[Lamplighter]

Friedman is not the only pundit going down that road.
Paul Krugman discusses each of the candidates in his editorial and concludes with:

NY Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 12, 2012

Severe Conservative Syndrome

How did American conservatism end up so detached from,
indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus.
After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget
followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation !

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic
conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad.
For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions,
only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy
— a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election
by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists,
then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum
— and now the party elite has lost control.

And besides all that:

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words.
On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference
that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

Talking heads are substituting their own cliche for Mitt's
"severely conservative, such as: disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

The one I liked best was "severely mistaken"