Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Whoops. Romney dropped the curtain and let us see what he's really about when he was talking to a group of his fellow fatcats at a private fundraiser. By now everyone knows about The Videos in which Romney derided all of us out here in the world of government-tit-suckers who are "victims" dependent on government handouts, blah blah blah.

The magic figure is 47%. This is, not merely by coincidence, the same figure from the Faux "News" meme that 47% of Americans don't pay income tax. They've been harping on that for several years now, completely ignoring the fact that most of the people who pay no income tax also have no income... Talking Head/Spewing Mouth/Professional Asshole Steve Douchbag even went so far as to argue that those who don't pay income tax shouldn't get to vote!

So here I am, an elderly shutin on a fixed income, eking out a drab existence on the dole -- government "handouts" in the form of Social Security and Medicare, my VA Disability pension and a state government retirement pension -- so I guess that I'm in that 47%, too. Pretty much ALL of my income is from "the gubmint". And all of those income sources are apparently "entitlements" that I didn't earn and that I don't deserve and that I'm foolishly squandering on my riotous lifestyle.

Aside from the fact that I do have to pay income tax every year (hey, what's up with that?), I'm smack dab in the middle of that demographic that Romney derides. Jesus, I feel like such a victim... Especially since Romney says, "my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." [emphasis added]

Well, damn. I guess that's what I get for not being a member of the Lucky Sperm Club and instead choosing to be born into a family of "those people". You know, people who were not born into wealth, who had to actually work for a living, who had to go into the military to win WWII (and whose sons had to settle for getting sent to Vietnam as soldiers and not to France as "missionaries"), who were, it turned out, against all odds, exactly the kind of hard-working people who built the economic juggernaut that was the 1950s -- back in the day when the highest marginal tax rate was a staggering 91% on those "job creators" who still managed to somehow limp along and even make money and create jobs for the rest of us.

Yeah, damn it to hell. Maybe next time I ought to make better choices, huh? Take a little more "personal responsibility" in my choice of parents?