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Thursday, January 26, 2012

“I’m Running for President, for Pete’s Sake, I Can’t Have…”

I’m the furthest thing from surprised that an American multi-bazillionaire like Mitt Romney employs transparently inequitable but legal tax dodges and loopholes and shelters to insulate his ill-gotten gains from being taxed in a way that would make such a beneficiary of American norms and infrastructure pay his fair share to support them.  Obviously, all these rich guys do most of that crap. But I must say it really is a little perplexing that when such a multi-bazillionaire also happens to spend more than a decade running for President he doesn’t polish and prune and fumigate the most damning details of these financial shenanigans long before they would attract the inevitable scrutiny of actual primary contests as his party’s frontrunner.

I mean, quite apart from the hypocritical unpleasantness of caring so conspicuously and so opportunistically about optics over substance every single moment, from moment to moment, whatever the soul-pretzeling demanded by that in the first place, what the hell was Romney thinking just leaving all these blatantly obvious landmines lying around all this time? Have all the competent professionals just left the GOP in despair, preferring to work with people who, you know, appreciate science and aren’t bigots? Is Romney just so insulated by privilege that he dismisses efforts to connect him to the perceptions and problems of people who work for a living without whose votes he cannot win the Presidency he so covets?

And if I can be forgiven a sudden topical veer, since I’m pointing out perplexities rather than the usual disagreements about policy and facts, just why is it that Romney so covets the Presidency anyway? Why keep fighting for it famously in the face of so much antipathy from his colleagues? Why invite so much scrutiny, especially given how obviously uncomfortable it makes him personally? It’s not that he’s on some kind of crusade, given his flabbergasting flip-flops on issue after issue. I’ve still yet to understand why he even wants the job so desperately… because it’s there? To kill time? To check off a box on his superrich white guy bucket list? Is it like W. again, some sick rich asshole inflicting his Daddy issues on the whole world via the GOP party apparatus? Honestly, what is it with this guy?

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

It's not like he has to work all that hard at it either in running for office or once he is in office. I also imagine there's quite a bit of ego gratification in landing the job. And I can imagine that Mitt might think that the world would be better off if he was the one running the United States.

I was really hoping that Gingrich would rout him but those hopes are fading. Romney is a like one of those movie villains that slowly approaches the camera with a menacing inevitability.