The Dancing Horse Meets the Dog on the Roof

By Dan Hagen

Say, Mormonism isn't one of those religions where they set themselves on fire, is it?

Romney’s self-immolating comments about the contempt he has for half the country merely confirm what we all already know — that Republicans regard all non-billionaire Americans as parasites and trash who deserve nothing. It’s part of the unconscious self-loathing that now afflicts and deranges the party.

Even though Romney apparently believes what he said this time — quite a rarity there — it’s still false. Nurses, teachers and firefighters actually pay a higher tax rate than some billionaires. Republicans never mention the fact that many Americans — including students, the elderly or the unemployed — do not pay income taxes BECAUSE THEY HAVE ALMOST NO INCOME, but that they nevertheless PAY MANY OTHER TAXES. They cough it up out of their meager incomes through payroll, state and sales taxes. The richest Americans are paying FAR less than they were a generation ago, leaving the United States with one of the largest and most obscene income gaps in the entire industrialized world.

Actually, the real irresponsible parasite in the crowd is the guy who sticks taxpayers with the bill for his dancing horse.
As the ever-excellent Charles Pierce put it: "To this moment, I guarantee you, Romney is probably astonished at what all the fuss is about. This is simply the way the world is.
"There is himself, Willard Romney, and his perfect family, and his perfect life, and there is The Help, and The Help gets drunk on the job, and prunes the shrubbery badly, and pockets the silverware, and makes off with the odd can of salmon out of the pantry.

"He is who he is today because his breeding and his genes and his god have arranged him to be through a serious of immutable laws against which only a fool or The Help would presume to argue. He is what his golden life has made him to be, and his golden life was only the bare minimum of that to which god and nature entitled him. To ask him to doubt any of this is to ask him to doubt gravity or the movement of the tides...."

In order to repair their rapidly deteriorating images, I think it might help if Mitt and Ann Romney wrote a nice children’s book together. They could call it “Wee Little Willard and his 101 Grandmas.”

Their second children's book could be, "The Dancing Horse Meets the Dog on the Roof."