So the opposition has put forward the best candidate they can find, and he has more skeletons in his closet than a body snatcher. There's even an opinion piece at WaPo asking "Did Republicans forget to vet Romney?"
Not only is he being evasive about tax evasion and companies he may have owned overseas, but now there's a chance he committed a federal felony by lying on SEC filings.
And this is just the latest in the largest number of scandals I've ever seen follow around someone who hasn't even been elected yet. So let's go through the full list of Rmoney scandals. Let's put them all together, and paint a portrait of the man who wants to be the President of the United States.
First, let's talk about immigration.
You cannot both be someone who has hired lawn services for your mansions and employed undocumented workers and claim that you have all the answers on immigration. You can't say that there's a problem with immigration, hire illegal immigrants, and then support an "illegals out" type policy. Besides, even if you do manage to get elected and kick out 11 million people, who's gonna mow your lawns?
So we've got basic hypocrisy from Mitt on the immigration issue: hiring undocumented workers while complaining about people who hire undocumented workers, and then lying about the fact that he hired undocumented workers. Basic hypocrisy, and the kind of thing we've come to expect from politicians.
But then, there's the racism. The blatant, awkward, possibly intentional racism.
So when posing with a group of black folks, you decided that the best thing you could do was quip "Who Let the Dogs out, woof woof" ?!
You don't even realize that this is incredibly racist, do you?
You went to the NAACP and started quoting the right-wing chamber of commerce and told them you were going to get rid of a program that's helping end medical discrimination? You're okay with the fact that black folks are discriminated against by our for-profit healthcare system, and you basically tell them that?
Do you even know that our healthcare system is discriminatory? Now that insurance companies can't deny coverage to minority folks, we're going to see a huge improvement in public health, but you want to protect a discriminatory healthcare system.
You went to the NAACP, told them you supported discrimination in medicine, and then looked surprised when you got booed. What, were you expecting raucous applause?
You seem to be the kind of racist who can't understand why the things they do are racism. Maybe you're just completely ignorant on race issues.
Or maybe it's that you believe the stuff in the Book of Mormon about how "Skin of blackness" is a curse from god because black people are a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations who shouldn't be allowed to become full members of the Mormon church? (Neither should women, by the way.)
Because if you believed that, it might help explain why you're a racist.
Just saying.
What's that? You couldn't possibly be a racist because your daddy marched with Martin Luther King that one time? Is that civil rights credentials through some weird kind of familial osmosis?
Can't be! That's just another one of your completely pointless and easy to disprove lies.
And that's another problem with Mitt. There's the dishonesty. Not just normal dishonesty. I'm talking levels of dishonesty that Richard Nixon would consider excessive in a politician. He lies about literally everything.
Earlier this week Red Sox season-ticket holder Mitt Romney gave a national network interview at Fenway Park. This led someone to bring to my attention that Romney, who was governor at the time, was there at Fenway Park for the historic championship-clinching Game 4 of the 2004 World Series. Or at least, he told an Air Force pilot he was:
When he told me he was Massachusett's governor, I politely asked him to leave the flight deck, declaring the cockpit off limits to all Red Sox fans. He laughed and made a few cracks my way, regarding the Yanks, and we hit it off pretty well. I asked him if he was at Fenway when the Sox finally won the World Series, and with a huge boyish grin he replied, "Yes I was."
No, he wasn't. I could go to a lot of trouble proving to you that Romney was actually in New Hampshire campaigning for George W. Bush that day, but it doesn't really matter because -- as every New Englander has been screaming while reading this post -- Game 4 was played at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri.
I actually woke people up yelling about that.
And that's not the only time he's done this!
At the close of the debate in St Petersburg, Fla, Mitt Romney said "Eighty-seven long years. We waited 87 long years. And true suffering Red Sox fans that my family and I are, we could not have been more happy than to see the Red Sox win the World Series."
Except that it wasn't 87 years, Mitt, IT WAS 86.
And I'm not the only one who noticed the 87 thing. ABC News:
It is a number that millions of Red Sox fans know by heart. It is a number that many kids in Massachusetts know before they can even count.
What does this say about the Governor? His authenticity has been questioned on several issues: abortion, gay rights, gun control. Is his alleged Red Sox fan-dom also now in question? Romney, who was born and raised in Michigan, did once refer to Fenway Park as "Red Sox Stadium."
Mitt, you were the fucking
Governor of Massachusetts. You know how seriously people from New England take their baseball. So I'm sure there's some way a slick political team like yours can totally smooth over the feathers, I mean it's just baseball, right?
Sources close to Romney say he realized his mistake immediately after the debate. Romney Spokesman Kevin Madden, a native New Yorker, had only this to say, "as a Yankee fan…we’ve won so many world series, that I have hard time keeping count."
SERIOUSLY?! SERIOUSLY TEAM ROMNEY?! You fuck up a Red Sox thing and your solution is to have a
Yankees fan talk about how many times the
Yankees have won the world Series?! You're not even
trying to win in New England anymore, are you?
And then we get back to stuff that I can't even try to joke about. Overseas shell companies?! Lying on SEC filings?! And now people are saying "Oh no, he didn't lie, he wasn't doing any work for Bain during 1999 and 2002, he was just getting paid to do nothing."
And people are buying that.
Even if that were true, it proves another point: he doesn't deserve the money he has. Mitt Romney made at least a few hundreds of thousands of dollars from Bain Capital while not working for them anymore. He probably made a ton more money, but we don't know because he won't release his tax returns. That's an obscene waste of money that should have been going to workers and their families standard operating procedure for the 1%. Which is why so many people are confused by the latest scandal.
People who grew up in middle class families, the 99%, look at the Bain Capital SEC Filings situation and see a cut and dry case of criminal dishonesty. People from the 1% look at the Bain Capital situation and say "What? That doesn't seem like a problem to me. That's normal."
The pro-billionaire folks so blinded by wealth that criminally dishonest behavior looks like a standard and acceptable practice to them.
But when confronted by people about his dishonesty, he get's angry, starts calling other people liars, and calls it an "unfounded character assault." Well no, Mitt, when you have a paper trail like this one, it's not unfounded at all. It's well founded. But I'm sure you could clear this all up if you just released your tax returns.
He's like a monarch that is used to everyone else obeying the law while he can ignore it himself because he embodies the law. It's like he's never had to face tough questions about himself or his actions.
Maybe that's why Mitt Romney feels the need to confront people smoking pot and drinking beer on the beach? From the NYTimes:
The Romneys rarely entertain neighbors, but they have tried to weave themselves into the fabric of local life. Mr. Romney and his wife take regular walks around La Jolla, exchanging pleasantries with fellow strollers and occasionally enforcing the law. A young man in town recalled that Mr. Romney confronted him as he smoked marijuana and drank on the beach last summer, demanding that he stop.
The issue appears to be a recurring nuisance for the Romneys. Mr. Quint, who lives on the waterfront near Mr. Romney, said that a police officer had asked him, on a weekend when the candidate was in town, to report any pot smoking on the beach. The officer explained to him that “your neighbors have complained,” Mr. Quint recalled. “He was pretty clear that it was the Romneys.”
Okay, Mitt, I need to explain something to you. If you have trouble with people drinking beer and smoking pot on the Beach,
don't live in California. I know a few Californians personally, and that's pretty much all they do: sit on the beach, smoke weed, and drink cases of Schlitz. Occasionally, there are Cheetos as well. I know there are Californians whose lives don't revolve around beach parties, because otherwise the state wouldn't have an economy and wouldn't be able to pay for things like teachers and police officers, but the ones that I know personally tend to gravitate to that activity.
I'm sure this sort of behavior is just a sign of a man who wants to enforce the law though, and isn't a sign of being a creepy powertripping asshole with authority issues.
Robin Madden, who had also just arrived as a freshman, [recalls] the startling incident began when Romney called him and two or three other residents into his room, saying, “Come up, I want to show you something.” When they entered Romney’s room, “and laid out on his bed was a Michigan State Trooper’s uniform.”
Madden, a native Texan who graduated from Stanford in 1970 and went on to become a successful television producer and writer, has never forgotten that strange moment, which he has recounted to friends over the years as he observed his former classmate’s political ascent. The National Memo learned of the incident from a longtime Madden friend to whom he had mentioned it years ago.
Said Madden in a recent interview, “He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.” National Memo
So you took a Michigan State Trooper's uniform and used it to pull people over. Like your friends who were returning from dates. For kicks.
Knowing all this, I really can easily believe it when Romney says "I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and never did it again."
Nope. Never mind. Romney clearly have massive authority issues and shouldn't be allowed to be in a position of power, anywhere, ever.
But it gets worse. Not only does Romney oppose marriage equality, he also committed a hate crime when he attacked a gay student for having long hair. I'm not going to recount the horrific attack, but he hasn't done a single thing since then which would suggest to me that he's not a homophobe.
Finally, there's Seamus the dog strapped to the roof of a car for 12 hours. Here's a simulation of the sounds and sights of such a trip:
If that's how a man treats his own dog, how the hell do you think he'll treat the country?
So lets put all of this together into one ugly picture. First, add the homophobia, the opposition to weed and beer, the authority issues, and thinking that having one beer and one cigarette made him "wayward" together. This is someone who believes in religion in a deeply fundamentalist, deeply unsettling way. He's not just the kind of person who thinks its his job to tell people who they can marry, he's the kind of person who's interested in telling people who they can have sex with and what positions are ethically acceptable.
Considering his behavior towards black people, his religious dislike of various substances, and what his scriptures say about people of color, I think it's fair to say that Mitt Romney sees people of color as inferior. His behavior says so. He may even feel religiously justified in such a belief, and might not consider that belief racist.
Now add in the dishonesty. Add in the obsessive lying. Lying when you have nothing to lose. Refusing to release your tax returns. Being willing to hold everyone else in government to a higher standard than you're held to. Having hypocritical beliefs about immigration, and being willing to hold everyone else to a higher standard than the one to which he's held himself paints a picture of someone who's a narcissist and a pathological liar.
Now add in the fact that he's not a good person. Good people don't get involved in vulture capitalism. They don't attack gay teenagers. They don't pretend to be cops to scare people. They don't tie the family dog to the top of the car like a piece of luggage. He's a mean, arrogant, uncaring, bully.
Mitt Romney isn't just a Republican. There are a number of Republicans that I don't particularly like, but who don't seem like bad people. Some of them are Mormons like Romney. Take John Huntsman. I don't agree with him on everything, but I don't think he's a bad guy. I just think his political views are terrible.
But Romney? I don't know that Romney's views are terrible because he disagrees with himself so often that I still don't know what they actually are. The only person that Mitt Romney will not eventually agree with is Mitt Romney. It's not his beliefs that are the real problem.
I think that Mitt Romney himself is terrible. I think that Mitt Romney is a horrible human being. This isn't the kind of person you put in charge of a government. Hell, this isn't the kind of person you put in charge of a Kebab Cart. He'll find a legal way to make off with most of the money while tricking someone else into doing all of the work, and he'll poison most of the customers in the process. Then, after screwing you over and ruining your business, he'll expect to be thanked for it.
And that is what we can expect from a Romney presidency.
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Disclaimer: I do not think that being a Mormon automatically makes you a racist. I think that being Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, automatically makes you a racist (because of the things you decided to write about black people.) Like any group, you have to look at Mormons as unique individuals. Many of them may not actually believe what Joseph Smith wrote about black people. I think its clear from his behavior, though, that Romney does. I don't know what he'd have to say on that point, but judging from his track record of truthfulness, I doubt we can take his word on it.