The title isn't exactly a direct quote from Mitt Romney, but while we're celebrating the President's schooling of Romney--and while we wait for the Guiness Book of World Records to award Romney the distinction of being the first person ever caught lying in front of 70 million people in real time--that title will do for a good part of the morning's narrative. It seems that everyone's talking about it. Here's the New Yorker quoting Mitt Romney as he desperately searched for even one qualified woman in all of Massachusetts to join his cabinet:

And I—and I went to my staff, and I said, how come all the people for these jobs are—are all men? They said, well, these are the people that have the qualifications. And I said, well, gosh, can’t we—can’t we find some—some women that are also qualified? And so off they set. Romney did not say if his staff members were all men, but they became determined pursuers of mystery women—“we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet”; “I brought us whole binders full of—of women.” “Binders full of women” is a phrase that provoked instant fascination, because it is so strange, and, as a prop and a concept, so vivid. One saw a table at which middle-aged men sat slowly leafing through pages of plastic sleeves with photographs of women tucked inside. Or, more concretely, trapped between covers, battling with metal rings.

While he was at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney surrounded himself with women in binders. Here's a picture of the early Bain Capital partners along with what is presumably their "Binder of Women":

The New Yorker continues:

One got the sense of Mitt Romney coming from a place where women were generally in the other room, waiting to be invited in only when the moment—or the visibility of the job—called for it. Romney was fifty-six when he became governor, with decades spent in business during which he could have made the sort of contacts that would have turned him into a resource for others looking for qualified women. The Boston Globe pointed out that Romney “did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s.” Where were the binders then? The Globe added that even today, only four of Bain’s forty-nine partners are women. This is a firm he built and a culture he controlled. (The story, according to the Boston Phoenix, was also not quite true. An outside group put together the binder. Romney didn’t put women in the most important cabinet jobs. And he had fewer and fewer working for him as time went on.)

So, not only was Romney's actual quote shockingly callous, but it was also a big, fat lie. It should be no surprise then that the gaffe has been reported by the Washington Post ("'Binders Full of Women' is this week’s Big Bird."), by CNN ("When asked about women in the work force, Romney, whose record of promoting women at Bain Capital was dismal, actually spoke of "binders full of women." A metaphor for the ages."), ABC News ("Internet Takes Off With Mitt Romney’s ‘Binders Full of Women’ "), and, among many others, The New York Times, which provided this :58 clip of the gaffe:

Now, I understand that Romney's white male privilege isn't a joke and it sure as hell isn't funny, but one sword against intolerance and condescension is humor. Romney is a liar and a boor, and he treats women like shit. He'd continue to do so as President. So, with that in mind, time to jump over to see some more of the funny.