Political Irony

While the Republican National Convention is busy trying to promote their narrative that Obama has been a disappointment of a president, there are two things that you should remember:

First of all, that it is a lie. Despite relentless opposition from the Republicans — who even opposed their own ideas (like Romneycare/Obamacare) when Obama adopted them — and despite inheriting an economy in free-fall, this administration has actually succeeded in turning the country around and gotten it moving in the right direction again.

The “Please Cut The Crap” blog has put together a comprehensive list, with comprehensive citations, of 200 accomplishments of Obama. Whether it is tracking down Osama bin Laden, saving the American automobile industry, reforming America’s reputation abroad, putting new emphasis on education, pushing less polluting forms of energy, or even cutting taxes, there is a lot to like.

Second, notice that there is one person who will be noticeably absent from the Republican convention, and that is George W. Bush. Even Republicans realize that the last Republican president was one disaster after another. Sadly, the main reminder of the Bush administration today will be Hurricane Isaac dumping rain on New Orleans on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Well, that, and having to live with the legacy of Bush appointments to the Supreme Court, like the Citizens United decision that has opened the floodgates of special interest money in elections.

So when someone like Reince Priebus declares that Obama has “never run a company“, remember that Bush was our first CEO president.

And it isn’t just Bush. What have the rest of the Republicans been doing the last four years? Opposing Wall Street reforms. Opposing health care reform. Opposing gay marriage and trying to outlaw abortion. Trying to shut down Planned Parenthood. Promoting tax cuts for the rich and giveaways to large multinational corporations.

And what are the GOP priorities for the future? It is telling that the first item on the Republican platform is “Preserving and protecting traditional marriage” (against gays). While the first item on the Democratic platform is the economy.

It is instructive to read the rest of the Republican platform. Their vision of the future says “The Internet must be made safe for children” by going after “all forms of pornography and obscenity”. But they don’t say how they will do that while protecting freedom of speech.

Ironically, their “Prescription for American Healthcare” says:

We believe that taking care of one’s health is an individual responsibility. Chronic diseases, many of them related to lifestyle, drive healthcare costs, accounting for more than 75 percent of the nation’s medical spending. To reduce demand, and thereby lower costs, we must foster personal responsibility while increasing preventive services to promote healthy lifestyles.

And yet, when Michelle Obama promotes healthy eating for children in order to fight obesity, she is mocked as promoting a nanny state.

The Republican Platform also promotes education reform, which they call “A Chance for Every Child”. Wasn’t that what Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was supposed to do? And under “Improving our Nation’s Classrooms” they complain that “Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system” and call on “State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.” You know, those liberal ideas like evolution or climate change.

In an interview with CBS, Mitt Romney tries to deflect the blowback that the Republican Party is receiving due to their hardline stance on abortion. The Republican Party platform calls for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. After all, if you believe that an embryo is a person, then any abortion — even in the case of rape or incest — would be murder. Statements from prominent Republicans about “legitimate” or “forced” rape are just making things worse.

Which has led Romney to distance himself from his own party’s platform.

But here’s where it gets really ironic. Romney tried to downplay the whole thing and paint it as a political distraction:

Recognize this is the decision that will be made by the Supreme Court. The Democrats try and make this a political issue every four years, but this is a matter in the courts. It’s been settled for some time in the courts.

Just who does he think appoints the members of the Supreme Court? And who ratifies those appointments?

Does he really think that we are too stupid to realize that the really crazy and damaging decisions (like Citizens United) made by the conservative members of the Supreme Court have nothing to do with the Republican Party that put them there?

UPDATE: Readers have made comments pointing out additional hypocrisy in what Romney says. When he says “this is the decision that will be made by the Supreme Court” he has it backwards — Roe v. Wade was already decided by the Supreme Court. Yes, as he says “it’s been settled for some time by the courts” — just not the way Republicans would like. Indeed, it is the Republicans who keep bringing this issue up — nobody forced them to put a call for a constitutional amendment into their party platform. Alternatively, they will continue to stack the Supreme Court with social conservatives who will overturn Roe v. Wade. It is also important to point out that if they do get a constitutional amendment passed, then saying that this would be decided by the courts is just nonsense. A constitutional amendment trumps the courts.

And finally, as I’ve said before, Republicans have had multiple chances to push for such a constitutional amendment, most recently during the last Bush administration when they also controlled Congress. But they didn’t do squat about it. They just keep cravenly bringing it up during elections to fire up the base.

The Economist magazine — who should be his biggest boosters — takes a long, hard look at Mitt Romney, and doesn’t like what they see.

A few quotes, but the whole article is worth reading:

All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr Romney could win an Olympic medal in it (see article).

Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper.

Mr Romney may calculate that it is best to keep quiet: the faltering economy will drive voters towards him. It is more likely, however, that his evasiveness will erode his main competitive advantage. A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. Indeed, all this underlines the main doubt: nobody knows who this strange man really is. It is half a decade since he ran something. Why won’t he talk about his business career openly? Why has he been so reluctant to disclose his tax returns? How can a leader change tack so often? Where does he really want to take the world’s most powerful country?

Yesterday, Gawker published 950 pages of “internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters” for companies and other entities in which Mitt Romney has a significant investment interest (mostly through Bain Capital).

The whole thing reeks of irony. Indeed, defenders of Romney scream that Gawker itself, while pointing out that Romney avoided taxes by using things like offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, is organized under a shell company based in … you guessed it … the Cayman Islands. To their credit, the article in Gawker does explicitly acknowledge the irony, saying that “It is of course breathtakingly routine and legal for hedge funds and equity funds (and blog companies!) to locate themselves in the Cayman Islands for tax, regulatory, and privacy reasons.”

OK, we get it. Gawker is not known as a paragon of virtue. But do two wrongs make a right? Just because Gawker does something questionable, does it make it ok for someone running for president to do the same thing?

The bottom line is that nobody is questioning the authenticity of the documents released. And now that, a day later, actual tax experts are looking through the documents, they are finding tax-avoidance techniques employed by Bain Capital — when Romney was CEO and sole shareholder — that would not pass muster.

For example, Bain regularly treated management fees they earned as capital gains. The problem with this is that it is “not legal” and “if challenged in court, Bain would lose”. Of course, this is just the studied opinion of a tax expert (a professor of law at the University of Colorado), not the judgement of a tax court. But a tax court judgement could take years (or, more importantly, until after the election).

Other practices seen in the documents are highly questionable. For example, the practice of holding US dividend paying stocks in an offshore account and pretending (for accounting purposes) that you don’t own the actual stock, but instead own a derivative product that is identical in every way to the stock, except that it isn’t the stock, so therefore no US taxes are owed. According to another tax expert, who is a professor of taxation at the New York University School of Law, “taxpayers who engaged in it to avoid the dividend withholding tax were coming perilously close to committing tax fraud, in cases where the economic equivalence to direct ownership was too great.” Indeed, the IRS has issued notices warning against this practice. But Romney did it.

Contrary to what Romney has said, according to at least one tax expert “Bottom line: Mitt Romney has not paid all the taxes required under law.”