Mitt Romney Thinks Half of the Country Can Sod Off

What you currently hear right now is the last nail being directly hammered in the coffin of Mitt Romney quest to unseat Barack Obama for President of the United States.

During a private fundraiser earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a small group of wealthy contributors what he truly thinks of all the voters who support President Barack Obama. He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them. Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:

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…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: "[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."

Yes, you really did read and hear that right: Mitt Romney thinks that half the country that supports President Obama are "dependent upon government, who believe the are victims, believe they are entitled to health care," and that if he's elected, he's not going to give a toss about half of the population that prefer Obama over him and his policies.

Now, faced with his own words, Mitt could have taken time to craft a deeply-felt apology and that his comments were wrong and that he would be a president for all Americans, even the ones that disagrees with his policies. But, as we have learned over the last 24 hours, a statement of this gravitas would require a deep recognition of his comments: how insulting they were and the depths of contempt said statement projected. Or he could have blamed the media for taking an entire statement out of context, the usual route to take when a candidate is faced with an oncoming 2-3 days of negative press in the news cycle. Any one of the solution outlined would have been a vast, vast improvement over the press conference Romney gave hours after the video leaked, in which be basically admitted that he wasn't sorry in the slightest for his reprehensible comments, or for the video capturing every thing he uttered in that private fundraising dinner! It was the equivalent of Chris Brown's infuriating and arrogant single "Deuces", in which Brown says bad things about a girl, then spends the rest of the song telling the ungrateful bitch to take a hike.There was no sense of remorse over his comments, or even the fact the tape was released.

Before the tape, I thought of Mitt Romney as a human chameleon: someone who changes frequently to adapt to his political surroundings and a businessman who cared more about how to keep his friends in the black than about middle and low-income Americans. Afterward, I think he's a spoiled, selfish son of privilege; a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth who only knows his lifestyle of luxury and doesn't really understand, much less care about the plight of ordinary people: the college student taking out student loans (i'm about to head into that process myself very soon) in order to pay for tuition, classes, books and housing among other things, the single mother working two jobs in order to provide for her baby girl, etc. To Mitt, they can go fuck themselves, plus, they're jut lazy mouth-breeders who expect the federal government to bail them out at the drop of a hat, and it's because of this "Let them eat cake," attitude that has the pundits from Bloomberg News to Politico all-but saying that this may have cost him the election.

I'm not saying he's an asshole, or that he's a cruddy human being. I'm sure he's a likable, business-savy person and that he's earned his vast sum of wealth though his venture at Bain Capital. He just doesn't have any business running for President of the United States.