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Kinsley: Homer Simpson for president
The Randian babble was the first thing I noticed watching Mitt talk. His speeches are littered with it.Ayn Rand, the favorite author of many geeky teenage boys (who generally grow out of it) and Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (who didn't), combines an extreme libertarian capitalist message with a high-Soviet-propaganda literary style. This makes parody fairly easy.
Still, it would be hard to top Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee. His Ayn Rand imitation in remarks at a private fundraiser last May, caught on video and posted on the Web by Mother Jones, is pitch-perfect. Romney observes that 47% of Americans don't pay taxes and yet feel that they are victims, entitled to have all their basic needs housing, food, healthcare supplied by the government. This nicely captures the contempt that Rand had, and that Romney apparently shares, for those who don't make it to the top of the success ladder.
Romney later said that his point was "not elegantly stated," but he's being modest: It was a perfectly elegant summary of the views of a cartoon conservative, which is what Romney took his audience to be full of.
In terms of accuracy, the notion that almost half of all citizens love big government and don't mind higher taxes because they don't pay taxes is both laughably false and truer than Romney would dare admit. False, in that (just for example) this 47% figure is only the income tax. It doesn't include taxes for Social Security and Medicare, which are paid by anyone who makes a dollar in wages but partly disappear on wage incomes over $110,000 and don't apply at all to income on capital (dividends, interest, capital gains, profits from private equity, money stashed on Caribbean islands and so on).
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kinsley-column-romney-47-percent-20120920,0,721710.story
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Kinsley: Homer Simpson for president (Original Post)
bemildred
Sep 2012
OP
grasswire
(50,130 posts)1. "cartoon conservatives" -- I love that.
Nice turn of phrase, Kinsley!
LiberalLovinLug
(14,176 posts)2. even more...
bemildred
(90,061 posts)3. LOL.