Fresh from the shellacking he got for his ill advised, ill timed, tin-eared op-ed opposing President Trump in the Washington Post, and underscored with the chilly reception he got in the Senate for it, Mitt Romney is refusing to change course.

Now the embittered former presidential candidate is pooh-poohing President Trump's border wall showdown with intransigent Democrats, saying the drugs, illegal aliens, criminals, and smuggling operations pouring over our border are really not much of a crisis.

"I don't want to see a declaration of national emergency," Romney told MSNBC.  "I think that's an action that would be taken in the most extreme circumstances, and, hopefully, we don't reach that."

This rather contradicts Romney's earlier claim that a border wall is necessary and that he supports one.  Here he was, just the other day, as reported by HuffPo:

"I would vote for the border wall," Romney, former Republican presidential candidate, told CNN's Jake Tapper in a Wednesday afternoon interview.

"We should have a wall on the southern border," the former governor of Massachusetts added.

Maybe Romney thinks a wall's necessary, but only if he's the one building it, not President Trump.  Maybe he thinks it's OK, but only if Democrats give permission.  Or worst of all, maybe it's something he just says at election time or to spin out of a crisis.  He sure as heck doesn't believe it now.

Whatever it is, this is not the time to be blasting Trump on his border wall.

What we have here, in fact, is a failure to recognize the political situation.  Trump knows that if he doesn't get his border wall, he's pretty well finished, because the migrant caravans are organizing, and they're about to pour in.  But it's more than a migrant issue, even with these migrants being the most expensive migrants, given the number of social services they will avail themselves of once they roll in illegally – or the high numbers of crimes they will commit against Americans, which, frankly, is a crisis.  It's also a drug issue.  Here's a recent headline in Axios, intended to suggest that costly illegals are less of a problem than this: the border's deadliest threat: opioids.  No question, they are right that that is a deadly problem, one that has cost 42,249 Americans their lives in 2018 alone, and more than $500 billion in costs.  That's the work of drug-smugglers, a large number of whom use the U.S. border to bring in their deadly wares.

The Democrat solution to this is to force innocent Americans to pay for the whole thing by attaching extremely expensive mandated drug treatment costs to their insurance policies, driving up the cost of their Obamacare.  It never bothers them that more and more of Americans' incomes are suctioned in to pay for the rising price of health insurance, and it certainly doesn't bother Obamacare-model Mitt.  

The serious solution is to make the drug-dealers pay for it instead, by shutting their operations down at the border.  Tens of thousands of lives are at stake, and here Mitt is, trying to soil Trump's efforts to end this crisis, taking the side of implacable political opponents, allowing these people, who govern from exactly one house of one branch of government, to have the full call on the matter.

All because he hates Trump.

There's a crisis, all right, and that crisis is political.  Mitt's job is to stand by and support Trump on this most commonsense of commonsense proposals, a cheapie border wall to keep a building wave of criminals and spongers out.  The dead bodies of Americans and the gargantuan costs to everyone else are the evidence (as are the billions earned by the cartels who oppress Mexico and Central America), yet there Mitt goes, saying there's no crisis.  Perhaps it's because the killings, both opiate and criminal, are occurring among his famous 47% that he sees no crisis.

More to the point, he fails to recognize the implacable nature of the political opposition to the piddly little wall by a party that is literally in political debt to illegal aliens and their interests ahead of those of Americans.

Instead, Romney wants to get right in and start with business-as-usual politics, not Trump's politics of effectiveness.

Trump wins when he stands firm on issues.  It helps a lot when Republicans stand with him, we all know Democrats stood by Obama in lockstep to get his agenda through.  And, as the last midterm showed, the Republicans who refused to stand with Trump tended to get trounced.  There was a reason why Jeff Flake decided not to run for re-election last midterm, and it doesn't do him credit.

All of that flies Mr. Magoo-style over Romney's well pompadoured head, and he's started right in, as Whoopi Goldberg likes to say, "pooping on people."

Mitt, Mitt, Mitt.  This isn't starting well.  You aren't learning.  You're Talleyrand's Bourbons, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, same old mistake-maker.  Can Lindsey Graham maybe talk to you about political horse sense?  This isn't going to end well for you.

Maybe it's time you started over.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.