Uh, Mitt, You Are Not a "Common Person"

One of the funniest aspects of the sham reality teevee show that has been the 2012 presidential campaign is watching Wall Street oligarch Willard Romney try to pretend he just an average Joe. His first problem is that going by his middle name, "Mitt," instead of his given first name still makes him sound like he was born with a silver spoon stuck up his ass. Willard Mitt's latest trick is to try and convince the voters that he spent time living in austerity while doing his Mormon missionary work as a young man. Here is Talking Points Memo with the details:

Mitt Romney has been trying to relate to voters by letting them know he’s more than a rich businessman who makes $10,000 bets. Over the past week, Romney has been discussing his time as a missionary for the Church of Latter-day Saints in France in the late 1960s. He describes living an austere life on a limited budget, rooming in a series of apartments without proper toilets or luxury items like refrigerators. “I lived in a way that people of lower middle income in France lived,” Romney said. But Romney may have stretched the truth a bit.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph decided to check into Romney’s account of his time and France. They found that, for about 8 months out of his 30-month stay in France, Romney lived in a mansion in Paris, living a comfortable, upper-class lifestyle. The building, someone familiar with it said, could be described as a “palace”:

It featured stained glass windows, chandeliers, and an extensive art collection. It was staffed by two servants - a Spanish chef and a houseboy…The building, on Rue de Lota, was bought by the Mormons in 1952, having been seized by the Nazis during the Second World War. The Church sold it again in the 1970s, and it was until recently the embassy of the United Arab Emirates. It is currently worth as much as $12 million.

Romney wasn’t thinking about his housing in Paris when he told supporters, “I don’t recall any of them having a refrigerator. We shopped before every meal.” The head of the mission at the time, Duane Anderson, told the Telegraph that the house not only had refrigeration, but a chef who cooked for Romney and the other missionaries five days a week. Romney also made comments that most of the places he lived didn’t have a bathtub or shower, but the Telegraph discovered that this was at least unlikely. If that were the case, it would be an outlier, one Mormon who met Romney in Bordeaux told the paper.

You know, I actually don't give a shit how luxurious the Paris manor Romney stayed in during his missionary work might have been. In fact, it could have been a pig sty. Doesn't matter. What matters is that he was a rich little fuck who could call his daddy and go home anytime he wanted. Real poor and working class people don't have that option.

In other words, Mitt, as William Shatner could have told you, you'll never live like common people, you'll never do whatever common people do. You'll never fail like common people, you'll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw because there's nothing else to do: