Ann Romney's Cowpoop. The Republicans have created an absolutely PHONY controversy about the remark by a Democrat, Hillary Rosen, that Mitt Romney's wife "never worked a day in her life". The Republicans have focused on that short-form statement, without addressing Rosen's longer-form attack, that Ann Romney "never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing, in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future." Nothing in Rosen's long-form accusation is false, dishonest, or misleading in the SLITEST.
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"Work" means, in general use, "for money". Everyone understands that, tho Ms. Rosen's statement would have been clearer, and UNASSAILABLE, if it had been "never worked in the paid economy a day in her life".
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The Federal Government does not recognize staying at home to take care of children as a legitimate activity for POOR women who ask for Government assistance.

As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, if you're poor, deciding to stay at home and rear your children is not an option. Thanks to welfare reform, recipients of federal benefits must prove to a caseworker that they have performed, over the course of a week, a certain number of hours of "work activity."

So Republicans are absolutely falsifying what Ms. Rosen said, to suggest that there is an economic, moral, and legal equivalence between staying at home to raise children and "working". NO, there is not.
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Women who raise children as their sole devotion, but are not rich, are NOT regarded as making a fully valid choice — and Ann Romney shamelessly used the word "choice" repeatedly, as tho she and her husband and the Republican Party are pro-"choice". What a bunch of shameless, but hopelessly clueless and clumsy, con artists they are. Republicans actually portray stay-at-home mothers, if their husbands (if any) cannot support the children without so much as one red cent of public (taxpayer) assistance, as CRIMINALS, STEALING from "decent people" to support their 'parasitic' children. "If you can't afford to take care of your own children, from your own resources, don't have children" is the uniform, uncompromising, unrelenting propaganda of the Republican Radical Right.
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So we have this interesting notion: the rich are entitled to reproduce; the poor are NOT entitled to reproduce. Of course, you never hear it put that blatantly, but that is, of course, what the Radical Right is saying.
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Implicit in that stance is the assertion that the poor are genetically inferior, and their progeny will never amount to anything more than a drain upon society. The rich, of course, always produce progeny worthy of a place on this overcrowded planet, and no one should ever question the fitness — be it intellectual, physical, moral, or any other kind of fitness to exist on a grotesquely overcrowded planet — of the rich.
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Mitt and Ann Romney had 5 children (all sons; how lucky for Mitt, so he needn't worry about unwanted pregnancies among dauters) and have at present some 15 grandchildren. All this at a time when planet Earth was becoming profoundly overcrowded. But Republicans believe they have the right to litter the Earth with as many children as they can possibly produce. Sterilize them all.
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Did Mitt and Ann Romney raise their children with NO help from nannies, maids, or other servants? That is INCONCEIVABLE, no matter what they might say. Inconceivable. Obscenely rich people do NOT do all their own housework, childcare, cleaning, etc. If they say they do or did, you need to DISBELIEVE. Even people of modest means in this country in the 1950s hired occasional help. Whether the Romneys called their help "maids", "nannies", "babysitters", "housekeepers", "chauffeurs", "drivers", "personal assistants", or anything else, only an idiot would believe that a family whose wealth was in the hundreds of millions of dollars did all their own housework, childcare, etc. Only an IDIOT. If I had five sons, but millions of dollars, you can bet YOUR bottom dollar that I would hire help, if not with the boys, then with the cleaning or laundry or cooking or SOMETHING. Especially would that be the case if I had, as is now claimed for Ann Romney, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS and CANCER. The idea that she did all the work in a household of 7 people while sick with multiple sclerosis and cancer is ABSURD. What kind of idiot believes any such thing? How STUPID do the Romneys think we are? PLENTY stupid, it would seem.
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Ann Romney never "worked" (for money) a day in her life. That is absolutely true.
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Worse, her husband, Mitt Romney, hasn't worked a day in the past TEN YEARS, since he was 55 years old and perfectly healthy. By contrast, I retired, on niggardly Social Security, at age 62, because I had serious trouble walking and, especially, negotiating stairs, after three knee surgeries. I worked seven years longer than Mitt Romney, despite knee problems, but he pretends to have been a hardworking model citizen all life long. What a bunch of bullshit.
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The Romneys PRETEND to be hard-working, ordinary Joes (and Josephines), who have suffered the very same worries about paying the rent, or mortgage, meeting their bills, putting food on the table, etc. How stupid do they think we are? In a revolution by the poor, the Romneys would ALL BE KILLED as vile, worthless PARASITES upon society.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:51 AM