Politicians, of course, mean what they say and then, if it doesn't play well, claim that it was taken out of context.
Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”
Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets. ...Paul Krugman, NYT
For most of us, saying what we mean can get us into trouble, even career trouble, but not into national trouble. Inadvertent truth-telling can destroy politicians.
Earlier, Romney had blurped that social safety-net programs "have 'massive overhead,' "and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.” But that's bs, says Krugman -- proven, documented bs.
And of course, Romney is wedded to bs. He is walking, blundering, blathering bs.
U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare? ...Paul Krugman, NYT
Krugman leads us through a steaming pile of Romney statements and ends up with the basic truth about the man, polite and tidy though Romney seems. He's a thoughtless brute -- like many on his side of political reality in America.
You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were. ...Paul Krugman, NYT
Krugman may be wrong -- or overly polite -- on that score. Seems to me that many Americans are now openly proud of being mean and hard-headed. That's because they're talking about the poor and "we all know" that being poor is being "lazy" or "illegal." To admit anything else is to admit one is wrong, and wrong in a very nasty way.
As for Romney, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that, outside of some sort of hold he maintains on religion, he has no moral sense -- no sense of being at home in the real world. That's a common problem on his side of American political life.
