Hannan….est-ce qu’il y a un cul-de-sac, peut etre?

What on earth made the Tory MEP send that tweet about Romney?

You may or may not be a Twitter user, but let me anyway relay back to you a ‘tweet’ made by the seemingly twitterbiquitous Dan Hannan this morning:

‘Americans! Are you really more interested in what Mitt Romney does with his money than in what Barack Obama does with yours?’

Now sometimes, I read what Dan has to say (mainly on the EU) and think that he is about as on the money as it’s possible to be. Mind you, as he hates the EU and Camerlot, I am often left wondering why he is a Tory MEP, but that’s a discussion for another day. However, in the case of this tweet, a simple deconstruction of it serves as an admirable example of why these days, I think almost all politicians are (a) unconsciously ethically bereft, and therefore (b) impossible to take seriously.

What Dan is suggesting is that Americans should be sensible, and vote for a tax-evading, asset-stripping, law-breaking believer in the prophecies of Joseph Smith, rather than a smug, empty lawmaker who looks acceptably negroid, has failed to deliver on most of his campaign promises, and – on the one he did deliver – proved himself, by and large, to be fiscally and economically illiterate.

Granted, this is not the sort of political plurality you’d want to push up there as a Premier League defence of the American Party system: but let’s be real about this….please? Romney has moved US jobs offshore, made a lot of money from unemploying folks, and refuses to discuss where his untaxed money is. As Obama doesn’t suffer from any of those sincerity challenges, he has to be the winner on this one. If, that is, you have a single moral, fair and open-minded synapse anywhere in your being. If that is, you are a member of a Party whose leader proclaims that any and all forms of tax avoidance (let alone evasion) are “morally repugnant”.

After his election in late 2008, I managed to alienate pretty well everyone on the liberal-left by asking, “Where’s the beef?” in relation to Obama. I am on the record (over two years ago) as saying I think Obama is a jerk. But what I have never suggested is the idea of replacing a jerk with a bloke about whom the jury requires more evidence as to whether he’s a tax crook or not. And as he refuses to give that evidence, we of the dastardly, sick, twisted and world-weary, incessantly cynical tendency are left to conclude that, um, yes, the chances are he is indeed a tax crook. My God, how do we people live with ourselves?

OK, foot off the ironic sarcasm pedal. I’m sure Daniel Hannan is a very nice man. But were I to offer any advice to his critics on the Left – and perish that thought, because they don’t engage with anything other than certainty repetition – it would be this: simply retweet everything Dan tweets, minus any use of the words ‘cock’, ‘twat’, ‘arsehole’, ‘Tory scum’, ‘pillock’ or indeed any other braindead insult you hope will serve as a wit replacement.

I offer that advice in vain on the basis of having spent thirty-one informative years as a communications strategist. I can tell you this, Hard-Lefties: nothing kills an all-promise-no-content product more quickly than good advertising. Think on it.

Finally, as to my prediction that Barack Obama is a one-term lame duck President…I fess up in a wriggle-free manner: I was wrong. I plead guilty to the assumption that the world’s largest soi-disant democracy would come up with a better opponent than Mitt f**king Romney.

See also The Saturday Essay: Why Germany will leave the eurozone…even if it doesn’t want to.