Sunday, July 15, 2012

Retroactive Retirements, Etch-a-Sketches, and Neuralyzers -- so many ways for Romney to dodge responsibility

In case you missed it on Meet the Press this morning, here's the video of Mitt Romney Senior Advisor Ed Gillespie saying that Romney "actually retired retroactively" from Bain Capital in 2002, thereby trying to avoid responsibility for anything that happened while Mitt was CEO there between 1999 and 2002.

#Retroactively quickly became a trending hashtag on Twitter earlier today, with tweets about everything from Seamus Romney retroactively riding inside the car to Mitt Romney retroactively retiring from the Massachusetts Governorship immediately before the signing of Romneycare (one of mine).
 It took on the viral character of that earlier famous Etch-a-Sketch moment started by this remark from another Romney Senior Advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, on CNN back in March:

Mitt Romney personally offered yet one more metaphor for this desire to induce amnesia in American voters who might notice his flipping and flopping -- the Neuralyzer used by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black:
 

The real issue here is why Mitt Romney is running from his whole history.

  • Why is he running from his Bain experience when his experience as a businessman is his one (specious) argument for why he would be a better President than Barack Obama?
  • Why is he running from his major accomplishment as Governor of Massachusetts, the health care act that helped insure many uninsured people and served as one of the models for the program he now refers to dismissively as "Obamacare"?
  • Why is he running from Mormon experience as missionary and bishop in the Mormon church? Is he afraid of being connected with the White Horse Prophecy?

And to get back to the specifics of today's claim, if the Romney people on all the Sunday talk shows were saying that he was inactive in his role of CEO at Bain Capital between 1999-2002 because he was too busy working on the Salt Lake City Olympics, doesn't that work against him too?  Shouldn't any high-powered executive applying for the job of President be able to run a Utah Ice Show and a Boston Vulture Capitalism firm at the same time? Doesn't Barack Obama seem like he'd be able to add an Olympics to his portfolio with no problem?


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