Mittens: Here Comes DA VULTURE CAPITALIST!

Is there anything Willard Mitt Romney says that actually originates in his head? The patently ridiculous slogan, "the politics of envy," was plagiarized from an essay with said title, authored by conservative sociologist Paul Hollander in 2002.

The topic is "Anti-Americanism" defined as "a hostile predisposition that may range from distaste and aversion to intense hostility, rooted in conditions and circumstances that are often largely unrelated to the actual qualities or attributes of American society, institutions, values, or foreign policy" that "may culminate in political violence ... the scapegoating impulse followed by envy and ambivalence." Hollander delivers a broadside against the usual suspects on the Left, a way of branding critics of America as unpatriotic, or of "apologizing" for America, itself a treacherous charge leveled at President Obama by Romney, one which has no foundation whatsoever. Interestingly, Hollander argues,

"From the sociological and historical points of view, anti-Americanism may best be understood as a diffuse, ongoing protest against modernity — its major components and unintended consequences. These include secularization, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, mobility (both social and spatial), and the decline of community and social-cultural cohesion."

And yet Hollander is become the intellectual inspiration for the most anti-science, anti-modernity party in more than 100 years? A party that, as noted by Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation Magazine, would take us back to the "Gilded Age" of robber barons, unregulated industry, child labor, no social safety net, and extreme income inequality.

 Rachel made an astute observation regarding Romney's rabid and somewhat puzzling anti-European rhetoric. He took his military deferment by traveling abroad to do 'missionary work' in France, speaks French fluently, and by all accounts enjoyed his time abroad. But Mitt Romney is no Thomas Jefferson. Where Jefferson soaked in French culture and celebrated it to the end of his days as one of the great experiences of his life, Mitt Romney is seemingly ashamed of his passage through France and seems hell-bent on concealing any positive experience abroad with growing anti-Europe hostility. Such is the concession he has made to be the standard-bearer of a xenophobic isolationist party whose mainstream fringe still believes our President is a foreigner.

Katrina lifted the "vulture capitalist" scab off Mitt Romney in her column, excerpted below:

"But it is on economic policy where Romney’s extremism is most apparent — the extremism of the 1 percent, reflecting the zealotry of a former corporate raider at Bain Capital who made his fortune preying on U.S. companies.

Romney calls for returning to the same conservative policies — deregulation, financialization, corporate trade — that generated Gilded Age inequality and a declining middle class even before driving the economy over a cliff. He supports repealing Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform act. He favored the Republican effort to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board by blocking Obama’s nominations to those agencies. He wants a weaker Environmental Protection Agency, calling regulation “the invisible boot of the state.” Not surprisingly, he agrees with Rick Perry that anti-union “right-to-work legislation makes a lot of sense for New Hampshire and for the nation.”"

And Rachel mocked Mitt's strained appropriated metaphor:

Here Ya Go, Mittens ... For Yer Lil' BOOTIES: