REMINDER: Our last two Republican businessman presidents were Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush
Imagine being so full of bullshit that you turn everyone around you into a fact checker—it’s almost like a fable or a Greek myth. But it’s also become our presidential election.
You know the man I’m talking about. The world’s record holder for Politifact Pants-on-Fire awards, the man who said “Of course!” my tax plan ads up then made up new details on the spot, the guy who ran as a progressive and governed as severely conservative… W. Mitt Romney.
During the debates it happened to Candy Crowley, last week it happened to Chrysler, this week it happened to General Motors.
After suggesting that GM was moving American jobs to China, GM spokesman Greg Martin said:
We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.
Mitt Romney’s definition of truth is whatever helps him close the deal. He’s forever the seventeen-year-old boy talking the neighbor girl into sex—but instead of just wanting your virginity, he wants your Medicaid and Medicare so he can keep 14 percent tax rate.
Plus he’d like to be the most powerful man in the world—which seems to have become his goal since the first time he put on a tie, at some point in his second trimester.
If Mitt Romney ends up losing, there is a poetic justice that he had to spend his last week of his life lying about the auto rescue.
The restructuring and rebirth of the Big Three is a success so evident even Republicans have given up opposing it—now they just try to minimize it or take credit for it.
You remember that Mitt Romney was the only national figure to directly oppose immediate government help for the auto industry—he said that if they got it, they would be gone. He was dead wrong.
Since then he’s twisted and gnarled his positions so many times as his family made millions on a company that held the rescue hostage and exported America jobs to China. His basic argument against the way the president executed the rescue was that workers should have been stripped of more of their retirement, which would have cost the government more anyway.
Now Mitt Romney is suggesting that he has a plan to “save” the auto industry, which reminds me of Gargamel’s plan to “save” the Smurfs.
Romney’s original stance on the auto industry best sums up how his management style meets governing philosophy—investors must be coddled, workers must be punished.
He opposed the bailout in 2008 because it was easy politics and because he saw the financial crisis as a chance to break up the unions that created the middle class in America. The president saved both the industry and the good jobs that go with it—and that’s the difference between these two men.
That a man who told the world, “Corporations are people, my friend,” is now being fact checked by corporations does give you faith in karma.
Now we just need to follow through and make sure that the 99% of America who will be punished if Mitt Romney wins knows what’s at stake.
[Image credit: Donkeyhotey]
