Mitt vs the 47%

Mitt Romney does it again...this time writing off Democrats en masse as tax-avoiding bludgers who think the government owes them a living and who can't be taught  personal responsibility. With just seven weeks till election he's written off half the country. Way to go!!  

So there is a campaign god, and she’s not Mormon.

If ever the American electorate was in doubt about which Mitt is which, now they know, courtesy of the candidate himself and a 70-minute video of him in full, wealthy-donor loving flight. 

The Mitt of caring soothing, vacuous, fact-free tones who promises to fix everything Obama has ruined is, by the candidates own rules, the ‘elegant Mitt’.

The Mitt who, in a private $US 50,000 a seat cosy dinner, spills his guts on the whinging, moochers who bludge off enterprising Americans like him and who are all Obama voters, is the “inelegant” Mitt.

Instead of apologising for misrepresenting Democrats, and exposing his ignorance of the American tax system, Romney called a hasty late-night presser to double-down on his smarmy idiocy and excused himself for not presenting what he was saying in a more elegant fashion.

How he could more elegantly parse his beliefs that half the American population is devoid of self sufficiency, dependent on government, and believe themselves to be victims who are entitled to health care, to food, housing, to “you-name-it”, is quite some leap. Mitt's "you-name-it" might even extend to Americans wanting the wealthy to also pay taxes. Very dangerous indeed. 

There is no elegant way of saying even before becoming President I don’t give a monkey’s about these Obama-loving bludgers because “my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”.

Elegance on planet Mitt seems to have quite a different meaning from that in our earthling dictionaries.

In Brylcreemed paradise where you love firing people, strap your dog to the roof of any of the fleet of cars, and never have to disclose tax returns, off-shore tax havens or policies, ‘elegant’ obviously means bullshitting the electorate in such a way that you hope the fools will vote for you, because you deserve to be President for the simple fact that you are not Barack Hussein Obama.

Simple message really, and while simplicity is usually the epitome of elegance, it is not the case when the veneer of meticulous physical and verbal coiffing is so thin that even the candidate can’t help the dirt from seeping through.

‘Elegance’, Willard Mitt Romney, does not equate to a strategy, nor a credible core on which to fashion a candidacy, let alone a Presidency.  

Romney’s self-sufficiency and tenacity in building his dossier of own goals, is good for voters because, in his inelegant moments, he finally reveals something about the cardboard cut-out presenting for inspection.

It is bad news for the divided campaign team and the smithereened Republican party because everyone gets to see the stupid, arrogant (Republican devotee Bill Kristol’s words) out of touch, self-satisfied, bumbling excuse for a candidate that they have selected to represent them.

There are two other aspects about this unbelievable/believable revelation.

The first is the equity fund king/economic guru doesn’t seem to understand nearly all Americans pay some form of tax. It might not be straight federal income tax, but the US is deluged with taxes - payroll tax for medicare and social security, property taxes, sales taxes and each state levies taxes.  More than ten percent of Mitt’s bludgers are elderly people, who have likely paid a lifetime of taxes, there are students with loans, and war vets on pensions.  The share of taxes the country’s poorest pay is only slightly less than their share of total income. How will a Romney administration sort out the bludgers from that then?  It should not be a surprise if the elderly in key states like Florida take exception to the ‘businessman who is here to help’. 

Second is Romney’s continued cluelessness about foreign policy in the Middle East. He learnt nothing from his blunder earlier this week in politicizing the death of the US Ambassador to Libya, three other Americans and eleven Libyans (the latter who hardly rated a mention in the US).

No, Romney in the 70-minute recording shows he can’t resist ingratiating himself to his  wealthy funders by slagging off the Palestinians (along with those Obama-lovers). Palestinians, according to the self-appointed oracle on the Middle East peace conundrum, have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, that the two-state solution is implausible and Palestinians “remain committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel”. 

Romney is an ill-informed waste of space.

But wait, there’s more derelict space where this issue is concerned, and I am not talking about the bombed out homes in Gaza.

Romney “recognizes” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going to remain an unsolved problem. Very helpful from the man who wants to lead the country that gives Israel billions and billions of US taxpayer dollars. What’s it for Mitt? To keep the illegal occupation going? To complete the dehumanization and disenfranchisement of an entire people? To perpetuate the unsolved problem that lies at the heart of so much of the turmoil in the Middle East?

See the thread? He’s happy to be concerned with tax breaks for wealthy Americans to be paid for by middle class and poor Americans, and he openly admires the ‘superior culture’ (as he termed it in July) of the US-funded Israelis over the dependent Palestinians. ‘Occupation Smoccupation’ and ‘let’s bomb Iran’ seem to be Romney’s only explicit foreign policies so far.

So the message is he won’t waste any time on the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, and anyway he’ll be too busy bombing Iran.

If Romney - the family man - is perfectly OK with the suppression of a people through illegal acts, what else is he OK  with when it comes to people who can’t take his advice and just “borrow from their parents” when they want to start a business?   

Perhaps someone in his campaign should tell him to shut it on the Palestinians, after all 78% of Jewish Americans voted for Obama in 2008.

As for the rest of the world who will be adversely affected by a Romney presidency, well, we can hope like hell there are more inelegant Romney moments American voters can be privy to before November 6.