The magnitude of the basic deceit that is the Romney/Ryan campaign has grown so large that it presents a problem for the blogging format. Time and again, I am dissuaded from pursuing a topic by the sheer effort it will take to explain it, or by the fact that I have already expended that energy more than once. It must be part of their plan. Here’s Greg Sargent, giving it a go:
Romney has broken with recent precedent — his father included — in refusing to release his tax returns, but he says has paid 13 percent for 10 years. (Just trust me.) Romney has not released the names of his major bundlers, but he won’t be beholden to his donors, as Obama has been. (Just trust me.) Romney vows to eliminate the deficit, and promises that his tax plan will be revenue neutral, even though he won’t say which loopholes and deductions he’d eliminate to pay for deep tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich. (Just trust me.) Romney says he intends to eliminate whole agencies of government, but won’t say which ones, except in closed-door meetings with donors, and even then, details are scarce. (All together now: Just trust me.)
And so on, in that vein. Rather than doing a piece this morning that attempts to correct the record, I just want to talk about this strategy of “Just trust me.” On one level, I agree with the strategy. When it comes to something like tax reform, for example, it makes sense to set out some broad principles and leave most of the details for later. This is because you have to work with the Congress you get, not the one you might wish to have. So, details don’t count for much. What the voters need to know is your bottom line and what you are trying to achieve.
But, if you are going to propose a radical change in the tax code, and ask people to trust you about the details, you have to work to earn that trust. And Romney doesn’t come with a lot of built up trust. It’s not a problem for me, but his Mormon religion is something a lot of people don’t trust. His work at Bain Capital is not something a lot of people trust. His destruction of his gubernatorial records didn’t promote trust. The destruction of his Olympic records didn’t promote trust. His refusal to release his tax returns is suspicious, as is his foreign banks accounts. Lying about whether he filed his taxes in Utah or Massachusetts didn’t inspire any trust. And, frankly, that fact that he says about twenty inaccurate things a day is not helping people trust him.
He’s in a terrible position, based on his biography, work history, and record on the campaign to ask anyone to trust him about anything. By refusing to talk about his religion, or his time at Bain Capital, by having destroyed the records at the Olympics and of his time as governor, and by lying about and refusing to release his taxes or talk about specifics in his policy proposals, he’s done about everything he can to make people not trust him.
The Romney strategy is simple: Hammer away at Obama for proposing cuts to Medicare and promise, in vague, aspirational ways, to protect the program for future retirees — but don’t get pulled into a public discussion of the most unpopular parts of the Ryan plan.
As we have gone over (over and over again), this charge that Obama proposed or made cuts to Medicare is a gigantic lie. The cuts are actually cost savings that don’t impact Medicare recipients. Since, one leg of Romney’s strategy is to tell a gigantic lie over and over again, the fact that another leg of his strategy is to earn the trust of the American people seems less than ideal.
here’s the thing…
Rachel Maddow has done numerous segments spelling it out – Willard LIED in 2002 about his taxes.
So, WHY should he be given the benefit of the doubt.
There’s no debate on whether he lied – he LIED in 2002
trying to pull now what he did then.
But no one who doesn’t watch Rachel or read liberal blogs knows that. She builds an unassailable case that he intentionally and flagrantly lied to the public and the press in Massachusetts and then argued for residency by “retroactively” amended his returns like he retroactively retired from Bain. I want to know if he reimbursed Utah for the big property tax break. But-no one knows. This should be being blasted from the front page of every MSM news site and program. Romney should be asked every where he goes, “You lied about this before why should we trust you now?”. But it is not happening and I sadly don’t believe it will. It has the power to take down his entire “trust me” facade and to bring him down. But I am not confident that this information will break out to the general public.
you forgot about mentioning his staff TAKING THE HARD DRIVES FROM THE COMPUTERS when he was Governor.
I’m still trying to understand how that was fucking legal
well, yes, that was how they destroyed the records.
And destroyed the records from the Olympics.
It was legal because Willard reimbursed the state for those computers and their hard drives. What I’m really wondering is if they wiped the servers.
How was it legal? Simple, my friend: They bought the hard drives, as government surplus. All quite in character for our would-be vulture-capitalist-CEO president.
… The “Just Trust-Fund Me” ticket.”.
But…but…But Mitt’s integrity is “golden”!! Ann said so! And that is a woman who knows her gold.
Not just Romney, but the Party he leads, have murdered each and every platform but ‘trust me’.
Yes, they have murdered the abortion platorm, by drawing it to such an extreme that the vote for a personhood position you deny in vitro, and accept that the party of small government will spend a suspicious amount of time in women’s vaginas. They renamed this religious freedom. But I know more than a few people who are reverent of that particular part of a woman’s being.
They murdered fiscal conservatism by a platform that hailed that ‘deficits don’t matter’
They murdered Congress with years of denial that the govt is supposed to work for the people.
Now they are running on murdering the word TRUST.
They’re counting on our laziness. “It’s wonky, it’s complicated, it’s five thousand pages!” How often do we hear that whining.
I really don’t care to read either of those guys’ version of the world, or listen to their stupid speeches to gullible people, but if it mattered I would. Unfortunately for the pirates, it’s my job as a citizen to pay attention. Eternal vigilance is really inconvenient to the PTB, and Hard Work for a journalist who gets paid to inform me. It’s nice to see some of that lazy journalism tide turning in response to the efforts of bloggers.
It would be so much easier if they could just buy the election. Poor Mitt doesn’t get that you can’t fool all the people all the time. Lots of us can recognize a liar and a stolen election. The people are really in the way this time.
As they have for the past 18 years, the Republican Party is campaigning based on a big lie. Democrats should point out that in 2010 Republicans made the same assurances about Medicare and the same allegations about Obamacare cutting Medicare and the same dogwhistles to the death panel bullcrap they established in August 2009. And then the put forward the Ryan budget, which seeks to privatize Medicare and replace it with an inadequate voucher. It is not just the Romney who is untrustworthy; it is the entire Republican Party. They cannot win if they tell people what they want to do for the 1%.
Obama has asked us to trust him on certain issues too — not indefinitely detaining American citizens although the NDAA gives him that power. But Obama has been more deserving of that trust than any Republican.
But that misses the real issue. A government of laws and a democracy of informed consent is not based on assumptions of trust. It is based on an equal application of the law and on persons demanding trust providing means of verifying their trustworthiness. Obama misses this on NDAA. Romney, Ryan, and the Republicans miss this on every issue they promote and every issue they criticize.
And after spinning in the Reagan administration, lying in the Clinton administration, and stealing the government in the Bush administration, the Republicans during the Obama administration to a person have been relying on the “big lie”–one so big that believing that they would lie that boldly seems incredible to most honest people.
It’s more than irritating. It is downright dangerous.
If it’s not their plan, it sure matches the GOP record of the last decade or two. It reminds me of the Bush II years, in which the administration would commit unbelievable outrages one after another in such rapid succession that no one person could keep up with all of it. There might be a thousand or more awful things they managed to pull off that I have yet to hear of.
At least with Mitt’s lying, so far you can still keep up with them personally, even if you can’t always translate it to the reading public. Of course, with Ryan on the ticket, the pace is sure to double.
Speaking of Ryan, he’s busy dragging out the old teleprompter jokes again. Al Gore inventing the internet can’t be far behind.
A point I forgot to make above: as with the Bush outrage overload, all Mitt has to do is keep the lies coming faster than the fact-checkers can cope with in order to bury the undecided voters in the Fall.
He’s got a solid 40-45% he can count on (although their geographic distribution might not always be helpful), and he’s looking at about the same percentage of voters who won’t vote for him under any circumstances. The leftover segment of mostly low-information voters is highly susceptible to a campaign based on lies, especially when the media can be relied upon to ignore or promote the bulk of them.
Given that it’s a “cost saving” is an established, incontrovertible fact, perhaps he should be asked why he’s against it as an “extreme conservative”.
Imo this “trust me” thing was born of the distrust brewing/perculating in the ranks of his base, which is the primary reason why he made the Ryan pick, to induce the perception that he is “one of them”. And needless to say, if it earned their collective trust, the charges that he’s being a secretive asshole are largely gonna fall on deaf ears. I think this is why Biden recently did what should have been done long ago — take SS changes (of the benefit-reducing kind)off the table so as to avoid the traps and pitfalls uncertainty produces and has produced in the dem base since the Catfood Commision was empaneled. I think they’ve long banked on the many diappointments BHO has provided will result in no votes. Based on my experiences, I think they’re all wet, because even the most disappointed I know still intend to vote BHO because of the well earned fear of rightwingnuttery his kind have instilled. The disappointments have been far eclipsed by the fear of the alternative, where disappointments are a certainty.
This “trust me” thingy is also a great springboard from which all sorts of disgust, fear and loathing of the BHO admin can be produced from complete fabrications and speculation. “Talk about secretive! Is the BHO admin gonna take your guns away in a second term?” Before the Biden thing, which doesn’t lay the issue completely to rest yet imo, they can ask “What were all those cuts to Medicare and SS they were willing to make in exchange for tax revenues?”
“Romney himself has embraced the Ryan budget and President Obama also signaled a willingness to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of a deficit grand bargain.” http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/242755-aarp-poll-highlights-importance-of-entitlement-r
eform-in-election
Let your imagination run amok. Offensive offense is ALWAYS their first line of defense, and this “trust me thing” has the potential to be an obsfucation gold mine.
If Romney was to ever have a prayer of winning, it was first and foremost required that the base be consolodated and enthused. The Ryan pick all but insured that. What is most amusing about this to me, is all the BS I read about how BHO isn’t running on his record, as the Mutt desperately tries to hide his, as well as avoiding going on the record with a detailed roadmap as to how he intends to achieve the future record his goals presumably are.
And how can he be held to account for broken promises that roadmap would contain by either side later if he makes none?
What this all adds up to me, is that like with their abandonment of the 9th Commandment and the way they still contend that they are our “moral” leaders despite that incontrovertible “fact”, he will avoid any and all personal responsibility and accountibility for his past, present, and future record, all while contending that he is the leader of the party of personal responsibility and accountibility. Face it dude — there is no getting over, around, or under the mountainous turd based in the Land of Denial they collectively are these days. They know they can’t win by honest means, so their conduct is dictated, and therefore should be unsurprising and predictable. If in their world, lies are facts and up is down, why wouldn’t distrust be transmuted into trust for their base by rightwingnut alchemists? They are already well on their way to having accomplished that for Romney.
And just as surely as the conned cons/minions have granted his kind a license to lie without fear of political or financial reprisal, they will insist now and in the future that the vacuum (insomuch as all he was for before he was against it cancels each other out) the Mutt is, is really saturated with what they know to be right.
So distrust isn’t much of an issue on his side, just ours, and perhaps within that ever-dwindling group known as “undecideds”.
US Official: Israeli Leaks Are Damaging Efforts to Halt Iran’s Nuclear Program
See the PNAC boys beginning to stampede President Obama on Iran right before the election in this? You should. Republicans have a long history of sandbagging Democratic incumbents’ efforts to bring peace and stability. Nixon and the Paris Peace Talks. Reagan’s promise of arms for hostages (actually delaying their release).
You didn’t suppose Romney and Netanyahu spent all their time in closed-door meetings discussing moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, did you? Wonder what all they got up to there…
But if a surprise is in the works, they may have to step up the program a bit. A late Iranian Spring may still be possible, if just barely.
Netanyahu has a problem. There have been significant leaks that the IDF and Mossad are not on board with his plan to strike Iran. Yes, no doubt Bibi and Mitt were all about how to shaft President Obama and bring back the PNAC boys.
The sanctions are delaying, not speeding up, the possibility of an Iranian Spring–unless the election next year is very surprising. (Ahmedinejad is reported not to be seeking re-election.) What sanctions do is provide an external focus against which to direct the anger at the regime.
The most stunning way to bring it about would be an agreement between the US and Iran that solved a bunch of issues and renormalized relations after 33 years. But that doesn’t seem the way that Secretary of State Clinton is moving at the moment. One doesn’t know what rational discussions are occurring privately while the chest-beating goes on publicly.
(Wikipedia, “Big Lie”)
That’s Hitler they’re talking about (oh, and screw Godwin), but it describes what the GOP is up to. Just more of the Big Lie Technique. Except now amplified by captive media, segmented social media, and a large dumbass demographic.
Maybe the biggest of the Big Lies is the constant GOP whining about “personal attacks”, when in reality a campaign based on “trust me” leaves the other side nothing to dispute except the character of the candidate. Romney keeps his past, his goals, and his intentions secret, so there are no issues left except his trustworthiness, which hardly exists. It’s kind of the inverse of Rove’s doctrine of attacking the opponent’s strength. Romney instead seems to be trying to market his weakest point. Can’t wait to see how that works out.
My most eye-rolling moment in canvassing today. A conversation with a 34 year old white woman in a “typical” middle class neighborhood. Paraphrased, but you’ll get the drift.
Can the President count on your support in the fall?
No, not voting for Obama. Just can’t do it.
Is there a particular issue which causes you to feel this way?
It’s the health care thing. I don’t like the health care thing at all.
What specifically about it troubles you?
Well, they’re spending all that money. I just really don’t like that they’re spending all that money and it’s all going to go to, like, you know, all those other people
I’m not sure what you mean.
Well, all those illegals and everything. They are all going to get it for free, and everyone else will get nothing.
Sigh…………..