PERRY: Stepping away makes it clear: Romney is feeble, and Sandusky is gross

There’s no credible perspective from inside a burning building.

I forget this until I make my annual trek to visit fellow heathens outside the United States. As much as I believe that I am the center of the universe, I like to leave home once a year to remind myself that we are but part of a very big world, and that we can learn a lot from others if we just put aside our egos and fascism for a brief spell. The downside of these respites is crushing jet lag.

I’m no weenie most of the time. I get up at the crack of stupid and can walk, ride or ski forever. But when it comes to body clock things, I’m a mess. It does, however, add to the new look at life when I get back from vacation.

If you, too, feel only tired and out of sorts when you return from time zones far, far away, you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. If you come back from Europe or Asia and feel as if you’ve been poisoned, feel that you could happily sleep on a bed of frozen, broken glass, or that you’ve bathed in Kryptonite, you have some notion of how I felt stumbling into JFK Airport last week.

Suddenly, everything is in English and there are people in uniforms barking it all over. I realized that we live in a friendly country that hates everyone.

Lord only knows why, but JFK and the friendly folks from the U.S. Customs office set up blaring TVs in various locations of their cavernous version of Ellis Island. Busy trying to make my feet work and balance on them at the same time after having them crushed for hours at 36,000 feet, I couldn’t stomach watching American TV during my rope-maze acrobatics. It was only after a friendly Customs agent barked something about sleeping in line that I realized the blathering, smarmy, creepy game show host on the blaring TV was in fact, Mitt Romney, candidate for U.S. president. He was asking the kind of people who go to game-show tapings whether they were better off now than they were four years ago.

A man who had eyelids for lips and lips for eyelids sputtered a big, fat “no way.”

That’s Romney’s campaign strategy? To persuade enough thick-headed Americans that the Great Recession never happened? That President Barack Obama walked into a dream job and just ruined everything?

Oy. Before I left for vacation, I just saw Romney as a smarmy, calculating politician who was trying to persuade a bunch of crazy, right-wing zealots that he was crazier than Newt Gingrich or even Rick Santorum. Then, he was trying to persuade the rest of America that he wasn’t as crazy as he let on in working to get the Republican nomination.

Standing there in JFK, mouth open, unable to drool from plane-induced dehydration, I realized Romney has all the presidential cache of Peter Marshall or Bob Eubanks. Yuck.

Queasy, I made it home anyway. Later the next day, as my jet lag ripened into a condition not unlike acute malaria, I was editing a recap about the Jerry Sandusky trial. If you’re lucky enough not to know, it’s the trial over a Penn State football icon accused of molesting an endless number of little boys over a series of many years.

He’s accused of molesting at least 10 boys over 15 years, eight of whom testified against him. The stories are horrendous tales of boys being “groomed” for abuse, baited with trips, toys and other goodies. Despite an overwhelming similarity between all of the stories and compelling testimony, Sandusky and his wife stand firm in saying that nothing nasty ever happened, and that these dozen or so boys all made it up. Sandusky did admit that he had a habit of showering with boys, but that there was nothing wrong with it, and that it was no big deal.

Wow, what part of “guilty as sin” are we expected to ignore here? The sordid testimony? The admission that lathering up with little boys is all in a day’s work for an old football coach that gets more of a daily workout getting in and out of the shower than he does in the gym or on the field? The fatal flaw in Sandusky’s scheme was that he forgot that little boys don’t shower at all, especially outside the house where their moms can’t make them.

I, like most Americans, am too cynical about things that don’t matter, and too oblivious to important things in our face to call it what it is and move on. Romney’s vapid, folks, and Sandusky’s a child molester. Now, can we move on so I can lie down?

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com