Mitt Romney: Garbage Nightmare

So, the Big Story that broke last night, in case you haven't heard yet, is that Mitt Romney is sooooo terrible! I know, I know—you're thinking: "THAT IS NOT NEWS! There's a 'Mitt Romney is terrible' label with like one million entries in it!" But, seriously, all the previous terribleness is HA HA CHILD'S PLAY compared to the terribleness that is in this video, shot at a private fundraiser at the Boca Raton home of this fucking guy, in which Romney is heard disgorging sneering contempt for the 47% of USians who he claims will never vote for him because they don't pay taxes and "believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right—there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

And, I mean, the president starts off with a 48, 49—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that's what they sell every four years.

And so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion—whether they like the guy or not.

Okay. Wow. That is some full-tilt fuckery, right there.

Now, there are a lot of people talking about this, and many of them are making excellent points about how Mitt Romney is attacking his own base since most of the people who don't pay taxes in the US live in red states, about how Mitt Romney is wrongity-wrong oh so wrong about how no one who voted/will vote for Obama pays income tax, about how Mitt Romney is unfit to be president of the nation if he holds half of it in utter contempt, about how Mitt Romney probably lost himself the election, about how Mitt Romney is a privileged jerk and a huge d-bag, and about how this election really comes down to a choice between two men with wildly disparate levels of empathy and compassion:


People will be parsing this shit for days, deconstructing in all the ways in which it underscores how terrible Mitt Romney really is.

I just need to make this observation:

MITT ROMNEY THINKS PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO FOOD. MITT ROMNEY THINKS PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO FOOD!!! OMFG MITT ROMNEY, CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THINKS HUMAN BEINGS!!! WHO LIVE!!! IN THIS COUNTRY!!! AREN'T ENTITLED TO FOOD!!!

It's unfathomable to me that there are people in this nation who think their fellow citizens (and their own damn selves) aren't entitled to healthcare! And housing! But to assert that BASIC SUSTENANCE isn't a right! That people who are STARVING and seek assistance from their government are ENTITLED ASSHOLES! OH MY GOD!!!

MITT ROMNEY THINKS PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO FOOD!!!

This would be a good point at which to picture me jumping up and down in my office with my hands in the air screaming: "MITT ROMNEY THINKS PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO FOOD!!!"

A candidate for the presidency said, on videotape, that citizens of this country who cannot afford food should starve to fucking death because their government doesn't owe them shit!

And his campaign doesn't even dispute the statement! Romney simply said the recorded comments were "not elegantly stated" and were "spoken off the cuff." HA HA WOWEE WOW!!! I would love to hear the elegantly crafted version of PEOPLE AREN'T ENTITLED TO FOOD.

Anyway. There are more clips from that fundraiser being leaked today. This morning: Mitt Romney "calls Middle East peace 'almost unthinkable' and says he would 'kick the ball down the field'."

I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way.

...[S]o what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

Good fucking lord. And then there's this gem:

If I were Iran, if I were Iran—a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb." I mean this is where we have—where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

So, for the record, Mitt Romney cannot empathize with a single one of the 47% of USians who don't pay income taxes, but he can totes imagine what he'd do if he were "a crazed fanatic" from Iran. PERFECT.

What a neat candidate you've got there, Republicans.