Ann Romney at the RNC - Right Turn - The Washington Post

Anyone who buys for a second that Mitt Romney is the culmination of nothing but bootstraps—that any Joe Schmo from a middle class family could have done what Mitt Romney did career-wise so quickly and so easily, without his family money and connections helping him get through school, without his family money and connections helping him land the right jobs—is seriously naive. 

I am just so, so, so tired of a couple of rich people, who have always been rich people, pretending to be not rich people, to try to trick not rich people into thinking that their policies, which are demonstrably not for not rich people, will help them.

When I see how much people on the right seem to struggle with the context of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, it’s not hard to see why. They often don’t understand the context of their own lives and privilege. Can’t figure out that growing up the child of a millionaire, governor, and former presidential candidate means that you are given the sort of opportunities and privileges that absolutely no one else would get…and that when you are the child of people with no money, no education, no lofty titles or careers, you are dealt all sorts of challenges and obstacles that someone like Mitt Romney would never encounter. These people utterly fail to see how their achievements are largely dependent upon circumstance, and how a rich dude growing up and figuring out how to be rich is not the same as a person who grows up in poverty simply figuring out how to survive, much less work themselves into a better life. It is not meritocracy that turns a rich kid like Mitt Romney into a rich man like Mitt Romney. It’s plutocracy.

On a final note, I am sick of Ann trotting our her experiences with MS and breast cancer as examples of how “regular people” she and Mitt are, how much they have “struggled.” It is not that I don’t have sympathy for her for what she has experienced. It’s just that I find the, “Look at my illnesses! See, we’re just like you!” crap to be pretty meaningless when Ann, unlike many people in this country, has health insurance and access to the very best America’s medical community can provide. A poor person who has MS or has battled breast cancer would have a very different story…and very likely, a story with a much less happy ending. The fact that “Obamacare,” which protects people with MS, who have or had cancer, is one of the Big Bads for the Romney campaign, the fact that there is no understanding that Ann Romney’s struggles are not the same as the struggles of a poor person who has MS or breast cancer, infuriates me.

I’m just tired of Republicans trying to erase the differences produced by class in America. The only time you can get a Republican to talk about issues of class is if the topic of race comes up, and then, it’s just to derail the conversation and say the real problem isn’t race but money. 

I’m done. I can’t watch or listen to this bullshit anymore. It is insulting to my intelligence, and everyone else’s, when the Romneys stand up in front of the country and pretend to be regular people with regular concerns who built their fucking bootstraps instead of coasting to wealth on the bootstraps handed to them by their parents. Fuck. That. Noise.

(via robot-heart-politics)