Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Annoying Campaign Coverage

Mitt Romney apparently addressed a heckler recently. I kind of like to see candidates do that. Get off the stump speech and deal with the extremely unhappy electorate. It touched on corporate personhood. Here's a rough estimate of the exchange:

Romney - ...if we are able to balance our budget, we have to make sure that the promises we make for Social Security and Medicare are promises we can keep. There are a couple ways to do that: one way is to raise taxes on people.

Heckler - Corporations!!

Romney - Corporations are people, my friend.

Crowd - No they are not.

Romney -Of course they are. Everything that corporations earn ultimately goes to people.

Heckler - Bwahahaha!!

Romney - Where do you think it goes?

Heckler - Their back pockets!!

Romney - Who's pockets? Human beings, my friend.

I might agree that corporations should be taxed more. I might agree that giving corporations the legal status of persons has been very bad for our country. But in the sense that Romney intending his terms here he's right. If you do tax corporations more ultimately you're taking more money from people. Mostly from rich people, but people nonetheless. Romney is probably fine with the Citizens United ruling. But he's really not discussing that here. That's kind of separate.

Well, for Rachel Maddow this is now a sound bite. And this just goes to show how bad a candidate he is. This is proof that he's terrible with people. Maddow shows several other instances that reveal how bad Romney is with people. She showed a clip where he's getting his picture taken with a bunch of ladies and somebody I think grabs his butt and he jumps. Is it wrong to be ticklish? I don't get it. Then he made a bad joke one time. Then he apparently pressed into someone's legs while reaching out for a handshake and this made someone uncomfortable. I'm no fan of Romney but this kind of coverage is really annoying. There's plenty to criticize about Romney and instead the problem is that he said a truthful thing in an inelegant way and he's ticklish. It's just silliness.

Maddow seems OK to me normally but this is nonsense.

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