Romney's Tax Returns - What if it's the Rope-A-Dope strategy?

[DirkGently]

29. Hard to think that, when he's ALWAYS stretched this hard

... to avoid releasing his returns. While demanding others release theirs. And, as Rachel's piece pointed out, Romney has a history of hiding his official documents and lying about what's in them, like when he told everyone he had claimed Massachusetts as his primary residence so he could run for governor, but actually had not.

I do think the "bombshell" he's hiding could simply be an embarrassingly low effective tax rate. Although he might also have sought amnesty over Swiss accounts.

But I think the history indicates he's obsessed with this issue -- he's willing to look bad to avoid giving in, and willing to flatly lie, and I don't think it's coming from anything as simple as a sense of "privacy."

It goes to a core issue though -- Romney believes he is a member of a class of Americans -- the extremely rich -- who simply don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Yet he's happy to tell us how he will change the rules for everyone else, specifically, to favor people like him over those with less.

There's something intensely nasty hiding back there though. He's a little boy saying he hasn't seen the cat, but holding a bloody sack behind his back. He's guilty, and frightened and furious, to the point where he's in denial of reality -- the reality that this issue will not go away this time, that he's actually going to have to answer to "those people."

I thought about rope-a-dope too, but he's already past that point. He already looks so squirrely and scared and angry that he looks un - Presidential. Nixonian. Crazy.