Political Irony

The media has been abuzz with the story of the leaked video of Romney at a fundraiser, writing off 47% of the US population as tax-dodging, government-dependent parasites whom he has no chance of convincing to not vote for Obama. I have to say that originally I found the story a bit silly. I felt the same way back in 2008 when Obama was recorded at a fundraiser saying that rural voters “get bitter” and “they cling to their guns or religion”. Besides, Romney’s comment was made back during the primary, and I think everyone had figured out even back then that Romney would say just about anything his audience wanted to hear in order to get their campaign donations or votes.

Yes, the video is a disaster for Romney, but we’ve gotten used to that. Even conservative columnist David Brooks compared Romney to the character of Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island.

So I wasn’t planning on doing a post on it (besides, I didn’t need to since it was everywhere!), but I changed my mind because the reaction to the video has become even more interesting than the video itself. In particular, the video has brought out an interesting discussion about the Republican narrative of “makers” versus “takers” (or “job creators” versus “parasites”).

As Ezra Klein put it, the

vision of a society divided between “makers” and “takers” is core to the Republican nominee’s policy agenda.

In his comments, Romney says that “these are people who pay no income tax,” but they are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

This isn’t just Romney. We’ve heard similar comments from just about every Republican. Paul Ryan said “We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society.” Rick Perry said “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” Michelle Bachmann said “People who pay nothing can easily forget the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

The myth of the “takers” is a baldfaced lie. Let’s take that 47% who don’t pay any federal income taxes and see why. 61% of them (29% of the population) may not pay federal income taxes, but they do pay 15.3% of their income in federal payroll taxes, which means they pay a higher percentage in federal taxes than Romney. 22% of them (10% of the population) are elderly and retired. And the remaining 17% of them (8% of the general population) are unemployed because the economy was destroyed.

But what makes the takers argument even more hypocritical is that the main reason that 47% of Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes is because of the tax cuts passed by Republicans! The largest jumps in the number of people who don’t pay federal income taxes happened after the tax cuts instituted by Reagan and Dubya. The Republicans like to complain about the “takers” not paying federal income tax, but they built that. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from wanting to give even more tax cuts to the rich, and pay for them by cutting social services for everyone else.

Then it started to get even more bizarre. Someone figured out from the video that the $50,000 a plate fundraiser where the video was taken was hosted by equity manager Marc J. Leder, who has become known for throwing parties “where guests cavorted nude in the pool and performed sex acts, scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms and men twirled lit torches to a booming techno beat.” That’s your upstanding, no nonsense maker class for you! To make it worse, Romney inspired Leder to get into private equity in the first place, and was an early investor in some of Leder’s deals.

Finally, Buzzfeed found a stunning video of an infomercial from way back in 1962 featuring Lenore Romney promoting George Romney’s campaign for governor of Michigan (in case you didn’t know, these are Mitt Romney’s parents). Not only does Lenore Romney sound a lot like Ann Romney describing Mitt in her Republican convention speech, but the best part is when Lenore responds to charges that George is too rich to understand the concerns of the common people by bragging that George was on welfare relief for the first years of his life and that he was a refugee from Mexico.

So Mitt Romney’s father was part of the taker class? Irony knows no bounds.

© David Horsey

So let’s add this up. Polls say that around 98% of Americans have already decided whether they are going to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But the more important number is actually smaller, since we only care about likely voters (people who are probably going to vote). So at most about half that, or 1%.

But it is even worse that that. Even if you’re an undecided voter, you might live in a state that is strongly tilted to one candidate or the other. Since most states are “winner take all”, your vote is very unlikely go make any difference.

There are around eight states that could possibly go one way or the other. So a very generous guess is that there are at most half a million people that can be swayed one way or the other. And both sides are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to sway them. As David Horsey notes, wouldn’t it be so much simpler to take all that money to just buy their votes?

Of course, it is just as likely that the undecided voters will tune out long before election day and just stay home. Especially because of all the negative ads, which become tiresome very quickly. Therefore, probably the best thing that could be done with all the campaign money is for each side to make sure they turn out their supporters to vote.

That’s probably what it is going to come down to.

© Tom Tomorrow

Mitt Romney and his campaign staff (whom the NY Daily News calls a band of clowns) don’t seem to know when to shut up.

And Liz Cheney tries to blast Barack Obama, but ends up shooting herself in the foot (at least it wasn’t the face like her dad):

We’ve now had three and a half years of Obama policy and it looks an awful lot like — whether you’re talking about the Mexico City speech in 2009, the Cairo Speech in 2009, the extent to which he’s been apologizing for America, he’s abandoned some of our key allies like Israel, Poland, Czechoslovakia.

Not only have fact checkers declared false the assertion that Obama has been apologizing for America, but someone really needs to tell Cheney that Czechoslovakia stopped being a country in 1992, 16 years before Obama was elected president.

© Stuart Carlson

© Jim Morin
Are Muslims too easily incited to violence? There’s an interesting editorial in the Washington Post titled “Why is the Arab world so easily offended?”

Let’s ignore for the moment whether violence is ever justified. I believe in this particular case the violence is definitely not justified (mainly because it won’t do any good and will almost certainly hurt them more than anyone they are protesting against). But I also don’t think that the stupid movie is the only thing they are upset about. To coin a bad phrase, it is just the “straw that broke the camel’s back”. Don’t pretend like they don’t have anything to be upset about (cough, Iraq). How should they react?

UPDATE: AlterNet points out that the author of the Washington Post editorial may not be the best person to give us a Muslim perspective.

We are starting to learn more about the (so-called) film that caused all the fuss in Islamic countries. I say so-called, because it seems to be impossible to actually see the film. Most people haven’t even watched the 14 minute trailer (and for good reason).

It turns out that the actors who were hired to make the film had no idea they were making an anti-Islam movie. They were told they were making an “Arabian desert adventure movie” starring someone named George who is a “warrior leader”. In fact, most of the attacks against Islam were dubbed over in post-production, and you can clearly tell the actor’s voice changes. Needless to say, the actors involved are very upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer.

And just who made this film? Early reports said it was an Israeli named “Sam Bacile” but there doesn’t seem to be anyone by that name. Instead, it appears to have been made by an Egyptian Christian living in Los Angeles, who is on probation for bank fraud.

The spokesperson for the film is Steve Klein, who is associated with two hate groups. He’s also an insurance agent who was the American Independent Party’s candidate for California state insurance commissioner, but received only 2% of the vote.

But what’s really ironic is that in addition to spewing hate against Muslims, Klein also runs a website mornmoninfo.org that is anti-Mormon. The main part of the site seems to be claiming that Mormons are not Christians. This could become very ironic, because Mitt Romney defended the anti-Muslim film based on the principle of free speech. Would he defend an anti-Mormon website on the same grounds?

© Tom Toles

The Republicans picked Mitt Romney, because he seemed to be their only candidate who wasn’t completely crazy. And then he had to go and do this.

A crisis in the Middle East erupts because some asshole idiot in the US makes a really crappy low-budget movie that seems to be designed solely to anger Muslims (who at this point don’t need much to get them pissed off). It depicts Muhammad as a “cowardly, drunken torturer of children and old women.” Kind of like what would happen if some Muslim made a movie depicting Jesus as a gay pedophile who runs an abortion clinic and shoots up drugs (except a Muslim wouldn’t do that since they actually revere Jesus).

Riots break out. The American embassy in Egypt tries to cool things off by issuing a relatively mild statement condemning people who disrespect religion, any religion. The kind of thing you might do if you are trying to keep your people alive.

So what does Romney do? On 9/11, on the same day when Romney said you shouldn’t criticize the president about foreign affairs, he releases a statement condemning the administration. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

First of all, this statement is a lie. The statement from the embassy was made before any attacks on our diplomatic missions. In fact, the statement was designed to reduce the chances of such an attack.

Is Romney really this trigger happy? In fact, originally the statement was released with an embargo until midnight, so that it would not come out on 9/11. But a few minutes later, the Romney campaign lifted their own embargo. They just couldn’t wait. They had to turn an international incident where American lives were lost into cheap, lying political fodder.

Shame on you Romney. You are not qualified to be dogcatcher, let alone president.

Even Republicans were aghast at Romney. One senior Republican said “They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up.” and called Romney’s statement an “utter disaster” and a “Lehman moment” (referring to when McCain lost it during the financial crisis during the 2008 presidential campaign). Another Republican said “I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy. This is just unbelievable — when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it.”

So what does Romney do? He doubles down on incompetence. Defending his earlier statement against charges that it was released before Romney had all the facts, he said “It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values.” In other words, it is more important to act like an overbearing jerk than to try to defuse a violent situation.

Which brought even more disbelief from Republicans. A former Bush State Department official said “It wasn’t presidential of Romney to go political immediately — a tragedy of this magnitude should be something the nation collectively grieves before politics enters the conversation.” Steve Schmidt, senior campaign strategist to Sen. John McCain in McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said Romney’s “comments were a big mistake, and the decision to double down on them was an even bigger mistake. There are legitimate criticisms to be made but you foreclose on your ability to make them when you try to score easy political points. And the American people, when the country is attacked, whether they’re a Republican or Democrat or independent, want to see leaders who have measured responses, not leaders whose first instinct is to try to score political points.” Another former campaign aide for John McCain said that Romney is “Not ready for prime time.” And a former US ambassador to NATO under Bush said “Frankly, the charges he made were not only completely untrue but reckless and irresponsible.”

As damage control, the Romney camp then sends out a set of talking points. If asked “Did Governor Romney ‘jump the gun’ last night in releasing his statement?” they are supposed to respond “No. It is never too soon to stand up for American values and interests.”

And he’s supposed to be the Republican who isn’t crazy?

© Pat Oliphant