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Mitt Romney, Hater of Big Government, Thanked Big Government For Bringing Us iPods & the Internet

All presidential candidates must be chameleons, of course; big ticket elections are largely a contest to see who can best blend their egomaniacal personas in with the 'average' American zeitgeist. Mitt Romney, angling to fit in with the deeply...

All presidential candidates must be chameleons, of course. Big ticket elections are largely a contest to see who can best blend their egomaniacal personas in with the ‘average’ American zeitgeist. Mitt Romney, angling to fit in with the deeply conservative portion of said zeitgeist, has adopted the “government destroys everything it touches unless it touches cruise missiles” mantra so prevalent these days.

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He’s lambasted a popular, bipartisan tax rebate for wind power, he’s thrown his lot in with the relentless Solyndra haters, and he reaches out to Tea Partiers by assuring them he’ll continue to gut government funding for technological research.

But the old Mitt wasn’t always so dismissive of the government’s role in stimulating innovation—in fact, he’s on record crediting the federal government with playing an important role in the genesis of MP3 players and the Internet.

Thanks for building the Internet, government! Via Salon

Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald digs the prevalent passage out of Romney’s (ridiculously jingoistically titled) book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. As you can see above, Mitt attributes federal investment in research as a primary driver of technological innovation; and a resolutely Good Thing. So it was in the eyes of pre-Tea Mitt, but no more!

As Seitz-Wald notes, Romney is now in favor of doing precisely the opposite of all that. Never mind the fact that government investment in developing the Internet helped build the most important information network and economic asset of our time. Instead, he’d cut off funding for research into the things he described as important above, because to Mitt Romney, it is more important that Mitt Romney become president than inventing the next internet.

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