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In reply to the discussion: Monday Toon Roundup 1- Bainman [View all]Bucky
(53,805 posts)17. The "painful" heavy tax return burden may not be correct
But the economics of human behavior tells us that Romney will only reveal what he's hiding as soon as the cost of hiding it's more painful than the embarrassment of revealing it.
Two possibilities here, and actually the fact that something is not quite legal in there is the lesser of the potential evils.
First, of course, is that he's really got something to hide, something horrendous and possibly illegal or at least improper would be revealed by the standard 10-20 years of tax returns that most candidates roll out for the public and their rivals' oppo teams. If it was merely something embarrassing and he was a logical man, he'd have revealed it by now and gotten ahead of the game. Romney's not a typical Republican candidate in that he's not a sputtering nincompoop when forced to speak off script.
But of course if there was something quite all that bad, why would he be running at all, knowing what we all know about the revelations of one's past among all modern presidential candidates. And so this brings us to the second and potentially more troubling possibility.
The second case is that Romney doesn't have much to hide at all. Oh, the Cayman Island and Swiss accounts look tacky--they're certainly the financial investments of a greed and unpatriotic soul. But it's nothing a voting majority of Americans aren't willing to overlook in our New Gilded Age. And if this is the case, then the compulsive hiding tells us something uglier about Romney: that he sees himself as someone who simply doesn't have to play by the rules. When God chooses you to lead his people, you get to cut a few corners, drop a few frogs on Thebes, drown a few pharaohs. It's no biggie; the rules are for keeping the little people in line, not for hamstringing their moral leaders.
We see this already in his avoiding the release of the standard number of tax records, in the tish-toshing the president's ads for supposed exaggerations that are dwarfed by his own dishonest campaign commercials, and in the signing forms as an officer of Bain Capital for years after he'd assured the people of his state that he was out of the corporate raider dodge. His responses to calls to come clean about his record--feigned indignation, denial, grossly distorted counterexamples, and the smiling stonewall--tell us everything we need to know about how Romney would behave if he ever became president.
His every action as a campaigner speaks to us of a man who can't recognize when he's wrong, can't self-correct when he errs, can't comply when the sovereign people or simply decency demands a little humility, and can't quit bloviating when cornered. This is the character of a man who not only can, but inevitably will turn any minor mistake (as all human presidents have made) into a full blown, all consuming scandal. If leadership is about character, then disastrous policies aside Mitt Romney is a man fully lacking in what it take to be a real leader for the country.
It's more important now than ever before that this man be defeated in his run for office.
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Gee, if there really is a Civil War backed by corpoations,.....if they win, Waffle House would win,
Spitfire of ATJ
Jul 2012
#21