Freeloaders are made of taxpayers!

Suppose you are a contributor to one of the world’s more prominent blogs. And suppose you realize that the compensation that matters to all the unpaid people who produce writing online, is attention. Then how do you allocate the small but nontrivial quota of attention that is yours to dispose of?

If your answer is, “I use it to reward the stupidest and most repulsive people I can find,” then congratulations: You may already be John Holbo!

On the other hand, with my wonderful self-control and all, I can enjoy NOT clicking on those links just there. I guess you could always link to the google cache if you wanted to really be a dick but that just seems silly.

Anyway, your idea for an ad is honestly awesome, and I hope I get to see it on my TV.

No I think he was upset that you actually linked to some scummy wingnut blogs thus giving them pageviews. My first para was responding to the top post, btw.

So, at this stage of the game, which comic book character best represents Romney and his fortunes?

Hardly bizarro. Doesn’t Romney go home to swim in the money vault?

Hardly bizarro. Doesn’t Romney go home to swim in the money vault?

I believe Scrooge McDuck wouldn’t hurt himself doing it.

The most damning statement is: “[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.”

He can’t walk that back by trying to claim he’s sympathetic to all these losers. What will be hard for the Obama campaign is getting elderly whites, the unemployed, disabled etc. to understand that they are part of Romney’s 47%.

I’m not sure about civilized. Same guy wrote this chilling thing.

This does raise the fascinating question of exactly what a US presidential candidate has to say or do before they will be forced from the race? Apparently dissing half the population doesn’t cut the mustard, so I’m guessing committing some kind of crime on national TV is the minimum requirement for Romney to be replaced.

A couple of quick points

1. A while back, there was a big fuss about Romney saying “I don’t care about the poor”, with claims that this was out of context. His in-context quote was far worse.

2 (which I may try to expand upon in a post). This talking point has been around for ages – remember “We are the 53 per cent”, and refuted long ago with the observation that most of the 47 per cent pay payroll and other taxes. The interesting point is that the various rightwing commentators obviously saw the refutation and ignored it. But once Romney used it, they all started by admitting the point. The problem is, I think, the claim is “true enough for rightwing talking point work”, but not true enough to be defended by a Presidential candidate. Romney’s convention joke about climate change had the same kind of problem.

unsung heroes, bad Jim? I thought Paris Hilton had her own album?

#17: ” What will be hard for the Obama campaign is getting elderly whites, the unemployed, disabled etc. to understand that they are part of Romney’s 47%.”

Something tells me Bill Clinton could do that with little effort.

The military do pay income tax on regular pay, if they make enough. The don’t pay tax on housing allowances, special combat pay, and other military benefits.

http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/tax2000/blgross.htm

Haha Mitt, the Obama commercials practically write themselves:

If you’re a U.S. military veteran receiving help from the VA, Mitt Romney does not want your vote.

If you’re a hardworking family who takes tax deductions for your house and your kids, Mitt Romney doesn’t want your vote.

If you’re a retiree whose medical bills are paid for by the Medicare system you paid into your whole life, Mitt Romney doesn’t want your vote.

etc., etc.

So, at this stage of the game, which comic book character best represents Romney and his fortunes?

As Sadly, No have been saying for ages, The Smiler.

I’ve spent the last 15-20 years unpleasantly arguing with centrist/moderate friends and acquaintances , trying to get them to see what the Republican party really stands for – no abortion/no contraception, gutting the welfare state, etc’.

And now it’s as if all the masks are coming off at once – Sandra Fluke, Tod Aikin, Paul Ryan…

Interesting times.

What I find interesting about all of this is that so far, the most damaging line hasn’t gotten much airplay in the mainstream media — the line where he says that the nation can’t afford to have Latinos vote like African Americans. (I’m paraphrasing, but I don’t think I’m misremembering how utterly cringeworthy the statement was.) In other words, only white people know what’s best for the country.

I fear that there are enough independent voters in swing states who genuinely believe that half the country are freeloaders, and hence that Romney can survive that gaffe. I don’t think that there are independent voters in swing states who are willing to buy into such blatant racism that he can survive the “white people know best” gaffe.

Just do a montage of pictures of smiling children – at play, in school, with their families – and nice retirees – in their homes, pictures of their younger, working selves around them – with a brutal ‘FREELOADER’ stamped across each face. And the audio of Romney over it all.

I’m actually not sure if you propose these ads for the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign, which really says everything about the state the Romney campaign is in. Someone needs an Etch-a-Sketch, and quick.

Honestly, I had no idea you post about comic books. I always link over from memorandum, so I thought you just didn’t post very often. Now you’ve totally blown my image of you just sitting, brooding, waiting, until something happens that’s momentous enough to stir your typing fingers.

Just Mitt’s “you didn’t build it” moment. Channel all the defensiveness in reaction to Obama’s foot-in-mouth and watch it boomerg back to attacking Romney. I’m sure all you rapid partisans can see the difference … I can’t. I’d make a youtube video about that, but I’d risk being hauled off by police with media reporters present ;-)

Okay, understudy, I’ll bite….

Obama’s “you didn’t build it” moment involved a single sentence taken out of context. The “moment” doesn’t really work if the sentence is taken in context. Obama never said what he is alleged to have meant, so he hasn’t made any attempt to defend his supposed statement. And it took place at an open event, not a behind-closed-doors fundraiser for the very wealthy.

In contrast, Romney’s “moment” is not less damning in context. Indeed, the context adds more damning moments. And the Romney campaign has responded by insisting that he meant what he said (though he’d prefer to have said it more “elegantly”).

In short: tu quoque fail.

(Incidentally, the go-to “both sides do it” moment this morning is Obama’s “cling” speech from 2008. This is also not really the same thing. But at least you’d make us all work a bit harder to refute the analogy.)

I’m not as gleeful as most about this video because I don’t hink that what Mitt says in private is at all different from what the Rs have been shouting from the rooftops for decades.

For this to hurt him with a voter, that voter would have to understand that Mitt is putting him or her in with that 47% army of moochers. But even the poorest of the working poor pays taxes, and is damn sure more aware of paying taxes than most of us because even a few hundred a year to the tax man pinches more than thousands to most of us. Of course Mitt isn’t talking about me when he condemns the 47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes. He’s talking about all those millions of welfare queens who drive my taxes up, then vote Dem to keep this gravy train running!

The Rs have succeeded for decades in splitting off a huge chunk of working poor white voters with this idea that they pay taxes mainly to support an army of black and brown moochers dependent on government handouts. Lately this has worked especially well with the elderly. Just because, precisely because, this is the one group who really often don’t pay taxes, and actually do tend to live on govt checks, does not mean, at all, that they will see themselves as part of the 47% army of moochers. They think, quite rightly, that having paid into Medicare and SocSec for decades, the payback they are getting now is not at all a handout. But since they have been chatecised by decades of unanswered R propaganda to see any govt check as a handout, many literally can no longer see SocSec or Medicare as govt programs. They just exist. “Govt hands off my Medicare!” screamed that famous Teahadist sign.

Of course Romney didn’t disown these remarks. It’s the other side’s chief strategy, has been for a generation, to win elections by convining half of working class America that the Federal govt’s expenses are about 90% welfare plus foreign aid, that that govt is just a conspiracy of elite liberals to enslave working whites so that blacks and browns, foreign and domestic, don’t have to work for a living. Hell, at first I thought that his campaign had leaked the thing, as part of their recently announced intention to take the gloves off and get more militant. But the more bits they play, the clearer it becomes that if it had been the Rs releasing the thing, they would only have released the bit about the 47%. Still, if not a win for their side, this video is hardly a knockout blow against them. It may jolt you and me with its unaccustomed frankness, but we’re not the intended audience. They’ve ridden this crap to victory before, no law says they can’t do it again.

Glen Tompkins:

I am not sure what the current US Federal budget is spent on. But, I am pretty sure that billions are wasted on things like agricultural subsidies for things like cotton and foreign aid to places like Israel. This may be a small portion of the total budget, but nevertheless it is quite a substantial chunk of money compared to what most people earn. So the feeling that the elites in Congress are fleecing tax payers to pay for their own pet projects does have a kernel of truth.

Nah, I like the build it analogy better, for the same reasons you dismiss it. Obama’s clingers comment was condescending, but in a way that the left says “he said it for their own good” and the right, well, you know what they said.

The built it comment is NOT out of context – Obama resents/opposes/scoffs at sucessful entrepreneurs who think they’ve build it on their own. Do you dispute that this is the context and what he meant? Seemed clear to me. I don’t speak for rightwing attack ads which focus on the “build it” rather than then “on your own”. And for what it is worth, Obama has said he wished he could have been more articulate in saying what he said to mean what he meant, etc. etc. No different that Romney

understudy did you build the roads that your drove on to work today?

I think Glen Tomkins has it exactly right at 49. None of the people voting R think they are part of the 47% that Romney is talking about. Obama may be able to use ads to change that but I am doubtful.

Gel Tomkins @49 ” But since they have been chatecised by decades of unanswered R propaganda to see any govt check as a handout, many literally can no longer see SocSec or Medicare as govt programs. They just exist. “Govt hands off my Medicare!” screamed that famous Teahadist sign.”

Both political parties present SocSec and Medicare as paid for programs similar to having paid insurance premiums. The Democrats specifically do this to protect the programs from Republican cuts. It should be expected that both Liberal and Conservative voters view these programs as something other than Government Welfare. If retirees have already paid for these services, then it is not welfare.

You can not be really be against foreign aid without opposing its largest pay outs which were first to Israel and then to Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel.

Obviously I was unclear. A lot of US voters think that a) aid to Israel isn’t really foreign aid and b) foreign aid makes up a huge part of the budget.

Who supports cotton subsidies other than large agricultural businesses growing cotton

Anyone who believes all that stuff about protecting the family farm.

If retirees have already paid for these services, then it is not welfare.

They haven’t. Those programs don’t work that way. Furthermore they *can’t* work that way — the only way the benefits can be anywhere near the level they are is by cross-subsidy from all the people who pay in for decades and then die in car wrecks at age 64 (e.g.) That’s why privatization is a plot to destroy the system — nobody individually could afford to save enough to support them to 90. People who live to 90 get *way* more than they ever paid in, balanced out by the people who never lived long enough to collect at all.

“It almost seems unnecessary, but Freeloadergate opens the way for attack ads suggesting Romney is gearing up to expand the War On Women into a three-front war against Women, Children and the Elderly.”

You know who else opened up more fronts than he could handle?

You know who else opened up more fronts than he could handle?

“Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the Heir to the Kingdom of Idiot fights a war on twelve fronts.”

The video was shot in Boca Raton.
Calling your town “rat’s mouth” never made much sense to me.
It makes slightly more sense now.
The host of the fundraiser sounds like a real charmer, by the way.

James,

Well, what you say is part of the truth, both parties do take official and fairly (temporally) consistent positions on Medicare and SocSec that are honest representations of the social safety net as social insurance, something the elderly have already paid for. But even here you see that there’s a scam going on. Elders are entitled to Medicare and SocSec because they’ve already paid for them, but you don’t here anyone refer to this situation as an entitlement, not when they’re talking to the elderly to get their votes, because we’ve let “entitlement” become a swear word, like “liberal”. Only welfare moochers get or want “entitlements”. Honest hard-working Americans, such as the elderly I want voting for me, aren’t getting a goddam socialist moocher “entitlement” every month when they cash their SocSec check, or have Medicare pay for their Zocor.

The reason I put in that “temporally” to modify “consistent” is that, while both parties never change in their unwavering support for Medicare and SocSec, because, dammit, the elderly have already paid and deserve to get their just due back, the Rs also maintain, at the same time, an idea that is logically inconsistent with this pious, die-in-a-ditch, support for SocSec and Medicare. These programs undermine self-reliance and encourage a moocher culture, dammit, and have to go lest we continue the slide into Socialism!

There really isn’t anything new or unexpected or at all secret doctrine about what Romney says to these donors. It’s all very old stuff that they’ve been shouting from the rooftops for 40 years. It’s just that we are getting to crunch time on the cognitive dissonance, in that the zOMG SOCIALIST MOOCHERS line is passing from pure theater and mere rhetoric to actual programs they actually tell us they actually plan to implement.

To me, the only revelation I take from the video is that they are sharing the zOMG SOCIALIST MOOCHERS rhetoric with their $50,000 a plate crowd. They say this to the sweating masses and we can just pass it off as the same crap they’ve been selling to this crowd since imaginary welfare queens were first sighted driving their imaginary Cadillacs to convoy Reagan into the WH. But if they’re talking this stuff to people whom you would think know better, folks who are their real constituency, what that tells me is that this time they actually plan to implement. That, or there’s at least one respect in which the classes have levelled in America even as their incomes diverge — the rich are now incontrovertibly at least as easily gulled with fakenomics as the sweating masses. Not that we have to choose between these explanations, and can’t have both.

Mpowell @ 4:43: one of the world’s largest insurance companies was HQ’d in my town. I’m sure they sold plenty of old-age annuities. They were considered remarkably well-managed and stable – right up to the Friday afternoon they went bust.

Cranky

In Wash., D.C. and environs, a panda at the zoo has given birth, a boy at a Va. high school has asked a girl to a dance by dropping a stuffed animal from a helicopter hovering over a football field, and D.C. police are “cautiously” (very cautiously, one might hope) investigating reports that a man was robbed by a six-year-old. (This is all from WaPo’s local news hole. High-minded stuff, don’t you know.) Meanwhile at CT, Holbo is still wasting his time reading The Corner. And wherever he happens to be at the moment, Mitt Romney is still being an idiot. In short: nothing new here, move along.

they do at least attempt to salvage the distressed companies they buy
If by “salvage” you mean force a company into bankruptcy in order to stick the taxpayer with its pension liabilities. True, that would improve its cost structure somewhat.

It’s not the standard line. If it was he wouldn’t hide it. He’s trying to get elected, not write Wall Street Journal editorials.

Mpowell @ 5:38: Or just use the most stable, least likely to default old-age pension system in the Solar System: the Hopkins-Roosevelt plan.

Cranky

Then why is Romney doubling down?

He’s been caught.

“It’s not the standard line. If it was he wouldn’t hide it. He’s trying to get elected, not write Wall Street Journal editorials.”

Romney’s response to the video is that “This is the same message I give to people in public,” but that the remarks were not “elegantly stated.” It doesn’t seem to me like he’s hiding anything.

The Obama campaign already has the advantage. It’s Mitt that needs to win people over. Pointing out that he thinks half of Americans are somehow cheats who can’t take responsibility for themselves is not a political winner.

“As the evidence continues to pile up, I’m not quite sure why more people do not feel compelled to accept the hypothesis that Romney is actively trying to lose the election. Or, in a more sophisticated formulation: it appears as ifthe Romney Campaign and the Republican Party are trying to lose the Presidential election.”

Isn’t it easier to believe that they are just that incompetent?

“We will lawyer up and take this election and recounts all the to the Supremes, is what we’ll do!”

Roberts & Alito:”Sounds like fun.”

1 million tea-partiers with baseball bats:”Sounds like fun.”

Democrats:”Oh well, victims and martyrs again. But at least we are peaceable and play by the rules.”

@89: not when that statement is coupled with active scorn, characterizing that bottom 47 or 50% as people unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, feeling entitled to government support.

If current arrangements produce a “plutocrat bankster’s wet dream,” who is supposed to be pushing the risky & expensive switch to outright fascism?

“[Republicans] weren’t that incompetent in 2000 or 2004 or 2010.”

I probably should stay out of this since I don’t have a vote in US elections. But FWIW, looking from afar, many Democrats don’t seem to appreciate that Gore and Kerry, whatever their other merits, really were not very good at connecting with voters. Obama is the most charismatic campaigner I’ve seen in my lifetime. Maybe JFK was better; back then I was a bit young to judge. Reagan and Clinton were very good, but not that good. Added to that, Obama (like Reagan) has a knack of putting the boot in without looking like a thug. In politics, as in other rough sports, it’s easy to look good if your opponents are hesitant about tackling you. Both Gore and Kerry were a bit lacking in that regard. Funnily enough, Kerry seems to have improved.

No, MPAVictoria, I am aware that there are differences between the two political Parties. I do not think those differences redeem Obama and the Democrats, from the charge the Administration has worked assiduously to advance the interests of a corrupt, plutocratic financial elite, at the expense of the country as a whole. Did you hear Obama calling for the election of Democratic majorities in Congress, during his nomination acceptance speech to a convention of Democrats? Did you hear him calling for cooperation with Republicans in enacting a Republican agenda of cuts to Social Security? Cause he didn’t do the former, but he did do the latter.

The point of having competing political parties and elections is that it should make the political class dependent on the electorate. I don’t think that’s happening, and I think it is pretty obvious that it is not happening.

Marc: “Obama will allow the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire.”

What Obama “will do” isn’t really evidence. What Obama has done would be evidence.

“If someone is dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they are going to have to take what they get,” Eastwood said.

Really folks, sometimes a cockup is just a cockup.

As I have long argued here (in my winningly pompous and grandiose fashion), the Republican Party has entered an historical dead-end:

1) Their economic ideology crashed into reality after 30 years of winging it, but

2) they still have to sell this junk to the true believers who are their only reliable voters.

This combination of circumstances leads to increasing confusion and contradiction in their intellectual contrivances.

Of course, the country is so phenomenally stupid that it might have worked for another go-round.

But, in the intellectual and rhetorical disarray of this slo-mo-implo, another thing has happened. A short-term disaster:

3) The Republicans have managed to nominate for President a cynical opportunist who will say anything to anybody, leaving hundreds of hours of audiotape and videotape, some of it quite damning. His public persona is “cold fish”, his old job sometimes led him to fire workers, leaving them short on healthcare and pensions. And he won’t release enough tax returns to prove he isn’t a crook.

The only other people I know who get America the way Stephen King gets it all seem to be directing movies. I’m thinking of movies like Blue Velvet, At Close Range, Promised Land, ET, maybe, and my personal favorite, Near Dark, (which is probably my favorite because I went to high school in Oklahoma.)

Alone on the prairie, surrounded by adult zombies and their incomprehensible customs and bullying offspring, We discover some indefinable internal magic that drives us from our first day at school right through our adolescence, headlong and heedless of the attempts to discourage us, until the light goes out at last, and we become zombies ourselves. I’m sure there are other versions of this particular romanticism, but King is the most recognizably and truly American one I’m aware of. His pitch is absolutely perfect.

If we’re going for conspiracy theories, can I suggest that this is actually a play by the lunar right to get Romney kicked and Ryan moved up? It might not win them this election but it tells a cautionary tale about selecting “moderates” and sets the scene for a lunar right assault in 2016. Also, isn’t Ryan a much better performer than Romney? I can see him finding a way to smooth it over, using his small town origins (puke) to reassure the 47% he understands them, etc.

Maybe it wasn’t an Obama sympathizer who leaked the video?

chris 09.19.12 at 2:04 am:
‘I guess plutocrat banksters aren’t very objective then, because they’re backing Romney to the hilt with gazillions of their own personal dollars. …’

Rich people’s money is different from poor people’s money in that there is always more of it, at least under current arrangements. Didn’t the state just impart another helping? I lose track of these things.

In any event, I think the r.c. will be comfortable with either candidate, but it does not want trouble, in the sense of organized resistance. As Mr. O can lead even the proggies by the nose, he would be the more desirable master of ceremonies. But if by some chance the folk elect Romney and Ryan, okay, they asked for it, let them have it with both barrels. The switch to outright fascism will be made when and as needed.

The dog whistles are becoming audible now.

Things that have been said by Republicans and not gotten much attention are now getting much more attention than they ever used to.

Since we all know that nearly all drivers think they’re above average, we can hardly exclude the possibility that nearly all Americans think that they are in the 53 per cent of “makers” and not in the 47%.

Sure, but even if this self-conception holds, most Americans who pay attention to this kind of thing also know that freeloaders can’t possibly amount to nearly half the country, and they know by the 47% Romney basically means most Obama voters, so Obama partisans figure he’s talking about them and give off a sentiment of “who you callin’ freeloader, bigshot? I pay my dues.” Even if they, paradoxically, don’t. (Personally seeing a lot of this from college students currently. There does seem to be a nearly universal misconception that paying tax withholdings each pay period counts as paying income tax, even if it’s all refunded to you when you file taxes…)

most Americans who pay attention to this kind of thing

Well, that’s rather the key, isn’t it?

“As long as his supporters don’t feel they are included (and they won’t), active scorn doesn’t hurt.” (Mao Cheng Ji @98)

“…we can hardly exclude the possibility that nearly all Americans think that they are in the 53 per cent of “makers” and not in the 47%. Given this, it may not be such a damaging gaffe after all.” (Chris Bertram @112)

Could be, but “his supporters” were going to vote for him anyway – so to that extent “scorn doesn’t hurt,” at least as long as you assume, somewhat incredibly, that no-one who would take offense to his formulation voted for McCain – and as Romney himself said, this is a calculation about swing voters. For this not to hurt Romney with them, they’d all have to not only be generally/historically willing to swing their vote, but unoffended by Romney’s polarizing dismissal of a huge segment of the country – they have to buy into the Republican narrative of resentment so completely that their only concern is that he wasn’t talking about them, personally. I don’t think the kind of person who’s sometimes willing to swing Democrat, particularly for a black guy (remember per hypothesis these are Obama ’08 voters he’s trying to switch), is going to fall for that. Certainly not in large enough numbers to actually help Romney. The logic requires swing voters – swing voters who went for Obama in ’08 – who think like Tea Partiers. It requires the corporate-subsidized us vs. them narrative to actually be true. So I’m not too worried about it. Naively optimistic of me, perhaps, but I do still believe in America, that is I still believe many Americans possess, even if weakly, the virtues that permit one to describe such divisiveness as un-American. Besides, the reason it was said in secret, the reason the leak is a problem, is that even if it were true otherwise, Romney’s calculation is the kind of thing that only works if the people it’s about don’t catch wind of it.

The bit about 19% thinking they are the 1% is very interesting, if true, because it suggests that it’s possible, indeed routine, to be a high earner but also innumerate, economically ignorant, and blind to the big picture. As I’ve said before I think it’s an important bit of Republican strategy to make the upper middle class (Wikipedia says top quintile starts around $92K) imagine that they share the interests of the wealthy. They’ll stupidly vote to keep paying more than the plutocrats do, in the guise of lowering their rates relative to the next tax bracket down (never mind that the truly rich have scarcely any income of the type to which those brackets apply – if you don’t know that barely six digits doesn’t make you 1%, you probably know next to nothing about the tax code either); keeping the upper middle-class in a high tax bracket does triple duty of flattering their egos, priming them for resentment and – important but not much discussed – depriving them of funds that they might otherwise have used to compete for positions in the true upper class.

Umm, this is only sort of on topic, but just in case anyone was wondering about the Teh Absolute Crazy (from same fundraiser):

Audience member: How are you going to win if 54 percent of the voters think China’s economy is bigger than ours? Or if it costs 4 cents to make a penny and we keep making pennies? Canada got it right a month ago. Why isn’t someone saying, “Stop making pennies, round it to the nearest nickel?” You know, that’s an easy thing, compared to Iran. I want to see you take the gloves off and talk to people that actually read the paper and read the book and care about knowing the facts and acknowledges power. As opposed to people who are swayed by, you know, what sounds good at the moment. If you turned it into like, “Eat what you kill,” it’d be a landslide. In my humble opinion.

from Kevin Drum

The last two sentences are pretty priceless.

Why isn’t someone saying, “Stop making pennies, round it to the nearest nickel?”

What’s crazy about that? – the persistence of the penny is infuriating. Any candidate who ran on a get-rid-of-the-penny platform would at least get my respectful attention.

Not so sure about “Eat what you kill.” But it is a bit reminiscent of Horace Greeley’s 1872 presidential slogan, which I humbly suggest would be a perfect fit for the Romney campaign: “Root, Hog, or Die!”

Having now read almost all of the comments, and noting the point that several people have made: viz., that lots and lots of people who fall into the 47% percent in question and are already inclined to vote for Romney don’t and won’t realize that they’re actually part of the 47%; moreover that the “47%” rhetoric has been a standard part of Rep rhetoric for a while, etc., this Jon Chait piece is fairly relevant I think. (Snapshot: the video confirms voters suspicions of Romney as a sneering plutocrat all too well. This is a problem for Romney.)

@JW Mason: Thanks!