“The president’s campaign has put out a campaign that’s talking about me and attacking me. I think it’s just demeaning to the nature of the process, particularly when we face the kinds of challenges we face.” — Mitt Romney, in an interview on CBS News.
Dennis G. at Balloon Juice breaks this down the best:
The shock of it all. You run for office and your opponent talks about you, your ideas and why he thinks you are wrong for the job. Most folks would think that this just comes with the territory when you run for President, but for Mitt it is an outrage. The idea that anybody might question him offends his sense of entitlement.
In Romney’s view, he should be able to say anything he wants. Tell any lie. Mitt can attack Barack Obama as the ‘Great Other’, as an unAmerican usurper of power, as a man who hates the Country, as a man who doesn’t understand American values, as a man who wants to take the money from hard working white folks and give it to lazy brown people, as a man unfit for office, as a man who is incompetent, as a man who is a gangster thug and a thousand other insults and lies that Romney and the Wingnuts use to attack President Obama ALL the time. In Mitt’s view race-baiting is justified if it might help him win. He is fine with using code-talking to call Barack Obama an angry black man that all decent white folks should fear. It is OK for Team Mitt to lie and to promote policies that will destroy the middle class. It is OK for his side to bring all the crazy they want.
What is not OK—what Mitt thinks is out-of-bounds—is for anybody to notice and/or mention any of it.
If you call Mitt out for the ways that his policies will hurt the middle-class: that’s going over the line. If you notice that Mitt made his fortune through tax dodges and the destruction of American Jobs, well that is out-of-bounds. If you point out that Mitt is using memes about welfare and angry black men to appeal to white fear and anxiety, then you’re guilty of hate speech.
Mitt Romney wants to run for President with all aspects about him, his campaign, his record, his plans, his statements and his goals off-limits from any review or discussion.
I think we’ve all seen that Mitt can dish it out — but, wow, can he NOT take it. Not even a little bit. He’s a thin-skinned, whiny, spoiled aristocrat who can’t take criticism (he won’t release more tax returns for that reason!). He’s a guy who is used to telling people to jump and having them respond, “How high?” No one dares look directly at the King!
Dennis G. hits the nail on the head: Mitt’s sense of entitlement is massive — it may extend all the way to Kolob. Hopefully there are more of us who think Romney is not ”entitled” to anything, let alone the White House, just because he wants it. I hope after the election Romney can go spend some quality time with his money in the Caymans or Bermuda.
