This new Democratic National Committee presents a mash-up that pits two of the various versions of Mitt Romney who have appeared during the campaign over the past year in a debate. It’s RomneyBot, the often lifelike droid persona, versus “The Stench,” the plutocratic Romney who says what he really thinks to other oligarchs in quiet rooms.
Transcript of the ad:
Update: Turns out that Poltiico’s Roger Simon intended his Ryan’s going rogue story to be an Onion-style satire. However, a GOP operative in Iowa — the state where Ryan will launch his presidential bid in three years — did say that Ryan would have to “wash the stench of Romney off of him.” Ryan really was booed at the AARP convention last week, and he really has begun using Romney-esque Powerpoint presentations on the federal budget during campaign events. But everything else in the Politico story was meant to be a joke.
With nothing but bad news coming from the polls in the wake of the release of a secretly recorded video in which Mitt Romney’s asserted that 47 percent of Americans are hopeless, self-victimizing wards of the state for whom, as president, he would bear no responsibility, it now appears that, like the previous teavangelical Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, Romney’s running mate Rep. Paul Ryan is goin’ rogue.
In the New York Times earlier this week, an Iowa Republican operative said, “I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him.”
Now, according to Roger Simon at right-leaning Politico.com, Ryan has begun referring to Mitt Romney as “The Stench”:
[Maria Elena Salinas, one of the Univision anchors who moderated the forums] told BuzzFeed that tickets for each forum were divided between the network, the respective campaigns, and the University of Miami (which hosted the events) — and she said both campaigns initially agreed to keep the audience comprised mostly of students, in keeping with the events’ education theme.
But after exhausting the few conservative groups on campus, the Romney camp realized there weren’t enough sympathetic students to fill the stands on their night — so they told the network and university that if they weren’t given an exemption to the students-only rule, they might have to “reschedule.”
The organizers relented. One Democrat with ties to the Obama campaign noted that Rudy Fernandez, the university official charged with coordinating the forums, is a member of Romney’s Hispanic steering committee…
Romney’s team was allowed to bus in rowdy activists from around southern Florida in order to fill the extra seats at their town hall.
After living through two years of bumbling attempts by a former CEO to run state government like a business, I had a flash of recognition when I heard Mitt Romney’s take on the Israeli/Palestinian problem.
Tea Party Republican and former HCA Columbia Chair Rick Scott, who spent $75 million of his own money on his campaign, took over the Florida governorship confident he would use his business skills to root out waste, slash the state payroll, get rid of regulations that hold back business, and create jobs. One of his first moves was to turn down millions in federal assistance to build a high-speed rail line that would have employed Floridians, taken cars off the eight-lane parking lots that serve as commuter roads, and made the state a leader in the transportation technology of the future.
From there, he rolled out a series of privatization proposals, such as turning over prisons to corporate managers and allowing developers to build golf courses in state parks. Within weeks of taking office, Scott’s approval ratings hit record lows, along with Florida’s employment numbers, which under Scott’s leadership have remained worse than the nation as a whole.
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It has been less than 24 hours since Mother Jones magazine released the video of Mitt Romney disparaging half the electorate as government-dependent freeloaders, and many pundits are already suggesting that Romney may not be able to recover from it, and they may well be right.
But, as Rachel Maddow reported last night, the national media has been aware of the video for weeks and even months. Excerpts were first posted anonymously on YouTube as long ago as May, not long after the fundraiser took place. They were also posted by someone using a couple different YouTube accounts in late August, around the time of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. If the media elite have known about this potentially devastating, game-changing video for three weeks and longer, then it’s a sure bet that both the Romney and Obama campaigns have known about it that long, too.
Mother Jones has obtained secretly recorded audio of Mitt Romney at a fundraiser earlier this year with other 1 percenters in which he describes half the U.S. electorate as government dependents:
MITT ROMNEY: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, 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. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.
He also said, “[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
With his poll numbers sinking, Mitt Romney took desperation action earlier this week by falsely claiming that the U.S. Embassy in Cairo had issued a statement expressing sympathy for protesters who were agitated by a YouTube video allegedly produced by right-wing anti-Islamic activists in the suburbs of Los Angeles that besmirched the Prophet Mohammed.
The embassy issued the statement at 6 a.m., East Coast time, before the protests in Cairo had turned violent. After 10 p.m. in the East Coast, fully 16 hours after the Cairo embassy’s initial statement — during which Team Romney had plenty of time to deliberate and discuss what to do — they issued a statement condemning the embassy for expressing sympathy with “those who waged the attacks,” even though they knew the attacks had not begun when the embassy released its statement.
In a subsequent press availability, Romney deliberately used the word “apology” or variations of it five times to describe the embassy’s statement — which did not include the word “apology” or any variation or sentiment thereof. During the news conference, Romney also made it clear that he held Pres. Obama accountable, not only for the embassy’s “apology,” but for anything and everything anyone who worked for administration said:
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
