WAIT -- BUT DIDN'T MITT ROMNEY SAY...?

When I read about this quote, I actually thought some right-wingers might embrace it:

The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza has a (subscriber-only) long reported piece on the Senate immigration-reform negotiations, in which an aide to Marco Rubio strips bare the dynamic with a brutal frankness that I have never seen before in American politics:

"There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can't cut it," a Rubio aide told me. "There shouldn't be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can't get it, can't do it, don't want to do it. And so you can't obviously discuss that publicly."

Glenn Reynolds says that insulting American workers "is political poison." But how different is what this Rubio aide said from what Mitt Romney said at that fundraiser last year?

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax.

What did Glenn Reynolds say about that?

WELL, YES: Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel: Romney must own '47 percent' argument 100 percent of the time....

Related: Howie Carr: "A huge percentage of Obama's voters are basically wards of the state. There are millions of them, and they have no intention of voting for anyone who might want them to ever go out and work for a living."...

Me, I don't see much difference between saying that 47 percent of people in this country are shiftless parasites and saying that certain American workers won't do backbreaking labor -- to me, what Romney said is more insulting than what the Rubio aide said. And yet the right embraced Romney's remarks, at least until their political impact became obvious.

But I guess the difference is that when Romney talked about that shiftless 47 percent, he never called them Americans. He referred to them as likely Obama voters. The right certainly doesn't regard those people as Americans.