"Saturday Night Live" is taking harder shots at Mitt Romney: After months of portraying the Republican candidate as merely out-of-touch, the show presented him in a political special Thursday as a relentless and casual racist.
In a series of supposedly leaked videos — inspired by the real one in which Romney said 47 percent of Americans were reliant on the government — Jason Sudekis portrayed a Romney who assumes that the "chef" at McDonald's "no habla inglés" and takes pains to clarify that when he talks about the 47 percent, he only means black people.
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Sudeikis-as-Romney also refers to California as "North Mexico."
"SNL" tends to pick on politicians' surface-level flaws, from stuffiness to slips of the tongue — the kind of traits that politicians themselves might make light of to appear more human. With Romney, the show has gone unusually far by suggesting he is secretly dismissive of people of other races.
"SNL" did previously portray Sen. John McCain as apologizing for using the word "gooks" to refer to his captors in Vietnam, but McCain actually did use the word in 2000, and did apologize.
The fake videos aired during a "Fox & Friends" sketch that found the show's hosts trying desperately to spin the videos in Romney's favor. It ended with a long list of absurd corrections from the show's fact checkers, including "A wind turbine has never cut off the head of a pretty girl in a convertible" and "The Negro League is not 'back and better than ever.'"
Watch the video: