“We pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more”
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or adrift at sea, for the past week, you’ve no doubt heard what Mitt Rmoney thinks of the 47% of Americans who, he says, pay no federal income tax.
He doesn’t like them. And he gives the game away with a candid admission that they don’t like him.
Which is strange because candidate Rmoney likes to point out, with regard to his own taxes that, in his own words…
…wait for it…
“I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,”
This sentiment, which is the only explanation he is willing to offer for his obscenely low tax rate, seems to satisfy him. Such sentiments do not, apparently, extend to non-millionaires. It’s not good enough that legal requirements leave 47% of Americans with no federal income tax burden: there must, according to Rmoney, be another explanation: they are shiftless ne’er-do-wells who vote for the sole purpose of gaming the system.
And that’s the giveaway: There IS another explanation and it’s not about the 47%, it’s about him.
This speech comes full circle; Rmoney’s entire life has been one big whopping shiftless and endless seeking after ways to game the system: Bain Capital invented gaming the financial system; Rmoney didn’t want to raise taxes in Massachusetts so he lowered taxes and raised fees; even stories about his ‘family olympics‘ depict him as a manipulative anti-competitor who adds events just so he won’t be last. Gaming the system is his chief, perhaps his only, real talent.
And the full circle comes around and gets fuller: Mitt Rmoney isn’t an outlier in the Republican Party. He is, in fact, the apotheosis of all things Republican and Conservative: the worship of money; the rigging and gaming of the system and the rules; the pitiless attitude towards others; Nixon was bad, but Reagan was worse; Reagan was bad but George W Bush was worse; Bush was bad but he’s a piker compared to Rmoney. And none of these men, in ascending degrees of awful and pitiless, ever once stepped one toe outside the conservative line.
Mitt Rmoney is what the Republican party has been building up to all these years. The rarified essence of conservative values.
Guess what that says about Paul Ryan, next in line. Yup.
As usual, Charlie Pierce pulls back the veil and speaks the truth about what Rmoney should say:
I’m the end product, baby. This is where your party’s been heading for 30 years. Who do you think bankrolled Reagan? People who spoke Money, that’s who. You put a party together made up of snakehandlers, and economic alchemists, and neocon grifters, and get a whole bunch of people like me, people who speak Money, to foot all the bills, and who do you think is going to end up on top? Sooner or later, you all have to pay the piper, and the piper is me. I am always the piper, because I always get paid, because, well:
I’m Mitt Romney, bitches, and I’m all you got left.
In fact, when it comes to conservatism, Mitt Rmoney is pure undiluted essence…
