Mother Jones, 7 Highlights You Missed From the Romney Video:
- Mocking immigration in the United States: “I’d like to staple a green card to every Ph.D. in the world and say, ‘Come to America, we want you here.’ Instead, we make it hard for people who get educated here or elsewhere to make this their home. Unless, of course, you have no skill or experience, in which case you’re welcome to cross the border and stay here for the rest of your life.”
- Pondering how he’d exploit a pre-election hostage crisis: “…in the Jimmy Carter election, the fact that we have hostages in Iran, I mean, that was all we talked about. And we had the two helicopters crash in the desert, I mean that’s—that was—that was the focus, and so him solving that made all the difference in the world. I’m afraid today if you said, ‘We got Iran to agree to stand down a nuclear weapon,’ they’d go hold on. It’s really a, but…by the way, if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.”
- Falsely claiming that the Fed is buying “three-quarters” of America’s debt: “Yeah, it’s interesting… the former head of Goldman Sachs, John Whitehead, was also the former head of the New York Federal Reserve. And I met with him, and he said as soon as the Fed stops buying all the debt that we’re issuing—which they’ve been doing, the Fed’s buying like three-quarters of the debt that America issues. He said, once that’s over, he said we’re going to have a failed Treasury auction, interest rates are going to have to go up.”
- Predicting easy dividends from his anticipated victory on November 6: “…if we win on November 6th there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see—without actually doing anything—we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”
- Cracking jokes about Latino voters and Elizabeth Warren: “And had [my dad] been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this… [Donor: “Pull an Elizabeth Warren!”]…That’s right I could go out and say—for those who don’t know Elizabeth Warren, she is the woman who’s running for US Senate in Massachusetts who says that she is Cherokee…”
- Making enemies on the late-night talk show circuit: “I’ve done the night, the evening shows. I’ve been on Letterman a couple of times. I’ve been on Leno more than a couple times, and now Letterman hates me because I’ve been on Leno more than him.”
- Joking about media strategy and his reputation as a “rich, rich guy”: “You know that I’m as poor as a church mouse.”
Read the full transcript, and watch the full video.
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