Is there any other way to interpret this? Romney asserts that the single mother who works day-in and day-out, pays payroll taxes, state and local taxes, but uses the Earned Income Credit to defray her federal income tax believes that the government should take care of her, that she is a victim. But when he uses dummy corporations in the Cayman Islands and accounts in tax havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg to dodge tax payments, he says paying more taxes should disqualify him from being president. So to be clear, when the single mom uses the EIC to stay in the workforce, contribute productively to our society and immediately return her whole paycheck to circulation, she's a leech on society. Romney, now, keeping his hard-earned money from going into the treasury, making sure his capital isn't creating American jobs or bolstering the American economy, well, he's clearly demonstrating his presidential qualities.
Steady your stomach and read on.
And war? Wars are only fought by people too insignificant to even mention in his nomination acceptance speech. Important people like Romney can manage to get a religious exemption to go cycling through Paris instead. So Romney can cavalierly pledge that if elected, he will embrace the Netanyahu position, including a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran. His fiscal plan includes increasing defence spending by up to $2 Trillion over the next decade. Meanwhile, co-chairs of his campaign, including Senator John McCain voted to block the Veterans Job Corps Act, a bi-partisan bill written in conjunction with some of the very senators who voted against it. But veterans don't deserve our thanks, don't deserve job creation when their unemployment levels are 35% higher than the rest of the country. And if they go to the VA Hospital, they should be denigrated for asking for government health care handouts. Why? Because they were playing by the rules that told them that serving their country meant joining the military and actually fighting in the war. Rather than playing by the rules that allow them to bicycle through gay Paris during one war prior to working to start another.
" More than 85,000 women undergo IVF in the U.S. each year, with more than 25,000 IVF babies born annually." Mitt Romney supports a personhood amendment that would outlaw this procedure. He chose as a running mate Paul Ryan, whose anti-choice voting record includes personhood amendments and a bill co-sponsored with Todd Akin defining rape as "forcible rape". Of course, he wasn't worried about personhood when he helped pay for Tagg's IVF. And he wasn't anti-choice for Tagg when he financially supported a surrogacy with a contract explicitly defining Tagg's right to choose abortion in the case of birth defects. It's clear that he thinks the rules that cover him and his family are very different from the rules that should cover you and yours.
Romney thinks that the Obama campaign should pull ads run by a super pac (over which the campaign has no control) when fact checkers find them of questionable accuracy: “You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.” The ad in question tied the late diagnosis of Ranae Soptic's cancer to loss of health benefits after Romney and Bain Capital forced Roy Soptic's employer into bankruptcy and eliminated 750 jobs, including Roy's. Factcheck.org finds this link tenuous at best.
Now, Romney's own campaign (over which he does have control) is running an ad that has been judged false by fact checkers, news media, a former president, and even other republicans. The ad claimed that Obama "gutted" the work requirement for welfare reform. What the Obama administration did was allow states to apply for waivers from some of the rules of the program for demonstration projects to get more people off welfare rolls and back to work. That's about the exact opposite of "gutted".
Did Romney get embarrassed and pull the ad? No. His campaign response, from aid Neil Newhouse is, "Our most effective ad is our welfare ad," and, "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Well, I guess if your big, fat dog-whistle racism lie is effective, by all means, campaign on it. And add a lie about Obama raiding Medicare for $700 billion, lies about Obamacare, the 48%, "you didn't build that", stimulus money. The list is exhausting. According to one count of Steve Benen's not comprehensive, yet well documented list, Romney has lied 533 times in 30 weeks. Because that stuff about running accurate ads? Campaigning on the truth? That's for the other guy.
Romney has finally produced two whole years of tax returns--and a note from his accountant. That should be enough for us, right, after all, that's all he reviewed from his VP candidates--two years and a note? Oops, Tim Pawlenty gave the Romney campaign a bunch/several years and Paul Ryan and other candidates ponied up several years worth. So Romney was able to assess their returns for whether they took advantage of the 2009 general tax amnesty, to see how much money they were stashing in off-shore tax havens, and to see how their IRAs have developed over the years. All things we'd like to see in order to vet Romney as a candidate, as indeed, we've been able to vet every presidential candidate since his father established the precedent in 1968. But he's playing by a different set of rules.
Because the rules that apply to everyone else just don't apply to him.