Honey Badger doesn’t care!

It’s hardly atypical for politicians in our beautifully constitutional republic to dispense with uncooperative swathes of the electorate, but it’s wildly unusual for a candidate to let as many DGAFs** attract public notice as Gov. Willard “Mitt” Romney has. He’s transformed himself from a pasty, banal, say-nothing flip-flopper into the archetypal Honey Badger, a creature celebrated in song and internet ditty for its foolish, fearless disregard of stings and pain. Honey Badger don’t care! Honey Badger don’t give a shit! He’s “really pretty badass.”

One of the larger sectors this Presidential aspirant has written off is a solid 47 percent of the U.S. population. That’s nearly half, which seems confidently cavalier in a nation that hasn’t seen a 60 percent turnout for its presidential elections since 1968.  Forty-seven percent, I scarcely need remind you, is nearly half of us’ns. It was an incredibly bold statement, I grant you:

All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

47 percent! Honey Badger don’t care. Honey Badger says what he wants. His job is not to worry about those people.

Mr. Romney wrote off the troops (admittedly a tiny sliver of the population), not so much by failing to mention Afghanistan in his acceptance speech as by doubling down on it when asked a softball question on FOX News:

When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list. You talk about the things that are important and I described in my speech my commitment to a strong military, unlike the president’s decision to cut our military.

Mr. Romney omits the fact that, under President Obama, the budget for the Dept. of Veterans Affairs is nearly one-third larger (after adjusting for inflation) than it was in 1980 — despite there being fewer veterans now than then. On the other hand, veterans coming off current and recent operations tend to be more busted up: they carry more weight, run a high op tempo, are often older when activated, and often deploy multiple times to more than one theater.  They may need more help per capita than some of their forebears, goes the current thinking.

They might also be curious about how a candidate views the importance of their service. A soldier puts his or her life in abeyance every bit as much as a political candidate, and for far less reward. Also, active servicemembers may form less than one percent of the population, but they’re a lot more popular than, say, Congress — or either of the Presidential contenders. But Honey Badger ain’t afraid o’ no snake eaters! Honey Badger talks about what’s important, and ignores the rest. Soldiers ain’t job creators, bitch!

He ain’t afraid of no black voters, either. Mr. Romney took it straight to the NAACP, promising them that he would be a better president for black folks than the black president could ever be. Talking later to a group of Montana Republicans about the big, black booing that followed his pledge to dismantle “Obamacare” — a revamped version of what could accurately be called “Romneycare” — Honey Badger dismissed freeloading blacks with a sneer:

…if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy – more free stuff. But don’t forget nothing is really free.

Blacks make up 13.6 percent of the population. In the last election, 96 percent of them voted for the now-sitting President. But Honey Badger shakes it off. He knows that Democrats never win the white vote — haven’t, in fact, won the white vote in my lifetime. That’s how much we resent LBJ for signing the Civil Rights Act.

Mr. Romney, who advocated forcing “self-deportation” by bullyragging illegal immigrants until they flee for their lives and sanity, ain’t afraid o’ no Hispanic vote, either. You see, Honey Badger — who knows which people are valuable human assets, and which are cream-skimming drones — promises to veto the DREAM Act:

What you have to do in order to compete is reform our immigration laws to bring in more of the brains from around the world, eliminate the waste in our government. Immigration has been an important part of our nation’s success. The current system, however, puts up a concrete wall to the best and brightest, yet those without skill or education are able to walk across the border.

Well, what the heck… Hispanics only make up 16-odd percent of our society, and only around 43 percent of them vote. Let’s call them about 7 percent of our population. Honey Badger don’t even think twice about wetbacks. Honey Badger will kick a wetback in the ass until she self-deports.

Not real sure that the Gov is courting women very hard, either. He claims to support the Republican platform, which includes a demand for a Human Life Amendment to enshrine fetal personhood and declares that ” the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.” In other words, no abortion under any circumstances.

Now women make up 50.9 percent of the population, which officially counts as “most of us.” You might think even a Honey Badger would give a shit about that, but Honey Badger knows not all women believe that abortion should be safe and available. Only… um… 74 percent of American women believe that.

That’s 74 percent of all women, including Republicans, Libertarians, Catholics, Mormons… let’s just call them a solid 37 percent of the electorate.

Now, if this were FOX News, we might do the math like this:

47 + 1 + 13.6 + 16 + 50.9 = 128.5 percent… that’s us plus, like, a quarter of the generation yet to be born who are pissed off by Gov. Honey Badger! Republicans might reconsider their unqualified support of the unborn if they realized 28.5 percent of the little ankle biters are predisposed to vote for Democrats. You saw what they did to public funding of college education once they saw the studies showing that more educated voters turn away from Republican candidates…

But Honey Badger knows that most of those populations are already subsumed into that notorious 47 percent of servile freeloaders who’ve never mustered the gumption to get off their kiesters and export a few jobs to China. That 47 percent all by itself may be one big anthill to climb, but Honey Badger, he do not care. He ignores the fiery little bites, and just keeps climbing. Honey Badger knows they’re just insects, after all.

The thing about Honey Badger, though: he don’t hear so good. When he jumped into this river and started thrashing around, he never did hear that sound up ahead. It’s the sound of rocks in the rapids, leading to a waterfall…

…leading to a landslide.

================================

**Don’t-Give-A-Fucks