Eideard

During a private fundraiser earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a small group of wealthy contributors what he truly thinks of all the voters who support President Barack Obama. He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don’t assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them. Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: [M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives…

Here is Romney expressing his disdain for Americans who back the president…

Romney told the contributors that women are open to supporting me, but that we are having a much harder time with Hispanic voters, and if the Hispanic voting bloc becomes as committed to the Democrats as the African American voting block has in the past, why, we’re in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation…

To assure the donors that he and his campaign knew what they were doing, Romney boasted about the consultants he had retained, emphasizing that several had worked for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the world. I didn’t realize it. These guys in the US—the Karl Rove equivalents—they do races all over the world: in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel. I mean, they work for Bibi Netanyahu in his race. So they do these races and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign.

You can RTFA for more of the disgusting details. Class warfare is alive and well in the party-formerly-known-as-Republican. It’s always been there and it’s becoming more extreme as the party itself becomes more extreme, dedicated exclusively to corporate power and all that has meant historically.

Romney’s flunkies haven’t been able to deny any of this. It is available on video after all. These aren’t audio recordings. They’re publicly available online. In living color. In 50 shades of greenbacks.