My friend Nathalie Winans posted the above cartoon in Facebook yesterday, created by Mike Luckovich, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
I clicked on “like” and replied, “The only thing missing is a dog carrier tied to the roof of Romney’s car.”
I didn’t expect Nathalie’s other friends to use the opportunity to advance a false equivalency between the Republicans and the Democrats but they did. One wrote:
You know what though? They're all like this, not just Mitt. Yeah, he's scum, but so are all the rest, be they elephant, ass, or what have you.
And another posted:
They're all rich folks, looking to get richer. Which is the American way. But they stretch the laws, with insider trading, taking lobbyist money and anything they can grab along the way. Do you think they want to retire on Social Security like the rest of us? Heck no. The best retirement, the best benefits, and on and on.
I know blanket generalizations are imprecise, and I don’t think of or identify myself as a Democrat anymore (read this post from last summer again). But I nonetheless felt obligated to assert that although Democrats are incompetent wimps, Republicans are greedy, evil pricks and perpetuating the notion that they’re all the same is inaccurate at best.
I continued:
If I can bring your attention back to the cartoon that Nathalie posted, the cartoonist was making the point that Mitt Romney - and by implication the GOP - doesn't care about the plight of the less fortunate. Romney uttered as much himself recently. You can slam all politicians if you feel the need, but there is a marked difference between how conservatives and progressives view poor people. That's the point.
One of my discussion partners then responded with:
Or how they pretend to view the poor. They're two sides to the same coin.
It was at this point that I realized I might not be getting through to these folks.
So I googled, “Does the GOP care about poor people?” instead and within 0.54 seconds I was offered 143,000,000 different results – coincidentally, the same number as the balance in just one of Mitt Romney’s Cayman Island bank accounts – from sources such as the Washington Post, CBS News, the Huffington Post, the Borowitz Report, Politics USA, ABC News, Slate, Raw Story and several other websites and blogs.
I learned that Robotron Romney’s tax plan benefits millionaires to the tune of $150,000 each (and billionaires $500,000 each) while taking money away from the poor. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that the overwhelming majority of the benefits under Robotron’s plan go to the wealthy, and his plan hits households that include kids and make less than $40,000/year the hardest because he’d undo President Obama’s expansion of the child tax credit.
The Democrats may dance with Wall Street as much as the Republicans. Mr. Obama may appear infuriatingly aligned with neocons on some issues. All politicians may get paid too much for doing too little. But it still seems like those who have the least, those forced to sleep in their broken cars, dine in soup kitchens and ride two buses to get to their part-time, minimum wage jobs (if they’re lucky enough to have ‘em) are better off with a Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and Barack Obama in the White House.
Let’s give them that this November – instead of letting Robotron Romney give them the shaft.
We’re all in this together.
P.S. Read Paul Krugman’s essay in the New York Times entitled, “Romney Isn’t Concerned.”
Sources: Political Ruminations, Think Progress, Tax Policy Center, New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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