Daily Archives: September 17, 2012

Mitt Romney: the GOP’s very own geopolitical disaster

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Nicholas Kristof: “DIPLOMACY is a minefield, and Mitt Romney spent the last week blowing up his foreign policy credentials to be president. He raised doubts about his capacity to deal with global crises, and we were left hoping that if that 3 a.m. call ever went to him, he’d have set up call forwarding.

“The essential problem is that every time Romney touches foreign policy, he breaks things. He went on a friendly trip to Britain — the easiest possible test for a candidate, akin to rolling off a log — and endeared himself by questioning London’s readiness to host the Olympic Games. In the resulting firestorm, one newspaper, The Sun, denounced “Mitt the Twit.”

“[...] Then there was the Romney trip to Israel, where he insulted Palestinians and left some Jews uncomfortable with stereotyping by praising Jewish culture in the context of making money. Hmm.

“[...] Yet with the Middle East exploding in recent days because of a video insulting the Prophet Muhammad, Romney dived in with a statement that hit a trifecta: it was erroneous, inflammatory and offensive.”

And let’s not forget how Romney recently broke things with Vladimir Putin and Russia…

Graph: Tax cuts don’t generate economic growth — they just generate more income inequality

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Are you going to believe the party of the one percent or your own lying eyes?

Cutting The Bull On Taxes – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast

Sullivan: “After a terrific David Leonhardt piece, Derek Thompson highlights the findings of a Congressional Research Service study (pdf) – that tax cuts don’t generate economic growth. Thompson summarizes:

“Analysis of six decades of data found that top tax rates “have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth.” However, the study found that reductions of capital gains taxes and top marginal rate taxes have led to greater income inequality…. Well into the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90%. Today it’s 35%. But both real GDP and real per capita GDP were growing more than twice as fast in the 1950s as in the 2000s. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top tenth of a percent fell from about 50% to 25% in the last 60 years, while their share of income increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% before the recession.

“Meanwhile, Leonhardt recalls how Paul Ryan reflected on the above chart in one of their conversations: “I wouldn’t say that correlation is causation,” Mr. Ryan replied.” 

In other words, the Republican Party in general — and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan specifically — are asking the working and middle class to continue to subsidize the increasing wealth of the super rich while our own incomes, and the federal treasury, continue shrinking each year.

Romney: “The president tends to say things that aren’t true.”

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“I think the challenge that I’ll have in the debate is that the president tends to, how shall I say it, to say things that aren’t true. I’ve looked at prior debates. And in that kind of case, it’s difficult to say, ‘Well, am I going to spend my time correcting things that aren’t quite accurate? Or am I going to spend my time talking about the things I want to talk about?” — Mitt Romney to George Stephanopolis.

Related and FYI:

  • Steve Benen is now on the 34th installment of his weekly series Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. Benen said about Mitt’s comment above: “There’s no sense of shame and no sense of irony.”
  • It was a Romney pollster who infamously said, rather recently: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Don’t piss off the British: Pres. Obama vs. The Faux-Pas

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Political Wire: “Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein said that he had personally heard British Prime Minister David Cameron make disparaging remarks about Mitt Romney, the Daily Telegraph reports.

“Said Weinstein: “I witnessed Prime Minister saying to a group of people, myself included, that Mitt Romney had that unique distinction of uniting all of England against him with his various remarks. On behalf of my love of England, I have to support the President who is anything but making faux-pas.”"

The Associated Press joins Team Romney: cleaning up Mitt’s messes

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Josh Marshall takes the AP to task for either lying for Mitt Romney or for not challenging Romney’s obvious lies about the actual timeline of events regarding his criticisms of President Obama and the embassy attacks:

“…a new AP report suggests that the reason the Romney campaign repeatedly lied about the order of events in Egypt and Libya Tuesday night (US time) was because he wasn’t yet getting those briefings.

“…Romney came out late Tuesday evening with a scathing press release accusing the administration of offering sympathy to the attacks as its initial response to the attacks on US diplomatic compounds in Egypt and Libya. Of course, the statement referenced was issued by the Cairo Embassy before the attacks started. So the whole thing was a falsehood from the git-go — not even getting into the preposterous claim that the embassy’s press release constituted an apology.”

Marshall points out two items that prove Romney knew exactly what was happening prior to his statement released on Tuesday night:

  • No one needed a security briefing to know what had happened here. All the contemporaneous press reports (some noted here), which preceded Romney’s statement, noted that the statement came before the attacks.
  • Initial press reports can turn out to be wrong, of course. But you can’t claim that you were misinformed by press reports that didn’t exist.  

The AP report:

What if a sociopath wanted to run for president?

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“Sometimes it helps to laugh. But Romney’s smirk is disturbing. It betrays a preternatural sense of entitlement and self-satisfaction that comes out, often inappropriately, in all sorts of ways, from his odd remark that “I like to be able to fire people that provide services to me” to insulting the cookies supporters served him or the rain gear fans wore to a NASCAR event. It seems related to the calm self-importance with which he belittled British planning for the Olympics, insulting our closest ally. The smirk is a cousin to another odd Romney tic – his tendency to chuckle at the wrong time, like when he was trying to deny cutting the hair of a gay high school classmate. Who chuckles when they’re trying to project compassion?”

— Joan Walsh, “Romney’s haunting smirk” (via: salon)