Mitt Romney spent his Saturday night at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills, California. Yes, he took in $6 million at the event Beverly Hilton Hotel event, but he also wasted yet another of the precious few days left in the campaign in a solid blue state (California with 55 electoral votes, the most in the nation).
But the really big news out of the event was made when he talked about how his wife's plane made an emergency landing the previous day because of an electrical malfunction. The cabin filled with smoke, but luckily, there were no injuries.
"I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound," Romney said. "And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were."
Touching and appropriate...if he had stopped there. But Romney continued, suggesting that passengers should be allowed to roll down airplane windows, apparently forgetting the dangers of high altitude:
“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”
As almost everybody knows, a sudden loss of pressurization in a high-altitude airplane cabin can be extremely dangerous, including loss of oxygen (which leads to unconsciousness and loss of control of the aircraft), not to mention hypothermia or frostbite from the cold.
In fairness, the crowd had just heard from comedian Dennis Miller, so maybe Romney was speaking in that spirit. On the other hand, Romney takes everything seriously, even humor.
"I want to thank Dennis Miller for not just the humor, but the truth in the humor,” Romney said. “Much of what he said tonight, much of what he said was very encouraging and uplifting."
