We’ve heard a lot in recent days from assorted manosphere dudes about how the “slut vote” – and the endless hunger of our nation’s “sluts” for free contraception – helped to bring about a humiliating end to Romney’s presidential hopes. The sluts went for Obama, we heard, because he promised them (and women in general) what they supposedly want most: “free stuff without ever having to work.”
Minus the word “slut,” this was the basic argument we’ve heard over the past week from a lot of right-wingers as well, including such big names as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who’ve been loudly complaining that Obama won over women – and minorities – by promising to give them “stuff.”
Well, today, a new voice joined this chorus: Mitt Romney himself. In a conference call today with some of his big donors – no doubt a fairly dispirited bunch – Romney offered this explanation for his defeat:
The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people. … In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.
Never mind, as the Los Angeles Times points out, that Romney lost in some key states that have a minimal minority population, or that Romney’s promised tax cuts could be considered gigantic gifts to the rich.
While Romney talked less about gender than he did about race and enthnicity, he did single out one group that he said Obama had been especially generous to: young women. And you all know the easiest way to bribe a young female voter. As Romney put it:
Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women.
Apparently the government has been shipping out birth control pills along with those Obama Phones.
Ah yes, but free birth control lulls the men into a sense of false security, they assume the deceitful wimminz is on the pill … 😉
@princessbonbon
It’s a bizarre upside down world on that side of the pond. Perhaps you folks should give them what they want and let Texas secede or something. Maybe the only way to show them how reality works is to let them try out their fantasy in a sandbox that minimises the collateral damage.
@ eline
Many of those of us on the coasts would be happy to do that except for the fact that there are good people who live in, for example, Texas, who really don’t deserve to have to deal with that kind of fallout. I know people in Texas – I’d rather not have them die because their tinpot government seceded and then decided to make life-saving medical treatments illegal. And you know that if they did secede it would be women and minorities who would suffer the most.
@CassandraSays
We take all the people who want their little fantasy and put them on Reddit Island. I give the men a week, the women about ten hours if I’m being generous.
Before the election, the Bill O’Reilly and Limbaugh types joined in when Romney’s 47% comments came out; after the election, the O’Reilly and Limbaugh types came out with this line, and now Romney is joining in.
It’s the Great (Republican) Circlejerk of Life.
Why are people so afraid of raising taxes? I mean, it’s not like they’re not handing out thousands of dollars for their insurance anyway? Okay, I get it, if you had a national health care, then those other people would get health care too, which for some reason would be the worst thing possible.
That picture made me laugh so much. Then I got bored at work and made this.
@CassandraSays
Course not literally Texas with everyone unwilling along. But it would be an interesting social experiment to see what the willing reps could do with their policies. Consenting people only. Kids would be a problem as they aren’t consenting but in an ideal hypothetical experiment they should be included to really show the effect of unregulated homeschooling etc. It would be such a huge ethical problem whether that state would be autonomous about its kids or not that i don’t want to get to that in my thought experiment (though my personal answer as a “socialist” European might be obvious, were this a real thing).
Anyway, it would be interesting. A bit like the Reddit Island mentioned. Practical experience says they always fail, but how much does it take to get these people to see it?
@Ice
Yeah, I just don’t get the anger about national health care. It simply benefits everyone, whether you’re paying or receiving more. It’s like the police or the road network. It’s a core building block of a civilised society. That’s something in common with most high HDI countries, whether they lean left or right. It can be part of economically conservative countries policies because employers benefit from healthy employees.
Well, it would seem natural that the two main parties are spesialized in different parts of “bread and circuses”.
Not just HDI, btw, there’s a lot of indexes where the US isn’t as high as they should be according to the GOP, but lag behind a lot. HDI doesn’t show the effect of income gap very well as far as I understand, plus some other factors.
@ eline
See, that’s my problem with this whole thing, same problem I have with the FLDS compounds and similar groups. If a bunch of consenting adults want to go off and form some sort of weird alternate society then why not? But the problem is that those adults then have kids, and the kids don’t get the opportunity to opt out.
If there was a way to confine the experiment to consenting adults only then sure, why not? They’ll end up at the border begging to be allowed back into the functional state that they left in a huff within a few weeks/months anyway.
Has everyone seen that there are “secession” petitions in 33 states? Texas and Louisiana have the highest number of signatures the last time I checked.
This is now officially the biggest, most dramatic tantrum that the world has ever seen.
@CassandraSays
And it looks just like this.
Actually, this is my favourite tantrum of all time. OF ALL TIME. Every time I see it I can’t help but laugh. And these little girls are awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E87tAd9TwHE
OK, I’ll stop derailing the thread with princess hatred now.
Clairedammit, I resent your statement. I am damned near seventy and I have never *not* tried to get those who come after me as good or better than I had, and I’m not alone. What generation do you think staged sit-ins, peace marches, moratoriums? What generation litigated endlessly to overturn unjust laws? What generation gave up their liberty or their native land to avoid serving in an unjust war? And then we had to watch a bunch of snot-brained yuppies vote for Reagan and their stupid children vote for Bush.
Romney lost because he was a shitty candidate. Republicans can’t just lick their wounds and go on. They’re being the exact same assholes they’re complaining against if they bitch about losing their entitlement (the presidency) to other entitlements.
Can’t they lose with some freaking dignity?
Kitteh’s unpaid help: It’s early. Someone pass the coffee pot and the pastries.
If I could upload pictures from my Android, I’d send you one of my red Frizzle rooster, Rupert, who looks curiously like our carousel cock. He lives in the house with the cats and the hunting dog. Today, he and my king tom shared a delicious trashbag, all over my kitchen floor. I will be busy.
@Reymohammed as a proud member of OWS (and Occupy Sandy, now) I both appreciate and romantacize your generation’s actions on behalf of peace and equality. 🙂 I long for the good old days of turning parking lots into parks. 🙂
So much for personal responsibility on Romney’s part. It couldn’t possibly be bad, vague policies and positions that lost him the election, oh no.
Eline:
Just let me pack up the husband, the cats, and our shit, and we’re out.
@eline
But you know, their anger tends to be simple OMG MY MONEY I DESERVE MY MONEY and I simply don’t get it. Private health care COSTS MONEY. Sure, you’re not doing the payment yourself, it’s your employer instead. But essentially, that’s your money, so what’s the whole tantrum about? Does it MATTER whether it goes from your employer to the private health care institution, or from your taxes to the national health care institution. I don’t know whether anyone did some number crunching (pretty sure they did), but I’m certain this is not the amount of money to get your typical US-ian all hot and bothered about. No way national health care will cost 5 times more than private, no way. If that’s the case, then the entirety of Europe should’ve gone bankrupt in 1952 or something. When the whole thing is dissected that way, the only problem these guys have with the whole thing is the fact that some part of their money will actually benefit someone other than solely themselves.
And that kind of narrow minded, self serving take on life is flat out disgusting and pretty much TERRIFYING.
(And then I keep on hearing horror stories from the US down the line of people not divorcing even fairly abusive marriages, because one spouse, usually the one with a chronic illness, depends on the insurance of their abusive spouse. OH MY GOD, I know I’m preaching to the choir, but I just want to cry.
… I think that Ireland thing got to me too much too. 🙁 Every social injustice hurts all over again right now.)
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s been a major break in how politics actually ~work~ in this country since mid-last century.
Prior to the late fifties, society would look at a situation, say, “That’s a problem,” and then the parties would put forward their respective ideas forward for how to address the problem. Then the voters would decide which approach they preferred.
However, since the mid-20th, the conservatives have increasingly resorted to not merely advocating a different solution, but to denying the idea that there’s a problem there at all (racism, sexism, homophobia), and to creating problems where there’s no actual difficulty (see: Sharia Law). By denying the problem, or by talking about non-existent ones, they’ve absolved themselves of responsibility for putting forward solutions that have any relevance to the real world. The non-problems they bloviate about, meanwhile, let them claim ‘success’ anytime they pass a policy–since the dire predictions of what would happen didn’t ever materialize, they claim it was because of their diligence, and not the fact that they were trying to ‘prevent’ the equivalent of penguin flight.
And for awhile, it’s worked; in some areas, it’s still working. But increasingly, they’ve been forced to deny greater and greater swaths of reality in order to maintain their positions; one of the biggest being simply that their views aren’t popular any longer. This, of course, led to the drubbing Nate Silver gave to all the various pundits on the Right who claimed that their own polls were the only ‘unskewed’ ones.
Karl Rove tried to buy this election, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling sluts!
Also, the Affordable Care Act will help small businesses. There are so many people out there that dream of starting their own business and being self employed, but they stay with jobs they hate for the health insurance. With the ACA, more of them will be eligible for Medicaid or be able to buy cheaper insurance from state health insurance exchanges. Sadly, in Missouri, we’ve chosen to not expand Medicaid and not set up exchanges, so most of the ACA’s benefits won’t apply to us unless the federal government steps in and does this for us. Our state is also “nullifying” the mandate that insurance cover birth control.
Oh, and all Texas progressives are welcome up here in MO, but I warn you we’re not much better.
All progressive Americans are welcome to a place on my sofa in the UK as long as you come out and help when we have to fight our government striving to be more like yours. And do your own washing up.