Saturday, July 14, 2012

Obama Offers No Apologies in Bain Attack

Photobucket

WSJ: Romney's Bain Timing Fair Game
At issue is whether Mr. Romney left Bain in 1999 to run the Winter Olympics, as his campaign contends, or a few years later, a view backed up by SEC filings that listed him as chief executive and chairman. Earlier this week, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said Mr. Romney either lied to the SEC and therefore committed a felony, or is lying to voters now.

CNN Transcript July 13, 2012
ACOSTA: And do you believe you're being swift-boated in this campaign?

ROMNEY: Boy, I hadn't heard that term, but I'll give it some thought. I -- I -- I think what the president is doing is -- is terribly destructive to the political process and be -- beneath what the people of America expected from someone who said he was going to rise above partisan politics and bring a new era of change to Washington.
We're -- we're not seeing that in this campaign so far.

ACOSTA: Because both campaigns, on Thursday, Governor Romney, were basically calling each other liars.
Is that the kind of campaign the American people should expect?
And shouldn't your campaign take some responsibility for calling the president's campaign and their people liars?

ROMNEY: You know what the president's campaign has done so far is run advertisement after advertisement which is then shown by independent fact checkers to be wrong, false, misleading. And yet they keep running them. And they hold press conferences continuing to speak about them.
And at some point, you have to respond. You can't just have the -- the airwaves covered with these ads day in and day out without saying, look, those are false.

President Obama ought to apologize for the out-of-control behavior of his staff, which demeans the office he holds. Campaigns are supposed to be hard fought, but statements like those made by Stephanie Cutter belittle the process and the candidate on whose behalf she works.
~ Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades

Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to run the Olympics and has had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure."
~ Bain Managing Director Steve Pagliuca to John King of CNN

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He was just gone. And it happened very suddenly. ... After that, he was not on calls or writing memos. He was gone.
~ Anonymous Bain source to John King of CNN

The Obama campaign is blowing smoke here.
~ Glenn Kessler, the "Fact Checker," on Washington Post

Glenn Kessler jumps the shark . . . in case you missed it: "much of the language saying Romney was 'sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president' was boilerplate that did not reveal whether he was actually managing Bain at the time."
Brad De Long, the liberal economics professor and deputy assistant Treasury secretary under President Clinton, has called on Kessler to provide one example of another person who has simultaneously worn the four titles while claiming no responsibilities whatsoever with the business.
Stand by on that... though you may want to sit.
~ Dylan Byers on Politico

Romney got caught telling a lie. Period. That isn't a swiftboat job, as CNN is implying. Romney was legally and factually sole owner, President, and CEO of Bain Capital between 1999 and 2002, and was paid a salary of at least six digits (maybe more, we don't know) as compensation for his services as president and CEO. These are FACTS.
. . . Keep in mind that as sole owner, Mitt Romney, and only Mitt Romney had the authority to appoint a president and CEO of the company, and set the salary. Mitt Romney picked Mitt Romney to be president and CEO, and decided that he, Mitt Romney, as president and CEO, should be paid a salary north of $100,000 per year (we don't know how far north, it could have been $20 million).
Seriously, can this be any more black and white?
~ Sarge in Seattle on Daily Kos

King's (CNN) reporting, which was widely circulated under the title "When Romney left Bain: Here are the facts" (now under the banner "John King: Why is 1999 so important in 2012?") is a piece that attempts to whitewash Romney by incorrectly defining the issue as being whether Romney was in Massachusetts from 1999-2001, and then quoting a bunch of former Bain insiders (he keeps repeating that some are Democrats!) saying Romney was not in Massachusetts at the time. But he paints this as a definitive debunking of the story.
And then I realized every story on CNN must accept as an article of faith that Romney is a viable candidate. . . . the "fact-checking" on this story only makes sense if you assume that the for-profit media needs the election to be a close one for financial reasons. They need it to be a horserace because they are the ones who own the concession stands at the racetrack.
~ MarkC on Daily Kos

The sad truth is that the cult of balance still rules. If a Republican candidate announced a plan that in effect sells children into indentured servitude, the news reports would be that “Democrats say” that the plan sells children into indentured servitude, with each quote to that effect matched by a quote from a Republican saying the opposite.
. . . So running on the real policy issues by itself isn’t going to work. By all means, run on the real issues — but do so by creating a narrative, a pattern that registers with the public.
And Romney’s biography offers a golden opportunity to do just that. His policy proposals amount to a radical redistribution of income away from the middle class to the very rich; he’s also being highly dishonest about budgets and just about everything else. How to make those true facts credible? By associating them with his business career, which involved a lot of profiting by laying off workers and/or taking away their benefits; his personal finances, which involved so much tax avoidance that he’s afraid to let us see his returns before 2010; his shiftiness over when exactly he left Bain.
~ Paul Krugman in a column called "No Bain, No Gain"


"There is no whining in politics. Stop demanding an apology, release your tax returns."
~ John Weaver, a veteran Republican strategist, after presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney said anew that he won't go beyond releasing his 2010 tax records and, before the election, his 2011 taxes.

Mitt Romney ~ He sure asks for a lot of apologies.
~ New Obama Ad






















Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)