Old and busted, leftist meme edition: Mitt Romney is a heartless vampire capitalist who eats businesses, chews up workers, and also buries his opponents in a slew of unfair, out-of-context attacks.  New hotness: That heartless über-rich juggernaut is, er, kind of wimpy.  No, seriously — this is Newsweek’s cover for this week:

Well, gee, I don’t know … did Romney pen two memoirs pondering his identity crises, both personal and political?  Oh, wait — that was the other guy, the one about whom the media never asked questions like “Is he too insecure to be President?”

Romney himself scoffed at the attack from Newsweek:

“If I worried about what the media said, I wouldn’t get much sleep, and I’ve been able to sleep pretty well,” Romney said when asked about the cover during an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation.

He said that he couldn’t recall having been called a wimp previously in his life, but dismissed the label, saying that it didn’t mean much when Newsweek gave George H.W. Bush a similar cover treatment. A 1987 issue included a photo of the former president and the words “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’”

“They tried that on George Herbert Walker Bush,” Romney said. “He was a pretty great president and anything but.”

Yes, but when they did that in 1987, Newsweek had millions of readers.  These days, you can buy the whole company for a dollar, and they’re looking for ways not to print covers like this because they’re running out of readers and money.  This is desperation, on more than one level.

Update: How desperate is Newsweek?  Six months ago, they portrayed him as Spartacus, as Jim Geraghty reminds us.  Yeah, but he’s a wimpy Spartacus vampire capitalist heartless outsourcer out-of-context attacker, or something.