Gov. Romney's delicate sensibilities
I wasn't born this way
More than once, Harry S Truman said some version of, “If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen."
I suggest that the kindest action voters could take is to keep Mitt Romney from even entering.
In his latest simultaneous evidence of hypersensitivity and assumption that he is the center of the universe, Gov. Romney bristled at the implications of President Obama’s statement that he was not born “with a silver spoon” in his mouth, and neither was his wife.
The Silver Spoon Attack
Now, literally, that is true of everyone, but it generally is understood to mean that one was not born into wealth and privilege.
I admit that I like the president. I admit that when Republicans complain that he hasn’t done anything after blocking him at every turn, I see them as the self-centered child who murders his parents and begs for mercy because he is an orphan. Yet, I don’t think that it is my prejudice that colors my thinking that Gov. Romney doth protest too much.
In this most recent perceived outrage, as soon as the president completed his remarks, pundits were describing his comments as an obvious allusion to Romney. You know….
Listen to Governor Romney's response to what "fair and balanced" Fox News analyst Steve Doocy called President Obama's "fiery rhetoric."
Romney Responds to "fiery rhetoric"
And Yo Momma too
Apparently, I am simple minded enough to hear someone utter a statement of fact about himself without wondering whether it is necessarily intended to insult me by contrast. If the president says, “as a black man,” is he doing so only to emphasize and repudiate that Gov. Romney is a white man (to the nth degree)?
No matter how thin-skinned an individual is, I don’t understand how a self-directed statement, “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” can in any honest way be termed “an attack,” (or "fiery rhetoric") except in desperation.
Even odder, to my mind, is that Romney seemed even more pusillanimous by attempting to make it an insult to him and his heritage by claiming that it was an attack on his father,” which I understand as a clever and calculated insult to the president’s heritage by using an indirect allusion to the most grievous insult in the black community (i.e., “talkin’ about my mother”) thus making it both a racist response and a pointed reminder of the frequency of absent fathers in the black community.
Shame on you, Governor. Shame on you.
But what that doubly insulting retort sufficient for the (Sorry, I almost said whey-faced billionaire) man whose wife has complained that they were so poor as students that they had to rely on his inheritance to get through college? Nay.
Gov. Romney extrapolated the silver spoon comment –which, by the way, the Huffington Post reports he has been using since at least 2009, which I believe antedates Mr. Romney’s front-runnerism— to averring that the “president likes to attack his fellow Americans.”
Really?
How does one indicate speechlessness in writing without having readers think he has suffered a stroke?
!
He embellishes his charge with the “The president is really taking aim at anybody he can find these days.”
Again, given my inclination to like, respect and admire the president who I think shows more restraint than any of the Republicans in the race (and yes, Messrs Gingrich and Paul continue to labor under the illusion that they are still in the race for the nomination). Although no one asked him to, he was adamant that he was “certainly not going to apologize for [his] dad and his success....”
"And what rough beast...."
And then he-who-must-grasp-for-straws claims that it is President Obama who is “always looking for a scapegoat.”
“This is not a time for us to be attacking people; we should be attacking problems.” Romney said, while attacking the president. If elected, he said, “I will stop the attack on fellow Americans. I'll stop the attack on people....”
And the country shall be at rest, because never again will a man dare to suggest that he was not born to affluence lest he provoke the ire of the (delusional?) president of the one percent.
But if he can perceive President Obama’s mild assertion about himself as an attack, how many wars will result from perceived rumors of wars throughout the land?
In 1919, W.B. Yeats concluded his poem, “The Second Coming,” with, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
It unsettles me that the line just came unbidden to my thoughts.
