Mitt Romney: "a genuinely repugnant human being"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For some time now, I've been calling Romney a privileged rich douchebag with a plutocratic sense of entitlement. Actually, I've been calling him many things, but that's pretty much the gist of it, and it's a theme we here at The Reaction have been bringing to our election coverage.

Along the way, I've read a lot about Romney -- a lot of what people have said about Romney, much of it confirming our view. And one of the very best things I've read about him came from Matt Taibbi on Friday at his Rolling Stone blog, a response to Romney's NAACP speech from this past week.

I highly recommend -- in fact cannot recommend highly enough -- that you read the whole piece, but here, in my view, are the best parts:

Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting "free stuff" post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.

*****

Romney doesn't buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It's really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.

Absolutely brilliant. And as accurate a description of Romney you'll ever read. Yes, he's a privileged rich douchebag with a plutocratic sense of entitlement. But it's actually even worse than that. Much worse.