Gimme some of what he's smoking

Mitt, Mitt, Mitt ... stop bogarting whatever you're toking and let the rest of us take a hit.

On Thursday he promised ... well, read it for yourself. Per a Washington Examiner piece by Brian Hughes:

"I know that in campaigns, talk can be cheap. You can say anything," Romney said in Colorado, where he unveiled a middle-class jobs plan that called for more domestic energy production and fewer coal industry regulations. "This is not just an idea, but energy independence for North America."

Romney promised not only energy independence, but a better educational system, free trade agreements and small-business growth -- all while slashing a record federal budget deficit.

To do all these things in a Washington, DC, as dysfunctional as it is, and for a country as dispirited and as far in denial as we are ... well, it would take a miracle bigger than anything in the Book of Mormon.

By the way, the next sentence in the article is:

But he provided few specific proposals for achieving those things.

I've seen this movie and I know what that last sentence signifies: the Republican bluster machine is in full blow-hard mode. The strategy: make promises so huge that no one could possibly imagine you're lying about them. Once in office, you fail to deliver ... but hey, baby, you're in office! Who cares what you promised?

Obama made some extravagant promises he hasn't kept, too: remember the whopper about shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison? Still, that pales in comparison with "energy independence for North America" by 2020 — which, conveniently enough, would be at the end of a hypothetical second Romney term, and thus way, way too late to hold him accountable for his failed boast.

Energy independence for North America by 2020. Maybe for a week, and even then only if we all promise to turn off our lights at eight o'clock every night. But why am I sweating the details? Romney's campaign demonstrably isn't. And it won't. The details don't matter. Facts don't matter. All that matters is for him to make simplistic promises. Read Jared Diamond's op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which Diamond says, "he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue." Diamond goes on to assert that Romney's misrepresentation "is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it."

Energy independence for North America by 2020 is such a colossal fantasy that if the public were genuinely evaluating Romney for the highest office in the land, it would be calling for him either to be preemptively arrested for fraud (knowingly promising what is not in his power — or anyone else's — to deliver), or else to be confined for close psychiatric evaluation for a minimum of 72 hours.

So if Romney doesn't like to be thought of as a brain-damaged recreational drug user, he should remember that the only other plausible explanation is that he's a bald-faced liar.

Pass the kutchie on the left-hand side, Mitt.