(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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You want to know what venality Romney’s been up to, just look to what he’s accusing President Obama of doing:
… Addressing 300 contributors who paid $2,500, $10,000 or $50,000 to hear him speak, Romney acknowledged that the people in the room were well-off compared to many Americans. It was the middle class that had been let down by Obama, Romney said, and he pointed to the wait staff serving finger foods as an example.
“It’s tough being middle class in America right now,” Romney said. “The waiters and waitresses that come in and out of this room and offer us refreshments, they’re not having a good year. The people of the middle class of America are really struggling. And they’re struggling I think in a way because they’re surprised because when they voted for Barack Obama…he promised them that things were going to get a heck a lot of better. He promised hope and change and they’re still waiting.”
As he did earlier at a fundraiser in Baton Rouge, La., Romney accused Obama of funneling government money to his own donors, while neglecting those struggling in the country.
“This is a time when it’s good to be a friend of Obama campaign,” Romney told the crowd at the River Hills Club in Jackson. “Because you might be able to get some money for your business. But it’s not so good to be middle class in America.”
Mr. Charles Pierce, earlier that very same day:
At the end of 2006 up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), just as you were preparing to leave the job you had actually stopped doing two years earlier, and just as you were preparing your extended stumble across the national stage, you got caught larding various local government boards with 200 friends of yours from the local Republican party. One of these people was my old Wingo Square running buddy Eric Fehrnstrom, the man who personally revived sales of the Etch-A-Sketch, who found himself with a nifty gig on the Brookline Housing Authority until the Boston Globe went and harshed everyone’s mellow by pointing out that this put Fehrnstrom in line for a nice little pension package.
And then there’s the Salt Lake Olympics, which forced Willard into his retroactive retirement from Bain Capital, so he could finish the job of converting an international bribery scandal into a festival of old-fashioned American taxpayer-supported crony capitalism. In 2002, investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele published a piece in Sports Illustrated exposing in damning detail how, in “saving” the Olympics, Romney and his pet organizing committee kept their friends fat and happy….
SRW1
Maybe Romney at least got his donors to tip well on this particular occasion – the serving staff I mean, not Romney himself.
ETA: OMG, his Salt Lake heroics are unraveling as well? This will end in tears, I tellz ya.
Phylllis
Seems to me it would be better to be making that speech to the waitstaff themselves, at a, oh I don’t know, free event? If in fact he gave an actual damn about the middle class, that is.
JPL
@SRW1: And to think those folks can vote. After all they really don’t understand how the economy works.
MikeJ
As soon as Romney discloses who his bundlers are we can discuss the way Obama has treated his.
JPL
What is Mitt hiding in his tax returns?
HRA
They should have served him a plate of cookies from 7-11.
Deen
Anyone taking bets on how long before we hear how little the waitstaff were paid at the event?
And I still don’t understand how his economic plan is supposed to change anything for the waitstaff. Does he really think the tax breaks will cause their employer to give them a raise, instead of pocketing the additional profit, with a job market like this?
SRW1
@JPL:
Yeah, well, these folks don’t often get exposed to how the real economy works. Hopefully, they used the opportunity to listen to Willard and learn from one of the best.
SRW1
And there was a wailing among the attendants. Some of them were so moved to tears that they decided to give their money to the wait staff instead of donating to Romney’s campaign. God bless the good man’s soul.
NotMax
Yup, got to give a shout-out to the multitude of servants at his beck and call. It’s good to be the patrician.
“who offer us refreshments”
An extraneous locution worthy of the lips of the Queen Mother.
I suppose there were signs posted saying (or the program advised) “No tipping” so that didn’t have to be verbalized.
JPL
@SRW1: Mitt’s speech..
Obama bad, Obama bad, Obama bad. I wonder how many walked away saying Mitt’s not a deep thinker.
c u n d gulag
If I were one of the peons on the wait staff who was ‘offering refreshments,’ Mitt would have had his hair and lap full of them.
Actually, I’d have probably called in sick that night in order to save my job.
FSM knows, if Mitt wins, there’ll be less and less of them.
RAVEN
7 hrs with a screaming baby behind me and now. DWF. Karma is a bitch. the Leo valley was awesome!
NotMax
@Raven
You’re already missed here.
Gas went down 50¢ a gallon during your stay. Fairly certain it was your good vibes that did that.
RAVEN
@NotMax: Fuzzy posted some of the fish picks on his Facebook
Page. We also drove a few miles past the Mendes Ranch. Not enough time for the aqaurium but that requires a return methinks.
TheMightyTrowel
i am actually super shocked that we haven’t yet seen an interview with one of hose patriotic real American wait staff a la Joe the plumber. sounded like hack bait to me.
Celeriac
Offensive gestures aside, I’m just pleased to know that, while waiting tables in college, I was considered an accessory of the middle class!
I was not, at the time, aware of my lofty economic positioning. Possibly because I was still forced to consider a Long John Silver’s chicken plank meal an excessive splurge.
salacious crumb
the funny thing is that all those people at the 2500 fundraiser probably do not think of themselves as rich but as low to middle class hardworking salt of the earth blue collar Americans. You know, because some of them like to eat hot dogs from a hot dog stand and not in a fancy restaurant, or one of their dad’s was a milkman or janitor. That entitles them to being part of middle class.
Example: Lady Lyn Forested de Rothschild
Randy P
@TheMightyTrowel: I’m sure it won’t be long before we start seeing interviews with “randomly-selected” wait staff who are actually the children of million-dollar donors working a summer job before going off to college.
Hal
As I’m reading this story I’m hearing Romney’s voice in the tone of Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games.
Mino
Campbell Brown is concern trolling Planned Parenthood for the Republicans. If they would only stop doing abortions, Republicans might stop fighting to eliminate birth control. But don’t hold us to it.
Oh, and please stop running those ads that alert folks to what we’re up to.
Mino
WP has a follow-up on FDA spying story–our lawyers said we could do it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fda-authorized-spying-on-its-own-employees-senator-says/2012/07/16/gJQAoNvLpW_story.html?hpid=z1
And the spying was to keep track of whistleblowers concerned with medical radiation levels.
Was that FDA lawyer one of moles burrowed in by the Bushies? One of a cadre left in place to subvert their agencies and make mischief?
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)
Romney is completely inept in dealing with the media or attacking (or really anything involving getting his message out other than his memorized stump speech). The one and only thing our national press corpse can understand and call politicians on is hypocrisy – call it the dying patient’s one remaining vital sign. Yet Mitt constantly attacks Obama for things he’s done himself in the past. That will not fly, even with our “both sides do it” press.
Rathskeller
The Pierce story makes me think that there was some partial strategery on Romney’s side. They probably assumed that cronyism would be next on Obama’s list, and decided to get in front of the story by accusing him of it first. By implication, they believe that people will get tired of this Bain story.
It blows my mind that the villain/terrorist in the Batman movie is called Bane. I imagine the op-ed cartoonists are uniformly hoping everyone else notices that, as well.
JGabriel
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Mitt Romney:
At which point one waitresses shouted out*, “We’re right here, you know. We can hear you talking about us — making gross generalizations and lying in general about who we are, and about our hopes and dreams, which you have no frame of reference for understanding.”
(*In my fevered liberal imagination.)
.
ThresherK
@Randy P: But I don’t get how a $1M donor’s kid is working the summer before college, except as a stunt.
Aren’t those teens the ones who internships were invented for, to separate them from the “riffraff” who can’t think “summer” without “summer job”?