One by one the GOP’s primary candidates are biting the dust in a pattern as simple as it is repetitious. The media latches onto a candidate, pumps them up with attention, and then eats them as scrutiny exposes their politically notable flaws.
Sarah Palin was too smart for them (says something about the collective intelligence of our media) and kept the focus on herself, though she never meant to run for President. Then there was Palin’s smarter, loonier twin Michelle Bachmann who turned out to be too crazy for her own staff. The race to crash and burn is now between Rick Perry–the Great White Hope from N——Head, Texas and Herman “Amazin Grace” Cain who didn’t slay Abel, but couldn’t keep his hands off his sister and did his best Mahalia Jackson imitation for reasons we’re still trying to figure out.. Now that he’s pulled the race card out of his sleeve, it’s all over but the shouting. And was it drugs or drink that led Ricky Perry to channel Paul Lynde in New Hampshire?
And then there’s Willard. The GOP’s default candidate. No one really likes him. Certainly not the Republican base. It may be hard to hit a moving target, but when said target is doing nothing other than circling every issue–standing on every side of it–it’s only a matter of time he gets dizzy and falls down on his own.
Better yet is when the candidates regular way of doing business leads to trouble in a very 1% sort of way. Willard,, Tagg, and chief Romney fundraiser Spencer Zwick are connected to the second largest Ponzi scheme in history (first prize belongs to Bernie Madoff:
The Romney campaign today denied a published report that alleges the presidential candidate and his eldest son have business connections to three individuals who were once accused of being involved in an $8.5 billion Ponzi scheme.
The report by the liberal blog Think Progress claims that Tagg Romney helped create a financial firm named Solamere Advisors with three executives from the Stanford Financial Group, a company that was seized by the U.S. government in 2009 after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of being “a massive Ponzi scheme.”
Tagg Romney told Think Progress that his partners — Tim Bambauer, Deems May, and Brandon Phillips — have been cleared of charges.
Think Progress, however, claims that those charges are still being adjudicated.
Solamere Advisors, according to the piece, is a subsidiary of Solamere Capital, which was founded by Tagg Romney and was invested in by his father as well as the Romney campaign’s National Fundraising Chair Spencer Zwick, who now serves as a managing partner at the firm.
A Romney campaign spokeswoman was dismissive of the article.
“It’s not surprising that a left-wing blog with a highly partisan agenda would publish false material as it relates to Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney has no ties to the Stanford Financial Group or any of its activities,” said campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
The first stage of grief is denial.
It’s also often the first stage of scandals.
Denial means investigation. Investigation brings in more facts to mull over. Denial means controversy: Tagg has already denied what ThinkProgress has documented to be the truth. There’s a simple, well-publicized analogue in Bernie Madoff. There’s the fact that the scheme defrauded retirees in a time when OWS is drawing attention to the 1% making money, not by helping people, not by producing something useful, but in investing. There’s at least a echo of the investment fiasco that brought the country to its knees at the end of the Bush Administration.
Romney may not be directly involved in the Ponzi scheme. He may have done nothing illegal, but his and his campaign’s involvement takes the lid of the container where the 1% gets their money. They screw around with other people’s money and pay themselves big bonuses in spite of poor–or in this case, fraudulent–performance.
