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This Would-Be Mitt Romney Website Is Actually Pretty Boring, So Why Do I Love It So Much?

What it would have been like to not lose.

It’s strictly a personal opinion, of course, but fuck winning gracefully. Take a gander if you dare at some of the vile ooze seeping out from the right-wing of the internet post-Tuesday and tell me there isn’t a segment of America more worthy of being gloated upon. (Sadly, it’s rather difficult to emotionally separate the much larger well-meaning but severely deluded right-voting population from the aforelinked troglodytes. Try it.) In any case, in that ring-wing portion of the internet you may have accidentally stumbled upon the website of President Elect Mitt Romney, at least before it was taken down yesterday. Fortunately, Political Wire snagged us commies some screenshots to giggle about.

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The URL was romney.solutionstreamcreative.com, with Solution Stream being the design company that did the site. According to the Huffington Post, the site took said design outfit a day and a half to whip up. I guess the site is ultimately pretty boring, much like the candidate. He does a pretty decent job chode-mugging and “The Inauguration” page is pretty choice, but I’ve seen and heard enough from this dude over the past two years that I could have designed and written this page myself. Hopefully someone tries to recreate the original elsewhere, just because it’d be an ace prank for one of Romney’s brood to make it their dad’s browser home-page.

Finally, here it is: comic sans. This was snagged last night by Motherboard managing editor Derek Mead just as the Mitt site was in its final death throes. I suspect this was the result of some font going missing as the thing was being torn down, or maybe just maybe some web designer Nelson laughing at Romney in his own special way, but in whatever case, it’s beautiful.

So there it is. Not too exciting, but this more about the schadenfreude, right? Pleasure in a rival’s misfortune is as natural as anything. In fact, some recent research has shown that our brain’s pleasure center gets a kick out of it. No surprise that we’re hardwired to experience pleasure whenever we move — or are perceived to move — up in the hierarchy. Evolution, eh. We move up in the world, our survival chances get better. In this case, if you are, say, saddled with a preexisting health condition and can’t get health insurance, that survival might be pretty real.

Nature’s pretty good at this stuff.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.