[h/t Heather at Video Cafe]

Mitt Romney is not hitting his general election campaign with much aplomb this week. While it's true that he's wildly unpopular with women, that is not entirely Mittens' fault. After all, the whole GOP is wildly unpopular with women, and he's one of them. The leader, in fact. No matter how he tries to pander to women, he'll fail because he hasn't got the first clue what he's talking about.

Take this simple question put to the Romney campaign spokesmen this morning by Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post. It's easy enough: Does Mitt Romney support the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

Their answer? Silence. And then..."Um, we'll get back to you on that."

Really, guys? That's just pathetic. There's no other word for it, but then this campaign is pathetic so far. If they can't answer a simple question like that they should just give up on women altogether and soon, because here's the thing. We women have brains, and we don't need to be told what to think or shoved into some weird alternate reality where up is down.

It's pretty straightforward: Women don't like Mitt because Republicans hate women. Doesn't really get any clearer than that, and the only people who have set women back over the past few years happen to have the letter (R) behind their names.

Besides Romney's GOP-ness and his choice of advisors, who I view as being as evil as their Dear Leader Rove himself, there's another reason I loathe him and his campaign. Bob Cesca put it into focus quite nicely earlier this week when he awarded Mitt Romney and his campaign the Most Cynical Ever Award:

Romney is easily the most jaded, cynical presidential politician since Richard Nixon. He operates with the hubristic attitude that voters expect him to be shifty, and therefore he’s allowed to be shifty. The expectation gives him permission to be that caricature.

And so, for example, he accused President Obama of being an elitist because he attended Harvard even though anyone with a cursory knowledge of Romney’s history knows he also attended Harvard. But none of that matters. He’s smart and calculating enough to know for certain that a chunk of Republican voters will accept the claim at face value and not investigate the contradictions and hypocrisy, and the rest of the Republican voters expect him to say whatever it takes to win, so who cares if it’s bullshit?

The list of flagrantly obvious lies are longer than the list of workers that were fired in hostile Bain Capital takeovers. Romney isn’t “severely conservative.” Romney knows the economy isn’t “worse” than before President Obama was inaugurated. Romney knows the president doesn’t want to “end Medicare as we know it” — that’s Paul Ryan’s job. Romney is pretending to be a conservative and so he’s saying whatever conservatives need to hear in order to support him, and then, when he’s the nominee, he’ll soften his language and pretend his primary-era remarks never happened. And Romney’s possible vice presidential nominee, Rick Santorum, will pretend like he never criticized Romney or, quite possibly, he’ll just admit that it was merely the product of a primary contest and wasn’t really true.

This. Right here. The oozing cynicism and expectation that we can't possibly think for ourselves or have an opinion without these doofuses telling us what it is. The grinding, wearing, tearing cynicism is just, well, it's Willard's stock-in-trade. A man who has no values other than the values that fit the audience of the day. What kind of leadership is that?

So here's my answer to Willard's puffery about women and his idiocy in trying to woo them: Thanks, but no thanks. I'll go with what I know, with the folks who actually do something rather than blather on, or worse, remain silent.