Would You Buy a Used Playgirl From Mitt Romney?

Mitt "Cesspool" Romney announced his National Finance Chairs yesterday, and they included Meg Whitman, the President and CEO of eBay. Now, if you're like most people, you used to buy things on eBay, but now you find it cheaper and easier to produce your own fake sports memorabilia at home. Still, someone must be shopping there, because Meg Whitman is worth $1.3 billion dollars, even though she speaks PowerPoint nonsense like:

"As a non-Washington guy, Mitt would bring a fresh approach as well as the right tool kit and attitude needed to change Washington... (He) can tackle through the toughest problems, devise a get well plan, and deliver results."

Mitt Romney plays football with a toolbox? The toolbox is full of remedies and mail? Please, lady, I came to this seminar to learn to flip real estate, not have my intelligence insulted.

What does your brain feel like, when you ask it to build thoughts out of phrases like "devise a get well plan?" Does it hurt?

What's Mitt going to do? Right-size America by selling off the poor?

But that's neither here nor there. For all I know, Meg Whitman is a delightful dancer, a good cook, and if I were stuck next to her on an airplane, I'd take out my noise-canceling headset and hang myself with the cord.

The thing I'm having trouble with is her business versus Mitt's vision. Mitt Romney is running against obscenity on the Internet, and he says, "pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games," but eBay sells pornographic music and movies and violent video games on the Internet.

It's almost incongruous.

Right now, eBay is offering 1339 different items for Grand Theft Auto, 942 items for "death metal" and 583 items for "bitch." And I haven't even entered their "mature audiences" categories. Why not? Because I don't care how people I don't know get off. I was raised better than that. Mitt Romney's the one who keeps bringing it up.

And he can take eBay's money if he wants it. Sure, two weeks ago a German Federal Court ruled that, "eBay has created a serious risk of the company being used by sellers to distribute items harmful to children." But how could Mitt know that? According to the Washington Post, he didn't know how much money Marriott made from in-room porn, even though he was chairman of their audit committee.

For nine years.

I try to tackle through to a place where this makes sense, but the only solution I can devise is that Mitt Romney is full of shit.


To be fair -- to Mitt Romney and the responsible distributors of pornography he counts among his closest friends -- Mitt does admit that America is a free cesspool... er... country. As he explains it:


And Meg Whitman's eBay has a policy on smut that's so clear it could be a model for troubled parents everywhere:

"Pre-1980 Playboy, Playgirl and Penthouse magazines. These magazines may only be listed in the Magazine Back Issues: Other category..."

"Post-1980 Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse and other adult magazines... must be listed in the Everything Else: Mature Audiences"

Got it? The first category -- Playgirls from the '70s -- can be seen by any preschooler who's bored of Webkinz. To access the second, newer Playgirls, you have to register.

There's a piercing moral vision. Team Romney dreams of a place where only adults will buy post-1979 pornography. (Through them.) Leaving children to the simple pleasures of classic erotica, and nursery friends like Marilyn Chambers, Seka, and Johnny Wadd.

I really like the idea that there was a precise date when everything went seriously to hell. Justice Stewart only recognized obscenity when he saw it. Meg Whitman, Mitt Romney's National Finance Chair, knows the whole country turned into a filthy toilet it 1980.

When Reagan was elected.