If you watched TV in the 1980s, you surely remember this:
The TV show Diff’rent Strokes – which featured the iconic tagline “What you talkin’ bout, Willis”? – was produced by PFAW’s founder Norman Lear.
And when Norman heard that Mitt Romney – whose first name is actually Willard – was running for president, it rang a bell.
In a piece in Variety this week, Norman asks Willard Mitt Romney exactly what he is talking about:
"What You Talkin’ Bout, Willard?"
By Norman Lear
I don’t have to explain that line to Americans who grew up watching one of our production company’s sitcoms, "Diff’rent Strokes", which ran for eight seasons between 1978 and 1986 and for years after in syndication. Any one who knows the show will recall this signature phrase repeated by the young Gary Coleman to his older brother when stupefied and maddened by something his brother just said, "What you talkin’ bout, Willis?"
I know some people think Willard Mitt Romney is the only responsible adult i n that implausible field of presidential hopefuls, but often he will say something so surprising and disingenuous in this seemingly endless campaign, I find myself thinking, ‘What you talkin’ bout, Willard?
Absent a profanity, I don’t know a better reaction to Romney’s declaration that "corporations are people." Of course he’d be correct if the people he’s referring to are the billionaire Koch brothers. Or if they are the people who are setting up phony corporations for the purpose of supporting Willard Mitt Romney’s candidacy with million dollar gifts, and they could of course include the Kochs.
"What you talkin’ bout, Willard?" leaps to mind at the thought of the natty Harvard-educated Wall Street executive and former Massachusetts governor railing against "eastern elites" at the last Republican National Convention. And it aches to be shouted out when I am reminded that Willard Mitt Romney, seeking someone to head his legal team, chose a man whose reactionary views about the U.S. Constitution led to a bi-partisan Senate vote to keep him off the Supreme Court, Robert Bork.
Willard’s embrace of Bork, despite his angry rants since then, such as those calling for active government censorship of popular culture, is clearly meant to signal far-right activists that they can count on more Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito, who are all energetically working to make Romney’s assertion that "corporations are people" a legal reality.
What are you talkin’ bout, Willard?