Marie Antoinette "Mitt" Romney has been the subject of quite a tempest today, with his sneering that the 47% of lazy freeloaders who pay no taxes will always vote for Democrats. This has been roundly and mockingly criticized as not only obnoxious, but factually nonsensical. After all, those untaxed dependents include conservative seniors on Social Security, trailer park wingnuts, etc.
You think Romney doesn't know that?
Mitt Romney is a compulsive liar. He lies all the time, to everyone, about everything. It's his most fundamental character flaw, over and above his arrogance, his lack of empathy, his greed, and all the other things that make him him such a basically awful human being. His political character is to tell whomever he's speaking to at the time whatever it is he thinks they want to hear.
A private fundraising event, in the home of another robber baron. Men and women willing to pay thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, for the privilege of enjoying Mitt Romney's attention without having to suffer the presence of the unwashed rabble. These aren't people to be sated with softcore hints of birtherism, or mere promises of tax cuts giving us a deficit-free economic paradise, or fear of brown people from Mexico and the Middle East. No, they want something else.
They want to be told that they deserve what they have.
The super-wealthy have to be looking over their shoulders, smothering their souls, constantly at war with their own consciences. Deep down, they fear - they KNOW - that they're just grifters, rich on what they steal from those who work for a living (or what they inherited from some grifter daddy or grandaddy). They know they should be ashamed. So they need someone to salve their conscience, someone to tell them that greed is good, someone to say that the poor deserve to be poor - money follows morality. If they can believe the poor are just lazy leeches, they can believe their wealth comes from hard work and morality. And at that point, tax cuts and other punishments for the poor become not just a matter of fairness to the "job creators", but a matter of morality. Government aid to the poor leads to "a discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class", as Henry Potter put it in It's a Wonderful Life.
And Mitt Romney, self-serving liar that he is, told them what they wanted to hear, in a way that forwarded his own interests (getting elected). He told them the poor were all Democrats, which is hardly true. And he told them he, the anointed leader of the Republicans, would protect them from the Democrat-voting rabble.
Liar. But, unlike most of the rest of us, the rich Republicans are stupid enough to believe it.