The "Romney's Aide's Racist Comment" flap.

I bet that Romney aide was trying to talk about "Anglo-American heritage", because that's a real thing that people say, and it goes along with the term "special relationship between England and the United States."

And it just came out as "Anglo-Saxon heritage", because the aide had one of those brain-frotzes where your brain takes the beginning of a term, and autofills the rest of the term without consulting you, and "Anglo-Saxon" is the term that comes in before (heck, on Google, it's 27 million hits for "Anglo-American" and 50.5 million for "Anglo-Saxon", so I bet the aide's brain just autofilled it wrong.)

My new pet peeve

I don't have any specific examples in mind right now, but I've decided that it really annoys me when people are being snarky on the Internet, and they just aren't any good at it.

Mitt once again fails his Turing Test

From the New Yorker:

One thing Romney won’t be doing, evidently, is watching Rafalca, a fifteen-year-old brown mare that his wife co-owns, competing in the dressage competition, which starts next week. "I have to tell you, this is Ann’s sport," he told Brian Williams. "I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on…. She will get the chance to see it. I will not be watching the event."

Mitt. . . dude. . . your wife is in the Olympics. Your wife was in charge of raising and training a horse, and finding a rider, and managing training, and so forth -- it's her team. She is the manager and owner of a team that is in the freakin' Olympics.

Humans do things like "watch their spouse's team in the Olympics". She's not going to be physically on the field, of course, any more than Tony Francona got up to bat in the 2004 World Series. But do you think Francona's family went, "Meh, whatever, AMERICAN IDOL is on"?

Yeah, I get it. You're afraid that people will think that you're an upper-class rich twit because your wife trained a dressage horse. Me, I might have pointed out how many middle-class people do dressage -- between LiveJournal and Facebook, I can point to, like, four friends who do various forms of equestrian eventing, and none of them are rich. I mean, they have to really budget really carefully to afford it, but they can DO it.

You have GOT to get your human behavior emulation module upgraded. This is just embarrassing.

So, what was Romney thinking when he insulted the London Olympics preparations?

As much as I dislike Romney, I'm starting to feel my schadenfreude tip into a mixture of bemusement and pity at his whole experience in London these past couple days. And I'm trying to figure out WHAT he was thinking.

And here's what I've come up with as a hypothesis:

Okay, remember back in school when you had that guy who was really socially awkward but who WANTED to be accepted, so he TRIED to pretend like he liked the same things as everyone else, but it was obvious that he was just trying, and fundamentally didn't actually UNDERSTAND what everyone else was doing?

In my case, I WAS that guy, but still. I assume that most of you either knew him, or were him. Or her, I suppose. I only noticed it among guys, but that may be simply confirmation bias. I'm sticking with the male pronoun because that's where I personally saw it most.

So, yeah. That guy who kept coming up to you, and trying to join into your conversation, but fundamentally missing the point.

That's Romney.

He WANTS to be popular. So he does whatever it is the people around him do, to try to be accepted by them. And he goes to London, and hears all the Brits bitching about how screwed up the Olympics are, and how everything's going to be a mess, and nobody on the Olympic committee has the slightest bloody idea what they're doing.

And he goes, "Oh, okay. That's what people are saying. So I want people to like me, so I'll say that, too."

So he says that.

Which fundamentally missed the point -- missed a BUNCH of the points -- e.g., "British people bitch about things that they like," and "nobody beats up my little brother except me."

Honestly, I think that you can fit almost all the events we know of in Romney's life into the narrative of, "I want people to like me, so I'll do whatever it is that they're doing, too."