Gee, Another Lie

Mitt's adoring wife ("I just love women," she proclaimed as many shifted uncomfortably in their seats) told an adoring audience that her man is self-made. Yeah, she did. Well, he isn't, and it's not that he was born into privilege, which he was, unlike nearly everyone; it's that he took advantage (in all senses of the word) of government bailouts when he'd nearly ruined his business:

Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" – to the American people – for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.

According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds...

Well, surely that'll do it. Those "we built it" chanters at the RNC will finally acknowledge that no one makes it entirely on her own around here, and the plans of their party will see to it that it stops happening at all, mostly. (I threw in the "mostly" because of this guy -- well, he did have a gun, and a camera, and tools, and the occasional visit by an airplane...)

Like several of the speakers at the RNC who claimed to be self-made but received significant government money (and even those who didn't, became successful -- Romney has said it himself -- in part on the wings of educators, people who built roads with taxpayer money, the union workers who built, with government money, too, the hall in which the RNC is holding its days-of-ignorance-nights-of-deception rally) Mitt Romney would be a financial failure were it not for the infusion of taxpayer money into his struggling and initially mismanaged firm.

We already knew The Rominee "saved" the Olympics on the backs of American taxpayers. Now, it turns out, the same is true of his highly-touted and lowly-intentioned private enterprise. Is it a big deal? Well, no, it shouldn't be. Because it's undeniably true, except to teabaggers, that we can't get along without government, that no one in America ever has. So, who cares, right? Well, other than the fact that Ryan/Romney and all other Rs have decided to base their campaigns on lying about it, no one, I guess.

Certainly not teabaggers and those who love them, those who'll swing the election to a pair of constant and easy liars. Unless they were to decide to seek what we in the real world like to refer to as "information." (I'm putting air-quotes around that, too.) News. Facts. Truth.

Yeah. Like that'll happen.