Saturday, March 3, 2012

Self-righteousness and the Lie Reflex

On Jan. 28, I posted an old story about Damon Corp.  Bain Capital took a position in Damon Corp. and put Mitt Romney on the board of directors. They liquidated their position at a $12 million profit in 1993.  Damon Corp. was found to have submitted millions of fraudulent Medicare claims while Romney was a director and was assessed the largest fine in Massachusetts history.   The story can be found here.

http://www.redstate.com/willwong/2012/01/28/mitt-romney-damon-capital-blood-money/

Now I want to direct your attention to the end of the article, because this became an issue when Romney ran for Governor of Massachusetts.

"According to The Deseret News, when his Democratic opponent for the governorship, Shannon O’Brien, accused him of lax oversight at Damon and failing to report the fraud, Romney defended that he had helped uncover the illegal activity at Damon, asking the board’s lawyers to investigate. As a result, he said, the board took corrective action before selling the company in 1993 to Corning Inc.

"However, according to the court records, the Damon scheme continued throughout Bain’s ownership, and prosecutors credited Corning, not Romney, with taking corrective action.

"According to a Boston Globe report, then Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney, while insisting that he and fellow board members at Damon Corp. uncovered what was later determined to be a criminal scheme to defraud Medicare in 1993, acknowledged that the directors did not turn over their findings to federal authorities then investigating the medical testing industry.

"While the medical testing company went bankrupt, with thousands losing their jobs, Bain Capital captured a $12 million profit— over $450,000 of that money going to Romney personally."

In other words, Romney, when challenged made another lie: that he had uncovered the fraud.
This was a special kind of lie in that it was so obvious.  If Corning knew about the fraud, Bain could not have pocketed $12 million from its sale. If Romney knew and didn't tell Corning, he was still guilty of fraud in the sale. If he was part of the fraud, then he is a criminal. The best thing for Romney to do was to plead ignorance of the fraud.

Romney, however, could not do that. Indeed, he is so addicted seeing himself as the self-righteous "savior" that he invented a self-defeating lie that anybody could see through to justify his actions.  This tends to indicate he is lying to himself, not just to others.  That's a dangerous tendency.  He believes he is good no matter what he does, and to put that kind of mentality in charge of nuclear weapons is virtually a guarantee that they will be used somewhere.

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