Apparently, the GOP and the media think the public are dumb enough to believe anything. Romney's latest campaign against Obama's "Outsourcing" ads is to call him on a liar on two grounds, neither of which reflect favorably on Mitt Romney. The first claim is that Romney left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Salt Lake Olympics, so nothing that happened at Bain after that time can be charged to him. He continued to be CEO and was paid a salary through 2002, however, and indeed he continues to get money from Bain even today.
So either he was really Bain CEO at that time, in which case his claims to have "saved" the Salt Lake City Olympics are fake; or he wasn't CEO, in which case he was paid a salary for doing nothing. Neither case reflects creditably on him, and as we have seen in a prior post on this blog, the Salt Lake games were already in the bag when he headed them up, and he added little value. The Salt Lake games post was to groom him to be the first Mormon president, not to utilize his management skills. As for Bain, it is likely he interferes in both Bain Consulting and Bain Capital even today.
The GOP continues to try to get the media to contaminate itself in supporting his lies. Here's one Mitt-oriented "fact check" that misses the point with regard to Massachusetts using Indian call center labor on a program designed to help the Massachusetts poor.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/11/barack-obama/obama-ad-says-romney-outsourced-massachusetts-jobs/
In 2004, the Mass. legislature passed a law to end the funding of outsourcing, which the blog notes, most states were doing. Romney vetoed that provision of the law, meaning he intended to keep outsourcing in place. Citigroup was running a call center for support for the Massachusetts food stamps program in India. So an unemployed Massachusetts impoverished person who need help on her food stamps would call somebody in India for help. The dimwitted fact checkers say this means the Obama ad is a lie because Romney was only preserving outsourcing, not starting it; and it was the contractor Citigroup that was doing the outsourcing, not the state government itself. First of all, there is no claim as to when the program started. Chances are Romney did start it. Second, if they can't see there is something wrong with hiring a private contractor to run a program targeted at unemployed poor people by hiring cheap labor 12,000 miles away, then they don't know the meaning of "penny wise, pound foolish." Perhaps if some Massachusetts people had been hired for the call center, there would have been less need for food stamps. Moreover, they miss the fact that Romney's veto confirms he believed in the principle of outsourcing. In short, the Obama campaign ads are true: Romney was an outsourcer as governor.
But the Romneyites seem to think they can confuse the issue by claiming Romney wasn't responsible, even though the outsourcing happened, and even though Bain Consulting, Bain Capital, and the State of Massachusetts all did it, and all of them were headed by Mitt Romney. They think the public is stupid indeed. They think if they can catch Obama in any misstatement, or as outsourcer of even one job, they have completely removed these issues from the table, so Romney's outsourcing in fact and in principle, and his thousands of lies, no longer matter.
That alone should disqualify him with the voters. Romney thinks you're stupid. His best play in this situation would be to say, yes, he parked money in tax havens to avoid taxes, and yes he outsourced as a matter of policy in business; but that's why you should elect him, he knows how it's done and how to stop it. He will not, not only because he doesn't intend to stop it, but he is so committed to the notion that he is morally superior to everyone else that he will not stop the lies. Remember, Romney has been told his whole life that Mormons are better than other people, and that he has been chosen by divine prophecy to be the first Mormon president and possibly the One Mighty and Strong whose job is to save America. All his life he has been told these things, sometimes mockingly no doubt, but it would hardly be surprising that he seems to think that anything he does is by definition righteous. He can rationalize any crime, anything at all, with this mindset.
No comments:
Post a Comment