You see, nobody likes freeloaders.
The point is made for the benefit of Mitt Romney.
Of course, he’d likely consider Peters herself a freeloader. I’ve not seen her W-2, but it seems a safe bet that, working less than full time for fast-food wages, she doesn’t pay much if anything in federal income taxes. Romney was heard recently in a secretly-recorded video disparaging the 47 percent of Americans — low-income earners like Peters, Social Security recipients and others — that he says pay no taxes. Last May, speaking before a room full of well-heeled donors in Boca Raton, Fla., who had paid $50,000 a plate for some face time with him, the Republican presidential nominee described those non-taxpayers with contempt as people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims …”
In the video, posted online by the liberal magazine Mother Jones, Romney says it’d be a waste of time pitching his campaign to those moochers: “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Sharkara Peters does not need Mitt Romney’s lectures about personal responsibility.
Nor does George Farmer, 61, who became homeless when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and could no longer drive his truck. Nor does Michelle, an unemployed appliance repair technician trying to raise four girls on $694 a month plus food stamps. Nor do most of the invisible poor, the cashiers and servers, floor moppers and burger flippers whose annual income probably wouldn’t cover maintenance on one of Romney’s car elevators.
Demonizing poor
If the gaffe concretizes the caricature of an out-of-touch rich guy, a cognac-swilling peer of Thurston Howell III, Charles Emerson Winchester and Charles Montgomery Burns, it’s important to remember that Romney is hardly alone in his sentiments. No, he spoke against a backdrop of vitriol against the have-nots in our society. They are called animals by Ann Coulter, takers by Michelle Malkin, accused of laziness by Rush Limbaugh. Fox “News” person Charles Payne laments the “entitlement mentality” under which they fail to even be properly “embarrassed” by their poverty.