We have been discussing how mean=spirited and nasty the presidential campaign has already become on both sides. With Republicans called Obama a socialist and a Muslim, Democrats are saying Romney would not have killed Bin Laden . . . and now that he is vampiric.
The new ad, “Steel” describes GS Technologies, a steel mill in Kansas City, Mo., that was bought by Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital. One former mill worker says “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer, a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us.” “Mitt the Job Destroyer” is still better than “Vlad the Impaler” but they seem to be saying that he is both.
The question is how strong the anti-vampire vote is. After all, Obama is no Buffy The Vampire Slayer himself, but then again who is?
Before the Republicans denounce the ad, they should consider that there could be some positive aspects to an undead president for the GOP:
1. They work nights.
2. They truly can take the bite out of crime.
3. They are always taking the pulse of voters.
5. One meeting of the Group of Eight would leave a group of one.
6. The GOP would finally secure the Goth vote.
7. We would finally have a president who is all bite and no bark.
8. Republicans can re-use those “Drill, Baby, Drill” signs.
9. No one is more anti-evolution than a vampire.
10. Perfect for the slogan, “Better Undead than Red.”
Source: Washington Post
It is not like the issues of the pecariat are hard to understand, it is just that the Stockholm Syndrome within rejects the notion that mommy would sleep with the badman.
rafflaw:
The president doesnt know diddly about economics and neither do his advisers. Our economy is still in the toilet and getting worse.
Another 4 years of President Obama and the whole country is going to be broke. The policies of the Obama administration are truly Vampiric; if allowed to continue, they will suck the life out of this country.
@Bron: None of that is true; there is plenty of evidence, you just choose to ignore it because it would make your hero vampires look bad. I know you all too well, Bron, you really just make shit up to suit your argument.
1. They work nights. Just make sure you don’t turn on the lights.
2. They truly can take the bite out of crime. Just make sure they don’t suck your blood.
3. They are always taking the pulse of voters. Not after you’re dead.
what happened to number 4?
5. One meeting of the Group of Eight would leave a group of one. Don’t forget about the Fat Four.
6. The GOP would finally secure the Goth vote. The Goth’s don’t care.
7. We would finally have a president who is all bite and no bark. Since when is that going to happen?
8. Republicans can re-use those “Drill, Baby, Drill” signs. Just get clean coal instead. Unless you want to put a up bunch of wind mills and solar panels. Take you pick. Wait until the electricity goes out. It has to come from someplace.
9. No one is more anti-evolution than a vampire. Except the wolves.
10. Perfect for the slogan, “Better Undead than Red.” Do you want to be a vampire?
Tony C:
I might believe you if there was more evidence but there isnt. If anything Armco screwed Mitt and gave him a white elephant and he did the best he could to keep it afloat.
That company was going downhill when Romney took it over and it was far enough gone that he couldnt save it. Those guys got an extra 8 years of pay because of Romney. If the parent had not sold it they would have shut it down. That steel mill had 4,500 people in its day but most of them had been laid off by the time Bain bought the mill. It was a mini-mill and he tried merging it with another mini and he lost.
“A spokesman for Bain Capital said: “Over $100 million and many thousands of hours were invested in GSI to upgrade its facilities and make the company more competitive during a 7-year period when the industry came under enormous pressure and 44 U.S. steel companies went into bankruptcy. In the same period, we worked to turn around GSI, we helped launch and grow an innovative business called Steel Dynamics that is today a $6 billion global leader…. Our focus remains on building great companies and improving their operations.””
He took some money from government which I dont think was right but he didnt screw those people like that ad says.
Capitalism isnt a make work program, you actually have to pay your way. The reason you have to pay your way is so that there is extra money to create more jobs. Romney was trying to create more jobs, oh not because of any love for the working man but because more jobs means more money in his pocket.
When the left actually understands real world economics let me know. Karl, Keynes and Krugman were/are full of crap.
Bron,
I didn’t say he walked on water or produced miracles, but your comment that Obama and his advisors no nothing about economics is not backed by any substantive examples or evidence. Romney’s experience at Bain prepares him for a moral jail cell, not the presidency.
rafflaw:
“Your statement is blatantly false. Obama knows as much about economics as Romney does, and probably more.”
Are you serious? I am having a good laugh though.
The President also walks on water, heels the sick, feeds 5,000 with a loaf of bread and a pack of Hebrew Nationals [the regular size not the 1/4 pounders].
Tony C.,
you said it better than I could.
@Bron: Or, it equally looks as if Romney ran a steel company into bankruptcy, thus stiffing bond holders and other equity holders, while lining his own pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been used to pay the legal debts of said steel company. If you are looking for proof of managerial incompetence and malfeasance, a bankruptcy that unnecessarily stiffed creditors in order to pay the managers undeserved riches is a damn good place to start.
If Romney ran a 7-11, he would mortgage it, borrow as much as he could, pay himself a million dollars for his “management” effort and then claim bankruptcy because the 7-11 wasn’t earning enough to make the loan and mortgage payments it never had before he got there.
@importanttopics: I cannot recall the investigative reporter that I read some years ago (Taibbi? Did you do that?), but Bain Capital was engaged in unethical deals, not illegal deals.
Selling a large business can take years to do. Before Bain came on the scene, the standard operating model was that interested parties would make rough non-binding offers of what they thought a company was worth; and the highest few bidders would then conduct some due diligence with the company and refine their bids, and that would continue for some rounds. Of course, only the signed contract is a contract, so in essence the company is eliminating bidders based on the word of other bidders that they are serious, barring any surprises.
To my understanding Bain upended that model; by making bad faith high bids, which eliminated some good faith contenders, and after a year or two when they had eliminated everybody else, restarting negotiations (since nothing was binding) and claiming one trivial thing after another is a reason to lower their bid, and ending up a significantly LOWER bidder than even some of the first round bids.
By then, the company is boiled. If they back out with Bain, it looks to others as if Bain found something rotten at the core. Even if they can overcome that perception, they are a year or more behind whatever eight ball was motivating them to sell in the first place.
The model has changed since then, and many agents will no longer even ACCEPT bids by Bain, because of their bad faith actions. But I figure Romney doesn’t care, he made his fortune by betraying people that trusted him, both before and after the sale, and now he will try to bring that same style of bait-and-switch “management” to the Executive Office.
Bron,
Your statement is blatantly false. Obama knows as much about economics as Romney does, and probably more. Romney only knows that the rich much get richer and he doesn’t care how that happens. Actually, the economy under Obama has regained over 3 million jobs in the private sector since he has come into office. The stock market has been booming, and big corporations are making record profits, so what did he do wrong that Romney would correct? If Romney had his way, the US auto industry would be dead and millions of jobs would have been lost.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/06/us-campaign-romney-bailout-idUSTRE8050LL20120106
here is an article from reuters which seems pretty fair.
It looks to me as if this company was on its way out and Romney gave it almost another decade of life.
If the reuters article is correct, he actually tried to make it in the steel business by buying a south carolina company and merging the 2.
Since President Obama knows next to nothing about economics as do the majority of his advisers, it is no surprise they would use this as an example. Lets see some more examples and lets also see all the companies he invested in which did make money.
President Obama couldnt competently run a 7-11 if his life depended on it. He has been proving that for the last 3 years.
Tony C. Sounds fishy. Do you think Bain was engaged in illegal business practices?
Romney is obviously not a vampire in the sci-fi sense, but more to the point, and more to the metaphor, he is much more like a Ferengi than he is like a vampire.
The key to ascertaining that is the way the victims are characterized:
(Life In The Ferengi Homeworld, quoting Chomsky, emphasis added). The victims of a vampire are corpses, but the victims of Romney-Bain are the “precariat.”
The unacceptable part of this is that the Ferengi are far more prevalent than those in the U.S.eh? who bother to try to experience reality are wont to admit.
@importanttopics: Romney did not lay people off, he promised the owners and employees he would turn it around, and he put the company in the ground instead, and in the process of claiming bankruptcy still managed an overall profit of several hundred percent of his investment. He loaded the company up with debt it used to pay Bain Capital and then claimed bankruptcy.
Here is the story reported in Mother Jones.
Romney led Bain at the time, and I believe that was all done intentionally, and in more than one company.
I don’t know about socialist. Obama’s policies seem to be more fascistic, especially with regard to the health care bill. Romney has very similar policies so this seems to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Furthermore, if Americans were really afraid of having a Muslim President, would they have elected a guy whose middle name is “Hussein”? I think not. Is Romney a Vampire? I don’t believe in Vampires, but if I bought a company that wasn’t currently turning a profit, I would have to lay some people off as well.
D’oh. Zombies, not Vampire. Oh well.
Better red than bled?
The Obama campaign got it wrong. Romney isn’t a vampire–he’s an ivy league zombie.