It’s all over the political web sites that two-time Harvard degree holder (JD and MBA) Romney is once again bashing the Harvard Faculty Lounge, while taking advice from, you guessed it, folks with authorized access to the very same faculty lounge, including Greg Mankiw.
If that’s not enough, Mitt even gives money to Harvard.
Has he any shame? Is there nothing he won’t say?
Please share widely!
Doesn’t he have a JD and an MBA from Harvard? Or does that only count as one degree because he did the combined program?
JD and MBA.
Can US Senators not critique the US Senate? UMASS grads must remain silent about UMASS? Exxon and GM employees, even after they leave their companies cannot speak poorly about them or be labeled shameless and outrageous.
I don’t think even the smallest of schools are monolithic and certainly not about every issue. Go find a bigger problem with Mitt than this one, it’s in the noise.
The issue is NOT whether or not Mitt Romney can critique Harvard.
The issue is, instead, that Mr. Romney is loudly attacking President Obama for taking advice from people with Harvard connections, and by implication for being from Harvard, while Mr. Romney himself is from Harvard, sends his children to Harvard, and receives advice from Harvard faculty.
Hear is the second paragraph of the above-cited piece:
Please notice that Mr. Romney is attacking President Obama, not criticizing Harvard. He is attacking President Obama for doing precisely what Mitt Romney himself does.
Hence, Mitt Romney is a hypocrite. Now THERE’S a surprise.
Can you show me the part about where Mitt criticized Obama for taking advice from the Harvard faculty lounge?
All I saw was accurate reporting of what they think there…
Apparently, you didn’t.
… you’ve lost your reading comprehension: At best, it is an accurate transcription of what Mitt Romney said about what he thinks “they think there”… You are, of course, free to agree with Mitt Romney, just as you are equally free to be just as amoral and two-faced as Mitt Romney. No one here will stop you in that endeavor. Of course, few here will defend you also, for fear that defense might be construed as co-religionist tendencies.
I also seem to recall that Romney was in the vanguard of those defending George Bush and Dick Cheney with the particularly noxious canard that tearing down our leaders in a time of war was equally weakening of America.
Don’t get the idea that I think Mitt Romney is a hypocrite. I do not. One must actually have values, principles and ideals that you can betray behind a false facade to earn the sobriquet of ‘hypocrit”. But if all your facades are vapor and posturing and false then what are you betraying? Hypocrisy, at least, requires steady ground from which to work.
…being Governor of Massachusetts didn’t prevent Romney from making Massachusetts his punchline either.
to criticize Wall St (do you need any URLs) while he takes money from them, takes people from there (WH Cheif of Staff, William Daley), gets advice from Wall ST (Warren Buffet)?
My answer to my own question would be no, Wall St is not monolithic but I don’t hear Obama delineate, he normally condemns “Wall St” just as Mitt critiques Harvard’s Faculty Club.
Get out of the splitting hairs business and attack some worth attacking.
So not one tainted dime from that atrium to perdition!
John, let’s take it another time, more slowly.
Mitt.Romney.Attacked.Barack.Obama. Not Harvard. Not Wall Street. Barack Obama.
You continue to misread or mis-state the issue. Mitt Romney attacked Barack Obama, NOT Harvard’s Faculty Club. He attacked Barack Obama for doing the same thing he does.
The first line of the lead of the cited article says (emphasis mine):
Which part of “Mitt Romney once again criticized President Obama” do you not understand?
To be clear: Mitt attacked Barack by saying he’s a Harvard toadie, clearly implying that the Harvard is both wrong and weak and therefore Obama is more wrong and weaker for his adherence to their point of view.
Kinda like saying I MIGHT think JohnD might be an idiot because he parrots Randian delusions that ought not to be taken seriously by anyone: I would be attacking JohnD by pointing out the idiocy of the the initial ideology and the follow-on adherence to it…
How very… bald… of you.
Neither student nor CEO ever made the clear implication that the organization of people to which they once joined are not to be trusted, as a rule, and wholly deficient in core competencies. The only Senator I know to have done so was Zell Miller, who was clearly insane at the time.
But it is Romney who is making the clear implication that the Harvard faculty is monolithic (and wrong) in its collective outlook whilst simultaneously making use of a differing points of view from the same, ostensibly monolithic, faculty.
That thing you are being hoisted upon? ‘Tis your own petard.
Again.
Don’t you ever get tired of that?
Republicans dismiss scientists on climate change and human origins.
They belittle institutions of higher learning.
They ignore proven economic theories.
They call lies facts and facts lies.
What chance has any society if such a large and powerful segment of its population is hostile to knowledge?
Always advances the discussion.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? They’re a major political party and were dominant from 1860 to 1932 and again from 1980 (or 1994) to now. And they’re crazy!
This is a bit, though, like a co-dependent relationship in which the sober partner constantly and vainly attempts to convince the alcoholic s/he is a drunk. In such relationships, the alcoholic remains unconvinced and the partner never stops thinking up arguments.
Hey there! Get over it: It’s observable fact that a big majority of the Republican party places no value in science. You won’t shame them into admitting it.
Stop proving it. It’s proven.
We’re at step 2.
What are we going to do about it?
if you can manufacture an artificial reality where climate change does not exist and where Republican policies exploded the budget deficit and left us with no room to lower interest rates before the recession why not go one step further and pretend to be a foe of Harvard and its ‘faculty’ lounge?
That’s nothing: what will really be amazing is when Mitt tells us he was born in a log cabin in Kentucky and the assorted right wing pundits, bloggers, and the guys on talk radio tell us that it’s really true!
The ongoing Republican narrative is that Democratic elites are trying to force common sense Americans to believe things they just know are wrong, like climate change and the need for stimulus spending. In a sense this represents the appealing idea — represented by Sarah Palin at her most appealing — that a motivated amateur can do just as well as a practiced professional. Why shouldn’t I honor my neighbor’s ideas on economics or foreign policy above those of a professor of economics or international affairs? Isn’t it elitist of me to prefer expert opinion to my neighbor’s?
Maybe this represents a kind of dehumanization of academics. Didn’t the guy who’s now a climate scientist spend a lot of time learning physics, statistics, geology, and chemistry? Why don’t we see the difference between him and my neighbor like the difference between a professional and casual baseball player?
Why indeed can a major politician addressing an audience assume that only bad advice can come from the Harvard Faculty Lounge?
Or is everyone taking “Harvard faculty lounge” literally? It’s simply a metaphor for pointed-headed, cocooning progressives.
It was deployed by Bill Buckley in the early 1960’s … “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
The fact that Romney speaks with Mankiw or Feldstien doesn’t make him a hypocrite.
We’re not really interested in twisting ourselves into pretzels to find some charitable interpretation of Romney’s ridiculous remarks. But, knock yourself out.
Your collective outrage interpreting Mitt’s remarks is, by itself, hilarious. Do you look every day to see if he left his button-down collar unbuttoned, too?
Like the president’s “Intercontinental Railroad” flub, Americans understand what he’s trying to say and let it go at that.
I don’t mind BMG’s pathological criticism of every word from Mitt’s mouth, include “and” and “the”. To the folks who get what he’s saying, namely everyone, it makes you look hopelessly wonkish, petty and foolish.
Then again, talk about cocooning! BMG progressives, sitting in a circle, mocking a 5 second sound bite.
aren’t a flub. They’re a deliberate attempt to appeal to an anti-intellectual base, which is more convinced than ever that education is un-American.
Of course you do. That’s why you respond with such vitriol, though I frankly don’t know how you can even tell what you’ve typed with that much spittle on your screen.
Anyway, it’s all in good fun. We love Mitt, as you well know. How could we dislike someone who is responsible for so much good material? 😀
When I don’t know which day’s statements reflect the “real” Romney.
his continual self parody, so very much cleverer than anything I can come up with.
Obviously, this is a continuation of Mitt’s long standing pattern of saying whatever he thinks his target audience wants to hear without regard to whether it is consistent with what he has said in the past or even with his own beliefs (to the extent that he has any). While it is fair to point this out as another dot in the pattern, only someone who hasn’t been paying attention is going to be surprised by this much less experienced shortness of breath as a result.
and the breath is david’s. We all have our things that send us over the edge, and Mitt is his. On the positive side, this has brought us the Mitt-Hindenberg, it must be noted.
My prediction as of September 2011: Romney is going to win the nomination almost by default, but will not be trusted by his party’s activists. (the obverse of Kerry 2004). But, unlike 2004, he will be running against a weakened incumbent in a prolonged lousy economy, and will therefore have a pretty good shot at winning the general election. If so, the distrust of his party activists will keep in strictly in the ideological yellow lines. No Nixon to China moments, and we will not get competent-executive Mitt, but dogmatic ideologue Mitt.
He’s authentic, unlike those sushi-eating, Pinot-quaffing, newspaper-reading Democrats.
One should prefer newspaper readers to be at the helm of foreign policy. Jim Beam is a disqualification for being near the proverbial Button.
Mitt is the only tee-total candidate….
Source
This plays off the stereotype of the effete elite: no professor at Harvard would ever advocate military action.
After 8 years of the Bush Administration, it is surprising that the academics who were right haven’t enhanced their prestige while the buffoonish panderers to “common sense” are not busy trying to prove they know what they’re talking about.
But there you have it.