cabinet posts. It was about gender inequality in the workplace. So what did Lord Romney or his campaign have to say about the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which, as noted above, increases the ability of women to seek redress for income discrimination in the workplace?

Well, according to Romney spokesman Ed Gillespie, Romney opposed the passage of the bill, but would not repeal it.

Then, the very next day, Gillespie performed one of the flip-flops that have become such a regular part of the Romney campaign that no one in the mainstream media even seems to comment on them anymore: Romney, Gillespie told the political blog Talking Points Memo, “never weighed in on [the Act]. As president, he would not seek to repeal it.”

Once again, Mittens displays the breathtaking ability to take up to three positions on a single issue within the space of 24 hours: He doesn’t support it, takes no position on it, but won’t repeal it.

Awkward, out-of-touch, and condescending remarks, lies and shameless flip-flops, followed by whining about what people are quoting what the candidate actually said. Just another day on the campaign trail for His Lordship.