Ill Doctrine:
What Is the Polite Way to Tell Mitt Romney’s Family That We Think He’s a Weirdo? Because his family keeps trying to convince us Mitt’s a regular guy, and it’s getting really awkward.

 

I did not know that about the hot water heater. One that got me was in the video the RNC produced for the Convention, too cheap to buy the proper light bulb so this is what they put up with in the kitchen:

 

THIS is Mitt Romney, as described by his own son:

 
Why does his family tell such awful stories on him? Do they even like him?

Matt Taibbi:

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people “wants to have a beer with,” how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife’s name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing “entitlements” like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it’s paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he’s Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane’s sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he’s literally Gordon Gekko). He’s everything we’ve been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn’t fight his own battles and insists there’s only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

 

Update: And now this:

In an interview Thursday with television station KTVN, Mrs. Romney was asked what her biggest worry was should Mitt Romney be elected to serve in the White House.

“I think my biggest concern obviously would just be for his mental well-being,” she said. “I have all the confidence in the world in his ability, in his decisiveness, in his leadership skills, in his understanding of the economy. … So for me I think it would just be the emotional part of it.”

[my bold]