WE ARE ALL OCCUPIERS NOW, Jim Geraghty writes, based on the rhetoric that Romney’s opponents have been tossing around to attack him:

If Romney’s opponents embrace the rhetoric and class warfare of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any closer, they’re going to start pooping on police cars.

So, here we are, at the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? More than his liberal-softie sounding rhetoric in 1994 and 2002? More than his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than the fact that he’s won exactly one general election in his life, in a year that the left-of-center vote was divided?

Objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government? How do we think all of those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll? Mass alien abductions?

How bad is it? In a follow-up post, Jim spots this turn of the phrase, from a Democratic candidate turned media spokesman whom in 2006 was seen as relatively moderate, at least in comparison to the average MSNBC-approved candidate:

On MSNBC a moment ago, Harold Ford Jr. just asked, “Can Romney recover from his association with private equity?” The demonization of the free market is complete.

This is, of course, in the context of a discussion of the Republican primary.

Not to mention being  kind of a strange question to ask from a recent former vice chairman and senior policy adviser at Merrill Lynch, who’s now with Morgan Stanley.

But then, these days, “Gordon Gekko Would Have Fit in With Occupy Wall Street.” And apparently, surviving primary season now requires that both parties to cannibalize their base and their core ideals.