This made me laugh. Even the liberal Jim Fallows does his usual “to be fair to conservatives” routine on Romney and plane windows:
I have heard over the years, within the flying world, that Mitt Romney views airplanes more or less the way I view horses. He is (I have heard) not a happy or comfortable flyer, and one who can always imagine things going wrong. Fortunately I don’t actually have to ride horses — but he has no choice but to fly, white-knuckled, from one stop to the next. Someone with this outlook would naturally be all the more rattled by an emergency landing. So cut him all the more slack.
Steve M makes the obvious point and makes it well:
No, James — it’s not true that Romney “has no choice but to fly.” He chose to run for president — in fact, he chose to spend the last six years of his life running for president. I didn’t ask him to. You didn’t ask him to. He could be spending his days playing with his grandkids and lubing his car elevator. But no — he chose this particular endeavor, which requires him to fly day after day after day. If being president is what he wants, then he should just suck it up and never utter a peep about how uncomfortable flying makes him, because nobody put a gun to his head and compelled him to do all this flying. It was his choice.
Everything is always about elites defending other elites and making excuses for them. Fallows may be a relatively enlightened elite, but his point is worse than idiotic.
Would he be saying the same thing if we had an agoraphobic presidential campaign? Cut him some slack, he can’t campaign because he doesn’t like leaving the house.
DiTurno
I have to say that I despise Romney, but even I can’t believe he’s that stupid. He has an utter lack of principles and humanity, but he’s not a moron. I think.
BerkeleyMom
Romney’s not a “comfortable” flyer?? Speaking for those of us back in coach–FU Mitt.
Eric U.
I flew on a plane once where the head stewardess was a real comedian. Mid-flight, she was walking down the aisle and yelled, “sir, shut that window!” Everybody looked, and then laughed. I would love to have seen Mitt in that situation
Spaghetti Lee
Cut him some slack, he can’t campaign because he doesn’t like leaving the house.
Worked for McKinley.
Hunter Gathers
You’s think that someone (Mittens) who has spent a lot of time on small, chartered jets would be used to flying by now. Must be having to spend time on 747’s with other humans that aren’t there to serve him drinks and hand him hot towels that must have him rattled.
BGinCHI
Obviously when Mitt loses it will be because of air travel.
When is the Galt Jet Pack Company going online? No more pesky collective flying!
suzanne
A friend of mine was on that Phoenix-Sacramento flight that got a hole in the plane and had to make an emergency landing about a year ago. I’m sure he could explain to Rmoney why his windows don’t open.
cmorenc
@DiTurno:
I also despise Romney’s sociopathic nature, but even I’ll cut him some slack here and give him the benefit of the doubt that his “airplane windows” remark was an off-the-cuff dud attempt at humor, albeit the awkward sort of attempt that tempts his detractors to hear it as yet another instance of his tendency to foot-in-the-mouth disease.
TG Chicago
I love Fallows, but that doesn’t make sense. It wasn’t Mitt in the emergency landing; it was Ann. I mean, okay, that still would be cause for concern, but not in the same way.
And still… why does hearing about your wife in an emergency landing make you forget the basics of airplane flight? I mean, can we say that Mitt made his stupid 47% comment because he was rattled by having to fly earlier that day?
What Romney gaffe can’t we excuse with this silliness?
Dennis SGMM
I will cut Romney just as much slack as he would cut me.
Mike in NC
Fuck James Fallows for his bullshit.
count ulster
Never leaving the house should be Romney’s strategy down the home stretch. It’s bound to improve his numbers.
Hill Dweller
@cmorenc: Maddow showed the video on her show, and it is hard to tell if Willard was joking.
The fact that people actually think he was serious doesn’t bode well for his campaign, IMO.
MacKenna
Mitt Romney needs some sympathy and this is the best he could conjur up. I’m skeered o flying.
I am so sick of these assholes.
smith
If it was a joke, then Romney failed because he sucks at jokes and it wasn’t funny; if it’s not a joke then he very well may be the dumbest man ever on a Presidential ticket.
Alison
I don’t even get how being scared of flying leads to being a fucking idiot who doesn’t know why the windows on planes don’t open. The one has nothing to do with the other. I am positively terrified of flying, to the degree that I likely will never get on a plane again (especially when added to current poor health that makes flying basically not possible, which I’m actually fine with because it staves off people trying to persuade me how TOTALLY SAFE AND GREAT flying is, omg stfu)…but that fear doesn’t somehow eat into my brain and make me not aware of like, fucking physics or whatever.
Sheesh.
gwangung
This steady stream of gaffes and face palms is showing that Romney is cracking under the pressure of a campaign.
Realllllll presidential, doncha know….
Violet
Read this Fallows piece earlier and this part really annoyed me:
The plane fire happened Friday afternoon. The fundraiser where Mitt made this comment happened Saturday night. So, over 24 hours later. How is 24 hours after the event an “unexpected situation”? How is 24 hours later during a fundraiser full of his fellow rich people a “stressful situation” for Mitt?
Utterly ridiculous. I get that Mitt was worried for his wife, but he’s had over a day to absorb the situation. If this is how he handles his 3 a.m. phone call after 24 hours, just how badly will he handle it in the actual moment?
pete
I’ll cut Fallows some slack because he’s generally a pretty good guy, though I think he’s missed the mark here. And I’d rather slam the Republicans generally for having horrible policies than Romney personally for being a jerk.
However, I do think that the Mittbot’s humor package needs an interface upgrade.
Dennis SGMM
@smith:
Romney attempting to make a joke is pretty much like Mr. Spock trying to make a joke.
Pavonis
If people can’t tell whether you’re joking or just an idiot, keep your mouth shut.
KG
@Violet: The scary thing is that Mitt isn’t good when faced with unexpected questions or situations. Isn’t that mostly what we pay the president for? What the fuck is he going to do when a war starts or a refinery blows up or Mexico collapses?
West of the Cascades
Shouldn’t Ayn Rand acolytes like Mitt and Ryan be taking trains everywhere?
Eljai
How is he going to handle that 3am phone call if he can’t even stand a little turbulence?
Spaghetti Lee
I guess I’ll be That Guy and say, this is really worth getting mad about? I mean, even if you want to be all Total War and everything he says should be used against him, I don’t even see how this helps. So he doesn’t know about physics. I don’t.
Maybe it’s just my reflexes tensing up at the phrase ‘gun to the head’. I used to spend a lot of time arguing with libertarians and objectivists (and I can’t even blame it on drugs) and the phrase ‘gun to the head’ got used…a lot. Taxes were a gun to the head. Safety and environmental regulations were a gun to the head. Voting for Democrats was a gun to the head of Republicans. A literal gun to a literal head, Trayvon Martin’s head for example, was however not a gun to the head. Other things that were not guns to anyone’s head was a working single parent being unable to raise their kids, because hey, no one put a gun to their head and made them work three jobs. They chose to.
Mitt Romney, whose life has been nothing but unearned ease and raw ambitions that often got rewarded, can bear a ‘suck it up’ argument more than other people. But on its own, it’s not something I like to associate with liberal arguments.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
@KG: Non of that matters because he believes in America.
NotMax
Intimating that “uncomfortable” with flying is equivalent to clinical aerophobia is quite a leap.
Dennis SGMM
@KG:
He’ll call in some school children and read them “The Pet Goat” all the way through.
g
It’s true. Fuck Mitt. When was the last time he flew coach?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
put me down for shitty attempt at off-the-cuff humor by a man who sucks at off-the-cuff and humor
@gwangung: think he’ll go Billy Joe Armstrong, mormon-style, at the debate? “Confound all of you! I’m Mitt Romney, consarn it, and I’ve had enough of your ding-dong-diddly guff! Enough guff!” or the Orson Welles verion: “I’m Willard Mitt Romney! Willard Mitt Romey!” doesn’t scan like Charles Foster Kane, or even Charles Montgomery Burns
El Cid
Don’t worry, once Romney wins the White House, he and Ryan have plans which they’ll then work with Congress on implementing allowing airline companies to get special tax breaks for installing roll-down windows, which will somehow pay for the Medicare voucher program.
Redshift
@DiTurno: Well, I’m reminded of the time some years ago when I was on a high-speed train in Europe. It was summer and the air conditioning wasn’t on for a while. Another American tourist, who didn’t seem to be particularly unintelligent other than that he blathered constantly, was telling his traveling companion, “Gee, it’s warm in here. I’d open up a window, but they don’t open. I wonder why they don’t open…”
After this went on for a while, it was all I could do not to turn on him and say “the windows don’t open because we’re going 200 miles an hour, but if they did, I would gladly help you be the first to open one!”
I don’t think Romney is stupid. I do think he believes he automatically knows more than anyone around him about any subject, even if he’s never read a word about it or given it any thought before in his life. Consequently, I can easily believe that he would, the moment it affects him, decide that the reason aircraft windows don’t open is that lesser mortals like aircraft engineers haven’t thought of it.
hhex65
I feel sad for him because semi-autonomous robots like Willard much prefer to do their air travel by dirigible. His AI was not well developed and cannot process the complexity of our modern aerodynamics.
Violet
@Spaghetti Lee: If anyone’s angry, then they’re angry with Fallows for writing a sub-par post when he’s usually so good and aviation is one of his specialties so people were waiting to see what he’d say.
People aren’t angry with Mitt, except maybe for the usual stuff where he’s a plutocrat that thinks that means he should just be handed the presidency on a silver platter. But as for this airplane windows story, everyone is laughing at Mitt.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Spaghetti Lee:
Who’s mad about it? From what I have seen, the reaction has been more along the lines of a Nelson Muntz-like “HA HA!”
Ira-NY
Now we know why he is so concerned about trees being the proper height.
Hill Dweller
@gwangung:
Their latest gambit is going after Obama on China.
How can Willard’s campaign staff believe this is a smart strategy considering their candidate made millions investing in China, and called Obama a protectionist for being too hard on them?
Spaghetti Lee
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If I was him I’d drop the pretensions and go straight for Darkseid.
“When I command your surrender, I speak with three billion voices. When I make a fist to crush your resistance. It is with three billion hands. When I stare into your eyes and shatter your dreams. And break your heart. It is with six billion eyes! Nothing like Willard has ever come among you. Nothing will again. I will take you to a hell without exit or end. And there I will murder your souls! And make you crawl and beg! And die! Die! Die for Willard!”
“…That’s very interesting, Governor, but I asked you a question about financial reform laws.”
Alison
@Spaghetti Lee: I’m not “mad” about anything, except this: Romney said something really fucking stupid, and people want to go out of their way to make excuses because it JUST CANNOT BE that the man is actually maybe not that smart. Meanwhile, Obama, who is – to anyone with two brain cells to rub together – clearly very intelligent and bright and quick-thinking, has been lambasted constantly by assholes and wingnuts as being dumb, slow-witted, affirmative action student/hire, always needs a teleprompter because he’s so stupid, etc etc. They paint Obama as being this imbecile basically, and Romney is supposedly a fucking Mensa candidate because he ran a business or something. But Romney says something like this which is just ignorant and stupid, but will his intelligence be questioned by anyone?
To be clear, Fallows has not been in the “Obama’s a secret moron” camp. It just annoys me that Obama’s intellect has been attacked by so many people for no good reason, whereas Romney’s has been esteemed, also for no good reason, made more evident to me by this moment of doof.
Redshift
@Spaghetti Lee: Who’s mad? A few people are mad at Fallows, but I don’t see anyone mad at Romney over it.
No, it’s not “useful,” and it’s not going to affect the campaign. It’s just a hilarious, bizarre WTF. I’m all in favor of plumbing those for psychological insights, knowing full well that it’s probably mostly BS, just because it’s fun.
Roger Moore
@Pavonis:
I can’t keep my mouth shut; I’m running for office for Pete’s sake!
Steeplejack
@Spaghetti Lee:
For some reason your link goes to the TV Tropes home page. I don’t know which Darkseid page you want, so I no fix. You fix! Especially after my detailed monograph on sports gambling systems analysis.
? Martin
I’ll be that guy too. For all the really destructive, lying shit that Romney has tossed out there, why spend any energy on something that s merely stupid? Get back to him calling half the country lazy and irresponsible.
FlipYrWhig
This makes even less sense than “Don’t make fun of the horse Ann Romney owns but doesn’t ride because she rides another horse because of having MS.”
Spaghetti Lee
@Alison:
Well, that makes sense. I personally give Fallows a mulligan-he’s usually pretty good. But I get what you mean about the making excuses for Romney thing.
I wonder if it’s something more than that. The idea that someone as stupid and callous as Mitt Romney appears to be could be nominated for President and be still in it could drive anyone who cares about the future of this country to madness. So maybe the excuses are to keep from going nuts.
smith
@Redshift:
This. I did a “WTF” more than anything when I heard this statement. The problem is that Romney is stiff as a board and that makes for a crappy joke teller (if that’s what it was).
Romney is the bad comedian bombing on stage.
Spaghetti Lee
@Steeplejack:
This should work. It’s the one at the bottom: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/Darkseid
I seem to be cursed to be able to never properly embed a link. It’s a dreary life I lead.
Redshift
@Dennis SGMM:
Hey, Spock was pretty good at jokes! He frequently got the best of Kirk and McCoy when they were trying to have fun at his expense.
Romney is more like Data trying to tell a joke.
NotMax
Maybe Mitt now will feel compelled to repeatedly reference Joe the Glazier during the first debate.
A bunch of jabs about Mitt, windows and transparency also come to mind, but don’t feel like stealing the professional comedy writers’ thunder.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Steeplejack: Yeah, I don’t know Darkseid either. I am an old.
burnspbesq
Why are we even talking about this? It’s beyond trivial. It’s meaningless.
There are a gazillion substantive things, that have a real effect on real people’s real lives, about which you can go to town on Romney, and you choose this, Doug? That’s silly, childish, and generally fucked up.
DPS
My first thought was that Willard was trying to make a joke, but then I realized that it didn’t have a punchline involving him firing someone, so now I don’t know.
burnspbesq
Why are we even talking about this? It’s beyond trivial. It’s meaningless.
There are a gazillion substantive things, that have a real effect on real people’s real lives, about which you can go to town on Romney, and you choose this, Doug? That’s silly, childish, and generally fucked up.
Spaghetti Lee
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I just kind of stumbled across the quote. I do think it kind of speaks for itself, though.
? Martin
@FlipYrWhig: Remember, Fallows wrote campaign speeches. It’s all about focus and efficiency of message. This doesn’t matter. There are far more important things out there to focus on.
Mnemosyne
@Redshift:
To be fair to the tourist, you can open the windows on normal trains, so I can see why it might be confusing that you can open them on one kind of passenger train but not another kind of passenger train.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a normal airliner where you can open the windows.
Soonergrunt
@burnspbesq: We can do more than one thing at a time.
craigie
Who is this “Mitt Romney” I keep reading about? Is he a real person?
craigie
Who is this “Mitt Romney” I keep reading about? Is he a real person?
Redshift
@burnspbesq:
Today? And ones that aren’t just a rehash of lies and distortions he’s told a hundred times before, and that front-pagers have posted about nearly as many times? Blogs do sometimes try to keep up with current events, you know.
Makes me long for the (relatively) early days of blogging, when everyone knew that the correct response to telling a blogger that they were writing about the wrong things was Get Your Own Blog.
Believe it or not, there is room for very serious dissections of very serious issues, and posts that begin “This makes me laugh,” which for most people might be a clue that a midnight post isn’t always required to be about something vitally important.
Redshift
@Mnemosyne: Good point. Still, both struck me not as “I’ve thought about this and believe something stupid” but rather “I haven’t thought about this, but I’m talking as if I have.”
J R in WVa
I too think Willard is just that dumb… either too dumb to know about physics, or too dumb to realize that most people will think he is that dumb.
Born on third base, thought he just scored a touchdown!
burnspbesq
@Soonergrunt:
No doubt, but some things aren’t worth doing.
Amir Khalid
For what it’s worth, I think that Fallows’ only sin here is to decline, on this occasion, to join in the pointing and laughter at Mitt. Give him credit, though, for getting Patrick Smith himself (Salon.com vet and air travel blogger extraordinaire) to lay out exactly what’s wrong with Mitt’s comment.
DPS
OK, I saw the video clip. Funny as it would be if he actually thought this, I am totally sure that the guy was being facetious.
fuckwit
He’s another Bush. A spoiled rich kid, son of a rich guy, never had to actually work at anything, or live in the real world, and thinks he earned the wealth that was handed to him on a silver platter by his rich-ass dad.
What was it Molly Ivins said of Shrub? “Born on third base, and thought he hit a triple?” That fits so perfectly.
When, oh when, will people finally realize, once again, as they did in the progressive era and the 1930s, that the lazy, entitled moochers and leeches are the rich? When did the left allow the rich completely walk away with the narrative here, and make up into down, black into white, and freedom into slavery?
Say it with me: the rich are the lazy moochers, getting fat off of the sweat and work of people who actually do the heavy lifting, the grunt work, the inventing, or, more importantly, making someone’s brain-fart “inventions” actually work.
Galtian overlords my ass. Guys like Rmoney are pompous twits.
Don’t take wealth away from those who have worked hard and earned it, even if they get filthy rich. Instead, take it away from their idiot offspring, who have done nothing to deserve it except to be lucky enough to have been the product of their parents fucking!
We need to make the estate tax 100%, to flush out the hereditary aristocracy that has already taken a dangerous hold on this country, before we turn into Britain. Oh the sound of founders of this country, and those who died fighting against hereditary aristocracy, spinning in their graves.
R-Jud
@fuckwit:
Hey. Britain actually has more social mobility than the US at present.
Calouste
@fuckwit:
Turn into Britain? You mean have national single payer health care? Actually funny comedy shows on TV? Without adverts? A working press? Real beer?
Where can we sign up?
Central Planning
@Alison:
The reason is that the President is near.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Central Planning: Like she said,, no good reason.
arguingwithsignposts
If Mitt doesn’t like flying, he can always campaign like John Madden did color commentary – get a bus.
artem1s
@? Martin:
maybe it was just a joke, and it seems like a stupid petty thing to go on about, but my first thought was ‘do we really want this guy and his cronies making decisions on deregulating anything to do with public safety?’
Augie
So now we’re attacking James Fallows! James Fallows! Probably one of the three best journalists in the entire country (along with Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersh). Holy FSM people, get a fucking grip.
henrythefifth
I love how Fallows creates his own narrative by admitting he doesn’t know, but has “heard” that Romney may not like flying much (and even then, he has no idea the degree to which Mitt may not like it), then he goes on to explain how Mitt simply MUST fly. Huzzah, buses are for the huddled masses!
henrythefifth
@Augie: Just because he’s otherwise generally pretty great, doesn’t mean this particular paragraph is not pretty stupid.
TK-421
John Madden figured out how to *not* fly for his entire broadcasting career and pretty much his entire coaching career. The point is that if you don’t like flying, there are options, especially if you have a ton of money.
Ethan
I’m not sure whether what Fallows said is elitist coddling, I don’t really think it is, certainly not to an idiotic degree. However, at the point where you seem to be implying that choosing not to take plane flights is just as low-burden as choosing not to ride horses, you’re being an idiot. If this was Joe Biden then you’d be treating it as an endearing quirk. Just because Romney’s awful, it doesn’t mean everything about him is awful, or that he can’t be treated unfairly.
pseudonymous in nc
@fuckwit:
Uh, Downton Abbey is a) set in the past; b) fiction. And even if you want to head in that direction, the point made about the landed aristocracy is that their primary social value was as employers to the local community; an upper-class household that does not provide good jobs has no function.
pseudonymous in nc
@TK-421:
Madden wouldn’t have had those options in the NBA, NHL or MLB, regardless of how much money he had. So no, abject fear of flying is not necessarily something you can offset and do your job.
The Swiss Army Knife of Visual Effects
Romney was not trying to make a joke, for fuck’s sake. “Ha, ha, my wife almost burned to death on a plane less than 24 hours ago. The plane filled with smoke and she couldn’t breathe! Funny, huh?”
Seriously, folks, what joke? Where’s the joke here? He’s just being stupid.