Mitt Romney: Et Tu, Club for Growth?

As many of my loyal readers have figured out by now, I'm not much of a fan of Mitt Romney. To me, he's our John Edwards. Good on paper, but wishy-washy, opportunistic, and a proven failure as a candidate.

And now it seems even the group who so unabashedly supported him in 2008, the Club for Growth, has started to turn their nose at his b.s.:

As you may have heard, Mitt Romney went on Fox News this past Sunday and described the universal health care plan he passed in Massachusetts four years ago as “the ultimate conservative plan.”

Romney made the eyebrow-raising claim because he aspires to the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, and thus wants to put as much distance as possible between Romneycare and Obamacare, which is loathed by conservative GOP primary voters — even though the two plans are very similar in various ways.

But guess who disagrees with Romney’s assessment? The Club for Growth, a powerhouse conservative group with a lot of sway in GOP primaries. A top Club official tore into Romney, telling us that if Romney believes this, then he’s “in the wrong party.”

“We can say unequivocally that that is not a conservative plan,” Andy Roth, Club for Growth’s vice president for government affairs, told our reporter Ryan Derousseau when asked for comment on Romney’s claim about Romneycare.

Now on top of that we have this little back and forth between Romney and Don Imus this morning:

DON IMUS: Talking with Mitt Romney here on the "Imus in the Morning" program. This book is called No Apology in the Case for America's Greatness. Now, when you changed your mind abortion and went from pro choice, I guess, to pro-life, what -- walk me through the, what caused that.

MITT ROMNEY: Well, you know, I never really called myself pro-choice, but I did say when I was running for governor that I would keep the law as it was.

As the American Spectator states, "there are lots of examples of Romney calling himself either 'pro-choice' or 'effectively pro-choice,' but the simplest example came from his exchange with Sen. Sam Brownback at the 2007 GOP Iowa straw poll debate."

ROMNEY: Look, I was pro-choice. I am pro-life. You can go back to YouTube and look at what I said in 1994. I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice. I changed my position. And I get tired of people that are holier-than-thou because they've been pro-life longer than I have.

Mitt Romney can't be the GOP nominee in 2012.