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
Frankly, you wrote: The mob runs a scam that sounds awfully familiar. They buy their way into some small business, arrange to get some control and then borrow every dime they can in the business’ name, buy tons of goods on credit then take the cash & goods and leave the business holding the bag. Guys are doing time for this scam.
Somehow the MBAs of American industry, like those at Bain, have found a way to do this without going to jail.
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It’s because they bought the jail.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/26/nation/la-na-romney-labor-20120226 Romney is stridently anti-union.
Brooklin Bridge, Why would Romney be afraid of his buddy Paul Ryan?. If your point is that the election of Romney is preferable to the election of Obama because Romney is afraid, I disagree with that. Romney has made his peace with the tea party by being the anti-Obama and taking conservative stands on social issues. He has nothing to fear from them.
Brooklin Bridge,
I agree with you about Obama going after whistle blowers.
Regarding Romney in Massachusetts: It’s hard to be a bully when you’re outnumbered/not bigger than your victim.
On second thought, however, I agree with you. Romney is a bully. And he is functionally almost identical to Obama, probably just not quie as much balls in his bully.
The ultimate bully, by the way, would be someone who uses drones to kill people six thousand miles away with no judicial review.
Tony C. 1, May 14, 2012 at 6:24 pm
@Dredd: The people have never risen up to take over these factories that Romney-Bain capitalists have practiced [on]. Why?
We are too big. Marx is talking about armed revolution …
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Not totally.
For example, consider some of the Bain destruction that Romney did.
If the workers had been allowed to buy the corporation, to become the stockholders and occupy the executive positions, that would fulfill that stage of the situation Marx expected.
There is no need of armed conflict to accomplish that, just a normal business deal.
It would not be communism or socialism, it would be a hybrid form of corporate management.
I think it would work better than our current configuration in many companies.
Swarthmore mom,
If you want to talk about bullying, look at what Obama has done to whistle blowers who he promised to protect (during his campaign of course) or for that matter to anyone who threatens any of his policies. Look at how he as neutralized any serious opposition to his corporate support for illegal bank foreclosures.
Romney ‘s history in Massachusetts, with a strong majority of Democrats in the legislature, was more of a fraidy-cat than a bully, and that is pretty much what he would face in Washington.
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/155420/conservatives%3A_giant_bullies_that_abuse_the_weak/ Romney is far worse than an “empty suit”. He is a bully, and he will bully working people, women and gay people with his policies.
By the way providing Heath care to more people is not fascism it is a corporal work of mercy and an appropriate role for government certainly more appropriate than bailing out billionaires.
Providing health care to more people is not fascism. Providing an unwilling pool of customers to insurance behemoths, and then forcing them to pay up year after year, IS.
Romney is indeed an empty suit, which ever way the wind blows, and team Obama is at their wits end to make him look like a substantial goblin; hence the Vampire accusations, which incidentally are a pretty good reflection of what team Obama consider the mental level of the average American.
Tony C, brilliant point! I used to point out (in the days when I cared about arguing any point being bandied about by the national political news machines) that plagues are actually so contagious that even wealthy people will fall when all their servants are sick.
Mitt Romney Flip Flops | Mitt Romney abortion | Mitt Romney global warming | Mitt Romney Obamacare
Any disappointment with Romney is due purely to the possibility that he is not sufficiently frightening to get the herd into the Obama pen.
For the most part, he is indistinguishable from Obama, though he probably wouldn’t have the balls to assert the right to turn anyone off anytime anywhere on the globe. And even if he did, the Democrats would never let a Republican get away with that, nor with a direct assault on Social Security or Medicare.
Of course no one is proposing Romney for such serious work as putting the elderly on a cat food diet. He is just one more goblin (or Vampire or whatever) to get the herd moving. But there is the rub. For sheer scariness, Romney is about as inspirational as a Mexican drug lord in an ethics contest. The trick is, how do you find a guy who will do in a pinch if something does go wrong, that is, who can take orders, yet who has enough personality to scare voters into choosing the candidate you actually want? Romney is even better than McCain for the former, but utterly lacking in the latter. Moreover, he has no Sarah Palin and the RNC doesn’t think they can get away with that stunt again without risk of serious head scratching (I could be wrong on that).
What you end up with is a far too serious risk that Romney might actually win and you must then contend with a four year stalemate just when some serous advances toward privatizing the social saftey net were about to be made (thanks largely to the very people, understandably frightened out of their wits, that do not want them to be made), not to mention the fact that Trojan shills like Obama don’t exactly fall from the sky every day.
@Matt: In other words, who has the most to lose if all the government services disappear? So who should pay for that?
Is this a trick question? Obviously the RICH have the most to lose, by definition they have the most. If we go Mad Max anarchy, the 99% outnumber the 1% by 99 to 1, the rich would be lucky to escape with their skin intact. Any man can be overwhelmed and no man is bulletproof or fire proof. If they keep their money in gold and silver it will be a target, if they keep it in paper or bank accounts it will be worthless.
If you look at riots both here and abroad, moments of anarchy, the poor do not try to rob each other with any zeal, they focus their attention on the stores and people with assets.
If there was a long term loss of government, like a year, then history suggests the old-school farmers and food-animal growers are the big winners, because they have the only currency that matters: calories, and they can use those to pay for the labor that protects them and the fuel and manual labor that can produce more of it. When it comes down to it, people will work for food, and manual low-tech farming (done correctly, for example the 19th century French Intensive method) produces something like ten times the calories it takes in labor.
The investment bankers, the corporate CEOs, the media moguls: They are all dead and bankrupt. The people most ready to live without the protection of government are the people that get the least protection right now, the poor in the inner cities and the people living in remote rural areas with self-sustaining farms.
Tony C. Sounds fishy. Do you think Bain was engaged in illegal business practices?
Are there illegal business practices?
If so, wouldn’t that be part of archaic law, like not being allowed to feed your family lobster for more than three days in a week or that a hotel must be able to stable at least one horse for the night?
Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?
His greatest passion is something he’s determined to keep secret.
By Frank Rich
Published Jan 29, 2012
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/mitt-romney-2012-2/
Excerpts:
Aside from his ability to build Bain Capital and pile up profits there, Romney has remarkably few visible accomplishments to show for his 64 years. He can’t prove that he actually generated any jobs as a venture capitalist (beyond those at Bain itself), which is why he constantly revises the number of jobs he claims to have created (or, as he carefully hedges it, “helped create”). His sole achievement as governor was the Massachusetts prototype for the Obama health-care law—a feat he now alternately fudges or runs away from. The state’s record of job creation on his watch was the fourth worst of the 50 states.
Known for being frugal to a fault, Romney does not seem to particularly relish spending his fortune. He likes data, and his piles of dollars seem to be mainly markers to keep score of his success. Though he now tries to wrap himself in Main Street brands like Staples and Domino’s Pizza that passed through Bain’s clutches, he was not intellectually or managerially engaged in the businesses that Bain bought and sold; he didn’t run any of them. He seems to have no cultural passions beyond his and his wife’s first-date movie, The Sound of Music. He is not a sportsman or conspicuous sports fan. His only real, nonnumerical passions seem to be his photogenic, intact family, which he wields like a weapon whenever an opponent with multiple marriages like John McCain or Gingrich looms into view—and, of course, his faith.
*****
The questions are not theological. Nor are they about polygamy, the scandalous credo that earlier Romneys practiced even after the church banned it in 1890. Rather, the questions are about the Mormon church’s political actions during Mitt Romney’s lifetime—and about what role Romney, as both a leader and major donor, might have played or is still playing in those actions. To ask these questions is not to be a religious bigot but to vet a candidate for the nation’s highest job. Given how often Romney himself cites his faith as a defining force in his life, voters have a right to know what role he played when his faith intersected with the secular lives of his fellow citizens.
As we learn in The Real Romney, Mitt Romney has performed many admirable acts of charity for members of his church in dire straits. But the flip side of this hands-on engagement is whether, in his various positions in the church, he countenanced or enforced its discriminatory treatment of blacks and women, practices it only started to end in earnest well after he had entered adulthood. It wasn’t until 1978, when he was in his thirties, that blacks were given full status in his church—an embarrassing fact that Romney tried to finesse in his last campaign by speaking emotionally on Meet the Press of seeing his father join Martin Luther King on a civil-rights march. (The Boston Phoenix would soon report that this was another lie about his past.) In the seventies, Romney’s church also applied its institutional muscle to battling the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment for women. And these days, no major faith puts more money where its mouth is in battling civil rights for gay Americans. Its actions led Stuart Matis, a faithful graduate of Brigham Young University who’d completed his missionary service, to commit suicide on the steps of a Mormon chapel in 2000 in anguished protest of his dehumanized status within his religion. Unchastened, the Mormon church enlisted its congregants to put over Proposition 8 in California in 2008. Mormons contributed more than $20 million to the effort and constituted an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the campaign’s original volunteers. Romney, who endorsed gay rights when running as a moderate against Kennedy in 1994, has swung so far in the other direction that he ridiculed gay couples when pandering to South Carolina Republicans a few years ago. (“Some are actually having children born to them!” he said with horror.) Did some of his yet undivulged Mormon philanthropy support the Prop 8 campaign?
Even if these questions yield benign answers, we know that Romney’s faith has contributed to his self-segregation from the actual “real streets of America.” His closest circle comes from within his faith, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the fact remains that today the American Mormon population is still only 1 percent black. (Those recent television promo spots marketing LDS as a fount of diversity are a smoke screen.) Much as the isolating cocoon of Romney’s wealth can lead him to dismiss $347,327 in speaking fees as “not very much” (to take just one recent example of his cluelessness about how the other 99 percent lives), so the demographic isolation imposed by his religion takes its own political toll. When he’s forced to interact with the America beyond his hermetically sealed Mormon orbit, we get instant YouTube classics like his attempt to get down and rap with black voters on Martin Luther King Day four years ago by quoting “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
*****
To escape the twin taints of Bain and his one-percenter’s under–15 percent tax rate, some Republican elders are urging Romney to “stake his campaign on something larger and far more important than his own business expertise” (The Wall Street Journal editorial page) or, as Fred Barnes suggested more baldly, to find “a bigger idea to deflect attention from Bain.” But even Mitt’s own spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, once described him (to the Des Moines Register) as “not a very notional leader.” Romney is incapable of an arresting turn of phrase, let alone a fresh idea. Running on empty, he resorts to filling out his canned campaign orations with lengthy recitations of the lyrics from patriotic anthems. (“Believe in America” is his campaign slogan.) Take away the bogus boasts about “job creation” at Bain and the disowned Romneycare, and what else is there to Mitt Romney? Mainly, his unspecified service to his church and his perfect marriage. That reduces him to the stature of the Republican presidential candidate he most resembles, Thomas Dewey—in both his smug and wooden campaign style and in the overrating of his prospects by the political culture. Even the famously dismissive description of Dewey popularized by the Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth—as “the little man on the wedding cake”—seems to fit Mitt.
I know Tom and he believes what he is doing….. You know he was orphaned……