Remember early Presidential vetting back in 2008?

Me neither. But realizing the error of their ways, Matt Taibbi and The Rolling Stone are all over it this time:

Willard “Mitt” Romney’s background in many ways suggests a man who was born to be president – disgustingly rich from birth, raised in prep schools, no early exposure to minorities outside of maids, a powerful daddy to clean up his missteps, and timely exemptions from military service.

So no exposure to teh filthy Other before the age of four but lots of exposure to teh filthy lucre.  I see.

No choom?

Let’s try this:

Private equity firms aren’t necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. Experian, the giant credit-rating tyrant, was acquired by Bain in the Nineties and went on to become an industry leader.

Less offensive to rational thought but also relatively meh. Next:

Romney, who has compared the devilish federal debt to a “nightmare” home mortgage that is “adjustable, no-money down and assigned to our children,” took over Ampad with essentially no money down, saddled the firm with a nightmare debt and assigned the crushing interest payments not to Bain but to the children of Ampad’s workers, who would be left holding the note long after Romney fled the scene. The mortgage analogy is so obvious, in fact, that even Romney himself has made it. He once described Bain’s debt-fueled strategy as “using the equivalent of a mortgage to leverage up our investment.”

Romney has always kept his distance from the real-life consequences of his profiteering. At one point during Bain’s looting of Ampad, a worker named Randy Johnson sent a handwritten letter to Romney, asking him to intervene to save an Ampad factory in Marion, Indiana. In a sterling demonstration of manliness and willingness to face a difficult conversation, Romney, who had just lost his race for the Senate in Massachusetts, wrote Johnson that he was “sorry,” but his lawyers had advised him not to get involved. (So much for the candidate who insists that his way is always to “fight to save every job.”)

This is typical Romney, who consistently adopts a public posture of having been above the fray, with no blood on his hands from any of the deals he personally engineered. “I never actually ran one of our investments,” he says in Turnaround. “That was left to management.”

You get the gist.

I don’t particularly hew to anything The Rolling Stone has to say, and this breathless, subjective guilt-by-proximity and its twenty-eight paragraphs of slanted introductory summary – “oh noes, Mitt Romney engaged in high-level CAPITALISM! Legally, with the free agents who invited him aboard, USING MONEY!” Here’s how, kinda – is not Taibbi’s best work.  More importantly a predictable potboiler like this cartoons not just the right’s eternally despicable cabal, it reduces the consequences of all candidates to presumption and character — stylistically it also pleasantly cartoons the man on the other end of Taibbi’s spectrum, the guy who’s been in office for the last Presidential term, untouched.

Because, you know, he’s black and didn’t come from money.  And as a Democrat he said things on the campaign trail in 2008, stuff involving hope and change and not insufficient exposure to The Other before grade school or excess exposure to blue blood family money during.

Character mattering.

So I wonder what percentage of the radical left’s faithful are going all warning beacon over this, a Presidential candidate’s record being the testament to his character that it is.

That morally-sensitive left could have been full-klaxon four years ago when their candidate told us he was going to fundamentally transform classical liberalism and what glory it’s wrought for the little guy these last two hundred-plus years into the American version of the ideology that eventually lost two million of its own people on average every year of the last century.  That ideology is top-down Statism and the inherently misguided notion that all it takes to succeed — this time, finally — shall be The Right People who know how to turn its tyranny into bliss.

Character mattering.

That closed-door dealing is the inescapable, collective version of what Mitt Romney’s been, Taibbi says, practicing with willing accomplices in exclusive, corporate venues above the tenth floor.  Legally.  And which has cost relatively little human collateral, if any, per Taibbi’s breathless reportage…which starts after two dozen paragraphs.

In other words, that prescient and responsible left should have used Barack Obama’s professed character and intent to anticipate a tenor that would power the failures and frauds of all the Celegards, Ciga Technologies, GMs, Fisker Automotives, Solyndras, and, well, all the Goldman Sachs.  And to anticipate his regime adding some six trillion dollars to the national debt, courtesy of you and I and countless generations of our descendents.

We’ve been watching for years how the left’s false flag operation relied on projecting a Savior into place.  That Savior has since used or allowed Wall Street to rip off an entire globe while he blamed his predecessor for it.  So how many leftists remember how many leftists fingered the most successful corporatist in American history back prior to 2008 like we must Mitt Romney in 2012?  The one that operates in plain sight from that most powerful Executive office on Earth?

Taibbi’s Press in 2008? Largely silent. Taibbi’s Press in 2012? Largely silent.

Had TRS and the Press bothered to vet the other guy back then maybe Mitt wouldn’t even be in this race.  Let me rephrase that: Had TRS and the Press bothered to vet that other guy back prior to 2008, that journalistic product probably would have reflected a much different American ethical climate.

And thereby I’m thinking Mitt Romney wouldn’t even be in this race, mildly railing against the only Goliath that really matters.

Posted by JHoward @ 7:27am
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