A Joe Paterno apologist has written a Facebook posting demanding that ESPN publicly apologize for dragging the school, Paterno, Jerry Sandusky’s victims, and Penn State fans, families and alumni “through the dirt.” As of this writing, the posting has close to 72,000 “Likes.”
Where the author reaches new highs (or lows, depending on your perspective) of revisionism is when he writes the following, regarding the controversy over the now-removed Joe Paterno statue (emphasis in the quote is mine):
You should be man enough to face your past. We do not remove the Lincoln Memorial because he started the Civil War, rather we leave it as a reminder of the good he’s done. To some, the statute may remind them of the Sandusky Child Molestations, and I understand that. However, how are you to move forward in this life if you do not know where you’ve been? We study history to remind us to not allow it to repeat itself.
Reminds me of the words of the great historian, John Blutarsky:
By now, most people are familiar with the story of Seamus, Mitt Romney’s Irish Setter. But now the Democratic National Committee is using Rafalca, his Ann Romney’s Olympics-bound showhorse in a web ad hitting him on the tax returns controversy:
“This election is starting to look enough like 2004 that Karl Rove should be demanding royalties from the Obama campaign, and others may conclude that no presidential campaign should ever again be based in Boston.”
– Charlie Cook, National Journal, July 16, 2012
Update: You knew this was coming… Somebody created a parody @RafalcaRomney Twitter account.
Looks like the Bain and tax returns attacks finally got under Mitt Romney’s skin. Buzzfeed reports:
In speeches from Des Moines to Dallas, Romney has always been careful to hedge his tough digs at Obama with a civil nod toward the president’s moral character: “He’s a nice guy,” the Republican has often said. “He just has no idea how the private economy works.” But Tuesday’s speech included no such hedge — and one campaign adviser said there’s a reason for that.
“[Romney] has said Obama’s a nice fellow, he’s just in over his head,” the adviser said. “But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he’s really disappointed. He believes it’s time to vet the president. He really hasn’t been vetted; McCain didn’t do it.”
Indeed, facing what the candidate and his aides believe to be a series of surprisingly ruthless, unfounded, and unfair attacks from the Obama campaign on Romney’s finances and business record, the Republican’s campaign is now prepared to go eye for an eye in an intense, no-holds-barred act of political reprisal, said two Romney advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity. In the next chapter of Boston’s pushback — which began last week when they began labeling Obama a “liar” — very little will be off-limits, from the president’s youthful drug habit, to his ties to disgraced Chicago politicians.
“I mean, this is a guy who admitted to cocaine use, had a sweetheart deal with his house in Chicago, and was associated and worked with Rod Blagojevich to get Valerie Jarrett appointed to the Senate,” the adviser said. “The bottom line is there’ll be counterattacks.”
The reference to Obama’s past drug use seems to suggest that former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu wasn’t going off-script after all when he dinged the president for spending “his early years in Hawaii smoking something” during a Tuesday morning Fox News appearance.
Speaking on his syndicated radio show on Tuesday, the right-wing host brought up the upcoming Batman film The Dark Knight Rises (or as he called it, The Dark Knight Lights Up), in particular focusing on its main villain, the Tom Hardy-portrayed hulking madman Bane. With Mitt Romney’s time at the investment fund (and the questionable time at which he retired from it) filling non-entertainment news headlines, Limbaugh tied the two together, casting some tough accusations at director Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros.
“Do you think it is accidental that the name of the really vicious firebreathing, four-eyed whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?” Limbaugh asked his listeners.
Limbaugh did note that the film, the sequel to the 2008 hit The Dark Knight, has been in the works for a long time, with a summer 2012 release date long part of the plan.
“So this evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane. And there’s discussion out there as to whether or not this was purposeful and whether or not it will influence voters. It’s going to have a lot of people,” he continued. “The audience is going to be huge. A lot of people are going to see the movie. And it’s a lot of braindead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd, and they’re going to hear Bane in the movie and they’re going to associate Bain.
“And the thought is that when they’re going to start paying attention to the campaign later in the year,” Limbaugh asserted, “and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, not Bain Capitol but Romney and Bain, that these people will start thinking back to the Batman movies – ‘Oh yeah, I know who that is!'”
Four years ago, conservatives were singing a very different tune about The Dark Knight:
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.
“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.
– Andrew Klavan, The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2008.
But Batman goes into another country and with a C-130 snatches a guy out, and then throws him back here into Gotham. So there’s rendition. At one point the Morgan Freeman character says to Batman, wait a minute, hang on, you’re eavesdropping on everyone in Gotham? And Batman says, yes, to stop this terrorist. Morgan Freeman says, I can’t be a part of it. And yet Morgan Freeman does become a part of it, and they find the Joker. One of the ways they find the Joker is through eavesdropping. I mean the parallels here of what’s going on is to me stunning.
– Glenn Beck, CNN, August 6, 2008
Hey, guys… ever stop to consider that maybe the Batman movies are just meant to be entertainment? Or that maybe voters – right and left – are intelligent enough to make their own decisions at the polls and not base them on the name of the villain in a superhero movie?
Update: Politicizing Batman isn’t limited to Republicans. Check out this quote from a Democratic operative (h/t Andrew Sullivan):
“It has been observed that movies can reflect the national mood. Whether it is spelled Bain and being put out by the Obama campaign or Bane and being out by Hollywood, the narratives are similar: a highly intelligent villain with offshore interests and a past both are seeking to cover up who had a powerful father and is set on pillaging society.”
– Chris Lehane, Washington Examiner, July 16, 2012
After last week’s twofold controversy over his tenure at Bain Capital and his tax returns, Mitt Romney is facing two difficult choices: deal with the existing bad optics of the situation, or create a new set of optics which could be even more difficult to deal with.
If Romney keeps refusing to release his tax returns – which looks especially bad for him considering the precedent set by his own father during the 1968 campaign – the Obama campaign can keep the story alive. If he does release them, he will look weak for having caved to pressure from the Obama campaign, especially considering that Team Romney has demanded retractions/corrections for stories from the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, and an apology from the Obama campaign for Stephanie Cutter’s comments about Romney possibly committing a felony. Romney’s demands for all three were turned down.
Setting aside the questions about outsourcing, offshoring, and when he left Bain on paper and/or in practice, the question everybody is asking is why would Romney continue to withhold his tax returns? James Fallows and John Cassidy offer some possible explanations, which can be broken down into three theories:
The returns could reveal what a Fallows reader describes as “a shocking level” of tax avoidance.
The existence of more offshore bank accounts, which could give the Obama campaign more ammunition.
What Cassidy calls “politically explosive investments,” which could anger or energize the right and/or the left. Some possible examples would be if Romney directly benefited from Bain investments like some that have already been reported, such as companies that specialized in outsourcing jobs, or Stericycle, the biological waste company that specializes in disposing of aborted fetuses.
On top of that, the Obama campaign recently hit Romney with what is probably one of the most memorable and powerful attack ads from the last decade, if not longer. Unfortunately in politics, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. The Romney campaign responded with its own ad which set a series of headlines to Obama’s performance of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” The ad can’t be linked to or embedded because it was taken down from YouTube following a copyright claim by BMG.
The sustained attacks on Romney’s business record are clearly having an effect on the overall dynamics of the race and the national discourse. Searches for Bain Capital have increased on Google. Particularly worrisome from the Romney campaign’s perspective is the fact that of five out of the top ten locations where these searches are traced to come from key swing states (Ranked in numerical order: Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina. If you consider Arizona a swing state up for grabs this year, then six out of the top ten locations are swing states.) References to Bain Capital have also increased on Twitter. In other words, people are paying attention.
On the other hand, it is worth keeping in mind that Romney’s refusal to release the tax returns could be more damaging than whatever might be in the documents themselves. Remember John Kerry’s repeated refusal to release his Standard Form 180 in response to demands from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth back in 2004? By the time he actually got around to doing that a year after the race, the records essentially confirmed/upheld the historical facts of Kerry’s military service and didn’t have any damning or damaging revelations. Ultimately, the tax issue is a problem of Romney’s own making, no matter how many questionable excuses (John and Teresa Heinz Kerry) he offers to justify his position of nondisclosure.
There is no easy solution for this, regardless of what Romney ultimately decides. The basic question he has to answer on whether or not to release more tax returns is if he prefers the devil he knows or the one he doesn’t.
Update: Unrelated to the tax returns issue, but still worth noting… The New York Times reports that Mitt Romney’s name and/or signature has come up in 142 documents during the period between 1999 and 2002, raising questions over when/if he left he had severed ties with or ceded control of Bain Capital during this period while he was running the Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The Obama campaign released this simple but brutal ad yesterday: A series of headlines from recent weeks about Romney’s tenure at Bain, outsourcing jobs, and use of offshore tax havens, set to audio of Romney’s off-key performance of “America the Beautiful” at a campaign event in Florida last January. TPM’s David Kurtz compares this ad to the Lyndon Johnson campaign’s now legendary “Daisy” ad from the 1964 election.
FALLOWS: It has. And I think it’s worth focusing on why this is such a potential problem for the Romney campaign. The entire reason behind his campaign through the last year in the Republican primaries and now in the next four months in the general election is that America has business problems. He is a businessman, therefore, he’s the right person for the job.
And what the Obama campaign is doing on the basis of this Bain imbroglio is something similar to what George W. Bush was doing to John Kerry back in 2004 in the episode known as swiftboating. And by that, I mean making something that a candidate has assumed to be his strength, which, in John Kerry’s case was his military background, into a weakness.
RAZ: And so if the Obama campaign can make Mitt Romney’s business background not the presumed basis of his campaign, but instead a source of controversy, a source of potential weakness for him, that really does make problems in the campaign for the Romney team.
So if the Obama campaign is swiftboating, as you say, Mitt Romney – I mean, one of the criticisms of John Kerry was that he didn’t respond to this back in 2004, and Romney is only started to respond to it.
FALLOWS: Exactly. And I should make clear, in saying swiftboating, I’m not asserting that these are false accusations. I’m just saying they have this jujitsu effect. And it’s actually surprising the Romney team is not better prepared for them than it is. Number one, because they’ve had the last eight years since the John Kerry episode. Number two, over the last year, this is what Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and others were using as their angle of attack on Mitt Romney’s business background too.
Fallows’s analogy of the Bain attack being political jiujitsu by turning a candidate’s strength into a potential liability is correct. However, there are a few other reasons why the swiftboating analogy is not accurate here that are worth pointing out (Full disclosure/background: I reviewed hundreds of pages of military records for Kerry and others while working at CNN during the course of the Swift Boat controversy as it was playing out in 2004.)
After having reviewed multiple incident reports and service records obtained independently through Freedom of Information Act requests, documents filed contemporaneously at the time backed Kerry’s version of the events, every single time. In other words, the underlying basis for challenging Kerry’s service record was entirely false. In Romney’s case, independent reporting of multiple news organizations, as well as Bain Capital’s SEC filings and his 2002 testimony before the Ballot Law Commission in Massachusetts are the basis for questioning his version of events.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were an independent 527 group. This ad – and the entire strategy of attacking Romney’s record at Bain – was a direct hit organized by the Obama campaign.
Romney was attacked for his Bain record during the 2012 Republican primaries. He could have put a lot of these issues to rest if he had put the information out there months ago. Kerry’s military service was never challenged during the Democratic primaries, and did not become an issue until the Swift Boat group started running ads shortly after Kerry accepted his party’s nomination.
His continued refusal to release tax returns beyond 2010 is also compounding the problem. Also consider that when Romney was being vetted to be John McCain’s possible running mate back in 2008, he gave the McCain campaign 23 years’ worth of tax returns. Even though his tax returns and the end of his tenure at Bain are two completely separate issues, the Obama campaign has effectively joined them together at the hip. In this respect, Romney’s response is similar to Kerry’s refusal to release his full personnel and medical file (Standard Form 180) back in 2004.
The Obama campaign has effectively turned Romney’s record in the private sector – in his words, one of the main reasons why he should be elected president – into a liability. However, after looking at everything the Swift Boat campaign did to John Kerry, the analogy should end there. Romney’s current problem is almost entirely of his own making – the conflicting answers he’s given in the past and last week, as well as the SEC documents and his own refusal to release more tax returns.
Matt Drudge managed to single-handedly change the subject of the national media conversation away from Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital for a few hours. The non-scoop: that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was near the top of Romney’s short list to be his running mate.
Despite her formidable intellect and experience in academia and government service, Rice has one glaring omission in her otherwise impressive resume and life story: she has never run for elected office, nor has she ever had any interest in being a candidate for anything.
Nate Silver runs through Romney’s possible options for a female running mate. The bottom line is there is not much for him to choose from that would satisfy the different GOP constituencies, appeal to swing voters, and can present a credible option to step into the role of president as necessary to avoid a repeat of the Sarah Palin debacle of 2008.
I’d have to agree with Silver’s closing assessment: Romney is likely to play it safe in terms of picking a running mate; or in the words of an unidentified Republican official, an “incredibly boring white guy.” The talk of Condoleezza Rice is just that – talk.
Check out this fantastic writeup in the Wall Street Journal about the writing and recording of the Righteous Brothers’ classic “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”
A senior Romney strategist said Thursday that the campaign had a plan and wouldn’t be distracted from implementing it, despite pressure from outsiders. The strategist called the new charges part of an old line of attack that had already been thoroughly aired.
“We went through this in the primary,” the adviser said. “You have a lot of people inside the Beltway, who like to sit back and be armchair quarterbacks, strategists who talk to you and don’t go on the record. We have a plan. We know what the plan is, and we’re going to implement the plan.”
So the Romney strategist who won’t go on the record bashes other strategists for not going on the record? See if you can make sense of that one…
Icepicks and Nukes 