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by The Consul » Wed Sep 19, 2012 3:38 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 19, 2012 5:02 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 19, 2012 9:41 pm
Romney Apologizes To Nation's 150 Million 'Starving, Filthy Beggars'
SEPTEMBER 18, 2012
SALT LAKE CITY—Seeking to limit the fallout from a videotaped speech in which he asserts 47 percent of Americans “pay no taxes” and do not take “personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Mitt Romney hastily called a press conference today to apologize personally to the “150 million starving, filthy beggars [he] might have offended.”
Saying that he deeply regretted his choice of words at a private $50,000-a-plate fundraising function in May—during which he argued “[his] job is not to worry” about the lower-earning half of the nation’s populace—Romney personally appealed to the country’s “dirt-caked garbage pickers and toothless street urchins” for forgiveness.
“First and foremost, I would like to offer a heartfelt apology to all the whores, junkies, bums, and grime-covered derelicts out there who make up nearly half our nation,” a visibly contrite and solemn Romney said outside a campaign stop at a local high school. “Let me assure you that I in no way meant to offend any of the putrid-smelling, barefoot masses out there. My campaign is not about dividing this nation, but about bringing all sides together—the rich, elegant members of the upper class, as well as the 47 percent who are covered in flies and eat directly from back-alley dumpsters.”
“I am fully committed to building a better future for every American,” Romney continued, “and that means ensuring all 150 million grease-and-urine-soaked members of our society get a fair shake.”
The Romney campaign reportedly scrambled into damage-control mode after the video leaked Monday, issuing a statement late last night stating that the intended target of Romney’s remarks was ingrained big-government largesse, not the “hordes of uneducated, loathsome scum who unfortunately populate this country.”
However, with Romney’s comments continuing to dominate the news cycle today, the campaign opted to convene a press event to allow Romney to speak directly to the nation’s “grimy panhandlers and coke-addled whores” so that he could issue an apology and explain his familiarity with their struggles.
“I know just how hard it must be to get through a miserable, destitute life that is rife with crying babies whose shrieks consistently disrupt the affluent members of society who actually contribute something to this world,” said the GOP candidate, adding that he wanted to make amends for his recent statements and reach out to what he called the country’s “snaggle-toothed street people” and “hell-spawned savages.” “I know it can be challenging to wake each morning, covered in your own feces and refuse, and get back out there on the streets to beg for spare change and food scraps, always one step from dying right there in an alley.”
“I know your challenges, and I am ready to fight for you,” he added
Romney also said he recognized that the hardships of the nation’s low-earners are made more difficult by the fact that so “very, very many of them are drug-addicted, high-school-dropout single mothers and fathers who sleep in gutters while sewer rats nibble at their necrotic flesh.”
In an effort to right his campaign and rebuild his image, Romney promised to bring his message of compassion and economic opportunity to the “ramshackle, mud-floored huts” in which half of all U.S. residents live.
“Let me make this absolutely clear: I have the utmost respect for all of the filth-encrusted, lesion-covered degenerates of this nation,” Romney said. “In the coming weeks, I look forward to meeting real Americans in their squalid, roach-infested hellholes in every corner of this country. I promise to stand up for every one of you, even the 47 percent of you huddled together for warmth, fighting your own family members for moldy crusts of bread as you wallow in your own excrement.”
Added Romney, “And I look forward to serving you as your next president.”
by 8bitagent » Wed Sep 19, 2012 10:02 pm
JackRiddler wrote:8bitagent wrote:It's...almost as if Mitt Romney is intentionally throwing the election, like a pro wrestling "jobber" or a fixed boxing match. Unless they have some sneaky October Surprise planned(or electronic vote rigging) I can't see how Romney can recover. Like pro wrestling, so much of what happens in politics seems scripted("Obama got Osama!")
Yawn.
It's almost as if you will write the same post over and over no matter what happens.
Maybe Bull Connor was scripted to intentionally throw the Civil Rights movement!
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 19, 2012 11:32 pm
Romney’s Cluelessness on Palestine
September 19, 2012
Mitt Romney’s casual dismissal of Israeli-Palestinian peace as simply something to
“kick … down the field” was perhaps meant to sound tough, even coolly cynical, but actually revealed a stunning naiveté and ignorance, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
What Mitt Romney said about the Middle East at that $50,000-a-plate fundraiser at the home of a fellow private-equity tycoon is not what is getting the most attention and what Democrats are most energetically spotlighting.
That distinction, of course, goes to Romney’s dismissal of 47 percent of the electorate as freeloading government dependents who have a victim complex and do not take personal responsibility for their own lives.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. (Photo credit: mittromney.com)
And Romney’s rejection of a negotiated two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which even his friend Bibi Netanyahu claims he supports, shouldn’t be all that surprising given the indications of Netanyahu’s actual aims and how Romney is outsourcing to him his policies on anything having to do with Israel.
One might even gain comfort by noting that some serious and knowledgeable people who study this conflict have questioned whether a two-state solution is still possible. But then one is jolted back to a state of dismay by noting that Romney makes no mention whatsoever of the reason this question arises, which is the continued Israeli creation of facts on the ground by colonization of occupied territory.
Let us try to get away from the politics of the campaign and away from simply piling on and use this as a teachable moment about some important matters involving foreign policy and national security. The ignorance Romney displayed unfortunately seems to be shared by a good number of other people, and the more the results of such ignorance are voiced, the more that still more Americans are misinformed.
There is, first of all, an item that on the surface sounds relevant to that all-preoccupying nuclear program in Iran (Romney twice equated Iran with “crazy,” which has no basis in fact, but that is yet another item.) The candidate presented a scenario about the “crazed fanatics” in Iran giving “a little fissile material” to Hezbollah, which in turn brings it to Chicago and makes a threat about setting off a “dirty bomb.”
Setting aside everything about unexplained intentions and motivations for any of this, there is the misconception that fissile material is needed for dirty bombs, known more precisely as radiological dispersal devices. It isn’t, and radioactive isotopes of many other substances would be far better for that task.
The enriched uranium Iran is working on, as well as natural uranium, would be a lousy ingredient for a dirty bomb. Someone who wanted to put a dirty bomb in Chicago would find better sources of material among medical isotopes in Chicago hospitals. But in the miasma of ignorance that is involved, “Iran,” “crazy,” “nuclear” and “threat” all just sort of get blended together haphazardly.
The central untruth that the candidate voiced on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was that “the Palestinians” — no distinctions whatsoever being made among them — are “not wanting to see peace” and are “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel.”
Today — which is not to be confused with the 1940s — that statement does not come anywhere close to being true for any Palestinians beyond a small radical fringe. It is not true for ordinary Palestinians, as repeatedly gauged in public-opinion polls. It is not true of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority. It is not even true for Hamas, which has indicated its willingness to live alongside Israel.
Any Palestinian with half a brain knows that “elimination of Israel” would be impossible even if that were wanted. And the incentives are all in the direction of wanting a peace agreement instead.
As the veteran Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat put it, “No one stands to gain more from peace with Israel than Palestinians and no one stands to lose more in the absence of peace than Palestinians.”
Romney also echoed a line, from Israelis resistant to yielding any of the West Bank, that somehow giving up this territory would entail a security threat to Israel. Romney’s version had Iran bringing “missiles and armament” into the West Bank, as if the Kingdom of Jordan didn’t exist and there were some kind of Israeli-Iranian battle front that suddenly would advance to Tulkarm.
In fact, any careful analysis shows that the idea of such a threat is a myth. It does not accord with geography, with Israeli military superiority or with any incentives on the part of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the leaders of which would know that any hint of moving in the direction of something like an Iranian arms depot would, given the understandable Israeli reaction, spell the end of their long-sought state.
Israel faces more of a security threat from sitting on top of a dissatisfied population of Palestinians than from living beside a Palestinian state.
There is, finally, the candidate’s apparent inability to see any downside, as a matter of either injustice or instability, of having this problem fester indefinitely. Because his comments were unrehearsed responses to a question, he perhaps can be forgiven for having a plan that consists of “we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”
But the problem isn’t just lack of a plan. It is a profound misunderstanding of what Palestinians are subjected to under the thumb of Israel. We saw some of this in Romney’s trip this summer to Israel, in which he attributed inferior Palestinian economic performance entirely to an inferior culture.
We are reminded of how incorrect that is by the judgment this week by the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief for the West Bank and Gaza that for economic recovery and development in the territories it is essential to ease the restrictions that Israel places on Palestinian trade and movement.
Confirmation of the ignorance regarding this last issue came in Romney’s comment in Boca Raton that we can live with an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict just as “we live with that in China and Taiwan.” In case he didn’t notice: China doesn’t occupy Taiwan. The Taiwanese have political liberties — and prosperity.
The issue in the Palestinian territories is not whether the militarily dominant power in the region will invade and occupy a neighbor; it is instead whether the occupation that continues from such an invasion 45 years ago will ever end.
One thing was at least internally consistent in the candidate’s remarks: he may as well write off any intention of trying to bring about a negotiated settlement of this conflict, because he has destroyed whatever standing he may have otherwise had to be an honest broker.
by StarmanSkye » Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:23 am
by Allegro » Thu Sep 20, 2012 3:13 am
without him?
by justdrew » Thu Sep 20, 2012 4:16 am
by seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 20, 2012 10:06 am
5 Ways Mitt Romney Has Stirred Up Race Resentment
Nestled amid the contempt Romney shows for everyday people of all races is a simmering resentment of brown and black people.
September 19, 2012 |
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney addresses a fundraising event in Salt Lake City.
Mitt Romney wishes he was Mexican. And right now, much of the Republican establishment wishes he would self-deport.
The reason, of course, is the now-infamous video of Romney's remarks to a group of well-heeled donors at a fundraising event in Boca Raton last May, in which the Republican presidential candidate, a multimillionaire, paints nearly half the American population as moochers -- people who, he said, "see themselves as victims," and believe they have a right to food, shelter and health care at government expense.
The candidate seems not to grasp that, included in the 47 percent painted by Romney as takers are senior citizens, members of the armed forces, a portion of the unemployed and others who comprise part of Romney's own constituency. The fallout is said to have set on edge the teeth of the very wealthy donors whom Romney once courted with such words of wisdom.
But nestled amid the contempt Romney shows for everyday people of all races who receive tax credits or Social Security is a simmering resentment of brown and black people. First, Romney says he wishes that he had been born to Mexican parents, rather than to an American father born in Mexico, because "I'd have a better shot at winning this."
Then, as he derides those who fall below the threshold that triggers an income-tax obligation, Romney concludes that all of those people "will vote for the president no matter what" -- presumably because the black president, as Romney has alleged in the past, is all about fostering a culture of government dependency.
Later in the video, which was obtained by Mother Jones, Romney describes Palestinians as a fundamentally violent group.
Up until this point, as I chronicled the race-baiting and bigotry of the Romney campaign, I had seen it all as a cynical strategy deployed simply to appeal to the basest instincts of the Republican base -- and not necessarily reflective of Mitt's own biases. But the video tells a different tale. There, in the well-appointed home of leveraged buyout mogul Marc Leder, Romney seems to be, at last, his authentic self, speaking in a relaxed manner before people of his own social class, giving the subtext of Romney's wish-I-was-a-Mexican remark the feel of a more authentic racial resentment.
Here are five examples of ways in which Romney has demonstrated disrespect for brown and black people.
1. Latinos get all the breaks. Early in his remarks to the Boca burghers, Romney discusses his "heritage:"
My dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico… and had he been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot at winning this. But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico. He lived there for a number of years. I mean, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino.
Because, you know, there have been so many Latino U.S. presidents.
Mitt's Mexican dream has given rise to all manner of hilarity on late-night shows and in the Twitterverse, where the newly hatched @MexicanMitt ("I am the Juan Percent!") is presently holding court.
Viewed in the context of his later comments about Obama voters as being freeloaders, Romney's rationale for wanting to be Latino seems to be that all those moocheros would totally vote for a guy just because he looks like them, as would, presumably, all those other dependency-addicted Americans, since a Latino prez, like a black one, is, in his view, emblematic of the dependency culture. It's a novel variation on the old producerist trope that dates back to the pre-Civil War Jacksonian age, and was used as a rationale for maintaining slavery.
Poor Mitt. It's tough to be a rich, white guy these days.
2. Black people want free stuff. In July, Romney made an appearance before the NAACP's annual convention, declaring himself to be the best presidential candidate "for African American families." Then, in an apparent bid to collect television footage of black people booing him, he declared his intention to "repeal Obamacare."
At a fundraiser later that night, according to a pool report, Romney responded to a question about his reception at the civil rights group's gathering:
I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this: If they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy -- more free stuff. But don't forget nothing is really free.
3. Arabs love war -- and are poor because of their inferior culture. In the video secretly shot at the Boca fundraiser, Romney offers a new twist on the Middle East peace process, basically saying the best approach is to kick the can down the road. Why? Because, Romney says, "the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace." That's right -- none of them. (This assumption, by the way, flies in the face of public polling data in the occupied territories.)
Add to that statement Romney's assertion before a group in Israel that "culture" is the reason for the wealth disparity between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and you have Romney painting Palestinian Arabs according to the racist "ghetto thug" stereotypes used against blacks in the U.S.
Romney's Israel remarks, as reported by TPM's Benjy Sarlin in July:
As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita*, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality."
"Culture makes all the difference," Romney said. "And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things." Among them, he cited "the hand of providence."
4. Falsely painting black president as promoter of work-free welfare payments. Having yet to close the deal with the Republican base, Romney set out in August to provide right-wingers with a false narrative about President Barack Obama that would vindicate the racist biases of the right, especially the notion that Obama favors blacks over whites, based around the false assumption of the average welfare recipient as black, and the lie that the Obama sought to remove the work requirements from federal welfare payments.
In a series of ads, the Romney campaign mischaracterized waivers granted to several states as the undoing of welfare reform when, in fact, the waivers were granted in order to allow the states to try new methods to increase the employment numbers of welfare recipients.
5. Another twist on the "lazy Negro" theme. As I reported in July:
At the end of May, the Romney campaign rolled out a new campaign based around the theme, "Obama Isn't Working." It was a neat little double entendre, with a surface-level meaning, if one read it as a grammatically tortured kind of shorthand, that Obama's policies aren't working, while its grammatically correct meaning implied that the African American president is, well, shiftless -- a notion that is a persistent racial stereotype of American black people.
When it comes to people who aren't white, or who aren't rich, Mitt Romney, it seems, has a few issues.
by sunny » Thu Sep 20, 2012 10:31 am
by DrVolin » Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:33 pm
by dqueue » Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:43 pm
sunny wrote:This bitch, I swear. How can anyone take him seriously? He's a walking cartoon.
by Allegro » Thu Sep 20, 2012 1:05 pm
by Nordic » Thu Sep 20, 2012 2:48 pm
dqueue wrote:sunny wrote:This bitch, I swear. How can anyone take him seriously? He's a walking cartoon.
Ain't it the truth. By extension, the same seems true for so many of these old, white guys representing us. Why, seeing my Congress critter in person, I'm struck by his cartoon'ish appearance - garish colors, misshapen, plasticky sheen. How is it that the ruling class continually heaps these caricatures of obsolescence upon us?
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