What does it say about early 21st century America that some of the best journalists, at least judging by the political facility of their readers or watchers, includes two fake comedy political shows and one guy from the Rolling Stone?
Rolling Stone Online — By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie.
Taibbi is one of those writers who makes it look so easy, you have to think we could all do it. And here he makes a rather obvious point others have made, yet somehow it speaks louder from his pen: The conservative religious scolds currently touring America berating the rest of us on debt and deficits ran up the biggest deficits in the history of the solar system and created the most toxic fucking debt known to mankind. Debt so massive and poisonous that every heartfelt economic conservative principle of small government and free enterprise had to be taken unceremoniously behind the Bush WH and shot in the head, so as to clear the way and allow the entire US Treasury department to ride to the bailout rescue with the full faith and credit of bewildered middle class taxpayers in tow. All as a direct result of the same policies they are swearing to God and country to reenact if elected to reduce debt and deficits.
We may be doomed.
No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie.
I dunno ’bout that, young Mr. Taibbi. You may not remember Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, and his “secret plan” to end the war on Vietnam.
The sidebar to Taibbi’s article is even more devastating. The parent company of Mitt’s Bain Capital once itself got a $10-million-plus bailout from the federal taxpayers in a sleazy arrangement personally blackmailed by Willard himself.
No wonder he won’t show his tax returns.
Nixon was an amateur compared to Gekko/Galt 2012