Obama Explains Symptoms of Mitt's "Romnesia" ~ with Updates

source: eriksfactory.tumblr.com

Obama at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, October 19, 2012

(My Transcript)

The choice between going backward and going forward has never been so clear.

But now that we're 18 days out from the election, Mr. Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said over the last year.

He told folks he was the 'ideal candidate' for the Tea Party. Now suddenly he is saying, 'What? Who me?'

He's forgetting what his own positions are. And he's bettin' that you are too.

I mean, he's changing up so much and he's backtracking, and side-steppin' -

We've gotta name this condition that he's going through.

I think it's called "Romnesia."

(Cheers from the Crowd)

I think that's what he's going through. I'm not a medical doctor, but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you because I want to make sure no one else catches it.

(Clapping)

If you say you're for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you'd sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work, you might have Romnesia.

(Laughter and Cheers)

If you say women should have access to contraceptive care but you support legislation that would let your employer deny you contraceptive care, you might have a case of Romnesia.

If you say you'll protect a woman's right to choose, but you stand up at a primary debate and you said you'd be 'delighted' to sign a law outlawing that right to choose in all cases, man, you've definitely got Romnesia.

(Laughter and Cheers)

Now, this extends to other issues. If you say earlier in the year 'I'm going to give a tax cut to the top 1%, and then in a debate he says 'I don't know anything about giving tax cuts to the rich folks.' That - that - you need to get a thermometer and take a temperature, 'cause you've probably got Romnesia.

(Clapping and Cheers)

If you say that you're a champion of the coal industry, when while you were governor you stood in front of a coal plant and said 'This plant will kill you,' . . .

(Crowd Shouts "You Could Have Romnesia!)

That's the Romnesia.

So, I think you're becoming able to identify these symptoms. And if you come down with a case of Romnesia . . .

(President laughs, crowd laughs)

. . . and you can't seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you've made over the six years you've been running for President, here's the Good News!

Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions!!!

(Crowd Roars)

We can fix you up!!! We've got a cure!!! We can make you well, Virginia. This is a curable disease. Ha ha.

Women! Men! All of you! These are family issues, these are economic issues. I want my daughters to have the same opportunities as anybody's sons. I believe America does better, the economy does better grows more and we create more jobs when everybody participates. When everyone's getting a fair shot. Everybody's getting a fair shake. Everybody's playing by the same rules. Everybody's doing their fair share.

That's why I'm running for a second term for President of the United States. I need you to help me finish the job!

(Crowd roars)



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

campaign official says the specific spelling is "Romnesia"
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) October 19, 2012

Already trending worldwide on Twitter. Cue the Tumblr memes.
~ comment by Tardisgal on Daily Kos

I think Mitt just got "Tagg"ed.
~ comment by here4tehbeer on Daily Kos

If your romnesia lasts more than 4 hours, consult your doctor. Side effects may include rigid personality, engorged ego, flaccid economic policy, premature celebration and a bitch for a wife.
~ comment by A Runner on Daily Kos

You might have #Romnesia if you think the President followed your plan when he saved the auto industry.
— Jennifer Granholm (@JenGranholm) October 19, 2012

Romnesia: Neologism of the day.
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) October 19, 2012

source: facebook

Mitt Romney has #binders full of #Romnesia.
— GottaLaff (@GottaLaff) October 19, 2012

Romney acts like a guy who was in a coma between 2001 and 2008. Then woke up and had the Bush years explained to him by Karl Rove #Romnesia
— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) October 19, 2012

#Romnesia Forgetting about the wet dog in the cart on top of your car as you drive off on vacation.
— Lynne A (@lahtay44) October 19, 2012

If you need a #BinderFullofWomen to remind you of ladies you can hire... you've got #Romnesia!
— Current TV (@current) October 19, 2012

What used to be called Flip Flop is now called #Romnesia
— William (@Puncheons) October 19, 2012

#Romnesia romney claims to have never had alcohol. What sober person names his son #Tagg ? #lintg
— Least Im not tht Guy (@lstimnotthatguy) October 19, 2012

Via yeahiwasintheshit.tumblr.com
If you can't remember how wonderful Big Bird was as a child, you might have Romnesia.
~ comment by OneFlewOvertheWooWoosNest on Huff Post

Romnesia: Forgetting about your peers who fought and di--ed in vietnam, or were lucky enough to make it through, while your privileged a--r--s-e was prancing around France.
~ comment by blackhole2008 on Huff Post

You think Romnesia is bad? It eventually leads to Ryanitis - complete flat out lying!
~ comment by asdf1010 on Huff Post


Update:

RT if you agree: We don’t need a president with #Romnesia in the White House.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 19, 2012

“I hope you all don’t get #Romnesia. It’s a bad disease—and it’s contagious.”—VP Biden in Florida today

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 20, 2012

You say the government doesn't create jobs, but then say you have a plan to create 12 million jobs 2 mins later #Romnesia

— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) October 20, 2012

#Romnesia - Mitt invented #Romneycare, tells poor people to go sit in an emergency room or die

— Jeanne Kimsey (@SnarkAmendment) October 19, 2012

My #Romnesia article seems to be going viral. Thanks Barack! guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/…

— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) October 19, 2012

#Romnesia is what Republicans are going to be experiencing en masse at the 2016 Republican Convention when Mitt isn't even invited.

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) October 20, 2012

The Romnesia Song via oneluv918 Tumblr
To the tune of “That’s Amore”. User cassandracarolina here had the idea for this song a short time ago and made some lines, other users (stevemb, Nickie Haflinger and me) quickly joined in and I have collected many of the lines, merging them together to make: The Romney song. You are all free to add your lines in the comments if you like.
And don’t worry: It’s covered ;). Bye!
Update: User nicteis’ lines have been added.

That’s Romnesia

If Obamacare sucks
But your plan saved big bucks
That’s Romnesia

Be pro-life or pro-choice
Just keep changing your voice
That’s Romnesia

It’s OK if you’re gay
If you’ll just go away
That’s Romnesia

If your Etch-a-Sketch lies
Have folks rolling their eyes,
That’s Romnesia

If your cheap-shot attack
Gets you fact-checker flak
That’s Romnesia

If the cry “That’s not true”
Leaves you feeling quite blue
That’s Romnesia

You forget who you are
When the White House’s not far?
That’s Romnesia

“Let us bankrupt GM!”
”Wait, I’ve saved all of them!”
That’s Romnesia

You start changing your shade
Once you hear “Roe v Wade”?
That’s Romnesia

“Let them self-deportate.”
But not yours, for Pete’s sake!
That’s Romnesia

When your tax plan’s a hoax
And your donors are Kochs …
That’s Romnesia

“47 %?
We love 100 %.”
That’s Romnesia!

“When I’ve slashed every tax
The same money comes back.”
That’s Romnesia.

Romnesia and Paulzheimer's from happycthulhuday on Reddit

Bibi's Bomb

pic via gifsfln
From Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Speech to the U.N. 9/27/12

So, how much enriched uranium do you need for a bomb? And how close is Iran to getting it? Let me show you. I brought a diagram for you. Here's the diagram.

************** This is a bomb; this is a fuse.

In the case of Iran's nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages.

The first stage: they have to enrich enough of low enriched uranium.
The second stage: they have to enrich enough medium enriched uranium.
And the third stage and final stage: they have to enrich enough high enriched uranium for the first bomb.



via newsgifs
Where's Iran? Iran's completed the first stage. It took them many years, but they completed it and they're 70% of the way there.

Now they are well into the second stage. By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

***************** Ladies and Gentlemen, What I told you now is not based on secret information. It's not based on military intelligence. It's based on public reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Anybody can read them. They're online.

So if these are the facts, and they are, where should the red line be drawn? The red line should be drawn right here…………..

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the second time in the recent history of the United Nations, today an unfounded and imaginary graph was used to justify a threat against a founding member of the United Nations. However, it is worth mentioning that in our increasingly interconnected world and in the information age, it is hardly possible for the nations to be fooled by such absurd means.
~ Iran’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Eshaq al-e-Habib, via NYT

Even before the speech was complete, the viral cartoons began to hit the Internet. The immediate association when one looked at the drawing of the bomb was Looney Tunes. And so the very first images to hit the Internet involved the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.
And then there’s been a lot of general playing around with the image: photos of Bibi using the red line to delineate between the place on a bag of potato chips where the chips end and the rest of the bag is filled with air - or how high to fill a kiddush cup of wine for the Friday night blessing.
~ Haaretz

From Haaretz:




Via Buzzfeed:









From Jest.com:

Romney Advisers on the Hotseat Over Chair Debacle

beingliberal facebook

Other Posts on this Topic:
Clint Eastwood Talks to an Empty Chair in Tampa
Romney Advisers on Hotseat Over Chair Debacle
Media Turn Clint Eastwood Every Which Way but Loose
Clint Eastwood Blames Mitt for Stupid Chair Skit

He spoke from the heart with a classic improv sketch, which everyone at the convention loved.
~ Romney top adviser Stuart Stevens

So the whole thing where he's addressing "Mr. President," the empty chair sitting next to him? Him interviewing the empty chair as if in the empty chair was President Obama, and then he was pretending that the invisible president in the chair yelled at Mr. Eastwood that he should go "eff himself" and to "shut up." That was the big joke of the riff.
So that's what the Romney campaign chose to broadcast to 25 million people about Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency.
What they did last night is a political disaster. This is unheard of.
~ Rachel Maddow on MSNBC

From the New York Times

Behind the scenes, Mr. Eastwood’s convention cameo was cleared by Mr. Romney’s top message mavens, Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, who drew up talking points that Mr. Eastwood included, in his own way. They gave him a time limit and flashed a blinking red light that told him his time was up. He ignored both. The actor’s decision to use a chair as a prop was last-minute, and his own. “The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it,” a baffled senior aide said on Thursday night.

. . . It also startled and unsettled Mr. Romney’s top advisers and prompted a blame game among them. “Not me,” an exasperated-looking senior adviser said when asked who was responsible for Mr. Eastwood’s speech. In interviews, aides called the speech “strange” and “weird.” One described it as “theater of the absurd.”

Invisible Obama just beat up Hologram Reagan.#Current2012 #GOP2012 — John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) August 31, 2012

I have one question: Was the mystery guest Clint Eastwood or The Invisible Obama? — Suzanne Munshower (@expatina) August 31, 2012

How, how, how has Obama attacked success? Or apologized for it? Maybe it was Invisible Obama who said that. thebea.st/OwiUrP — Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) August 31, 2012

Republican Convention Winners and Losers: LOSER: Mitt Romney. WINNER: Chair. #RNC2012 — Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport) August 31, 2012

 
Mashable: Interview with Invisible Obama

Now that you have gained more than 50,000 followers, what do you plan to do with the account?
I can’t just disappear (well, any more than I already have), so I’m going to keep on observing without being observed. . . .

What happens when other people sit in the chair? Do they become invisible?
When other people sit in the chair they usually get freaked out by feeling like they are sitting on someone else’s lap (that they can’t see). The reactions are priceless. My “and what do YOU want for Christmas” jokes don’t go over too well at that point. Then I just bring up “Invisible Touch” on my Spotify, and say over it, “you just got @invisibleobama’d!”

If you were to become chairman of anything, what would it be?
Let me be clear. I don’t have time for that. I’m an invisible President. Plus, I’m still running Clint Eastwood’s questions through Google Translate. But I guess if I could be the Chairman of anything, it would be Ikea. It would be great to have a full line of invïsibleöbäma furniture. Plus, I bet I’d get unlimited swedish meatballs and access to the ball pit after hours (because during regular hours it would be way too creepy).

Philadelphia Inquirer: Eastwood Unseats Romney

In this era of instant essays, Michael Moore of the Daily Beast called it "a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech and Chong," and CNN's Howard Kurtz and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called it the most bizarre thing they'd ever seen.

Marc Eliot, author of American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood, says the speech showed that the actor is "not that comfortable being spontaneous, being unscripted. As a producer/director, he's a control freak, and last night he did not show control." Eliot says it's "a very bad thing for a party looking to connect with younger voters," awkward for TV, since Eastwood, scripted for 3 to 4 minutes, overstayed, pushing Mitt Romney's acceptance speech over the far edge of prime time.

Ah, but . . . that chair. It ceased to be a chair, becoming instead . . . a meme, a word, phrase, image, or idea rocketed throughout the Web, ubiquitous, trenchant. . . . Andrew Beaujon of the Poynter Institute noted that the empty chair was already a multimedia meme. CNN's Piers Morgan and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell and Thomas Roberts all have interviewed vacant furniture lately. Morgan called his (standing in for beleaguered Senate candidate Todd Akin) "a gutless little twerp." The Smithsonian Institution, with hilarious seriousness, traced the tradition of politicians' interrogating empty chairs back to "at least 1924."

Transcript of The Daily Show with John Stewart

Yes!!! Amidst the tired rhetoric and empty platitudes and overwrought attacks . . . A Fistful of Awesome emerged in the night where it spent twelve minutes on the most important night of Mitt Romney's life yelling at a chair! Yes!
(points upward and mouths "thank you Jesus")
And oh, how the Outlaw Josie Wailed.
(plays clip of Eastwood rambling)
Are you not entertained? This is the most joy I've gotten from an old man since Dick Cheney non-fatally shot one in the face. I mean . . . more! Give me more!
(plays clip of Eastwood arguing with chair)
'I'm here to endorse Mitt Romney in this crucial hour. You will not silence me, Invisible Barack Obama.' . . .

Not that Romney didn't get a chance. I think he talked, too.
Romney: We Americans have always felt a special kinship with the future.
Yes, yes, we Americans, uniquely among Earth's people move forward in time.
Look - I don't care how many Marcos Rubio you put in between Clint Eastwood and Mitt Romney, Romney ain't outshining this little playlet I like to call "The Old Man and the Seat."




And here's why it hurts - it hurt these Republicans bad because this convention like all conventions is a scripted and focused group fantasy. And the display of Eastwood's Gran Torino id was the very thing the Republicans had constructed the entire week to suppress.
This convention was the vision of a perfect America that used to exist until Barack Obama ruined it. And so what if that American had never actually existed.
(plays clip of Romney making glowing statements about American life)
Gee Whiz, Pops, that sounds awesome!
Yeah, that was the uncomplicated American you remember. I think in the early sixties there were some churches in Alabama that might disagree with your sports-team versus place-of-worship anecdote.

But the point is this: what this convention attempted to do is say that we could all live again in this nostalgic paradise if it weren't for this one f***in' guy.
(plays clips of Republicans bashing Obama) Hey, his wife is nice though. In four years one man, Barack Obama, has broken the greatest nation God has ever given us on this earth. The message of this convention is that apparently up until November of 2008 Americans lived in a utopian ideal ...
(shows clip of Andy Griffith and Opie going fishing)
... born of our own individual gumption and hard work. Sadly now, not four years later, it's a blighted socialist hell-scape where jackbooted thugs lock you up for thinking about Christmas.

And here is the most incredible part of the entire fiction: while convincing us that Barack Obama is destroying our country's future, the Republicans have also invented a past where they were trying to help him succeed.
Mitt: I wish President Obama would have succeeded because I want America to succeed. Holy effin' sh**!!! You . . . wanted . . . Obama . . . to succeed?

We may not remember that America was never really Mayberry, but we sure as sh** can remember back to 2009
(plays apocalypic clip from Sean Hannity).
Well, he did give him 100 days before queuing up the song from "The Omen."
. . . I can't believe he hasn't fixed in 8 days what our guy did in 8 years.


. . . Here's where Clint Eastwood has done a huge favor to us all. The Republican Party's irrationality that they've worked so hard at the convention trying to conceal was unleashed in a 12-minute improvised avant garde performance of one angry man.
Eastwood finally revealed the cognitive dissonance that is the beating heart and soul and fiction of this party. They're so far gone, they're hammerin' Obama for things Bush did and Romney is.
(plays clip of Eastwood talking to chair about Afghanistan)
Oh Snap! You really gave it to the guy who didn't get us into that war!
(plays clip of Eastwood saying "It's not good for guys who are attorneys to be president anyway")
Yeah - take that Harvard lawyer, Barack Obama! You'll never be the man Harvard lawyer Mitt Romney is.

So we owe Clint Eastwood a debt of thanks. Not only because it was a truly hilarious 12 minutes of improvised awesome in a week of scripted blah. But because it advanced out understanding. This President has issues and there are very legitimate debates to be had about his policies and actions and successes and/or failures as President. I mean, tune in next week.
But I could never wrap my head around why the world and the President that Republicans describe bears so little resemblance to the world and the President that I experience. And now I know why.

There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see.
And . . . while the President the rest of us see has issues, apparently this President, invisible to many, is bent on our wholesale destruction. But look - invisible Obama is great for my business. I'm still sad that Trump's not running. But if you really want to make this election about this guy (shows pic of chair) let me see if I can paraphrase . . .
'Go ahead, make my day'