Romney Portrays Fellow Republicans as “Craven Cowards”. Weirdly, They are Also Climate Deniers.

Above, Mitt Romney portrays climate change as insignificant compared to the problem of national debt, which he declares “almost immoral”. (wow, strong words, Mitt)

In 2012, Mitt Romney carried his party’s banner as Presidential Candidate. He lost to Barack Obama, but was elected to the Senate from utah in 2018.
Now he is retiring, and has some choice words describing the corrupt state of his Party and leading Senators, in interviews with journalist Mckay Coppins.

Turns out, many of those he paints as craven cowardly hypocrites, are also the Senate’s leading Climate deniers.
Weird, right?

Washington Post:

The headline Wednesday was that Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is retiring — another Trump-critical GOP lawmaker heading for the exits in a party that is, relatedly, still dominated by Donald Trump.

What may be even bigger news is the abject portrait the departing senator is now painting of his fellow Republicans. More so than virtually any American politician in recent history, he casts his colleagues — seemingly the vast majority of them — as craven cowards.

The article’s portrait of Romney fills out the picture of a conservative movement increasingly bereft of scruples or morality in the age of Trump. It focuses on his Senate colleagues but also high-ranking former GOP leaders more broadly, often singling them out in ways that you rarely see from a fellow partisan, even in retirement.

Here are highlights:

• Romney reserved his harshest words for freshman Senate Republican J.D. Vance of Ohio, once a strong Trump critic like Romney who has refashioned himself as a MAGA warrior. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Romney said in 2022. Romney said he imagined confronting Vance and telling him: “It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”

(A search for “JD Vance climate” yields nothing – which speaks volumes in itself.)

• Close behind are Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), whose furthering of 2020 stolen-election claims Romney seems to regard with particular disdain. “They know better!” he said. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” Romney said they made a “calculation” that “put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

(Cruz and Hawley positions illustrated below.)

• Of former vice president Mike Pence, a man who like Romney wears his religiosity on his sleeve: No one has been “more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly than Mike Pence.”

• Romney said he felt he could work with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), unlike others, because Johnson operated in good faith. But he suggests that Johnson’s good faith is symptomatic of his conspiratorial true-believerism. “Ron, is there any conspiracy you don’t believe?” he recalls saying after Johnson spoke about Hunter Biden and Ukraine.

You know what conspiracy Ron Johnson does not believe in? The well documented 40 year conspiracy of big fossil fuel companies to squash action on climate change.

Meanwhile, during the brief moment when Romney was relevant, running for President, and could have exerted actual leadership on climate for his party, he whiffed.
A thousand years from now, this will likely be the only thing, if anything, that is taught in history classes about the Republican Party of the 21st Century, and a clip of Romney’s shameful “rising seas” moment at the 2012 convention will probably be the only trace of his wasted existence.