5/15/2012

In Brief: It Ain't Just What Romney Did at Bain; It's What He Didn't Do, Too:
If the Rude Pundit were writing ads to attempt to destroy Mitt Romney's credibility as a man who shits out jobs like they're turds made of gold, he'd probably want to quote Romney himself. So here's a couple of lines from early in Romney's 2007 book, Turnaround, about his role as CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

After describing what Bain Capital did in buying "underperforming companies," Romney says on page 16, "I never actually ran one of our investments; that was left to management." You got that? Romney himself says that he never personally went into, say, Staples or Sealy or Domino's or Wesley Jessen, and did anything. He ran the company, Bain Capital, yes, but he wasn't involved in, you know, creating jobs anywhere but at Bain.

Is that too far? Can't you come back and say, "Well, you know, that's just a bullshit, out-of-context line. It's not like it's some 'capital v. labor' thing." And the Rude Pundit will say, "Page 18."

'Cause, see, here's what Romney says he said to Frank Joklik, the CEO of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee, while on a 1998 ski vacation, when Joklik spoke to Romney about taking over the SLOC job: "He said that he thought project management skills were the most critical...I protested, 'I don't have any project management experience.'"

See, as the Obama campaign and its SuperPAC tear into the Bain jugular, which is as Rovean as it gets by going right at your opponent's perceived strength and turning it into a weakness (see "Truth, Swift Boat Veterans for" in the index of campaign horrors perpetrated on Democrats), they need to remember that not only was Bain Capital itself an entity that destroyed some companies in the name of investor profits, but that Mitt Romney couldn't even bother to get his hands dirty.

He wasn't a vulture capitalist. He was a pussy capitalist. It's like having your friends hold down a gay classmate while you cut his hair. No, wait. It's like paying someone to do the cutting while you watch and jack off at the sight.

Again, unfair? Jesus, let's go back to the book. As the good Governor himself says, "[Joklik] looked at me and saw someone who had never engineered or constructed anything in his entire life."

That's about as good a measure of a man as you could find.