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The Intertoobz are ablaze with the video posted by David Corn on Monday afternoon, in which Willard Romney re-enacts the great comeuppance scene from A Face In The Crowd, except with less sweating and superior coiffure. And I agree that the footage, recorded at an "intimate fundraiser" with "a small group of wealthy contributors," offers an extraordinary look at what the candidate is like when he's around people he perceives to be worthy of what he believes is the truth. And I also agree that, when the One Great Scorer comes to write against Romney's name, he's going to be stumped as to whether the man was a bigger jerk than he was an incompetent. There won't be enough whiskey in heaven for the OGS to resolve this, so he'll just fill in the box marked "Both" and move right along.

To this moment, I guarantee you, Romney is probably astonished at what all the fuss is about. This is simply the way the world is. There is himself, Willard Romney, and his perfect family, and his perfect life, and there is The Help, and The Help gets drunk on the job, and prunes the shrubbery badly, and pockets the silverware, and makes off with the odd can of salmon out of the pantry. He is who he is today because his breeding and his genes and his god have arranged him to be through a serious of immutable laws against which only a fool or The Help would presume to argue. He is what his golden life has made him to be, and his golden life was only the bare minimum of that to which god and nature entitled him. To ask him to doubt any of this is to ask him to doubt gravity or the movement of the tides.

(And, holy blog in heaven, imagine what a genuinely balls-out progressive president could do with this tape. The man has declared a class war on himself. Please, whoever's doing the president's ads for him, ignore that message that Geithner left on your voice mail this afternoon.)

God, he's a foof and, god, are they selling his ass out wholesale. Somebody shipped this tape to Corn for the express purpose of confirming every single stereotype of Romney in which people already had come to despise. This is a perfect demonstration of what every other Republican candidate came to hate about him in 2008 — I'm willing to bet that old John McCain is pouring himself a nice Merlot tonight, and chuckling evilly to himself — and what drove Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich around the bend four years later.

We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he's a fake, which means he's not a very good one. There's really only one campaign left to him now.

Unfortunately for American politics, that means only one thing. It's going to get extraordinarily dirty extraordinarily fast. There is going to be pale birtherism and barely covert racism. The body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens is going to be exhumed and used as a bludgeon. There is going to be poor-baiting, and gay-baiting, and ladyparts-baiting, and probably baiting of things I haven't thought of yet. The polite part of the campaign is going to be Romney's effort to convince You that he was really talking about Them when he was calling people moochers and sneak thieves. He wasn't talking about Your Medicare or Your Social Security. Naw, he was talking about Their greed for what You have. That's going to be the polite part of the rest of the campaign, reinforced in the lower registers by a few million in ads to make sure You remember who They are.

There ain't no goin' back, as the song goes, when the foot of pride comes down. Ain't no goin' back.

UPDATES: The Comeback Speech Romney Should Give and a Few Words on That David Brooks Column

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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