I was getting a little burned-out with all the Bad Lip Reading videos posted onYouTube. However, this new istallment of a Mitt Romney BLR Soundbite is just freakin’ genius.
Too good not to share.
Via High Definite
Romney confuses Sikh with Sheikhbit.ly/N2Xh5z. Also confuses “Prophet” with “convicted conman using magic hat to read gold plates”
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2012
Have you seen the latest commercial from Priorities USA Action, the Democratic super PAC closely affiliated with the Obama campaign? It sticks a knife pretty deep into Mitt Romney’s craw by strongly linking the Republican candidate and his former investment company Bain Capital to the cancer-related death of former steelworker Joe Soptic’s wife. (Soptic appeared in an earlier, hard-hitting Priorities USA Action ad that also seeing renewed interest this morning).
In the ad, Soptic, a former employee of GST Steel in Kansas City—he worked there for 30 years—speaks about his life after the steel plant was shut down under Bain’s ownership.
“When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my healthcare, and my family lost their healthcare. And a short time after that my wife became ill,” Soptic says in the ad,
Is it fair to say the Mitt Romney had anything to do—personally—with this woman’s death? That’s, of course, pretty debatable stuff, but this is entirely the point, that the country debate the matter. All’s fair in love, war and politics and it’s not like Romney’s ads are any “truthier.”
It’s nice to see these issues raised. At last.
On that level, I think it’s fair politics to remind people that Mitt Romney will take away their healthcare in the unlikely event he’s elected President. I also think it’s well within the bounds of the rules of politics as it is played today to link Romney to the real world wreckage that Bain left in its wake. Even if he left Bain before Mrs Soptic’s illness, it’s the entire culture of vulture capitalism that should be called to task when lives and entire communities are destroyed to enrich fat cats like Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney.
Of course conservatives, Libertarians and free marketeers will say that this is how capitalism is supposed to work, creative destruction and pricing efficiency and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Tell that to Joe Soptic. He knows it’s all bullshit.
Free enterprise, free market… free to die like a dog in Mitt Romey’s America. Don’t tread on me!
I thought LOLGOP nailed the reason why this commercial is so effective, and why it’s got so many conservatives seeing red. Via Eclectablog:
This new Priorities USA ad finally makes the connections between a lack of financial stability, a lack of health insurance and death. Yes, death. People die because they lack health insurance and more will die if Romney wins and the Affordable Care Act is repealed. That point needs to be made.
This woman died because she lacked insurance. Like too many Americans, she waited till the last possible moment to seek care. And since we all pay for each other’s health care, we ending paying for a huge percentage of it during the last days when little can be done. Is this Mitt Romney’s fault? No. Does he want to take health care away from millions of Americans? Absolutely.
And Republicans are furious that someone is finally saying that Americans die because of our insane health care system and more will die if Romney wins. Conservatives are willing to use the threat of death by foreign interest to scare you into anything they want. But use the real life fear of what actually kills us and suddenly you’ve gone too far.
Now is the time to go too far, then. Because what the Republicans are planning means that we’ll pay more for health care and get less of it. And Americans will die. We can prevent that if we’re willing to say what’s at stake.
Bingo.
There’s another, (slightly) more subtle message in the ad that echoes something The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote this morning about Romney’s bigger picture problem with Bain and the MIA tax returns:
The question is not whether he did well, or whether he did it legally, but whether he did it with any sense of ethics.
Romney almost certainly didn’t break the law by putting his money in Switzerland or the Bahamas, or by paying an income tax rate of 15 percent. He didn’t necessarily break any laws by creating a $100 million 401(k).
The question is whether such things are fair, or whether Romney has exploited a system that allows rich people like him to get richer at the expense of less wealthy taxpayers — Italian, in the most recent case, or American, in other cases. Of more concern is that, as president, Romney would further expand the advantages of fellow rich people.
Romney encouraged that worry on Tuesday, when he announced at a campaign stop that he would be tough on welfare — “we will end the culture of dependency and restore a culture of good hard work” — and then went to a pair of fundraisers where high-rolling donors paid as much as $75,000 for access to him.
“The question is not whether he did well, or whether he did it legally, but whether he did it with any sense of ethics.”
Does that one pithy sentence just not sum it the fuck up?
Life should be good for Mitt Romney, but the multi-multi-millionaire Republican just can’t seem to catch a break. Ever. After a brutal week and a half (on top of a brutal month and a half) that saw him called a “wimp,” “the American Borat,” and a racist for his dumbshit musings on Palestinian culture, Romney probably thought that his mittadventures abroad—meant to shore up his foreign policy gravitas—would at least win the booby prize of taking the spotlight off of his MIA tax returns….
It didn’t happen that way, did it?
I like the way Alternet’s Joshua Holland phrased it:
“Mitt Romney knows how to do a cost-benefit analysis, and he’s determined that it’s better to be dogged by reporters for failing to release his tax returns for the duration of the 2012 campaign than it is to make the documents public.”
On the other end of the spectrum, conservative pundit George Will made a similar observation on ABC’s This Week:
“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”
A “cost-benefit analysis,” I’d imagine is exactly how the MBAs in the Romney campaign looked at the situation. Anyone with even a remote interest in the matter knows that there has to be SOMETHING in those returns that is so toxic, so damaging to Romney, that a sober decision was made to stonewall the press! Extraordinary! Who in their right minds would try to get away with something THIS DUMB? “No matter what they throw at us, we say nothing, and we don’t release the returns.” This calculation, it would seem to me, was a hope against hope (and common sense) that events (like a mass murder, the Olympics, the Jackson family) would overtake the “Release your tax returns, Mitt” news cycle.
A news cycle that even saw several prominent Republican leaders say that they thought Romney should release his tax returns! Good luck with this one, Mittens. You’re going to need it.
The birthers didn’t stop even after Obama showed them his long form birth certificate. The matter of his MIA tax returns is not going to go away for Romney, nor should it. When you consider just how feverish and over-the-top the speculation has already gotten, it’s all the more remarkable that they haven’t just released the damn tax documents already. I mean, seriously, how bad can they really be?
Plenty bad, apparently, how else to explain that Romney hasn’t released them after all of the pain he’s sustained?
Governor George Romney, Mitt’s father, is practically THE national politician who started the tradition of releasing many years of tax returns. “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show,” he famously said in 1968, a remark that has come back to haunt his son!
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made his decidedly “loose-lipped” statement that an acquaintance of his who has investments at Bain Capital told him that Romney paid no taxes whatsoerver for a decade. Although this scenario seems highly unlikely, that didn’t slow Reid down from trolling Romney mercilessly with this scurrilous gossip, as The Las Vegas Review Journal reported:
Sen. Harry Reid caused a stir this week when he told an interviewer that Mitt Romney hasn’t released more of his tax returns because “he didn’t pay taxes for 10 years.” On Wednesday, Reid doubled down on the charge.
In an interview published Tuesday, Reid said an investor in Bain Capital, the former private equity firm of the Republican presidential candidate, told him in a phone call that Romney had paid zero taxes.
“Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” Reid told the Huffington Post, declining to identify his source. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?”
His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,” Reid said, referring to then-Michigan Gov. George Romney making public 12 years of his tax returns when he ran for president in 1968.
Reid also suggested that Romney’s suspicious withholding of his tax returns would bar him from getting a Senate confirmation for a Cabinet post. This is a pretty serious thing for the Senate Majority leader to say, and no matter what you think of Reid’s politics, or even if you are offended that he was obviously just baiting Romney with malicious hearsay, that last bit is undeniable… He wouldn’t get confirmed for a Cabinet post!
And although I laughed out loud when I read what Reid had said—I’m someone who wants to see Romney and all Republicans defeated and defeated badly, but I’m no Democrat, either—the stark truth of the matter is that whatever percentage of Mitt Romney’s income he paid taxes on, from zero to whatever it really is, his effective tax rate is undoubtedly going to be a helluva lot less than you or I pay on our mere mortal incomes because Mitt’s only going to be paying capital gains taxes on his pot of gold. Probably about HALF of what the rest of us little people pay.
Do ya think this information will thrill the GOP’s blue collar base, who probably have no idea what the capital gains tax is, but who will only see spectacular unfairness?
That alone would sink his battleship, of this I have no doubt, but what else could be in those returns that is so bad that it merits having to withstand a steady barrage of shit being flung in Romney’s direction on a daily basis? The only way to end this Mitt-storm would be to release the returns, but APPARENTLY, based on ALL THE AVAILABLE EVIDENCE it’s still better for him to stand there all shit-covered. Go figure! It must be pretty damaging if they’re this steadfast in their refusal to release the tax docs. And again this only turns the heat up more. The longer this brouhaha over Romeny refusing to release his tax returns goes on, the worse we can assume it is.
The thing is this information probably IS going to come out and come out soon—those tax returns (23 years’ worth) were put in the hands of the McCain campaign’s VP vetting committee back in 2008, so you can be as sure as shit that they are “around” and are just waiting safely in a vault “someplace” before they are put into the hands of the highest bidder.
One would assume that Mitt’s tax documents are in the possession of the Obama campaign, too. (Not that I have any insider information, it just stands to reason, does it not? Then again, if they did have them, what are they waiting for? I suppose timing is everything!).
There’s only one way for Mitt Romney to be able to in any way control his narrative and stage manage the (inevitable) release of his tax documents and that is to do it now and to do it himself before some other party beats him to it. Any expert consultant on public relations “damage control” would see where this was going to end and surely Romney has been told this and is well aware of what the refusal to release his returns has cost him.
And yet here we are.
See how this works? That’s what I mean by Chinese fingercuffs: The more Romney struggles against the inevitable, the worse he makes it on himself. It’s a highly unusual position, historically speaking, for a presidential candidate to have put himself in, I think all Americans of all political stripes can agree on this.
Below, new Obama campaign ad takes aim at Mitt Romney’s “ideas” for reforming the tax code. Yours go up around $2000. For millionaires, like Romney, well their taxes go down. Sounds fair, right?
Further reading:
The Tax Trap Springs Shut on Romney (New York)
Considering how negative the presidential campaign has already become this year—going back to the GOP primary when Newt Gingrich landed a hell of a blow to Mitt Romney’s glass jaw with that hilarious and skull-fucking “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” film—it’s surprising to me that the “800lb Mormon elephant in the room” hasn’t become more front and center by now. I’d have thought that shoe would have already dropped.
I’m sure that Democrats would love to be able to paint Romney’s kooky faith as a 19th century Scientology—if the shoe fits, wear it!—but so far they don’t seem to have the stomach for what would be considered a low blow and gutter politics. You could argue that fair’s fair and that the GOP has spent the last four years zealously and feverishly painting Obama as a Muslim Communist from Kenya and as “the other,” but hey, that’s just Democrats for you.
No matter, someone’s going to do it for them, anyways and the Internet seems to be revving up for it, too. It’s a matter of days, probably, and not weeks, before all manner of Mormon memes start making their way all across the Internet. I kept waiting and watching for that moment to happen, but I think it can be said with assurance that it’s on the way, or underway already. The rumblings are there, let’s just say.
How long will it take before “#WhatMormonsBelieve” becomes a trending topic on Twitter or this video ends up on the reddit homepage with this title: “ENDLESS. CELESTIAL. SEX. What Mormons believe!”?
Not long, I’d wager.
To the majority of Americans, let’s face it, the Mormon belief system is a little hard to swallow. Nutty sounding? Yeah, that, too! And it’s not that I don’t find all religions suspect, it’s just that we don’t have actual legal records of Jesus or Mohamed being arrested for being con men, unlike Mormon founder prophet Joseph Smith. The average American doesn’t have that clear of an idea of what Mormonism is all about—-“clean cut white people, like the Osmonds; they have a big choir in like a tabernacle or someplace real big”—would seem to sum it up adequately for those of us who have never stepped foot in Utah—but if they did, of course, it would blow their everlovin’ minds.
Why hasn’t a journalist laid a rhetorical trap for Mitt Romney asking him first to say, politely affirm the seriousness of his faith. Check. Then lobbing him an innocuous question about the Book of Mormon and would reading it be of benefit to Christians maybe? Wait for the answer and then go in for the fucking kill, innocently asking Romney “Oh, yeah, can you explain to me that stuff in the Book of Mormon about the differences between black people and white people, because I didn’t really understand that bit? And what would the Book of Mormon have to say about someone of mixed race heritage, like President Obama, for instance? That whole Lamanite/Nephite thing he’s got going on. Does he truly understand Nephite culture, do you think, Governor Romney?”
It would be so easy to ask this, or a wide variety of similar enough “Mormon gotcha questions.” Cue another deer in the headlights moment for Mittens
Cue many!
(And did you see the footage of him reacting to the “Wimp Factor” Newsweek cover over the weekend? PRICELESS!).
Below, BBC documentary The Mormon Candidate. No one would say this is a balanced view of Mormons, but it sure is fascinating.
After the jump, What Mormons Believe...
Of course it’s hearsay, but there’s a Mitt Romney story on the Patriot Boy blog that is so ridiculous, weird and hilarious that it falls into the category of “you can’t possibly make this shit up.” It’s got to be the funniest Mitt Romney story I’ve heard, yet. Still, as insane as this story is, I have faith that Mitt will eventually top it…
This anecdote involves Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney’s tipping habits—or lack thereof—and it took place at a Seattle’s Best Coffee located in a Borders bookstore in the wealthy enclave of Provo Canyon, Utah. The story is told by Bryan Young, the editor of Big Shiny Robots and the brother of one of the employees who was there when it happened:
One day in 2010 the baristas were surprised to see Mitt Romney and his wife come to the counter.
Since they’re both Mormon, neither ordered a coffee drink. They each ordered a hot chocolate and took them… without tipping. It seemed odd for someone so wealthy not to tip, but no one thought of it as a big deal. Baristas usually make less than minimum wage and make their living on tips. I understand that it’s not worth Bill Gates’ time to pick up a hundred dollar bill, but Mr. Millionaire couldn’t dump his change in the tip jar?
The man was out of touch…
...only they didn’t know just how out of touch he was until later.
Romney spent some time in the coffee shop as his wife browsed through books before they were called to leave.
On their way out, Anne throws away her half-consumed hot chocolate, but Mitt approaches the counter. “I know you guys can’t sell this again, but I was wondering if one of you guys wanted the rest of my hot chocolate.”
“No thanks,” one of the other baristas told him, wondering if this was some sort of bizarre joke.
“I don’t want to waste it, there’s still plenty left, it’s still perfectly good…”
According to my brother, Romney seemed genuinely confused by their refusal. His hot chocolate was so good he didn’t want to waste it, but it wasn’t so good that it was worth tipping those who made it. “I think the important part of this story isn’t the tipping,” my brother explained. “It’s that he doesn’t understand that everyone else is throwing their unused drinks away because they understand that it’s against social norms. His germs are on it, but somehow, in his mind, his millionaire saliva is good enough that it shouldn’t bother a barista of the serving class.”
Money can’t buy you friends, but it can buy you new (nonexistent) Twitter followers. Just ask Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney!
Yep, it would appear that Mitt Romney’s startlingly inept presidential campaign is at it again. Today’s mishap? Buying up fake Twitter followers to give the appearance that Romney’s lackluster social media fortunes (at least in comparison to Obama’s over 17 million followers) might be turning around… but not just a few, a few football stadiums’ worth!
The Romney camp must be kinda new at this stuff. How else to explain how Romney saw his Twitter followers spike with over 100,000 new followers added within 24 hours (and not the 1000 to 5000 new followers Romney’s account normally gets)? His best day EVER was gaining about 9000 new followers in April. Peek You analyzed the Twitter accounts of the Republican presidential contenders in 2011, and found that only 26% of Mitt Romney’s followers were actual human beings! (Amusingly, 92% of Newt Gingrich’s followers were fake accounts.)
This is what you might call a statistical anomaly.
There are other ways to describe it, too, of course…
Check the number of followers, then watch as it increases by a hundred or so every time you reload the page. If you look at all these followers, they seem to have major trouble with spelling simple English words, have names that sometimes seem to be random assortments of syllables, and have no (or very few) followers themselves.
At the current rate, he’s adding about 10,000 followers every hour.
Strangely, a great many of Mitt Romney’s new followers, for some reason, have tweeted this gibberish:
“Lmao lucky there was no time left on the clock lol home boy dead hit dat half court shot”
Search for that word salad on Twitter and look who comes up. Some of these “people” haven’t tweeted even once since last year and yet TODAY they all just up and decided to fire up their moribund Twitter account, follow Thurston Mitt and then tweet inane shit like that?
Kids these days, right? Wasting their time on that Twitter, posting nonsense like “Lmao lucky there was no time left on the clock lol home boy dead hit dat half court shot” when they could be watching Internet porn or playing video games. I mean, what gives?
How ridiculously low-brow and stupid Romney’s Twitter followers seem to be would be alarming IF THESE PEOPLE REALLY EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
If you can’t even manage a fuckin’ Twitter account, or delegate better than THIS, how you gonna run a country, Thurston Mitt?
Meanwhile, against all evidence to the contrary (see chart below) the Romney campaign is denying that it purchased any Twitter followers!!!
Julie Goodridge, who was one of the two lead plaintiffs in Goodridge v. Dept of Public Health—the lawsuit that brought same-sex marriage to Massachusetts—describes her personal meeting with then governor Mitt Romney and the shockingly cold thing he said to her about her child.
Goodridge (powerfully) describes her encounter with Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney as “the most frustrating experience in the entire marriage case.”
More at the Mitt Gets Worse Project.
“We didn’t know who the hell Mitt Romney was when all that stuff started. It wasn’t until later we found out who Romney was. We just knew he was just another guy with money. It wasn’t until his boys came and started gutting the place that we found out he was an asshole.”
—Former GS Technologies steelworker Donnie Box, of Kansas City, Missouri
Although Donnie Box is the star of a pretty darned effective anti-Mitt Romney web ad produced by Priorities USA, that doesn’t mean he’s voting for Barack Obama in November, as Mike Elk reports in In These Times:
For Donnie Box, it doesn’t matter whether Romney had a direct day-to-day managerial role when Bain Capital closed his plant. Box feels Romney was still in a position to change things and that Romney had no problem profiting from his suffering. And Box notes that it was the actions Bain took before 1999, when Romney was indisputably head of the company, that led to the plant closing.
“There is no doubt in my mind when he came in with Bain Capital, he was the President and CEO of that corporation,” Box says. “He was responsible for the people who came in there and started loading up on debt. They knew with that much debt that there was no way that the place could survive.”
The scandal has led to a serious credibility problem for Romney among working-class voters. But being disillusioned by Romney is one thing; voting for Obama is another. And Box, for one, says he won’t be doing the latter.
Despite appearing in a controversial ad for the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA, denouncing Romney’s role in the GS Technologies plant closing, Box, a lifelong Democrat, says he won’t be voting for the first time since 1971 because he has lost faith in politicians.
“I could really care less about Obama,” says Box. “I think Obama is a jerk, a pantywaist, a lightweight, a blowhard. He hasn’t done a goddamn thing that he said he would do. When he had a Democratic Senate and Democratic Congress, he didn’t do a damn thing. He doesn’t have the guts to say what’s on his mind.”
Box’s refusal to vote for Obama shows the challenges that organized labor faces in convincing its members to vote for Democrats. Many union members like Box feel the party hasn’t pushed hard enough for jobs bills or labor law reform while making sure to pass trade pacts, like the South Korea Free Trade Agreement, which the AFL-CIO and the United Steelworkers opposed.
As the son of a life-long union member who retired early in disgust at the way he and his co-workers were being treated—and I’ve briefly been in a few labor unions myself when I was younger—I can easily see why Donnie Box would say “Fuck it” to Obama. Who could blame him? The White House hasn’t done much of anything for the unions (except talk) and labor gets next to nothing out of its unquestioning support for the Democratic Party. Although I believe that it most certainly is worth voting this year, if only to keep the GOP wolves at bay, I fully understand where Mr. Box is coming from and I wouldn’t argue with him that I think he’s wrong, either. Because I don’t.
As far as I’m concerned, the best thing that Obama and the Democrats have got going for them in 2012 is that they aren’t fucking Republicans. That isn’t enough for Donnie Box and god bless him for having the guts to say so.
Read more of Mike Elk’s
Laid Off Steelworker in Anti-Romney Ad Says He Is Not Voting for Obama (In These Times)
After the jump, see what ABC News is calling “The Bain Ad That Romney Should Fear the Most”
After the past week of just painfully pathetic public prat-falls capped off by the devastating new Obama TV spot released over the weekend that left Mitt Romney’s patrician glass jaw smashed into tiny bits, you’d have to imagine that the Tea party-led rightwing shock troops, having pinned ALL of their post-2010 electoral hopes and dreams on the deeply flawed shoulders of one Thurston Howell III Willard Mitt Romney, is more than a little worried.
Who wouldn’t be? The man is an excruciating embarrassment as a candidate. Mitt’s a self-parody who jumped the shark before he even became the official nominee! What a “Debbie Downer” on the GOP morale he must be! It’s hard to keep rooting for the home team when the quarterback is such a witless plonker, isn’t it? The GOP is terrific at getting the vote out, but will the faithful line-up to vote for a tax-dodging plutocrat with Cayman Island bank accounts like Mitt Romney? If you know, for sure, that your vote will count for nothing, would you even bother making the effort to vote? If the very act of voting is perceived as a waste of time? What if it’s a little rainy that day? Can even a superior ground game on election day (the GOP always has a better ground game, always—it’s a lot easier when your base voters are easily-herded, authoritarian-loving sheeple) make a difference with Mittens? It will be interesting to see. My gut tells me there will be lower GOP turnout this year than in 2008. Not that much lower, but lower, crucially lower.
Mittens looks like a sad, ineffectual “Richie Rich” who just had his pants pulled down in front of the entire class and then a plate of school lunch spaghetti dumped over his head (Karma’s a bitch, Thurston!). Romney seems undignified, unsure and weak. He’s (quite obviously) the worst candidate one of the two parties has nominated since hapless Democrat Michael Dukakis back in 1988.
THIS bungling sacrificial lamb in khakis is the best candidate all of that sweet, sweet Republican money can buy? Mitt Romney? Seriously?
After last week, it wasn’t just the Democrats and Independent voters who were asking that question, the Republicans are asking it aloud now, too.
Scanning the rightwing blogshere in the aftermath of that weekend YouTube bomb Obama lobbed into Romney’s lap (more a nuclear warhead), it’s incredible to the extent that the rightwing is wringing its collective hands over “the Romney problem”: From FreeRepublic’s redneck red staters to Breitbart editor John Nolte (who called the Obama ad a “kill shot” aimed at Romney), let alone East coast “establishment” Republican stalwarts like William Kristol (the man who extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin to the McCain camp, don’t forget) and the increasingly barmy George Will (Why does anyone care what he thinks? Why the hell did I just mention him if no one forced me to???) Republicans, clearly, are starting to hit the panic button.
Even the dumbest, doofiest Fox News-watching flag-waving, red, white and blue Republican true-believer dipshit can recognize a loser when they see one, smell the blood, and predict the inevitable November outcome as they take a look at Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney. Romney’s GONNA LOSE and the entire country knows it, or at least strongly suspects it. Even Romney must realize his performance is getting panned and why. The guy has NO GAME, zero, none, no charisma, apparently no empathy, just… bales of money. It won’t be nearly enough. I’ve never seen a poorer-looking national candidate in my life. (Michael Dukakis must be watching his fellow former Massachusetts governor with glee as Romney erases his reputation as a nightmare national ticket political punchline with each newly reported misstep and ineffectual response to Obama’s repeated kicks to his balls. (“Is (fill in the blank) the ‘Mitt Romney of 2___?” will be a cliche in the punditry for years to come, mark my words).
So what happens next? Well, this could get interesting.
Memo to the mainstream media: It probably won’t.
Among credible Republicans who is gonna be dumb enough to want the gold-plated booby prize that an open convention—something that was discussed for MONTHS leading up to Romney’s week from Hell—could bestow upon them? Newt Gingrich must be having quite a good “I told you so” chuckle, not that a desperate GOP is (ever) going to be desperate enough to give that slimy amphibian another look.
Cain, Santorum, Perry… you all probably shouldn’t sit by the bat-phone holding your breath, either, fellas.
Who could or would step up for the good of the Grand Old Party, to carry that tarnished brand’s sword in November, even unto certain career-ending defeat, if Romney were to be pushed aside? Besides mentally deficient, unhinged attention seeking halfwits like Sarah Palin, Allen West, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Louie Gohmert, etc., etc. who is that, ahem, white knight going to be? Well, not one of these folks. It’s useless speculation.
Ron Paul? He’d take the sword into battle, but it will never be offered to him. Not worth discussing him, either. They won’t even let him speak at the convention and that seems to be the big reason he ran, to influence the GOP platform. Not gonna happen.
Rep. Paul Ryan? Rep. Eric Cantor? Chris Christie? Bobby Jindal? Jeb Bush? Scott Walker? Think any one of them is jealous of the nationally televised dick-stomping Mitt Romney is getting? Marco Rubio knows he’s not ready, even for the VP slot. Maybe John Boehner will run? Orin Hatch? Who then? Someone you’ve never heard of? Will James Baker III come out of retirement at 82? John Sunnunu? Is a picture starting to paint itself?
WHO among the Republicans save for Mitch Daniels or Tim Pawlenty—would even have a tiny chance of taking enough blue states to flip the race if pulled in at the last minute to replace Shit Romney? Christie is the governor of one, but as a former resident of the Garden State myself, I wouldn’t even bet on Christie getting a second term. His popularity is already dropping. Besides that, any smart Republican would just stay out of it until 2016, it just stands to reason. This go round is a strategic non-starter.
Thaddeus McCotter?
Fred Karger, maybe?
HEY, WHAT ABOUT DONALD TRUMP!?!?!
John McCain?
My point, if there is one, is that the Republicans have no plan B. Any speculation that there will be an open convention, I think, is utter poppycock. There is no one on that team that can beat Obama. There is no one on that team with half a brain that really wants to try. They’re stuck with Mitt Romney, what choice do that have now? I hate to say it—I mean I really, really hate to say it—but Newt Gingrich was 100% right about Mittens and the GOP should have taken his advice and looked for a Romney alternative while there was still time. Not that I think they should have picked Newt (he’d have been slaughtered) but it’s so apparent what a loser Romney is, that, in truth, practically ANYONE would better.
If someone offered you—at a great bargain, too—a lotto ticket guaranteed not have the winning number, would you buy it? Look how many Sheldon Adelson bought and now he wants to buy some more. I say let him!
(I used to think that Citizens United decision was the worst thing that could happen to this country. Now I’m looking at it more as a “give ‘em enough rope” kinda scenario. Many Republicans might tend to agree with me by the time the 2012 election cycle is over. A billion dollars spent advertising a faulty (Fawlty?) product such as the candidacy of a buffoon like Mittens is a billion dollars spent reminding the American voters why they don’t want this blue-blooded nincompoop in the fucking White House. “Hey smell this, it smells like shit” amplified with a billion dollar advertising spend might backfire badly with a derp like Romney topping the ticket…)
The Obama campaign has defined Mitt Romney in the eyes of America as a whiny blue-blood with too much money made from sucking the blood of the little guy. Maybe a felon? Sounds about right to me. That classic commercial is so smart, and so vicious that it is positively thrilling. It’s what the Democratic base wanted to see and what John Nolte fears it was: a “kill shot.” Tell me that Obama doesn’t look like Muhammad Ali about to take down well, take down Thurston Howell the fuckng third? What else can really be said about this situation?
And the best part of it will be the batshit crazy reichwing reaction everyone is bracing for after Romney is crushed in a landslide defeat. How long will it take until after the vote is in before a crazed sheriff from Arizona or a freakish fuck like Rick Scott of Florida is shooting his mouth off on Fox News about election fraud and that’s the next new dumb dumbly dum-dum thing we’ll have to listen to until 2016???
A wasp’s nest got stirred up in 2008 that still won’t get put to rest during the second Obama term, and expect full retard from the GOP in 2016, but I’m getting ahead of myself…
Like so…
The nice girl and her Schlep Labs posse have done it again for America…
After the jump: remembering The Great Schlep…
Although Drudge Report and other rightwing media outlets have been reporting that Mitt Romney is considering former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his vice presidential running mate (in a vain attempt to drown out the massive Mittstorm Romney currently finds himself in the middle of, perhaps?), Romney himself declared that he would pick only a pro-life running mate at a South Carolina candidate forum in September of 2011:
Moderator: Gov. Romney, will the person you chose as your vice presidential running mate be someone who shares your pro-life and pro-marriage convictions?
Romney: I certainly imagine so, I haven’t made and selections in that regard … [as I look around at the people I would consider] I would expect that they would all be pro-life and pro-traditional marriage … but this is an important enough issue that the person that I would select in that position would share my views on those important issues.
Host: So more than just expectation — would share those views?
Romney: Yes … that person would share my views, yeah.
Someone had better break it to Mittens that Condoleezza Rice is pro-choice.
The rumors that Rice is going to get the GOP VP slot have been seized upon by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Peggy Noonan, the WSJ, WIlliam Kristol and everyone’s favorite dingbat dipshit, Sarah Palin. Truly the selection of Rice would have been a brilliant one, but how is Mittens going to square the fact that she’s pro-life with his pledge and the fact that the religious right would be furious at him???
Here’s what Condoleezza Rice told Washington Times correspondent Bill Sammon after she described herself as “mildy pro-life” to him in 2005.
Sammon asked her “But it sounds like you do not wish to change the laws that now allow (abortion)...”
“Well, I don’t spend my entire life thinking about these issues. You know, I spend my time really thinking about the foreign policy issues. But you know that I’m a deeply religious person and so, from my point of view, these extremely difficult moral issues where we have—where we’re facing issues with technology and the prolongation of life and the fact that very, very young babies are able to survive now—very small babies are able to survive—these are great moral issues.
What I do think is that we should not have the federal government in a position where it is forcing its views on one side or the other. So, for instance, I’ve tended to agree with those who do not favor federal funding for abortion, because I believe that those who hold a strong moral view on the other side should not be forced to fund it.”
Not at all an unreasonable position, but when has the Republican party ever been about reasonable?
When Sammon pressed Rice and told her that in order to become a Republican president, the applicant for the position must be firmly pro-life, Rice replied:
“I’m not trying to be elected.”
And in case Romney didn’t get the message, this morning the Susan B. Anthony List — a pro-life advocacy group — sent TPM a video clip of Romney at that 2011 South Carolina candidate forum. He might have forgotten, momentarily, that he’s supposed to be pro-life, but trust me, the rigthwingers are going to remind his ass, but quick!
Why would Rice want to get herself involved with the clownjob Romney campaign, anyway? Her place in history has already been set. No matter what one might think about her years serving in the Bush administration, she’s not an undignified, or unintelligent person. Mitt Romney may need Condi Rice, but she certainly doesn’t need him!
It’s not been a good week for Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney has it?
And in case you missed it, Rachel Maddow took Romney’s head off last night over the Bain lies. And the Boston Globe refuses to retract their reporting. Big fun.There is no schadenfreude quite like Republican schadenfreude.
If Obama had to release his birth certificate, then why WON’T Mitt Romney release his tax records? (And why the hell haven’t the Democrats made this lingering question into a jaw-breaking, character-defining campaign issue already? It’s so obvious that even a Fox News viewer could understand it).
What is Mitt Romney hiding? I want to know. Don’t you?
Romney claims he will release his 2012 return when he’s “ready,” but the longer he waits, the more the American public is going to demand that he come clean with the exact same information that every other candidate won’t hesitate to provide, several years worth of returns. The way the Romney team is managing public perception of the matter SUCKS and is only serving to stoke the flames of speculation. Is the truth worse? Might be, from the looks of things. That perception, until confirmed or not by release of the returns, is entirely the campaign’s fault.
His own father, Michigan Governor George Romney, famously released TWELVE YEARS of his tax records when he ran for the Presidency in 1968 and yet his son wants to keep his cards close to his chest. Closer than any presidential candidate since the Watergate era? Apparently so. Thus far, Romney has released only ONE complete tax return, from 2010 (“One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show,” said George Romney in 1968).
What bombshells await? We know about the Swiss bank accounts, the Cayman Island accounts, even the one in Bermuda that surprised Mittens himself… what else is Mitt Romney hiding that his tax returns would bring into the light of day? It’s a burning question.
That the Democrats are thus far failing to turn the heat up a little higher on the issue is yet another missed opportunity on their part: If Obama had to produce his long-form to satisfy the braying asses called the “Birthers,” why can’t we “Taxers” see Mitten’s returns?
Turnabout is fair play, right Republicans?
Asking to see Romney’s tax returns is a far, far more reasonable request than the wingnuts clownishly demanding Obama produce his birth certificate (which he DID do). A demand to see Thurston Howell III’s Mitt Romney’s tax returns , however, has no undercurrent of Tea party racism, either.
And just what did John McCain find in the 23 years of tax returns that his VP vetting team saw? Oh yes, if you don’t recall, Romney provided 23 YEARS worth of his tax returns to the McCain campaign in 2008 and soon afterwards McCain rather unceremoniously dumped the idea of running with Romney, and instead choose Sarah fucking Palin?
Romney’s tax returns must be explosive indeed solely based on the circumstantial evidence this historically pivotal cause-and-effect relationship implies!
It just stands to reason. Sarah Palin? Over Romney? How bad was it?
In 2008, the McCain team got 23 years of Mitt Romney’s tax returns. And now, four years later, we have ONE year, 2010’s return. (“One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show,” says the Ghost of Romney’s Past…)
I can’t wait to see McCain put on the spot about the matter. He’s been asked before, but he stonewalled. He needs to be pressed a little harder: McCain is a terrible liar (for a Republican) and often even tells the truth when he can’t stop himself. What did John McCain see in Romney’s tax returns that instantly ended any consideration of Romney as his running mate?
And why after that, have all of these 23 years of tax returns been kept under lock and key since 2008?
PS Romney has long claimed that he resigned from Bain Capital in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He lied about that, as public records (a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003) state that he still owned 100% of Bain Capital in 2002! What other lies will Romney be caught in? RELEASE YOUR TAX RETURNS, MITT! WHAT ARE YOU HIDING
Read more:
Where the Money Lives, Vanity Fair’s investigation into Mitt Romney’s off-shore fortune
WHAT did Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney THINK was going to happen when he stood there and told seven million African-Americans that he would take away their healthcare???
Applause??? He’s lucky he wasn’t punched in the fucking face.
Romney has the BEST team of political advisers money can buy. Obviously.
BONUS: Check out Romney’s advisers helping their candidate deal with his “white man problem.” (This is the video that all of the wingnuts are hilariously condemning as “racist” today (white on white racism, don’t you know??? It’s really got their panties in a twist to see their guy mocked this… um… easily!. Video by The Message, a new progressive online media hub.)
This comes via Redditor “bigger_than_jesus”:
In an average work year there are 2080 work hours. He made $21.7m in 2010. The median household income is about $50,000. It will take the median household 433 years to make what Romney made in 2010. Here’s more showing how out of touch he is:
He suggested to borrow $20,000 from your parents to start a business. That is nearly half of the median household income in America. He made that in 2 hours.
He casually bet Rick Perry $10,000, with the cavalier attitude of someone betting their couch cushion change. He made that in 1 hour.
He characterized $374,000 as “not very much.” He made that in 35 hours, less than a work week. The median household income at 35 hours is less than $900.
It will take the median household 7.5 years to make what Romney earned in 35 hours.
I’ve tried to make it clear, in my writing here at Dangerous Minds, that I am no fan of either the Democrats or President Obama. The ONLY reason I vote a straight Democratic ticket is because I hate the Republicans more. If the American electorate is stupid enough to elect Mitt Romney (not that I am losing any sleep over this coming to pass) then the country will have gotten what it well and truly deserves: an oligarchy.