This nonsense from Redstate’s Erick Son of Erick is laugh OL funny:
The geniuses at Team Obama are showing their complete ignorance of private enterprise, the law, and the one well vetted part of Mitt Romney’s career — his tenure at Bain Capital.
It is well established that Mitt Romney left Bain to go salvage the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. It is also well established that his name remained on some SEC documents. This stems from winding down his partnership interest in Bain Capital. It is a quirk in the law. It has been well vetted. Even FactCheck.org and the Washington Post are unpersuaded by Team Obama’s hyperbole.
Oh, honey, no.
A quirk in the law? Really? The fact that Mitt Romney has been lying for ten years — and is still lying — about when he left Bain Capital is not a quirk in the law. It’s a quirk in Mitt3PO’s honesty chip.
Poopyman
Felonies are for the little people.
Brian R.
Mandatory minimums for crack cocaine and the three strikes rule are also “quirks in the law.”
But like the first commenter says, laws are for little people.
Alex Milstein
OK, Erik, just ask Mitt who ran Bain when he was gone. It’s a simple thing. I’m surprised Mitt hasn’t revealed it already. You know, folks, I couldn’t have been running Bain, because ???? was in charge. Crickets…
Jay in Oregon
So now Romney’s plan to inspire confidence in his future leadership of the U.S. economy is to claim that SEC filings regularly contain misstatements, half-truths, and deceptions to keep investors happy?
Really curious to see how well that one plays.
JGabriel
Erick, Son o’ Himself:
Shorter Erickson: No Fair! Obama’s using our [alleged] strengths against us! So Rovianly stupid!
.
PurpleGirl
OT but important: Happy Bastille Day! everyone.
A few posts down someone linked to La Marseille.
General Stuck
Been scanning the right wing bloggers and others reaction. And I must say in all honesty, we are in a period of flooding 40 nights and days with wingnut tears in torrents of joy to my grumpy heart. Mitt is going to find out his white male entitled status is liquified into mushy milk of fail, in the bright lights of a POTUS campaign. He will get his 45 percent of the vote, but it won’t be FOR him.
Now, if we could just get Obama to stop wasting teenagers of color like George Zimmerman, we may end up with some nice things.
slag
I’m curious as to what other “quirks in the law” Rmoney might choose to disregard if he were to become President…
Turgidson
This has been vetted, guys, really! Pay no attention to the SEC documents signed under penalty of perjury, the sworn testimony saying he came back for meetings, the documents showing his continuing involvement in Bain-tied entities, the Bain newsletters saying it was a part-time leave…because SHUT UP HE’S A RICH WHITE REPUBLICAN!
Thought experiment here: what would that fascist bastard Erickson be saying if it was Obama caught in this lie? Fucker would be calling for a fucking beheading by now.
pseudonymous in nc
Irregular verb time again: I deal with quirks in the law, you lie in official paperwork, he’s been slapped with a five-count indictment.
And it’s not as if Ericksonoferick’s experience of “private enterprise” covers Bain Capital’s Russian-doll corporate vehicles.
slag
@PurpleGirl: I just went to Les Mis again. Bawled my eyes out. Really, I need to stop seeing that production in public places.
handy
Man somebody at the Globe really doesn’t like Mitt Romney.
gnomedad
Forgive me for repeating myself — I’m less interested in whether Mitt is truthful about whether he left Bain and when than in the fact that he seems to be simultaneously touting his awesome business experience and trying to disavow it. What’s your take, Mitt? Are Bain pirates, criminals, heroes? Should they be in jail? Should they have been prevented by regulation from doing what they did? Were they clearing out the deadwood to pave the way for job creation that’s going to happen real soon now? What’s your story?
Jay in Oregon
I wonder if Romney would consider his response to this mess as milk before meat?
xian
@General Stuck: they *knew* he has a glass jaw, is their Kerry. Why do you think they resisted his “inevitability” for so long? they do possess low cunning.
Violet
Sully got it right in one of his multiple posts on the subject yesterday:
Jay in Oregon
Yeah, so well-vetted that they don’t have a single coherent answer about who was in charge of Bain from 1999 to 2002.
Brah-fucking-vo, Erickson.
Brian R.
What the fuck does Erick Erickson know about private enterprise? He’s been a conservative media flack since day one, living of the fat teat of wingnut welfare.
Prostitution is the oldest profession, though, so maybe that counts.
AkaDad
Mitt Romney: “After 1999, I did not have fiduciary relations with that company.”
Credit goes to a NY Times commenter named gusii.
General Stuck
@xian:
What I think is that every other possible candidate for prez on the wingnut side, that was electable, was smart enough to know, and to keep out of the way of the ugly shitstorm to come, and not be tarnished forever by trying to beat a well like incumbent, that deep in their tiny hearts have a lot of political respect for that incumbent. Even though they hate his policies and world view.
And at once being pushed into joining the racist jackal pack, and trying to control the craziest of that pack. Mitt was all they had left, out of the miscreant GOP primary field.
Violet
@AkaDad: Ha! That made me almost spit out my tea.
JCT
@handy: As an ex-Gov of Mass, it seems that to know him is to dislike him.
Their “tip” lines must be running full blast, I am sure Mitt made many enemies on his rise to the top…
FlipYrWhig
I like how there’s no inconsistency in Republican-land between holding Obama personally responsible for Solyndra and Fast and Furious, on the one hand, and, on the other, absolving Romney of all responsibility for the acts of his company while he was the boss four times over.
eldorado
@AkaDad: THIS
ABL 2.0
@General Stuck: ::snicker::
AkaDad
@Violet:
The same for me, but with coffee.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck: I still have a hunch that Republicans knew Romney was likely to lose and wanted to get him and his pile o’ money out of the candidate pool for future elections. By picking him they get rid of him. (The flaw in this reasoning is the millions to billions being dumped in by Adelson, Koch, et al., who certainly aren’t acting like they want their candidate to take a dive.)
sb
The WaPo and FactCheck.org is being cited again and again by wingnuts and MSM.
Nice job, both of you. Assholes.
slag
@General Stuck:
I’m actually hoping that the Tea Party types make every potential Republican presidential candidate unelectable for quite some time. That’s obviously the potential danger of liberals getting too envious of Tea Party-style politics.
That said, that style of politics clearly works better in regional settings so we need to somehow thread the needle so that we can manage to gain control of all three branches of government, which seems like a fairly impossible task. As we’ve seen–even having just two branches is a not a functional situation for Democrats (let alone liberal Democrats).
ploeg
Obama’s practically stuck all that in an ad that begins “I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.” How much more responsibility do you want Obama to take for the message, dumbshit?
MikeJ
I see Obama has responded to the request for an apology.
Turgidson
@General Stuck:
You know, they don’t even hate his policies that much by and large – the GOP sees politics as an abstract zero sum game and hate letting him “win.” They’ve decided they have to say they hate everything he proposes for political advantage, but most of Obama’s policies were uncontroversial moderate policies that consistently got GOP support. Or at least, the policies Obama bothers to propose, knowing nothing will pass. I’m pretty sure Obama would govern with a more liberal bent if he had the votes to pass liberal things, but that’s not the congress he has.
This “infrastructure spending is fascism” kind of bullshit isn’t a deeply held belief by anyone but some of the retrograde, brain-damaged teabaggers who came in in 2010. It’s just rank political opportunism. Mitch Daniels, or whatever “reasonable” Republican who didn’t run this time, supported shit like that in the past and will do so again as soon as it’s their party’s idea again. And everyone but political junkies will conveniently forget all the crazy shit they’ve been saying since January 09. And the deficit will double and rich people’s taxes will be slashed. Freedom!
gf120581
@FlipYrWhig: I find a lot of truth to that. It was, I think, the same reason Bob Dole and John McCain got the nod in 1996 and 2008; because it was “their turn” and the smart folks in the GOP (such as they are) thought, “Well, we aren’t going to win this time out, so lets just let them run, get beaten and then we don’t have to deal with them anymore.”
Same deal with Mitt. It’s “his turn” and the GOP would like to get rid of him, so they’ll let him go down in flames and concentrate on 2016, when the real GOP contenders actually go for it.
FlipYrWhig
@ploeg: Maybe Obama should say that he was only technically the candidate at the time, being that he was off president-ing rather than taking an active role in the campaign, so when you get right down to it, he’s not really responsible for the ad in question.
Jay in Oregon
@MikeJ:
I love how they use Newt Gingrich at the end of that ad.
hueyplong
So Aquirk N. Thelaw was running Bain while Mitt was away? Never heard of that guy. Best I can tell, he’s not listed in any of the SEC filings.
NonyNony
@General Stuck:
I’d be willing to respect this point of view, but I need one thing first.
A list. A list of GOP possible candidates for president that were electable.
I’m not seeing Republican presidential candidates out there. If one existed, he or she would have stepped up and stomped on Mitt Romney’s ass during the primary. Because the ONLY two things that Mitt Romney had going for him during the primary season were the buckets of his own money he was willing to spend on his candidacy and the fact that he was perceived as the most electable clown in the GOP primary clown car.
Eliminate point 2 from his list of attributes and you end up with money. Which might be enough to get him the election, but if a more electable choice were in the offing, I imagine that the Koch money would flow. Newt Gingrich found a sugar daddy to pump his vanity campaign for months – an actual electable candidate could have found more money than that.
I think the real problem is that Mitt Romney actually IS the most electable presidential candidate that the GOP has for 2012. That says more about the current state of the GOP than it does about Mitt Romney though.
Brian R.
@FlipYrWhig:
Boom.
jl
Hey Erik, Bams is bearin’ down on yer folks. You go that froze look yet?
Ahhh, the damage the coming calm, earnest, Bam analysis and the Biden”gaffes”(R) will do, I will savor it.
This is one case where the crank-it-out phone-it-in dishonest he-said she-said reporting will be wonderful, and I will love it, I will savor it, and read it with joy in my heart.
I will not be fearful, bitter or outraged.
I look forward to a long summer and fall of the GOP/Romney team explaining why their damn near white collar crime behavior is OK, and understandable, and unfair to attack because of ‘quirks in the law’.
I do believe that most of Bain’s business model, as a leveraged buy-out racket, is possible due to ‘quirks in the law’. Thousands and thousands of people got laid off, cheated out of their benefits, their dignity, their retirement, the country stripped of productive assets, due to ‘quirks in the law’.
I do hope and pray that the ‘quirks in the law’ defense is given extensive coverage and the corrupt celebrity news actors explain these ‘quirks in the law’ to their viewers and listeners repeatedly, in great detail. And I hope the most saccharine and elaborate pity is lavished upon poor Mitt for being accused merely because he took advantage of ‘quirks in the law’ to make untold millions of dollars.
I wish to hear repeated explanation of how these magical ‘quirks in the law’ magically transform socially destructive and corrupt behavior into the purest and most noble embodiment of the Amercian Dream.
Fat low pitches for Bams and the Bidenator, all summer long. I will wear out a dozen track shoes trying to keep from getting fat again from eating buttered popcorn.
General Stuck
@slag:
I suspect the country is going to require some severe pain caused by republicans, in whatever status of power at the national level, before dems can get a true governing majority. And it is not certain that even that severe pain can cause enough of them to sober up from their decades long love affair with the GOP and their manufactured message to govern for all, in time, or at all, to save their democracy from a dystopian fall from grace. But who knows? I don’t
Turgidson
@MikeJ:
Nice. That ad doesn’t close the loop all the way on Romney being a lying shithead, but I suspect it’s just an early strafe.
Fuck you, Mittens. You’re not playing the Washington Generals anymore, pal. Enjoy being beaten into a bloody pulp, which is less than your lying, soulless ass deserves.
General Stuck
@NonyNony:
The primary I saw, was a genuine test drive for all the seven wingnut dwarves, before coming back to Romney. It is true that republicans are a top down bunch, that value their candidates be sort of promoted to the top over time. And Romney was that, but the conservatives that are at least 60 percent of the GOP, neither trust nor like the man.
I could name a few names, but trying read the wingnut lizard brain is a tricky business, on who is electable AND that they would be satisfied with. I will say that if you are right, and Romney is the best they have for electability and in general as a leader, then it is time to dance in the liberal streets.
kay
@ploeg:
It probably doesn’t matter to the general public, but I’ve been seeing ads attacking Obama from GOP “outside” groups since 2009. No names. No elected Republicans are in those ads.
So I get a kick out of “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message”
Unlike Romney (or Bush, for that matter) Obama is willing to own this.
trollhattan
@MikeJ:
Wow. Just a few posts below I noted Obama could base his entire ad campaign using Willard video and quotes. They listened right good! [Pulls muscle patting self on back.]
Heh, remember the good old days when we were concerned about Perry getting into the race and displacing Willard? Ah, good times.
slag
@General Stuck:
The only areas in which this argument concerns me are:
1. We’ve had more years of pain from Republicans than I’d like to count already, and it hasn’t seemed to do a ton to correct the electorate’s approach–at least on a local level.
2. Pain! Pain’s not good. I’d prefer to prevent pain, if at all possible. It marginalizes more and more people out of the system while distributing more and more power to those already firmly ensconced in the system.
I think we can do better than wait for more pain. I think we HAVE TO do better than wait for more pain.
Hill Dweller
@sb:
If the Romney campaign is the hill they choose to die on, so be it.
I’m betting the Obama campaign has plenty more info on Willard’s involvement with Bain between ’99-’02, but is playing a long game. They’ll judiciously leak stuff, letting hacks like Kessler risk their reputations protecting Willard, then drop the hammer as the election nears.
NonyNony
@General Stuck:
Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I see Romney as the most electable candidate they have right now in 2012. That doesn’t say anything about the quality of candidates they may have for 2016, and it doesn’t say anything about the quality of candidates the Democrats will have in 2016 either.
4 years is a long time in politics, really. Candidates who aren’t ready for prime-time yet might be ready to shine in 4 years. It’s just that right now NONE of the GOP is ready for prime time. Who would have been more successful up there against Obama than Romney? Nikki Haley? Bobby Jindal? Jim DeMint? I can’t think of anybody. And that’s the most important point – their bench is really shallow right now (in more ways than one).
gnomedad
@NonyNony:
One of the wingnut memes I’ve seen is that the libruls used the Force or something to prevent the goopers from selecting a True Conservative.
General Stuck
@Turgidson:
You can be assured that they hated the stimulus, the ACA, DADT repeal, among other passed bills under Obama. But it is true the House wingers, and the Senate wingers with a workable filibuster vote against cloture, has pretty much shut governing down the past 2 years. But a lot of stuff got by before that. Stuff that was jammed down their pie holes by a 60 vote cloture in the senate, with both Reid and Obama holding every dem in line to get that stuff passed.
I don’t buy the meme of Obama not passing liberal bills. They might not have been to a sufficient purity level for some on the left. But HCR, regardless of who first thought of what idea, was, and is, something they are stolid against. And always have been, beyond running their mouths about it for political cover.
As for the stimulus, my view is that their hate for that bill was firstly from a state of pol impotence at the time, but mostly because of all the research monies for R and D on things like alternative energy, that their plutocrat masters put out a fatwa of sorts on. It is why they attack things like Solyndra, and any other thing they can find in that area.
Turgidson
I’m not convinced ol’ seceding Rick would be doing any worse than Mittens is right now on a tactical level, to be honest.
Still a complete moron and less electable than Mittens, no doubt, but his idiot swagger might have kept him from getting pinned to the mat taking body blows like Mitt’s pathetic operation is right now.
Bobby Thomson
Well, Erickson ain’t a lawyer. Winding up a partnership has nothing to do with who the CEO, President, and Chair is. But if you say it loud enough you almost sound precocious.
lacp
Christ. Willard probably would be better off having Charles Pierce write his public statements – couldn’t be any worse than what he’s doing now.
Turgidson
Maybe. Though I think they would have dutifully gotten in line if a reasonably popular moderate GOP president had decided to pass something. It would have been more of a corporate giveaway and reached fewer uninsured, but I think the party would have gotten behind it.
And their shrieking about the stimulus – I’ll never think anything but that they wanted to tie Obama to a burgeoning economic depression. Sure, there was stuff in there they didn’t like, but there were also boatloads of tax cuts and infrastructure spending they didn’t hate until Obama proposed it. It was naked political calculation to unify against it to the degree they did.
anyway, this is all a tangent from the real issue. Mitt Romney being a lying sack of shit who is being hoisted on his own petard. I want to talk more about that!
trollhattan
@Turgidson:
You could be very right. What I/we non-Texans learned by his brief
runjog was that Perry’s such a nimrod he must necessarily have gotten where he is via the Texas machine, not his own mad skilz. What he is, is compliant with their directions. Willard, by contrast, clearly needs things his own way and surrounds himself with yes men.Perry would have had to detox for the general (no way he’s not hooked on painkillers) if he’d survived the primaries, but he’d have reassembled you-know-who’s campaign team and I never want to give them a shot at the White House again.
General Stuck
@NonyNony:
I think we are talking past one another. In a sense, Romney could have been the only electable republican, for the simple reason he is the pathological liar and Chameleon that he is, as juxtaposed against the GOP as it is right now, ideologically. People like Jon Huntsman are electable, but run into the brick wall of GOP requirements for sufficient purity in all areas, from an angry and demanding base/as it currently is. So they picked Romney, because he was willing to tell them what they needed to hear. All of them
And I have said all along that the GOP is a funny bunch, not haha funny. But weird in their ability to subvert their primal desires politically, into a loosely held coalition. This if from a coalition that is wildly disparate in nature, often from directly competing policy wishes. It generally takes them a couple of election cycles for the hunger for power, will begin to overtake their intra tribal impulses. So, by 2016, that time out of power as having the WH, is usually enough to bring them together, like with a GWB. That for me, then and now, was patently unelectable in any sane political world that I personally recognize. So it is more about the state of the GOP at any given point in time, as well as the general electorate.
Romney is special though. He can tell you the world is really flat, and not bat an eyelid. And that, along with the money and waiting his turn got him where he is now.
SRW1
Where can I get one of these winding down positions. Cause I sure would have use for the extra $100k annually.
General Stuck
@Turgidson:
Oh, the tax cuts as they proposed, mostly for the lower income and middle class, was something they hate the most of all. There might have been a few things in the stimulus that they liked, but never said so on the national stage, and yes, a lot of the hate for that bill, now dovetails into their BIG hate for a president Obama.
But if you think a single one of them would have voted for anything remotely like a national framework of regulating the health insurance industry, I got a bridge for you. They did it for seniors, with the medicare part d, but the rank and file hated it, even with all the corporate welfare. But not for the whole of the health care industry, from insurance to all the other ways the ACA reaches into that part of society. That was a punch to their wingnut guts, that now fuels a lot rage we see from them now.
MaryRC
What’s really funny about that RedState post is that Erik used the B*rth*r word, and sure as flies flock to shit, there they are. And now the other commenters are kept busy trying to shoo them away.
NonyNony
@General Stuck:
Ah I get what you’re saying now. When I say “electable” I mean “can get elected as a Republican by going through the Republican primary process and then going on to win a general election”. I discount Jon Huntsman as “electable” because he was going to run into the same problems that Mitt Romney had – he was never going to be able to convince the base that he was “one of them” enough to be able to tack rhetorically to the center the way W did in ’00.
But I think you’re misunderstanding just how good a candidate W was for the GOP in ’00. It isn’t that the base was hungry for a win so they compromised on a candidate – the base loved W in ’00. I knew some rabid W supporters in ’00 and they didn’t just vote for him because he was “electable” – he was almost like the second coming of Ronald Reagan in their eyes. In some ways he was better than Reagan because he was an openly Evangelical Christian in addition to being a conservative.
W got a TON of leeway from the base not because they were hungry for a win, but because they believed he was “one of them” enough to let him go out and shade the truth for public consumption. He knew how to speak code. He knew how to push out that “compassionate conservatism” double-speak that let the general public think one thing and his base another.
You’re selling W short as a candidate if you think it was really the hunger of the base for a win that led to him getting close enough in the polls to end up in the Oval Office. He was the best Republican political candidate to hit the stage since Reagan. He made a connection with conservatives in ’00 in a way that I hadn’t seen for decades.
General Stuck
@slag:
I never said otherwise, that we should do what we can to fix this country, and avoid pain. But that is the ideal, not the reality. The electorate in this country is poorly informed, or complacent that prosperity is a certain permanent thing, so they indulge in all sort of creature comforts of prejudice and fear, that the wingnuts have become very good at appealing to.
And the pain I am talking about looks nothing like what we have recently been through/ It would be much worse than that.
RP
Screaming “this has already been vetted!” is incredibly weak and pathetic.
Roger Moore
@gf120581:
This would be a more plausible theory if somebody could push a list of who those serious Republican contenders who are holding back this year are. Also, too, if the Republicans aren’t strong enough to run when unemployment is 8.2%, what are they going to do if the economy is actually working properly 4 years from now?
General Stuck
@NonyNony:
I didn’t say GWB was not a good candidate, only that in my mind and world, he was, or should have been unelectable for all sorts of reason. He was a good candidate confirmed by winning two POTUS elections. And most of that was a personal ability to hand over his political will to a person that was able to direct that in a consistent way. Karl Rove.
As for the GOP base loving him and making a connection, that is true, to an extent. But it also involves other things like hunger for power from being out of it for awhile, 8 years. And a lot of other things as well. We will just have to disagree on that.
piratedan
@MikeJ: I dunno, I think a simple “Go Fuck Yourself Mitt” would have been equally effective
piratedan
@MikeJ: I dunno, I think a simple “Go Fuck Yourself Mitt” would have been equally effective
Roger Moore
@slag:
The practical alternative is to push incremental improvements whenever we can. ACA is a good example. Yes, it’s not what we really want, but it’s better than the pre-ACA situation, and you can bet that it will be popular if it’s fully implemented and people get a chance to get used to it. The Republicans won’t be able run against it, and they probably can’t even try to end it when they didn’t run against it explicitly (see Social Security Privatization). OTOH, the Democrats will be allowed to patch flaws in ACA in ways that make it more liberal. That’s how you implement liberal policies in the face of strong Conservative opposition.
RaflW
So we’ve all missed one important thing! Erick Ericsdottir called Obama’s team geniuses. It seems a tad premature to laud them that much, but nice of Eric to offer the plaudit!
General Stuck
For those who need a list of other republicans that could be electable, and that are conservative enough to suit the base. Rather than having Romney, like they do now. All you have to do is ask yourself why they ended up with a guy who is none of those things. And everyone knows it, and most of all the republicans themselves. I think it is because what I said first in this thread, that they are hopelessly fragmented from coming together enough to support an imperfect candidate, at this time, that is electable in the general election. And all both sides has is imperfect candidate. Unless you can find one that is willing to be the Tom Ripley candidate.
RaflW
Y’know I just wanna mention that Erick Ericksdottir got one thing right: He called the Obama team geniuses. Personally, I’d wait till the election postmortem to grant that high an honor, but it’s mighty nice of Erick to notice that now.
RaflW
Sorry about the dupe posts. Intertoobz/firefox/wordpress (take pick) was acting really weird for a bit…
Bobby Thomson
@RP: Oh, it has already been vetted. Badly. Welcome to The Show, Willard.
feebog
If you follwed the Tykeforce at Red State during the early primary season, you would know that the Romneybot 2.0 was absolutely detested. When Perry got in the race you would have thought that Jesus H. Christ hisself had declared. When it became apparent to almost everyone that Perry was a complete and utter moron, there was still a hard core of support at Red State.
There was also quite a bit of support for Cain, although the racist element tamped that down a bit. When Cain was revealed as a serial sexual harasser and flamed out, a lot of them just gave up. There was little enthusiam for Newt, and I most of them recognized that Santorum was an insufferable prig.
Bottom line is that the Romneybot 2.0 was the only one left at the dance. That Erick-son-of-Erick is defending the bot now is pathetic.
maya
I ditched my Bain for some SLC fun,
I quirked the law, but the law won.
Haydnseek
I didn’t read any of the comments. I scrolled down as fast as possible so I could comment. Erick Erickson is a brownshirt in the form of a canned ham. I mean, really, just look at that motherfuckers face. Total Berlin 1937. The fact that he’s alive wouldn’t be a problem, but he’s on CNN. His website is his business, but CNN? Fuck CNN. But you already knew that…
lless
Really it is so simple for Mitt to prove his withdrawal from Bain. Release tax returns from 1999, 2001, 2002 and we can have the answer. They certainly were relevant to McCain’s thinking in 2008.
Catsy
@handy: I suspect the good people at The Globe have correctly surmised that they are on the official wingnut shitlist no matter what they do, and they have the facts on their side, so there’s no downside to riding this ride as far as it will go.
Or, more succinctly: they have the tiger by the tail, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that he’s made of paper. Why let go until you’re done ripping him apart?