The Wit and Wisdom of Mitt Romney

              GUENEVERE: What else do the simple folk do 

                                       To help them escape when they're blue?

               ARTHUR:       They sit around and wonder what royal folk would do

                                       And that's what the simple folk do.

                                                                     ---Alan J. Lerner, Camelot

On Yom Kippur eve, I found myself hesitating to post a snarky criticism of Mitt Romney. No doubt, Mitt has a tin ear. Tone deaf and elitist, yes. Too many years as a corporate executive, being yes-ed to death by underlings. But he seems to be a doting husband and father. And whatever else his tax returns may reveal, they do demonstrate one thing: Mitt tithes faithfully and generously.

So what is it about him? It’s the quelque manqué factor—something essential is missing. I find his view of the poor and the struggling appalling, and his detachment chilling. These are our fellow human beings, and there--but for the grace of God—go Mitt, you and I.

Five days later, I've overcome my hesitation.

1.   If Mitt wins, everything will be coming up roses.  Markets will spontaneously right themselves. Elusive capital will magically re-appear, and all will be right with the world. Or maybe not….   

…if we win on November 6th there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back, and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy. If the president gets reelected, I don't know what will happen. I can never predict what the markets will do.

Conclusion:      A. Who knew governing could be so easy?
                           B. Didn't he just contradict himself?

2.   Mitt is a man of the world, with a sophisticated understanding of other countries and their cultures.

…When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You've seen them.

And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, "Gosh, I can't believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in." They said, "No, no, no—this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they'll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we—this is to keep people out." And they said, "Actually, Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they've saved enough money and they don't come back to the factory." And he said, "And so on the weekend after Chinese New Year, there'll be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven't come back and they can come to the factory.”

Conclusion: The man can’t recognize slave labor when he comes face to face with it.

3.   On Ann Romney’s value to the campaign:

We use Ann sparingly right now so that people don't get tired of her.

Conclusion: I wonder if Ann owns a gun.

4.   Mitt inherited nothing. Really?

By the way, but my dad and Ann's dad did quite well in their lives but when they came to the end of their lives and passed along the inheritances to Ann and to me we both decided to give it all away. So I have inherited nothing. Everything Ann and I have we have earned the old fashioned way.

Conclusion: No, he did not inherit nothing. He may not have chosen to keep the money. But he did receive the money. Odds are he decided that it was more advantageous to turn the inheritance into a tax deduction.

5.   On the 47%:

All right, there are 47 percent who are with him [Obama], 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. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Conclusion: Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? And who gave these parasites the right to vote, anyway?

6.   Mitt has the common touch.

I tell you what! $10,000 bet?

Conclusion: Rarely have so few words conveyed so much. That was Mitt challenging Texas Governor Rick Perry to a bet—on camera and before a national audience, no less—on whether he (Mitt) had advocated an individual health coverage mandate while he was governor of Massachusetts. Perry responded like a reasonable adult dealing with a bragging, blustering teenager, “I’m not in the bettin’ business.”

7.   More of that wonderful common touch.

[I don't follow NASCAR] as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.   

Conclusion: I think this is where Mitt bursts into a heartfelt performance of What Do the Simple Folk Do?.

8.   Empathy is everything, and Mitt has it in spades.

     

      I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed. 

Conclusion: That was Mitt joking with an audience of unemployed people in Florida. Can this man read an audience, or what! The audience laughed nervously but politely. They could have lynched him, but they didn't. Now that's what I call charitable.

Wisconsin Death Trip

People turn their heads and quickly look away. Like a newborn baby it just happens ev'ryday.-- Mick Jagger, Paint it Black

Another vicious and senseless shooting, this time in Wisconsin. A crazy man entered a Sikh temple and starting killing people with a semi-automatic weapon. This comes close on the heels of the July 20^th Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre. And the Aurora shooting followed the April 2^nd slaughter of seven people at a college in Oakland, California by a crazed former student. On February 7, a student shot three and injured six more at an Ohio high school before being stopped. Oh, wait—I’ve skipped over the May 20^th shooting in a Seattle café (three dead and two wounded in the café, and one more shot dead while the shooter was on the loose ).

The list goes on and on. We don’t even hear about the smaller massacres anymore. 

In the wake of the Wisconsin murders, one of CNN’s talking heads suggested the Sikh community take this opportunity (yes, the twit really did call that appalling carnage as an opportunity) to educate the world about their faith. The only thing lacking from this breathlessly tasteless comment was the teachable moment metaphor.

And our politicians? Useless. Utterly useless. If Romney or Obama utter one more platitude about tragedy and loss and overcoming sorrow, I’ll throw up. Platitudes are cheap to toss around. Do something!

A friend of mine, Susan, a doctor who spent years in South Africa providing healthcare to women and children, despises the men of South Africa. She sputters with disgust as she describes their  reckless spreading of HIV to the women in their lives. People are dying like flies from HIV, but the culturally accepted norms--polygamy and male promiscuity--are still attuned to the 1800’s. Susan is furious that these men don’t understand that the real world around them has changed, and that they must change their behavior in order to survive. It occurred to me that the South Africans have stalled at a cultural blind spot. The age-old practices are killing them, but people keep on keepin’ on as if it were 1812 instead of 2012. Hello! Is anybody in there?

And doesn't that apply to the United States? Haven't we stalled at a long-standing assumption about guns? I’m sure that wholesale slaughter is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they spoke of bearing arms.

Most of the shooters seem to be mentally disturbed and yet the NRA is still insisting on the untouchable perfection and clarity of the Second Amendment. Having guns for hunting—and even for self defense—is one thing. But making weapons that were clearly intended for battlefields and wars accessible to un-medicated schizophrenics is quite another. The NRA and gun activists would better represent their cause by joining forces with gun control advocates to solve this one, obvious problem: how to keep weapons out of the hands of the clearly dangerous and delusional. Surely this is something we can all agree on. The NRA would be enhancing its own reputation as a responsible organization leading the movement to curb excesses and dangers inherent in its sport. And the gun control lobby would be thrilled to have a working partner in its concerns.  Hello! Is anybody in there?

Bring on the Sugar Daddies

Rick Santorum has Foster Friess. And, as unappealing as Santorum is, he even has a back-up donor in the wings—a Dr. John Templeton—who has already forked over $250,000 to Santorum’s PAC.

What is this man thinking?

Newt Gingrich, as utterly improbable and inexplicable as it is, has a Jewish billionaire underwriting his campaign. Inexplicable doesn’t begin to describe Adelson’s choice. And I say that as a Jew. If Newt continued to repeat Saul Alinksy’s name to the raw-meat chewing mob, I don’t know what I would have done. How could Adelson fund such overt Jew-baiting? Of course, Sheldon Adelson, is smart enough to have his own back-up—a back-up candidate, this is. Adelson has already made overtures to Mitt Romney—when Newt finally does hoist himself on his petard, Adelson will be ready to jump on Mitt’s bandwagon. (Romney doesn’t really need a sugar daddy. He has enough of his own money to burn. But, a wise man never looks a gift horse in the mouth.)

I’m not sure I quite understand why Adelson would back Romney either—a member of the enigmatic Mormon religion. (Aren’t Mormons the faith that posthumously baptized Anne Frank and a host of other Holocaust victims in absentia? They didn’t want the Jews lost to history to be lost to Christ. Their actions are a little tone deaf in modern America’s world of multicultural sensitivity, but well intended, nonetheless.) Adelson must be thinking, what do I care what Romney thinks of the dead? Just as long as he takes care of the living—those living in Israel, that is. Because Romney sure isn’t interested in the poor souls living in the US.

Well, as usual, I’m losing my way. There’s so much ground to cover…. Obama’s campaign has signaled that it is ready to hold its metaphoric nose and open the deposit chute to its own PAC. So now we will be deafened by the ka-chink of money on both sides. Those campaign jets don't fly themselves, ya know.