Free I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up by D.L. Hughley Page A

reasonable.
    Then I had Paul on my CNN show, where we had a wide-ranging conversation. The clip is still on YouTube, and I challenge anyone to watch it and categorize the way I spoke to Ron Paul as anything other than respectful, if not downright deferential. At the end he confessed that he supposed he’d get in trouble for being on my show, but it wasn’t bad. Had I gone on some of the Fox News shows, I would not have gotten anywhere near as polite of a reception.
    If anyone doubts how far off the deep end the Republican Party has gone, take a look at how Ron Paul is regarded. His political positions have not changed for
decades
. He’s got some very nuanced views, and I think that he’s a principled man. But in 2008, when he ran for the nomination, he was regarded as the crazy person in the Republican Party. In 2012, Ron Paul isn’t looked at as crazy anymore. He’s almost an elder statesman, and his coherent, calm philosophy is being shouted out by people foaming at the mouth with anger and rage. Ron Paul obviously hasn’t changed. It’s his surroundings, the Republican Party, that have changed—and the thing that happened between 2008 and 2012 is that we got a black dude in the White House.
    It’s funny to me that I can freely admit that I would feel comfortable voting for a Ron Paul or a Jon Huntsman. But all the people on the right who view progressives as brainwashed plantation slaves can’t name
one
Democrat that they would support. Ain’t that a bitch?
Mitt Romney
    I met Mitt Romney in May of 2007. We were both guests on Jay Leno’s show one night, so the two of us sat backstage and talked fora long time. I thought he was going to get the nomination. He was perfectly tan, with sparkling white teeth. He had all his kids with him, a lot of kids, and a beautiful blond wife. Ann Romney was
naturally
beautiful; she didn’t look plastic. They genuinely looked like they were a close family. Whoever was running against this dude was in trouble, in my view, because it looked like they had cast a president.
    Here’s the thing about Mitt Romney. If you grow up in the streets, you’ll sound like the cats you grew up with. If you grow up in New York, you’ll sound like a fucking New Yorker. If you’re around all rich white people and you hear them talk and you go to school with them, then, when you grow up, you’ll just talk like them. You would sound pretty bright even if you weren’t. It’s like how Americans think all British people are smart just because of their accents.
    That’s the impression I got from Mitt Romney. He was
entitled
bright. It’s the kind of bright that you get because you attended the finest learning institutions in the world. You can get some of that shit just by osmosis. He had that white-guy “I’m superior” kind of vibe about him, that feigned kind of modesty. He seemed shallow to me. The things he was saying just weren’t particularly resonant. It was all clichés and talking points. He reminded me of a very highend used-car salesman. I didn’t go away thinking, “Wow, what a bright guy.” I went away thinking, “Wow, what a rich white guy!”
    There’s a thing Mitt Romney said that was quite telling, and everyone pounced on it. I want to quote him exactly so that it doesn’t seem like I am caricaturing: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine.” A lot of people brought up only the first part to assert that Romney, as he said, didn’t care about poor people. Romney says that’s out of contextand not what he meant. I am going to give Mitt Romney something that he doesn’t give poor people:
the benefit of the doubt
. Let’s pretend that statement is not an example of utter callousness. Even so, it is clearly a statement of a man
completely
out of touch.
    When he says he is not concerned about the poor because there is a safety net, he