Let Them Eat Tax Cuts

I'm supposed to be surprised, right? 

Mitt Romney doesn't care about poor people who "think they're entitled to food".  Mitt Romney knows that if starving people are just too lazy to ask their butler to go downstairs and tell their personal chef to fix them some breakfast, it's not the government's job to bail them out.  Get an intercom, jerks!  Or even better, just have a standing breakfast order with your personal chef and then you don't have to tell him to make you breakfast every day, he'll just bring it to you.  If starving people weren't so lazy and stupid, they'd be less starving, like Mitt.

But why am I supposed to be surprised by this?  This Presidential election has been going on since 1914.  Can you tell me one time when Mitt said something that made you believe that he thinks anything other than what we now have video of him saying?  I honestly can't.  There's no magical time before today when I can remember thinking Mitt Romney had any compassion for poor or working people, or any plans or ideas for how to help them. 

It's been a tough couple of weeks for Mitt.  His opportunistic and unbelievably stupid reaction to stuff being on fire and people being dead was a catastrophe, even for him.  It wasn't so much that he jumped on a national security crisis to try to score political points before it was even over.  It wasn't so much that he did it on September 11th (after all, Barack Obama didn't take a day off from emailing me and asking me for money on September 11th, which I thought was pretty stupid).  It was really two things.

First of all, Mitt failed so miserably at capitalizing on a national security crisis.  Nothing he said even made sense.  Listening to Mitt Romney talk about foreign policy is like listening to a four year old tell you where babies come from.  It's just rambling and incoherent and makes you wonder why his parents would bother telling him anything.

More importantly, Mitt doesn't have anything valuable to say about foreign policy at all.  That's what makes his little adventures into stupidity so infuriating.  Anybody can say something stupid, but when you don't have positions to fall back on that people can look at and say "well, he wasn't on his game today, but he's clearly not an actual moron", people start to wonder about you. 

Take Mitt's other comments about how maybe there's no peaceful solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  If someone smart said that, my reaction would be "shit, maybe they're right".  But when Mitt says it I just think "Middle East peace is hard, huh?  Thanks for the update captain dumbass."

But, again, I'm not surprised.  At no time during the 600 Republican primary debates did Mitt say anything that suggested his interest in foreign policy went beyond talking tough and promising not to apologize for things that nobody ever suggested apologizing for.  I just don't think he cares about it that much.

The same is true for Mitt's comments about 47% of Americans.  It wasn't that Mitt was saying things that were condescending and arrogant.  Barack Obama says condescending and arrogant things all the time, it's one of my favorite things about him.  The problem is that Mitt's actual economic policies square up with what he was saying so perfectly.  If your economic situation can't be significantly helped by tax cuts, then Mitt Romney doesn't really understand why you're bothering him. 

But again, there's just nothing surprising about this.  Mitt believes in the magic power of tax cuts.  If you're struggling to feed your family, Mitt's going to cut your boss' boss' taxes.  If you don't have a boss because you don't have a job, then Mitt's going to cut the taxes of some guy in your town who owns a business, and maybe he'll hire you...probably not though.  If your house is on fire, Mitt's going to put it out with tax cuts. 

And if that doesn't work, well, Mitt's pretty much out of ideas, and so is the rest of his party.  Well, except maybe jesus can help out too, that's always Republican plan B.  But he can't really help out, because he still isn't real.  I don't know if Mitt's mormon god, or gods, or whatever it is he believes in, are the kind of gods that are supposed to help with stuff, but unless Mitt's willing to lend you his magic underpants, I wouldn't hold my breath.

This is what Republicans believe in now.  Magic and fantasy.  If it can't be fixed by tax cuts or praying, then it can't be fixed by Republicans.  People are always whining about how Mitt doesn't give any specifics.  He doesn't have any!  It's like asking a magician to give you specifics about how he made the elephant appear out of nowhere.  He can't give you specifics, because that shit didn't actually happen.

And the people left in the Republican party with working brains are starting to chirp about the amazing lack of substance, common sense and basic competence from the Romney campaign.  Some of them have a right to complain, but most of them deserve to be blamed.  They embraced Sarah Palin.  They embraced the tea party.  How exactly did they think this story was going to end?

Last week, Rick Santorum said at their little apple pie and gay bashing rally that the "smart people" will never be on their side.  You said it, Rick.