Mitt Romney Touches Things:



It was a day of miracles, Father's Day 2012, for Mitt Romney on his campaign bus tour (motto: "We're rolling over the United States"). He went to the magical store of Wawa in Quakerstown, Pennsylvania, which is in America, goddamnit. Real America. Not the fake America of New York or California, where they vote for black Muslims from Hawaii, which is just a town in Kenya. If you've never been, a Wawa is a convenience store that sells sandwiches. You know the truck stops with Subways in 'em? Yeah, that's pretty much Wawa except a little cleaner.

But, by gum, Mitt Romney was gonna show he was a man o' the people and that he can join them in their sneeze-guard covered condiment bars o' normalcy. See, Romney had ordered his hoagie on the Wawa touch screen ordering system, which Wawa installed in 2001 in order to catch up to local competition, Sheetz, which had had the touch screen hoagie ordering system already. A motherfucker doesn't need to talk to a person to get his ham and cheese on a roll.

The touch screen was fuckin' fantastic, according to Romney, who had to tell the crowd about it at a rally later, "You press a little touchtone key pad… You touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, and there's your sandwich. It's amazing!" Romney probably loved it because it meant that someone got fired. Christ, no one tell him about ATMs.

The miracle of the touch screen is actually the miracle of the free market, gosh darnit: "It was a technology, he said, that had been fostered by competition—competition he said the federal government lacks in delivering its services to Americans. He said the government's lack of competition and bureaucracy was hurting the United States in keeping jobs that are moving to other countries."

Who wants to be the first person to tell Mitt Romney that touch screens were developed from government funding of projects by engineers at the University of Kentucky and the University of Illinois and the University of Delaware, and that's just in the U.S.? Yep, if it wasn't for those innovations and innovators, backed by government entities like the NSF, Romney would have had to speak to a human being to order his meatball hoagie with pickles (seriously, that's fucked up).