All this brouhaha with the presidential bid must have gone to Mitt’s head. Just listen to the unfounded, spurious, mendacious nonsense he’s spreading around.
In a secretly – and justifiably! – filmed video he says, ‘There are 47 percent who are with Barack Obama, who are dependent upon government… These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to worry about those people.’
Is he trying to suggest that the selfless, altruistic, victimised people who derive their tax-free income from the state may vote for any candidate just because he promises more of it? Preposterous! We all know they’re guaranteed to support the candidate who says he’s going to get them off government payrolls and make them look for real jobs. Bono publico and all that, these chaps swear by it. And it’s those like Mitt whom they swear at.
And if that’s not enough, Romney then went on to spread lies – are you ready for this? – about the moderate, peace-loving, Israel-adoring people of Palestine. ‘I look at the Palestinians not wanting peace anyway, committed to the destruction of Israel…’ His nose is lengthening even as we speak.
All progressive people know for sure that every word there is a malicious falsehood. Palestinians want nothing but peace, prosperity and democracy, preferably of the American kind. The only reason they keep firing thousands of rockets at Israel is that the ghastly Israelis – led by a Likud prime minister, may one add – want none of those things. They want war, genocide, tyranny and all those other horrible things Jews champion unless they vote for Obama.
And oh yes, every Palestinian leader from Arafat onwards has been misheard stating he wished to drive Israel into the sea. What they meant – what they actually said! – is that they’d like to drive to Israel for a sea holiday. Unplug your ears, Mitt! Now open your mouth and sing along: ‘Yasser, that’s my baby, Nasser, don’t mean maybe, Yasser, that’s my baby now.’ You know the tune.
If you think that was bad, what Mitt then had the gall to say about China really takes the fortune cookie. He implied – hell, he didn’t just imply, he said it out loud! – that Chinese workers toil in less than perfect conditions for less than princely wages. According to Romney’s slander, he was appalled by ‘…the number of hours they worked, the pittance they earned.’ And he was shamefully put off by the barbed wire surrounding the factory he visited.
Pittance, Mr Romney? Perhaps by the standards of your ill-gotten millions that’s what it is. Just shows how out of touch you are. Why, these people earn at least $1 a day – and every day they can buy a whole bowl of rice! Not a quarter of one, not even half! A whole bowl, and they don’t even have to share it with many children because their government cares about them and therefore allows them to have only one. And, as his Chinese hosts kindly and truthfully explained, the barbed wire isn’t there to keep the workers in, but to keep thousands of job applicants out. That’s what real humanism is all about, something this running dog of capitalism needs to get his head around.
It’s no wonder Romney’s fascist, bigoted, reactionary, racist, homophobic (well, strike that, perhaps not racist and homophobic, but definitely all the other things) remarks have caused so much outrage in the progressive community not only in the USA but everywhere.
A Palestinian spokesman said Romney’s remarks were ‘irresponsible and dangerous’. That’s putting it mildly, if you ask me. What can be more irresponsible and dangerous? Certainly nor flying airliners into tall buildings.
And Obama’s campaign manager, a man of utmost selflessness, objectivity and veracity, quite rightly said that ‘… it’s shocking for a candidate… [to suggest] that half the American people view themselves as victims entitled to handouts.’ He didn’t add that what’s even more shocking is that the statement was true, so I have to do that for Mr Messina. Telling the truth, Mitt? Call yourself a politician?
Poor Romney gets it coming and going. Even Bill Kristol, the editor of what The Times describes as ‘the arch-conservative Weekly Standard’, is irate. Let’s remark parenthetically that for publications like The Times, there’s no such thing as simply conservative. The adjective is never complete without intensifiers like ‘arch’, ‘ultra’, ‘rabidly’ or ‘extremely’. But the Weekly Standard is actually none of those things. It’s not conservative at all. It’s neoconservative, meaning mostly socialist, but with a good touch of American supremacism and expansionism.
People of this persuasion make up Romney’s foreign-policy team, and therein lies Kristol’s problem. He described Romney’s remarks as ‘arrogant and stupid’ not because he disagreed with them, God forbid, certainly not with the ones about Palestinians. It’s just that by speaking in such a forthright manner Mitt let the cat out of the bag. People all over the world are up in arms, which means Romney has hurt his chances. What’s worse, he hurt the chances of Kristol and his jolly friends to find themselves at the pinnacle of power.
Any way you look at it, Romney has committed the ultimate faux pas of politics: he said things that MUST NOT BE SAID. So what if they are all true? That makes it much, much worse. Mitt is in the business of politics, not of truth-telling. And if he doesn’t realise that the two never overlap, he’s even more ‘arrogant and stupid’ than Kristol says.
Grow up, Mitt. Tell lies, if that’s what people want to hear. And never, ever tell the truth – even if the people want to hear it. That way you’ll be a real politician. And what’s more, you may be a president, my son.