Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Wait, THIS Wasn't Yesterday's Big "Gaffe"? Romney Promises to "Help the American People" By Firing More of Those Apparently Un-Helpful, Un-American Public Teachers, Fire Fighters, and Police



Transcript of the Romney statement in question via ThinkProgress:
Romney said of Obama, “he wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Set aside how annoyed you might be by the hairball of Wisconsin spin he's coughing up there, Romney is declaring that it doesn't matter that hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off from public-sector jobs (when this is palpably central to the overall unemployment crisis as a matter of fact). But notice that Romney is also declaring fire fighters, and police [he calls laughingly incorrectly them firemen and policemen because he was programmed in the fifties apparently, but that's not the key point here] and teachers are "government" and he believes "government" should be "cut back" in principle, presumably even if Americans weren't still struggling with the recession people in his line of financial-fraud brought on us all Romney would want there to be fewer public school teachers and fire fighters and police treading on the liberty of Americans by teaching them stuff and putting out fires and protecting them from criminals. Indeed, not only does Romney seem to suggest these workers are not part of the economic picture of our present distress (in which he is idiotically wrong) and suggest that he despises the idea of government actually providing useful services (in which he demonstrates he is possibly ill-suited to run a government, though that is the job he has assiduously been seeking for over a decade), but he even suggests that teachers, fire fighters, and police aren't themselves among the American people and that the American people are not helped by teachers, fire fighters, and police, which are really rather surreal things for a person to say. It is interesting that this Romney quote is not being treated as a "gaffe" in the media, but Obama's off-the-cuff statement that the "private sector is doing fine" as compared to precisely the public-sector job losses Romney is dismissing along with the rest of the Republican party which refuses to address this crisis despite the President and Congressional Democrats struggling to do so. Obama had just delivered a long detailed speech elaborating the ways in which he knew the private sector was far from "fine" -- it was plain to the meanest intelligence attenting his speech that his "gaffe" was indicating the far greater and actually more easily addressable problem of public-sector job-loss. This was obvious, this is true, this is urgent, and Romney's comment is a symptom of the very problem at hand. Also, too, it isn't really that surprising to hear Romney repeating such sentiments. Remember his ardent confession, after all: "I like being able to fire people who provide me with services."

No comments: