Mitt Romney’s Leaked Video: Not Wrongness, It’s Weirdness.

Not that anyone will need this, but the Romney video isn’t wrong—it’s just plain weird.

By now, we’ve all seen it: In the recording, Governor Romney whips out a fan-favorite talking point—that 47% of Americans can simply be expected to vote for President Obama because they don’t pay income taxes. Not only this, but that these people can never be convinced to “take responsibility and care for their lives.” It may sound like unremarkable supply-side shibboleth, but as the media’s near-universal decision to run with it self-evidently shows, let’s assume it’s a big deal.

(Side note: I can understand “take responsibility.” But care for their lives? If this video explodes this week, Romney will have simultaneously saved the entire Obama campaign plus the jobs of everyone currently on staff at Saturday Night Live. I’ll let you decide who needs it more.)

Anyway, “47%” is a throwback to the anti-Occupy group “We are the 53%,” who parsed through IRS data to make a technical claim that supposedly validates their narrative, wherein the only thing holding the country back from an economic boom that makes Reagan look like Trotsky is a class of “takers” of Americans who lie in the “hammock” of government by avoiding income taxes and collecting benefits. It’s a repeated line of the Republican faithful, most notably Paul Ryan.

There’s just one problem: it’s 83% false, because according to the Tax Policy Center, over 61% of these “dependents” paid payroll taxes—which is to say, they have jobs. Another 22% are elderly, and Romney’s official position is to defend those deductions (because they “earned” it).

There’s a lot to splice, and reactions have been varied and mixed (mostly angry). I will summarize the most irritating fallacies with cheery exclamation points for balanced effect:

1. 60% of the loafers paid payroll taxes averaging to 15%, meaning they paid more taxes than Mitt Romney in all of 2010!
2. Most of the 47% had their tax liabilities eliminated as a direct result of the Reagan and Bush tax cuts!
3. Because hordes of workers in the finance sector funnel their income into “carried interest” exemptions to proper income taxes—and because Romney has not revealed his tax returns, likely for this reason—there’s nothing to keep us from assuming that Mitt Romney is a part of that 47%!
4. Romney’s parents were once part of the 47%!

Meta alert and bonus round: Later in the video, Romney identifies a current strain in political strategy-think, that rather than “intellectual policy” details it’s “emotion” that decides elections—such as independents asking “Whether I like the guy or not,” as Romney says—before going on to confirm every suspicion and stereotype that exists about Romney’s born-on-third-base caricature.