By Donkey Hotey via flickr.com.

At this point, complaining about Mitt Romney‘s inconsistency seems almost as fruitless an exercise as it is predictable.

The GOP pick for the presidency routinely changes his positions in what can best be described as shamelessly pandering to voters.

We know this — and we have known this since Mitt’s first White House bid. This is not new information and I am not, by ANY means, the first to point it out.

BUT — and isn’t there always a but? — Mitt’s shifts might not be all bad in and of themselves.

For starters, let’s just clarify that a political candidate’s inconsistency is not logically correlated to the veracity or morality of their claims.

That’s to say, there’s no causal relationship between being a shifty jackass on the stoop and maintaining good or bad positions.

For example, a pol could claim “it’s raining, and it’s not raining” at one juncture and “cats have whiskers” at another point, and the contradictory batshitness of the first set if statements does not mean the second is B.S.

Rather, it puts to question the trustworthiness of the orator and whether his or her data is reliable, but does not intrinsically taint the info.

(This is why I get so pissed off when political rivals focus entirely on each other’s inconsistencies rather than their positions and why you should, too! Yes, shit’s important to point out because we want to be able to trust electeds. However, inconsistency ultimately says nothing about the positions themselves if we examine the essentials under a formal logic lens).

All that said, let’s return to Romney.

NPR has just featured a segment suggesting that the former Mass. gov might be shifting his abortion position AGAIN.

(Also, a bit of context: He used to be pro-choice, then switched to being pro-life, then appeared to “soften” his opposition to reproductive rights, then appeared to not soften his position, then seemed like maybe he had in fact re-changed his mind because his sister said he would NOT ban abortion, etc.)

So yeah … where does that leave us?

While we really can’t tell WTF is going on, this unpredictability might not be the worst thing in the world for choice advocates. I’m going to go out on a limb here but, I find the prospect of a candidate who is undoubtedly and unwaveringly pro-life far scarier than one who just seems to talk out of his ass to woo social conservatives.

That’s not to say that a Romney presidency wouldn’t be a threat to reproductive rights — he tapped Paul Ryan as his VP and the Republican platform is against abortion in all cases which is scary, scary shit (that we should vote against, ahem.) Still, I’m not convinced that Romney poses as great a risk as, say, Rick Santorum.

abortion, flip flopping, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan