The American writer Gore Vidal, who died recently, said, "Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent." I hope so too, and I venture to say that Mitt Romney has lost the U.S. presidential election before the U.S. voters go to the ballot boxes on the sixth of November. What he said, that the Palestinians are not interested at all in peace, and want to destroy Israel, reflects his ignorance on the one hand, and his opportunism on the other, as he was addressing a gathering of Likudnik American donors. Nevertheless, the media has perhaps taken his statement as a gaffe, and ignored it so as not to make it a major election issue. What destroyed Romney's campaign instead, making me believe that he will lose, is the fact that he has insulted half of the American people in a way that is impossible to accept or overlook. He said, "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president [Obama] no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, [...] who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them... These are people who pay no income tax. ... My job is not to worry about those people." 47 percent of Americans? He is talking about 150 million Americans, denying that they have a desire to work and live decently, and shirking his responsibility to help them improve their conditions. This time, he will not manage to "get out of it", like he had done with his repeated insults to the Palestinians during his visit to his friend war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, that is, occupied Palestine, or his campaign tours in the U.S.A. These include his stop in Boca Raton, Florida, where he was received by businessmen like him wanting to donate to his electoral campaign, in the hope of protecting their interests and keeping the tax cuts for the rich in place. James Carter IV, grandson of former President Carter, played a role in leaking footage of Romney's address to the businessmen to the liberal magazine Mother Jones. He thus avenged his grandfather 32 years after he lost to the Republican Ronald Reagan, in a campaign that was full of lies about the Democratic President. Before the full details were made available on the subject, I had mentioned Romney's insult to half of the American people in the last paragraph of this column, two days ago. I said, "In English, they say about someone who talks and makes mistakes that he puts his foot in his mouth. But Romney barely removes one foot from his mouth to put another". In the evening, while reading the London papers as usual before bedtime, I was surprised to see The Independent's cartoon portraying Romney with one of his feet in his mouth, and trying to bend his leg to put the other foot in. It seems that he succeeded to put both feet in. The massive campaign against him (once again because he has insulted half of the American people, not the Palestinians), means that he will not manage to take both feet out from his mouth this time. The papers started running stories about his gaffes, and someone wrote that Romney's mistakes make Dan Quayle, the Vice President under George W. Bush, seem like a seasoned and eloquent orator by comparison. Quayle once said: We do not want to go back to the future. We want to move forward. Here, perhaps, I can add that Romney makes George W. Bush and Sarah Palin seem as eloquent as Winston Churchill. I have books about George W. Bush's gaffes, errors in information and mistakes in English. Even the word "Bushisms" has entered the dictionary to mean incorrect or inappropriate terms, or grammar mistakes. George W. Bush once said: I know that the human race and fish can coexist peacefully. I also have books that include excerpts from Sarah Palin's wisdoms. She was the vice presidential candidate under John McCain, who once said that she is an expert on Russia because she can see Russia from the window of her home in Alaska across the Bering Sea. All the above does not invalidate what I have often maintained in this column about an October Surprise. Indeed, Romney's declining chances in the election increases the odds that Netanyahu would attempt to drag the United States into a military confrontation with Iran on the eve of the election. If Barack Obama refuses to help Israel, he would be accused of betraying America's foremost ally in the Middle East, and if he helps it, then he would be implementing Israel's policy at the expense of the his country's interests. In both cases, the military confrontation with Israel would create a situation in which the voters would forget Romney's views about half of the American people, to focus on war or the threat thereof. I say again that Romney has lost the election, and add that this is the best news I have had in two years, since the start of the Arab revolutions. [email protected]
