Joaquin is not my favorite commentator, but I must say the Mitt man left himself open this time. Tone-deaf Mitt. Why does he say things like that? If he’s so rich, why isn’t he smart?

Not that J. is so smart, as per “jet-setting” below, in which he over-states his case, such as it is. And $60G a day is lunch money for George Soros and the Omaha sage with an exemption named after him; so J. should lighten up on how rich some people are.

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J’s email:

Dear Friend,

This morning, celebrating his victory in Florida, Mitt Romney went on CNN and said: “I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. “

Wait, what?

We’re not sure if Mitt knows anything about the “very poor,” but he certainly knows a thing or two about being “very rich.”  Today, while many of us are working hard for our paycheck (or struggling to make do without one), Mitt is also hard at work hopping around the country wooing voters (though, not the very poor ones).

Mitt Romney’s earnings for today’s jet-setting around the country are $60,000, and it’s all virtually untaxed “investment income.”

How much will you make today?  Is it less than the $60,000 that Mitt will make?

1. Yes
2. No

Click Yes or No and check out how much teachers, police officers, and minimum wage workers earned yesterday through actual hard work.

Prepare to be surprised, and don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Best to you!

Joaquin Guerra
Change Nation

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On the other hand, consider the context and legitimate qualifications, as here:

Soledad O’Brien: “I know I said last question. You said I’m not concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net. And I think there are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say that sounds odd. Can you explain that?”

Mitt Romney: “Well, you had to finish the sentence, Soledad. I said I’m not concerned about the very poor that have the safety net, but if it has holes in it, I will repair them. The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor. And there’s no question, it’s not good being poor, and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused on middle income Americans. My campaign — you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich, that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor. That’s not my focus. My focus is on middle income Americans, retirees living on Social Security, people who can’t find work, folks that have kids getting ready to go to college. These are the people who have been most badly hurt during the Obama years.We have a very ample safety net, and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.” (My emphasis added.)

Yes, Virginia, and Lugar is his name.

Have a look.

PURITANS AND ROMANTICS: Religion was reduced by the Puritans “to mere morality,” the Puritan imagination was “thoroughly moralized,” said H.B. Parkes and H.W. Schneider respectively, both of them quoted by Yvor Winters in his 1930 book Maule’s Curse.  The “highly stimulated” Puritan, said Winters, was “no longer guided by the flexible and sensitive ethical scholarship of the Roman tradition.”  [italics mine]  Highly stimulated but Calvinistically predestined, he was told by preachers he couldn’t repent even as he was told to repent, in some of the roughest, toughest preaching this side of Beelzebub.

This morality emphasis came to the fore when many years ago I profiled a Unitarian church I knew quite well, focusing on members’ common denominator, morality.  The preacher was very good.  But his game was morality, nothing but.  Fellow Daily News man Bill Newman saw that and observed they would feel pretty good to be characterized that way.  He was right.  Morality sells.  The doctrine that undergirds it does not.

Young romantics of the early 19th century did not feel as Puritans did.  Love is free, said the poet Shelley at 19.  Monogamy, he said, like religious faith “excludes us from all inquiry.”  . . . .  Read the rest here.

Quite a nice statement of where we stand in re: GOP nomination:

The conundrum:

We don’t dismiss outright the notion that character is important. But the value of the current race is the chance it gives the GOP to craft the substance of its message. It’s an effort in which all four are making important contributions but none — in our view — has combined all the elements together, at least not yet. [italics added]

Romney:

Mr. Romney has the gubernatorial experience and the businessman’s eye and a good fiscal sense. But it is a huge thing that he is so diffident on the monetary issue. “I’m happy to look at a whole range of ideas on how to have greater stability in our currency and in our monetary policies,” he told Lawrence Kudlow. What a wan excuse for leadership at a time when the value of the dollar has collapsed to below a 1,700^th of an ounce of gold.

Newt, on the other hand,

has what we sometimes call a legislative personality, evincing a tendency to talk a good game only to deal and compromise.

Santorum?

inspiring on social issues and religion, and his foreign policy is clear. But his targeting of  tax cuts — or breaks — are an un-nerving signal.

Palin?  Ah yes, Palin, whose Facebook “complaint” set this off?

The Alert Alaskan, as we like to call Mrs. Palin, seemed to comprehend the monetary matters, the foreign policy, the constitutional conservatism, the tax and regulatory issues, the social issues, and the urgency of opening up our domestic reserves of oil and gas.  But the Spellbinder of the Yukon,* as we also like to call her (with a bow to Robert Service), spurned the hopes of millions to get into this race, leaving the Republican Party the campaign of which she now complains.

* Technically in Canada, which is not our point.

 

Not to dismiss her complaint:

. . . this week the Wall Street Journal issued an editorial reminding us all how phony were the ethics charges against Mr. Gingrich. The Journal reprised what it was like during the days about which Mrs. Palin also writes. It was a time when the Left was using the politics of personal destruction to gin up picayune scandals like that for which Mr. Gingrich was investigated in the House.  Suzanne Garment wrote a book about the tactic, “Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics.”

Which lends credibility to Newtster defenders, to be sure.

 

Read this about Newt as more than what’s advertised by Romney-ites:

Tonight’s debate in Florida may be, as advertised, crucial to the outcome of the race there. But whether Speaker Gingrich knocks this one out of the park or he doesn’t, one fact stands clear. He’s survived this long against extraordinary odds and attained the challenger status he now holds not because of his nifty way of attacking the media, poor dears.

He’s here because he speaks to people in ways that assume their interest in ideas of consequence, and they know it — they can hear. And because he speaks [mostly, I’d say] in ways that reflect a respect for their intelligence, and has much to say to them. They know that, too.

This way of relating to voters is no gimmick. It’s a condition of mind and one of bottomless value on a campaign trail. [italics added]

Not that I don’t approve of media-bashing, which is needful for their reform.  Tough love, we might say.