On Sunday during a speech in Israel, Mitt Romney up and insulted Palestine, claiming that Israel’s economic superiority over Palestine was due to Israel’s culture, and certainly not the fact that Israel has been oppressing Palestine since forever ago.
Then on Tuesday morning, he went on FOXNews and pretended like he hadn’t said what everyone heard him say, claiming that he “did not speak about the Palestinian culture or the decisions made in their economy” and that he “certainly [doesn’t] intend to address that during my campaign.”
Everyone was like, “Dude, you totally said that shit about Palestine the other day.” And Romney was like, “No I didn’t. I have know idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t say shit.” And everyone was like, “Yes-huh.” And he was all, “Nuh-uh,” and just for a moment, everyone considered setting themselves on fire and ending it all.
Then on Tuesday night, Romney posts an op-ed for the douchebags over at National Review Online, in which he claims that he totally was making a point about Palestinian culture and the decisions made in their economy, actually, and why are you pretending that he didn’t say what everyone knows he said; and also, why is the shit that he said, but then didn’t say, but now totally said so controversial anyway? What’s the big deal?
[full post here]
not motorik
Please stop blogging.
Joey Maloney
@not motorik: Please stop commenting.
JGabriel
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Shorter Romney Relationship With GOP Base:
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Joey Maloney
“Mitt, honey…is it supposed to be this soft?”
texpope
I hope that all the Republican voters are warming up to the idea that if they help elect Mitt, he’ll unabashedly lie to them for the next 4 years just like he’s unabashedly lying to everyone else.
Why should they get special treatment?
Amir Khalid
Mitt’s op-ed would have been ghostwritten and submitted to NRO ahead of time, maybe even before the Sunday speech, while the Tuesday morning denial on TV was probably a spur-of-the-moment brain fart — fortuitously timed to make him look like he was doing a flip-flop-flip. Mitt’s not even good enough at lying to carry it off. What’s he doing in politics?
SRW1
Mitt just wants to please whoever he happens to be in the company of. It’s not his fault that you people cant’ make up your mind in any coherent manner what it is that pleases you.
not motorik
Everyone was like, “Dude, please stop blogging.” And ABL was like, “Funky neologism! Bad writing!” And everyone was like, “Please.” And she was all, “Nuh-uh,” and just for a moment, everyone considered setting themselves on fire and ending it all.
pastormaker
Not motoik could be some sort of post-modernist literary genius whose comments will be worth millions in a few years, or he could be just a fucking idiot. I suspect the latter.
geg6
@not motorik:
Don’t read her stuff, asshole. What is it with you people who have decided to become her own personal trolls? It’s some kind sick psychopathic stalker syndrome. I think you want her, like the little boys who pull little girls’ hair because they don’t know how to interect with the opposite sex. Grow the fuck up or just stay away.
Love ya, ABL. You drive assholes like this crazy and that means it’s working.
Raven
Mitt is givin Mornin Joe a fucking stroke!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Raven: And that’s a bad thing?
hep kitty
My mom tells me most all her friends are for Romney, b/c he is a big ole bidness man and Obama was a community organizer (gasp!)
So I was thinking yesterday, are they paying attention to any of this?
No, of course not. They probably think he’s a badass for going around insulting the world.
kay
Jesus, but that’s a dumb letter. Is that even a 6th grade reading level?
What if we find out Romney’s just not very bright?
Are we making the same mistake we always make, where people who do well in finance are assumed to be intelligent? One would think we would have let that myth go by now.
I’d like him to elaborate on this culteral inferiority conviction he has, because we found out he’s been saying it for years and it’s broad. He includes Mexicans in the culturally inferior group in his
book, and he’s made the comparison at fundraisers.
One in six Americans self-identified as “Hispanic” in the last census. He should have to flesh out this theory. Writing “freedom” over and over isn’t a sufficient explanation.
We finally found something that looks like a “belief” or a “strongly held view” in Mitt Romney and it’s cultural superiority. That seems important, and should be pursued.
kay
@geg6:
Obama’s up 11 points in PA in Q plus NYT poll this morning. Up 6 in Ohio.
11points! That has to make them happy in Chicago. It’s likely voters, too, not registered.
He has to abandon PA at some point. Are you seeing Romney ads?
not motorik
She sets up PACs about as well as she blogs, honestly.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
The op-ed’s reference to East and West Germany makes me think it was ghostwritten by the same campaign staffer who spoke of Czechoslovakia and the USSR in a recent conference call.
It’s like their hero Reagan never actually ended the Cold War.
JGabriel
@kay:
Perhaps I’m just a worry-wart, but right now I’m concerned about the validity of likely voter models in states like OH, and especially PA, that have enacted strict Voter Suppression laws.
I’ll keep PA in the toss-up column, and so will Romney probably, right up until the election — not because Romney has an honest chance of convincing the majority of PA’s electorate to vote for him, but because he has a dishonest chance of blocking enough of their votes to win it anyway.
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dmsilev
@kay: Well, there’s this from a couple of days ago, which suggests that both the Romney and Obama campaigns are beginning to regard PA as solid Obama and are pulling back their ads.
magurakurin
@geg6: Do you really want to know what it is? She’s black and she’s a woman. And to these mouth breathers both of “those people” need to keep their place.
Fuck people like him. The simple truth is that the United States of America, and the world for that matter, goes on in spite of them. They are a drag on the wheel, but nothing more. If they actually had their way the lights would be going off in half the country like in India.
They. Are. Fucked. Human. Beings. Leaveve them to die on the vine.
JGabriel
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dmsilev: Well that’s somewhat reassuring. Thanks for the link.
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jon
Either Romney doesn’t write his op-eds and speeches or he’s a mendacious ass or he’s just a sociopathic panderer.
I’m going with Yes.
Bobby Thomson
@kay: One of the benefits of my current situation is that I’ve seen very little TV over the last year, and especially very little commercial TV. With the caveat that if the voter law is upheld, all bets are off, PA is looking good. The record that is being developed in court on the voter law will make it difficult for pederast enabler Tom Corbett to win. Anecdotally, I never got the sense that PA was slipping away, and recently I’ve heard hard core Republicans saying they plan to vote for Obama because Rmoney is so loathsome. They compare him to the people at their country club who are always enforcing picayune nonsense.
Frankensteinbeck
@magurakurin:
I think this is true. It can be a pain to single out the racists because our culture teaches them that arguments traceable to racism will be punished. However, ABL gets three times the trolls the other posters do, her posts are not really particularly different, and there’s a tone of personal hate and frothing anger to the comments against her posts that you you see only in small amounts with other front pagers. This is all what the ‘covert racism’ model would predict. Some will merely be assholes, like the stalker trolls all front pagers get, but the extra harassment is racism and there’s a lot of that extra.
And that’s leaving out the comments never taken out of moderation that include obvious racial epithets, as John once pointed out.
Frankensteinbeck
As for the OP, the man is ridiculous. Just ridiculous. He’s already losing badly in the polls, but I’m hoping that there really is a large segment of the population that will start paying attention after the conventions. Their reaction is likely to be ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ To know Romney is to hate him.
Patricia Kayden
@kay: On Hardball yesterday, the poll only showed Obama up 4 points. Matthews also noted that Obama has stopped running ads in PA, so perhaps the NYT poll is more accurate.
ABL:
Just save your ire for when Romney decides to tell African Americans that their culture is inferior to his culture. I can just hear him now. Nothing but arrogant.
Cassidy
@not motorik: Fap harder, princess. Your whining only makes the majority of us happy. And, I know, you’ll say something along the lines that you don’t care and you just want something different, but we all know: you cared so much that you couldn’t just scroll past it. And it’s going to bother you all day. You’ll sit in your chair and think of all the witty things you want to say and before you type them you’ll come to the same conclusion we have: that’s a pretty pathetic way to spend your day. Scroll past it, get some fresh air.
Randy P
I think we’re seeing Romney’s debate strategy. Take one position on one question, take the opposite position on the next question. Confuse the hell out of the press, the opponent, the moderators and the viewing public. They’ll have to declare him the winner, right?
Be interesting to see how Obama counteracts it. He is a professor after all, he’s probably used to student obfuscation.
JGabriel
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TeamSarah4Choice @ DKos raises an interesting hypothesis that I’m surprised I didn’t think of: Does Romney Have Alzheimer’s? Seriously, Does He?
Romney is 65 years old, and, as I’ve noted before, he would be the third oldest president ever elected. It seems quite possible that he might be experiencing early symptoms of Alzheimer’s or some other form of senile dementia.
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gonzone
ABL,
I have tried posting your blog post links on Reddit because I think they need shared with as wide an audience as possible. There’s just one problem, your blog header has a cute picture of a baby’s bottom and that seems to give moderators there in /r/politics the vapors and they must seek the fainting couch.
Perhaps we could be considerate of their delicate sensibilities and use another header picture that doesn’t send them into paroxysms of panic please? Your messages are too fine to be missed by the masses due to a picture IMO.
Thanks,
gonzone
Nina
Romney having Alzheimer’s would make him more popular in Republican circles, where they still light candles to St. Ronnie.
Donut
@hep kitty:
Yup. Were it not for the fact that Romney is so unconvincing as a Republican macho daddy, they’d be creaming themselves for real, and not just pretending to. The right wing Christians luuuuuurved it when Dubya barfed out nonsense about issues and policy and offered horseshit platitudes about Teh Awesome Freedomz! that real ‘Murkins have a god-given right to, and everyone else in the world envies.
Poor Mittens just can’t quite pull it off. He’s all pretend wonk with no place to let his little light shine in today’s GOP. You’ll sometimes hear people talk about him being “data driven,” which has become one of those stock phrases one sees on resumes lately. We are talking about people who make 90% of their daily decisions based on blandly-worded executive summaries, spreadsheets and power point slides, and who can barely acknowledge anyone who lives below their same pay grade, unless that person is their assistant. That’s his world, I suspect.
Dubya, though, he never pretended to be that guy. He played the patrician, the entitled brat, much better than the blue blood patrician. Where one had the sense that Dubya’s id came bubbling up like a precocious three year old, that he was reflexively saying the first thing that came to mind, but unable to mold those thoughts into completely coherent communication, Romney is thoughtful only in the sense that he’s thinking really hard about how to sound as smart as he feels.
salacious crumb
well its all nice to bash on Mittens because we dont like him. But what has Obama done for the Palestinians? He has bent over backwards to please Israel and get the Jewish vote, so I dont see a whole lot of difference between him and Mittens on this. Mittens gets away with this because his base is a racist one. Thats the only difference.
Mike Jones
It’s too bad flipflopping isn’t an Olympic event. That was a Gold medal performance.
magurakurin
@salacious crumb:
not a dime’s worth a difference. Too bad Ralph is wearing Depends these days, eh?
ruemara
@gonzone: Baby butts are censor worthy? What a collection of idiots.
Tonybrown74
@not motorik:
The power of Black Vagina: it forces you to search out a blog to read the opinions of someone you don’t want to. That’s some strong stuff.
ABL, gurl, you need to bottle that and sell it in stores. You’d make a killing!
gogol's wife
@kay:
I’m beginning to think he isn’t very bright, despite appearances. And Dubya was smarter than he appeared. Dubya’s missteps were of a much higher order.
geg6
@kay:
I haven’t seen a single Romney ad this year. Rove’s outfit, yes. But not even many of them. They’ve given up the state, I think. Cookiegate pretty much fried him here.
flukebucket
@kay:
I came to that conclusion a while back. I really don’t think the guy is as smart as hundreds of millions of dollars might lead folks to believe. It is like Norquist said. The GOP does not need somebody to think. They just need a candidate to sign off on what he is given to sign off on.
With Mitt Romney I think they are shooting for exactly what they had with W. A completely blank canvas on which to paint their masterpiece.
geg6
@Patricia Kayden:
Tweety is delusional. I saw three last night and one this morning before I went to work. O is running hard here.
maya
@flukebucket:
However, if elected, Rmoney will begin an unprecedented four year negotiation of his severance package. That requires skillz.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby Thomson:
If Obama can set Romney up as the rich guy even other rich guys hate … that’ll be sweet.
wrb
@Joey Maloney:
Is it “Mitt the Twit” or “Bibi’s Bottom” today?
wrb
@Patricia Kayden:
I think he believes that is so self-evident that Everyone realizes it so it needen’t be stated.
Roger Moore
@Randy P:
Simple: you point out that he’s changing his answer from question to question. Break the fourth wall and challenge the audience to think about what it would mean to have a President who can’t keep his policy consistent for more than 15 minutes. And do it all with a gently mocking tone that will cause Mitt to flip out and turn into a frothing at the mouth crazy on live TV.
Another Halocene Human
@Patricia Kayden: Conservative “thinkers” used to say this stuff openly in the 1980s. Given the “soviet union” comments by Romney, maybe this is coming.
pk
@not motorik:
I don’t think everyone considered setting themselves on fire. But please go ahead and feel free to pour on the gasoline and torch yourself.
Another Halocene Human
@gogol’s wife: W was smarter than he appeared, but only by a little. 2nd rate hires 3rd rate and 3rd rate hires 4th rate. Given that he tapped Gonzales and whoever that woman was for USSC, I know where I’d place him.
Oh, and his cabinet “brain trust” was more of a “brain bust”. I mean, just look at how Rummy botched the ME adventure.
Yutsano
@not motorik: See now you’re still not clapping hard enough, because SHE is still posting here! You must defeat HER!! By any means necessary!
Chris
@flukebucket:
If we figure that the GOP’s financiers want to go back to the Gilded Age, well, that’s what the Gilded Age was: presidents who were mostly nonentities rubber-stamping legislation from senators and congressmen, who in turn were simply rubber-stamping whatever was put in front of them by the robber barons and machine bosses who’d bought and paid for them. A weak central government requires a weak chief of state.
It’s somewhat different now than it was then, though, because today’s conservatives do want a strong central government in at least one sphere, which is the national security state (not just military but the entire domestic side of it too, possibly minus the ATF and TSA). That sort of thing isn’t amenable to being run by committee, at least not the way they want to run it, and it does matter to a lot of them.
Chris
@Another Halocene Human:
The real disaster for them was 2006. Everything was going fine until then (the Republican Party got the electoral boost they were looking for in 2002 and 2004, Bush got reelected, and Halliburton got all its no-bid contracts). But then 2006 happened, the Republicans got bitch-slapped worse than they had in decades, Obama was elected two years later partly as a result, and the Democratic Congress repealed those Halliburton contracts.
They appear to suffer from the same problem as much of our corporate culture, which is that they know how to turn a short-term profit but are incapable of seeing or caring about the consequences of their actions over the long or even medium term.
auntieeminaz
@JGabriel: How about this for a theory, residual brain damage from his automobile accident in France while on his Mormon mission?
not motorik
I’d just like ABL to try to write like other people might read it. That’s all.
RedKitten
@not motorik: Considering that word-salad of a sentence that YOU just wrote, you have absolutely no standing whatsoever to criticize someone else’s writing.
Pococurante
Romney’s comments were racist.
Palestinians haven’t succeeded as well as the Israelis because of some inherent racial or genetic reason.
They haven’t succeeded because their leaderships are corrupt and/or fanatical, and their despotically-manipulated neighbors have a vested interested in keeping them destabilized and in a constant state of war and oppression. Even Jordan treats them like second class citizens.
It’s impossible for the average Palestinian to create a sustainable culture.