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Romney's Bain Capital to Send High-Tech Jobs to China Right Before the Election
As Joan Walsh says, "It's going to be a tough three weeks."
Those Bad, Bad GOP Boys
Tagg Romney wants to "take a swing at" Obama while Tommy Thompson's son would send him back to Kenya.
Classy.
Mitt Romney’s weird aggressiveness toward President Obama has been widely discussed since Tuesday’s debate. He stalked him back to his chair a couple of times, told him “You’ll have your turn” and otherwise treated him in ways no one can remember a challenger treating a president. That’s after his amped-up, periodically disrespectful first debate performance.
Romney’s son Tagg took the innovative disrespect to another level Wednesday, telling a North Carolina interviewer that watching Obama call his father out over what I would call lies (but Obama never did) made him “wanna rush down to the debate stage and take a swing at him.” All that constrained him, said Tagg, was knowing that he was surrounded by Secret Service and also, that “this is just the nature of the process.”
I’m not someone who thinks the president can’t be challenged, but I thought Romney reached a remarkable new high of disrespect Tuesday, after establishing an earlier benchmark in the Oct. 3 debate. Hearing his son Tagg say he wanted to “take a swing at him” makes me scratch my head and try to remember another presidential candidate’s son – or daughter; let’s not be sexist – expressing that kind of hostility toward a president. It just hasn’t happened.
I can’t help but think it’s either consciously or unconsciously channeling the unique disrespect and combativeness the right feels toward Obama. Add to that Wisconsin Senate candidate Tommy Thompson’s son Jason wallowing in birtherism, telling a Kenosha crowd “we have the opportunity” to send Obama back to Kenya. It turns out Jason Thompson made a birther joke earlier in the campaign, but only after someone in his audience made it first. Yet that doesn’t exonerate him.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was."
More Joan Walsh.
I myself am wondering if they aren't floored - absolutely aghast at the prospect of losing a couple of million of their prior billion-dollar taxpayer heist.
It's unclear why Fortune felt the need to print this piece of fluff or why Easton got the assignment, but her credit line does mention that her husband "is senior strategist for the Romney campaign." Curious, huh?
As Ray Charles sang, "Them that's got is them that gets." And sure enough, these richest of the riches got a lot richer in 2011 - the magazine gloated that these 400 swells jacked up their cumulative haul last year by $200 billion over the previous year - an average of half-a-billion each!
Now that's success, baby, especially when the typical American family's income dropped by 4 percent.
These ultra-wealthy, goes the Forbes narrative, are the "deserving rich," for they are our economy's makers and producers - as opposed to being takers and moochers, like those commoners who get Social Security, Medicare and other government help.
Before swallowing that, however, note that roughly 40 percent of these "achievers" on the list "achieved" their wealth by being well-born - they inherited the money from Dad and Mom. And all of them have indeed been takers, not only enjoying government programs, but also subsidies and tax advantages available only to the rich.
The Forbes list really says that you got special treatment - not that you are special.
But if the rich need to feel special, they can always count on the editors of Fortune. We should not be surprised that a magazine named Fortune would be empathetic to the feelings of the 1 percent, but - good grief - how embarrassingly sycophantish of the editors to hustle out a piece just before the presidential election titled, "Stop Beating up the Rich."
Written by Nina Easton, the timing of the article was less than fortunate, for it came out just as the infamous video surfaced showing Mitt Romney "beating up" the poor and the middle class, while his audience of fellow multimillionaires laughed, cheered and shouted encouragement.
Despite the timing, Mitt and company undoubtedly appreciated the writer's disdain for those who so insolently dare to criticize and even demonize those worthy ones at the top who, as she explained, "gained their wealth through their own efforts."
Also, you can almost hear the privileged ones applauding appreciatively as she scorns the divide between the 1 percent and the rest of us as a "flawed prism, marred by hyperbole, half-truths and unnecessary pessimism about what it means to succeed in America."
Passionately deploring "diatribes against the 1 percent," Easton assails critics of America's widening wealth inequality as being people who want "to raid the gold pot." On behalf of the pampered rich, she issues her own emotional "grito," wailing that critics must "stop the name-calling."
Does Easton propose any specific remedies for narrowing the wealth gap? You betcha, and it just happens to be one that's a favorite of Mitt and the multimillionaire's club - one that they prescribe for any and all of our nation's economic woes: "corporate tax reform," by which they mean lowering the corporate tax rate.
Yeah, three decades of that trickle-down idea has worked so well for the middle-class and the poor, let's give 'em another jolt of it.
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