The tape that was heard around the world is still circling the global net today. In it Mitt Romney basically calls out half of us as being parasitic moochers who pay no tax and for whom he isn’t concerned with. I’d very much like Romney to walk in my shoes for one month to see just how lazy and entitled I am … Anywho, that’s music to the ears of the trust fund and vulture cap brigades. What might not go over so well is the man in whose home Romney made those remarks:
MotherJones— Leder, who has given nearly $300,000 to Romney and other Republicans this cycle, used part of his fortune to become a co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team and has become a fixture of New York tabloid reports, hobnobbing with rap mogul Russell Simmons and other celebrities. The New York Post dubbed him a “private equity party boy.”
In August 2011, the same tabloid reported on a Hamptons bacchanal at a $500,000-a-night oceanfront mansion rented by Leder, “where guests cavorted nude in the pool and performed sex acts, scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms and men twirled lit torches to a booming techno beat.”
Leder, described in press reports as a divorced father of three, later dismissed such reports as exaggerated in an interview with the New York Times. “I think the portrayal of me as having wild and crazy parties is absolutely incorrect,” he said in January. “I spend a small percentage throwing some parties, attending some parties. I like music. I like to dance. But rather than reporting on how I spend 340 days and nights of my year, the media likes to report on the other 25.”
Mr Leder may have missed the media reporting on vulture capitalism extensively, Google Romney and Bain for example, which is what he does the “other 340 days” of the year. And I for one could care less if he has drug fueled sex shows or orgies or whatever. The 47% figure was taken at the lowest of the Great Recession lows and happens to include senoirs on Social Security and tropps in combat zones. If Romney really beileves that shit he’s buying into an economic mythology as wrong as Todd Akin’s female physiology take. A startling shortcoming in a purported Jedi Knight business man.
But there is a group of voters who might care, and they tend to vote conservative. They also happen to be Freudian grandmasters at pretending away info they don’t like, so it remains to be seen how they react to this. But Romney cannot afford to lose a single percentage point with the Bible thump’n crowd, so this could be the inglorious end of Mittens.
As much as I would love it to be true, Mittens Gone Wild will likely be no more than a blip in the radar. It will quickly be covered up by the GOP and they’ll just crank the volume up to 11 on their “Obama is evil, didn’t you know that?” rhetoric.
Funny, though, that something like this would destroy a sitting president… yet in the race, like as not it’ll just fall into the “liberal propaganda” bin.
My first response to this was, “Well, if Romney himself wasn’t personally at one of these baccanals, then who cares, right? Nobody would ever hold a politician responsible for the behavior of every single one of his supporters — that would be crazy!”
Then I remembered Bill Ayers.
The reactions of my conservative friends on Facebook: “What’s wrong with Mitt telling the truth?”
Sounds like our betters have upgraded from the stodgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut.
Gordon Brown lost an election because he called an ignorant woman (all these eastern europeans, where are they all coming from? She asked) a bigot.
Has it been covered by any major news chanels?
25 crazy parties per year is a lot. We happen to have a fairly large house and so probably once every 1-2 months we host a pretty big party for all of our friends, and I feel like even that is a little extravagant…
“In it Mitt Romney basically calls out half of us as being parasitic moochers who pay no tax and for whom he isn’t concerned with.”
I have to take issue with that last half of that sentence. He did say “I’m not concerned with them”, but to say it the way you did is taking it out of context and changing it’s meaning. He was talking about getting their vote, saying he wouldn’t be able to no matter what, so he therefore wasn’t concerned with attempting to.
What he actually said is ignorant and condescending and insulting and plenty damning without rephrasing it in a way that makes it look like he said he isn’t concerned with the well-being of nearly half of American citizens. Now, granted, he may in fact not be concerned with their well-being either, but at least, that’s not what he actually said, so to demonstrate that you’d have to use some other evidence.
Lets not play that game please. It’s not different than the “they didn’t build that” mantra.
I can second this.
In college I lived in a house known for its parties for three years. We threw the majority of the college’s really big parties and that was four really big a year. Maybe up that to 10-12 if we include smaller impromptu parties.
Even college wide I would have been shocked if there were 25 parties that could have counted as “bacchanals” during any given school year. There was certainly a lot of drinking, and 10-15 people getting together and drinking might qualify as a party, but it’s not a bacchanal.
On the other hand, 10 kegs, wine, jello shots and a foam machine? well…you get the idea.
Um, with “25 crazy parties per year is a lot.” – is going to the pub 3-4 days a week a lot?
Either way I’m looking forward to getting Mitt’s response on this, what can he say?
Are you drinking “a beer” or a number of beers?
If you’re going out and getting drunk 3-4 nights a week, you probably qualify as an alcoholic in the strictest sense. (Strict measures use absolute consumption, more realistic measures IMO consider whether drinking has impacted your life in any significant way).
On the other hand, going to a pub and having a beer at happy hour doesn’t mean anything.