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- Who’s laughing now, motherfucker? Who’s laughing now?
Listen! Can you hear that? Do you hear the roars coming from around the country? If you cock your ear to the wind just so, you can hear the people crying out: “Mitt was right,” they’re saying. “Mitt was right!” There’s an undercurrent of smugness in contemporary Republicans, a belief that if Romney had won the presidency in 2012, America would be a paradisiacal wonderland by now. And that pro-Mitt undercurrent seems to be going mainstream.
Why, no less a foreign policy expert than Ann Romney declared yesterday on Fox News that if we lived in an America headed by a President Romney, ISIS would not be the huge problem that it is. Romney believes her husband “would have tried to arm the moderates in Syria,” which would have curbed the ISIS threat, along with “other things that would have happened that would have made the equation a little bit tilted in our favor.” Do you see the error you have made, America?
And you know what else Romney was right about? According to Nevada Republican congressional candidate Cresent Hardy, that whole 47 percent thing was absolutely correct. ThinkProgress quotes Hardy: “Can I say that without getting in trouble like President, err, Governor Romney? The 47 percent is true. It’s bigger now.” Here’s video of Hardy saying that to a very friendly audience:
In case you’ve forgotten, Romney said that 47 percent of voting Americans are “dependent upon government,” and that they “believe that they are victims.” Hardy thinks this was a visionary statement, and the audience in the video seems to agree with Romney, too. But it’s not just conservatives who agree with Mitt Romney these days. Why, even Bill Clinton seems to be in favor of the corporate tax loopholes that Romney loves so much. Clinton told the New York Times that he disagrees with his fellow Democrats who want to stop the evasionary tactic of tax inversions, the act of buying a small international business in order to dodge taxes at home.
“Like it or not, this inversion, this is their money,” Clinton said. He explained that corporations “feel duty bound to pay the lowest taxes they can pay.” Nobody has ever accused Clinton of being especially hard on business, of course, but this straying from the party line has a different flavor than Clinton’s usual pro-globalism stance. To me, it sounds like a man who’s looking forward to doing some major fundraising on Wall Street for a certain presidential campaign sometime soon.
Listen! Do you hear that? Somewhere, Mitt Romney is laughing.