“Mitt Doesn’t Disdain the Poor.” That was the title of a video the Romney campaign is reported to have uploaded and then deleted from their youtube account.
Add that one to your Best Campaign Slogans of 2012.
Apparently the deleted video featured a clip from an interview Ann Romney with a Fox affiliate in Denver, where la Reina was trotted out to play a little defense and explain that, once again, her husband is being misunderstood. You can see the full video of the interview here.
Reina Romney in her $900 t-shirt. (Photo Credit: ‘CBS This Morning’)
Now the woman with the $900 t-shirts is tasked, once again, with informing us that she’s married to a human. But, boy, she just can’t keep herself from reminding us that she’s married to a very rich human: Vote for Mitt because he empathizes with your struggle! Why else would he run for office? Reina Romney declares in the interview, “This is a guy who obviously doesn’t need to do this for a job.”
Come on, you 47 percenters, stop mooching enough to realize he’s not doing this for the money! He rolls around in cash! (When he makes it to the Cayman Islands to visit it, of course).
This is, or course, familiar territory for Reina Romney. At the GOP convention in Tampa she painted a vivid picture of a time when she and Mitt once lived in a basement and ate out of cans of tuna and only made ends meet by selling stocks. Just like Joe Sixpack would do.
Seeing that didn’t work, the Humanizer in Chief later took back the whole Tuna Cans and Stocks fiction, admitting that “Mitt and I do recognize that we have not had a financial struggle in our lives.” She also informed us that el Rey was a victim in all of this: Her husband was being demonized!
As the new cycle keeps churning out more stories and analysis of the 47% worldview, I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of Reina Romney.
A Thug Can Hope.
Rey Mitt’s 47% Worldview
Last night I debated Mitt’s 47% Worldview with Republican Annette Meeks on our local Fox affiliate. Watch here. See if you can catch Meeks calling Bill Clinton a Great President!:
Journalist Michael Kinsley once wrote, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” In this case, Mitt was speaking his truth, not the truth. Because this can’t be said enough – the 47% myth is simply wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. ABC News did a helpful breakdown of the talking point:
Nearly two-thirds of the households that did not pay income tax in 2011 were on the hook for payroll taxes, a 4.2 percent tax that is automatically deducted from workers’ paychecks to fund Social Security and Medicare.
Only 18 percent of tax filers did not have to pay either income tax or payroll taxes.
Nearly all of the people who did not pay either type of tax were elderly – 10.3 percent of total tax filers – or had incomes less than $20,000 – 6.9 percent.
Of course, it’s not just the elderly and indigent who “get away with” not paying income tax. “About 1 percent of the top 1 percent of income earners, those making about $533,000 or more, did not pay income taxes.” Of course, the elderly and indigent don’t pay because they don’t have enough money, the super rich for very different reasons. Guess which group Mitt has a problem with?
Even conservative political commentators bristled. Matt Welch, writing for the Libertarian magazine Reason wrote:
“What the 53/47 dividing line says, to the direct contrary, is that income status is a permanent political condition, defrocking all Americans of agency and independent thought…. There are to my mind many more important things to consider in this presidential race than Mitt Romney’s reductive parroting of plausible-but-wrong GOP tropes. But the reason this controversy will have legs is ultimately because many Republicans think Romney’s comments were just fine. They are about to learn what the rest of the country thinks about that.”
And that is precisely the problem for Mitt and his attempts to brush this away. The 47% Conundrum is the mess that comes from imbibing too much Tea Party extremism, where you defend income and tax inequality at all costs. Taxes are bad for me, not for thee.
Put that on a bumper sticker.
Thug In Pastels 
I think that’s a lamprey on her shirt.