Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 01:44 pm
In last night’s episode “Democalypse 2012 – Do We Look Stupid? Don’t Answer That Edition – Grammatical Gaffes” Jon Stewart slayed Mitt Romney’s “You didn’t build that” attack on President Obama, laying it bare until it he exposed that “Romney’s attack on Barack Obama’s slight grammatical misstep regarding small business is what people do in an argument when they’re completely f**ked.”
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Stewart pointed out that Romney is hanging his whole campaign on a willful misunderstanding, leaving out Obama’s “the point is” discussion in order to “make willful hay out of this rather common, singular, plural demonstrative pronoun snafu.”
Stewart played clips of Fox News taking the President out of context in his “you didn’t build that alone” speech, replete with their name-calling attacks. Mocking Fox News, Stewart pointed out that Obama’s “‘You didn’t build that’ is ‘grade-school Marxism’ or as your second grade teacher might have said, sharing.”
Stewart was outraged, “Guys! He was clearly talking about building roads and bridges! It was in the speech. Do you really want to hang your entire campaign on a willful, out of context, misunderstanding?”
Answering his own question, Stewart rolls Steve Doocey claiming that he’s going to show his viewers “what the President said that got him into trouble with Republicans.” Stewart congratulated Doocey for setting the record straight and putting the comment in its proper context, and then played a clip where Doocey left the entire middle part out of Obama’s speech.
“Where’s the middle part? You didn’t even flash through it? You just had Obama dissolving to dust like a bad CGI vampire! That’s not in context, that’s just different no context!” Stewart concludes, “Can you be more manipulative?”
And then Stewart rolls clip of Fox News interviewing two little girls about their lemonade stand, who said, “I would say that’s very rude because we worked very hard to build this business….” And then the bomb drops, “But we did have help. Our help came from our investors, our dad and step-mom along with other friends and family.” Ouch.
Stewart makes the point that both sides like to have fun with gaffes, but “This ain’t a gaffe! This is the centerpiece of Romney’s entire campaign. He’s got signage, t-shirts and this unrelenting ad.” The ad is Obama saying over and over again, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
“Mr. Romney, hanging your argument on people’s grammatical misstep is what people do when they’re completely fu*ked and they have no argument.”
For the kill shot, Stewart sought higher ground by urging Romney to discuss his differences with the President, and then juxtaposed clips of Obama’s “You didn’t build that alone” speech with clips of Mitt Romney’s Olympic “You didn’t win alone” speech. No difference. Romney even thanked the government.
Stewart’s most devastating point is that Romney is hanging his entire campaign on a deliberate misunderstanding of Obama’s position. His entire campaign.
In spite of recent polls showing that voters want to know more about Mitt Romney (including his tax returns), the Romney campaign absolutely refuses to go positive. Instead, they keep doubling down on their primary campaign strategy of relentlessly negative ads.
The negativity will work on the Republican base who is brainwashed by Fox News into believing Republicans’ blatant propaganda about this President, but Romney can’t win just with the base. Remember when we were told that Romney would etch-a-sketch to the middle? That’s not happening.
Romney is staying far right, ensconced in his Fox bubble of epistemic closure, where he truly believes that he is running this show and can set the agenda. Jon Stewart might be a comedian, but he stripped Romney to his bare core last night in just six minutes.
Romney is hanging his whole campaign on an out of context quote. Why? Because Mitt Romney can’t afford to tell you people about his real plans.
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