The GOP of Mr. Perfect and the Boy Wonder Is Not My GOP!

“…Something odd is happening in Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. The GOP is marketing the concept that a great many Americans need to suffer before they can prosper. The government needs the equivalent of a P90X regimen — and never mind checking first whether it will actually be good for the country….”

The Pink Flamingo has noticed a trait Mr. Perfect has. He is authoritarian. Rules mean nothing to him. The ultimate sociopath, he will do anything, say anything, lie, cheat, and basically steal to get his way. Rules mean nothing.

That’s fine and good if you are a corporate raider, a great white shark swimming the sewers of Wall and Broad, but it’s not a good trait in the POTUS. Richard Nixon had those traits, and look at where it got him. That’s the problem. The Pink Flamingo would compare Mittens to Tricky Dickie, but I was a big Nixon fan. I don’t want to insult him.

From Mark’s America:

“...The only answer is that Mitt Romney wishes to rule without restraints. He does not wish to be confined by a base that will make trouble for him if he fails to live up to the promises he has made. He does not wish to be held to account, or to even have his arm twisted when it comes to such things as appointments or executive orders, or even such bills as he may sign into law. It is understandable that a politician would not wish to be accountable to people who had not supported him, but the truly baffling aspect of this case is that Romney does not wish to be accountable to people whose support he expects to garner in the coming election. Once one considers the explicit meaning of this action, there really is no method by which to resolve it without concluding that Mitt Romney intends to govern not only in disregard of conservatives, but in contempt of them….”

All that matters is succeeding. That’s fine and good if you are raiding companies and putting thousands of people out of work, but you don’t want a POTUS to do it.

“…You have worked hard all of your life. You have been dealt a very tough hand to play. You are an ethical and moral person who will not cheat or take from others. Today people are not measured by the content of their characters- their empathy, the suffering they have endured, their kindness to other people. This current Narcissistic Society evaluates you by what you own and how much money you have—-that is the sum total of your worth as an individual from a narcissistic point of view. This would all be pathetic if it wasn’t so harmful to those who are suffering so intensely.

There is something called luck or fate. It cab determine much of what is going to happen to us. Luck is real. Lucrative business connections are real. Being ruthless is real. Narcissists are completely ruthless and treacherous-especially with business associates whom they vanquish and with members of their own family.

“...Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender….”

This is the world in which Mr. Perfect and his little Boy Wonder

“…Narcissists focus on money, power, and their personal image every waking moment. (They are restless and don’t think deeply or are capable of seeing themselves from the inside) If there is money involved and you have a narcissistic mother, father or sibling (or all of the above) -watch out! The money threat will be held over your head for the rest of your life if you don’t make the decision that it doesn’t matter and you recognize that your destiny is not about money alone. Obviously, we all have to find a way to live each day. By the way it is a very rare person who understands the pain involved in not having enough money for rent, food and clothing. I have discovered that there are very few people with huge financial resources who have the capacity to understand what it feels like every day worrying about where your next dollar is coming from. It is equally rare for those who have not experienced tragedy in their lives to deeply understand it and have compassion and mercy for those who have endured it. …”

Mitt Romney is hypercompetitive.

A year ago, The Pink Flaming was prepared to support and vote for Mitt Romney. Then I started watching him in the debates. I saw a man who would do anything, say anything, and smear anyone to get what he wanted. Once I opened my eyes to who and what this man was, I can’t vote for him. Unfortunately, I have proven myself correct. He it not psychologically fit to lead.

Mitt Romney didn’t make that, either.

“...Which brings us to another aspect of Romney’s business career that has largely been hidden from voters: His personal fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government. The taxpayer-funded subsidies that Romney has received go well beyond the humdrum, backdoor, welfare-sucking that all supposedly self-made free marketeers inevitably indulge in. Not that Romney hasn’t done just fine at milking the government when it suits his purposes, the most obvious instance being the incredible $1.5 billion in aid he siphoned out of the U.S. Treasury as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake – a sum greater than all federal spending for the previous seven U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney, the supposed fiscal conservative, blew through an average of $625,000 in taxpayer money per athlete – an astounding increase of 5,582 percent over the $11,000 average at the 1984 games in Los Angeles. In 1993, right as he was preparing to run for the Senate, Romney also engineered a government deal worth at least $10 million for Bain’s consulting firm, when it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. (See “The Federal Bailout That Saved Romney,” page 52.)

But the way Romney most directly owes his success to the government is through the structure of the tax code. The entire business of leveraged buyouts wouldn’t be possible without a provision in the federal code that allows companies like Bain to deduct the interest on the debt they use to acquire and loot their targets. This is the same universally beloved tax deduction you can use to write off your mortgage interest payments, so tampering with it is considered political suicide – it’s been called the “third rail of tax reform.” So the Romney who routinely rails against the national debt as some kind of child-killing “mortgage” is the same man who spent decades exploiting a tax deduction specifically designed for mortgage holders in order to bilk every dollar he could out of U.S. businesses before burning them to the ground.

Because minus that tax break, Romney’s debt-based takeovers would have been unsustainably expensive. Before Lynn Turner became chief accountant of the SEC, where he reviewed filings on takeover deals, he crunched the numbers on leveraged buyouts as an accountant at a Big Four auditing firm. “In the majority of these deals,” Turner says, “the tax deduction has a big enough impact on the bottom line that the takeover wouldn’t work without it.”

Thanks to the tax deduction, in other words, the government actually incentivizes the kind of leverage-based takeovers that Romney built his fortune on. Romney the businessman built his career on two things that Romney the candidate decries: massive debt and dumb federal giveaways. “I don’t know what Romney would be doing but for debt and its tax-advantaged position in the tax code,” says a prominent Wall Street lawyer, “but he wouldn’t be fabulously wealthy.”…”

It’s all quite disturbing. We don’t need another Nixon. You saw how that ended.