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Opening Arguments

Rose and thorn

Call me a sentimental slob and a sucker for romantic tripe, but this got to me, too:

The only real coup came with its surprise tear-jerking moment, when Romney related a heretofore-unknown story about his father putting a rose on his mother’s pillow every day — and told how his mother realized his father had died on the only day in their 64 years of marriage that the rose was not there.

It was one of those anecdotes meant to "humanize" Mitt Romney, and I guess it did, but it mostly reminded me that people once treasured small gestures because the very act of remembering to do them said so much.

And we can't leave last night behind without considering the Clint Eastwood appearance, can we? Richard Fernandez thought Eastwood gave "a cutting delivery" of a presentation filled with "rhetorical cleverness." But Roger Ebert thought the performance was "sad and pathetic." I wouldn't go either way. It just struck me as one of the oddest things I'd ever seen. I do agree with John Podhoretz that those valuable prime-time minutes might have been better filled with the earlier series of tributes to Romney's personal generosity.

Comments

Christopher Swing
Fri, 08/31/2012 - 5:55pm

And the moral of the story was yeah your dad was rich and could afford to waste roses like that this makes you something more like a normal human how Mitt?

Anyway.

Jamelle Bouie seems to have summed up Eastwood's performance the best of anyone:

"This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama."

gadfly
Fri, 08/31/2012 - 7:39pm

Unfortunately, it takes far more imagination to pretend that Obama is imaginary than it does to give Clint Eastwood credit for a brilliant comedic performance. 

But we can depend on MSNBC and Ed Shultz: "I thought Clint Eastwood was bizarre. It was demeaning to the presidency."  Ed forgets that nobody can demean a presidency better than Obama.  



 

 

 

 

gadfly
Fri, 08/31/2012 - 7:52pm

Chris:

It does not require a rich man to afford less than a dollar a day (back then) to please a loved one.  Gosh, you certainly are not very romantic!

Harl Delos
Fri, 08/31/2012 - 8:31pm

He sold paint out of the trunk of his car.  He put a rose on his wife's bedstand.

Fine.  I liked George and Lenore, and supported George'srun for the presidency.  But character doesn't inherit.

If these were stories aboout things Mitt did, they would be meaningful.  Unfortunately, they are not.  We found out that George W Bush wasn't half the leader his father wads (not that GHWB was any great shakes, but he was fairly acceptable)  If Mitt was as good at business as his father was, if Mitt was half as good a governor as his father was, if Mitt had an idea what it's like to NEED to sell paint out of the trunk of your car in order to feed his family, then Mitt might make a decent president.

It's a shame we couldn't have Marco or Jeb or one of the other outstanding Reblicans running.  This country could use a good Republican president, and instead, we're running Mr. Etch-A-Sketch.  And an imitation Etch-A-Sketch at that.  Larry Kilgallen would be a better president.

RAG
Sat, 09/01/2012 - 2:28pm

Franklin D. Roosevelt never had to know how to sell paint out of the trunk of his car.

Harl Delos
Sat, 09/01/2012 - 9:58pm

You're right. FDR never had to sell paint out of the trunk of his car, but he was paralyzed by polio.  You think he was able to teach John how to ride a bicycle?

Do you think Mitt missed any meals when he was galavanting around France while others his age were dying in Vietnam?  Do you think he even was forced to do without soap ad hot water like grunts did?  He didn't even have to work in a fast food restaurant to save up money for college, like Obama did.

They say you have to suffer in order to become a great artist - and to a certain degree it's true.  If you've never had to struggle, your answer to financing college is that everybody should just borrow money from Dad. 

When my first wife was plant nurse at Eckrich, she had to go through the Senators' office because Medicare wouldn't pay for oxygen for a disabled worker who couldn't walk six feet without supplementary oxygen.  If Romney could say he'd done that, I would be less inclined to disparage his candidacy, but instead, he's got a long history of closing American factories so we could cheat workers out of their retirements and their health care, and building foreign factories with young healthy workers.

You know what the difference is between a slave and a Bain employee?  The owner takes care of the slave if something happens, because he's got a small fortune invested, but Bain simply fires the worker and ignores promises they've made.

 

 

 

RAG
Sun, 09/02/2012 - 8:21pm

Harl, are business owners your slave?

Any unfulfilled promises of retirement funds and healthcare coverage comes from a union that lied.  It lied by telling its members that the union can suck the profits dry from a company and still have something for you in later years.  Unions are great, but only to a certain point. 

John was riding a bike at five years of age.  Who cares?

The liberals are consistent victims.  You guys are fun though.

Harl Delos
Sun, 09/02/2012 - 11:36pm

Harl, are business owners your slave?

No. In my thirties, I did some soul-searching, and from then own, I structured my businesses so that I didn't have employees; I worked with independent contractors.  Some people do that to save on payroll taxes, and that's illegal.  I encouraged my "employees" to develop similar relationships with other companies so that nobody is responsible for more than 20% of their income.

There was a story going around back then about Sears placing an order with a supplier.  It strained their capacity, nut they filled the order.  Next year, the folks at Sears wanted twice as big an order.  They couldn't say no, and they borrowed heavily to expand.  Next year, the order doubled again, and again the year after that.  Now that the guy was in hock up to his eyebrows and every aunt, uncle andcousin had taken out second and third mortgages on everything they owned, Sears decided to bring production of that item "in-house" and offered the guy just barely enough for his factory to pat off the loans.  When I expressed surprice, I found that Sears did that a lot with their suppliers.

What Bain did with a lot of companies was to borrow heavily on the assets of the company, and use that money to pay dividends.  Then the company would declare chapter 11, and sell the assets of the company off to pay those loans off.  That left a company with no money and no assets, and any deals they had made with employees were worthless.  And the outfits that bought those assets when the company sold them off? In many cases, they were finances with Bain capital.

We're not talking about unions that lied.  We're talking about employees that were vulnerable because they were single-sourced.  Slaves picking cotton had a better deal because when their employer didn;t take care of them,he was hurting himself.

These days, you don't need 5000 employees running 2500 inflexible machies to make a complrx product.  With computer-controlled larges, milling machines, etc, you could build complex products with 20 exployees and 15 tools - and there's noreason those 15 machine cannot be owned by the 15 people running them.  The other 5 people would be partners that design and market the product.

Romney has no experience with creating jobs.  His experience is in replacing skilled workers with inexperienced drones, healthy, with strong backs and weak brains.

Mitt sucked the profits out of a compaby and lied to workers by signing long contracts that he knew would be worthless bwcause he was going to sucj the company dry.  That unlike George Romney, who revived a failing auto business by introducing new products that led to substantial gains in employment, 

When I was growing up, Republicans prided themselves on being community boosters and honorable men.  Today;s Republicans want to suck the public coffers dry.  A buncg of effing anarchists.

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