Newt's Revenge? "When Mitt Romney Came To Town"

Lèse-majesté is a definite no-no in the Romney camp

John Dean was once White House counsel for Richard Nixon. He, more than most, understands what it means when you call someone "Nixonian." And that's the adjective he applied to Mitt Romney in this timely tweet:


It was all about his Mitt Fits, something that happens when a mere mortal challenges a self-entitled CEO type who has come to be convinced his powers and privileges are the will of Quetzalcoatl (or whichever god or goddess he claims to derive his authority from). Sarah Jones reported that politicians like Romney now "actually expect reporters not to question them or call them out on what they see as inaccuracies." She used a now familiar CNN video to make her point.

The AP’s Glen Johnson named a lobbyist close to Romney, and the two tussled as Romney attempted to explain that while this lobbyist was an adviser, he was not running the campaign. The reporter wasn’t having that.

But the part that got my attention (as captured on what looks to be a cell phone by someone who appears to be a Ron Paul supporter based on the YouTube upload by Urban Warfare Channel that is tagged” We all know Romney is full of shit. RON PAUL 2012?") was after the q and a, when Romney’s Traveling Press Sec. Eric Fehrnstrom approached the reporter to tell him to not be so argumentative with the candidate.

In what world is it “professional” for the press to not ask sometimes-argumentative questions? It’s not as if he called him a name, for heaven’s sake. And let us not forget that Mitt Romney is running for President. He and his campaign manager may wish to familiarize themselves with the treatment our current President gets from the press, and if that doesn’t educate them, perhaps they should watch Fox News interview the president.

Yes, that’s a false equivalency as Fox News doesn’t argue facts or semantics, but rather their own reality – but the point remains the same. If the press’ job is to make the candidate look good in public, if that is the Romney campaign’s idea of their job, then we have larger problems than whether or not Romney has lobbyists “running” his campaign.

The press is there to ask the questions the people want to know the answers to, they are there to ask questions that inform us about who this candidate is and what they really stand for. They are not there to make any candidate or president look good.

If Romney can’t handle the heat of some push back on his convenient usage of semantics to cover the truth, how exactly would he handle being president? We will go back to the Bush-era tactics when the press was not allowed to ask certain questions?

These are but small reminders of what a Republican administration has in store for the people. But of course, you won’t know about it because the press won’t be reporting on it, just as they failed to report on the Bush era tactics lest they be kicked out of the pool.

Nixonian? I have a feeling that all of Willard's GOP rivals would agree with John Dean on that one. One of them, Newt Gingrich-- pissed off that Romney's SuperPac spent a not-so-small fortune smearing him in Iowa and destroying his campaign-- has been bragging that he's going to give Romney the same treatment that Romney and his shady allies have meted out to the other primary candidates. I don't exactly see Newt as a courageous figure willing to jeopardize his standing with the Republican Establishment, so I assumed he would grumble and hiss and, ultimately, pull his punches. Maybe I was wrong.

Watch the video:



It's part of a rollout Newt's Super PAC intends, they claim, to use to derail Willard's seemingly unstoppable campaign. They say the video above is part of a 30-minute attack film that depicts Romney exactly the way Democrats have been getting across all year: a greed-driven, selfish, sociopathic corporate raider whose business model was actually based on destroying jobs and destroying companies-- profitable for Willard and his partners, devastating for thousands of workers, investors, communities and society at large. (That's where the "sociopathic" comes in.)

Peter Boyer reported at the Daily Beast Friday: "The film was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. Meath had worked for the Romney campaign in 2008, creating much of the ad content for that failed effort." He knows what a scumbag Romney is from the inside. And his film reveals a lot.

“We’re going to release a short, 27-minute film that is well-documented, and tells the real story of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital-- and it’s not a pretty story,” says Rick Tyler, an adviser to the Gingrich-supporting PAC.

The video, called When Mitt Romney Came to Town, is a slick production focusing on Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, a private investment firm.

The movie begins with a cinematic tableau of Americana, as the narrator intones, “Capitalism made America great. Free markets. Innovation. Hard work. The building blocks of the American dream. But in the wrong hands, some of those dreams can turn into nightmares.”

A shot of an American flag, waving in the breeze is replaced by gathering storm clouds, as the narrator continues: “Wall Street’s corporate raiders made billions of dollars. Their greed was matched only by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits … nothing spared. Nothing mattered but profits. This film is about one such raider and his firm.”

At that point, a black-and-white photograph of Romney appears on the screen, as the narrator alleges that “Romney took foreign seed money from Latin America” to exploit “dozens of American businesses” and the “thousands of employees that worked there.”

“A story of greed,” the narrator intones. “Playing the system for a quick buck. A group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.”

According to four sources familiar with the project, the film was commissioned by Barry Bennett, a conservative activist who was once chief of staff for Ohio Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt. Bennett is now at the Alliance for America’s Future, a Virginia-based group whose principals include Mary Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town focuses on four case studies of Bain’s acquisitions—a Florida-based company called UniMac, which produced commercial laundry equipment; KayBee Toys; the electronics company DDI; and AmPad, an Indiana-based office-supply producer. The key result of these transactions, the film asserts, was “spectacular returns” for Bain through “stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder, and often killing jobs for big financial rewards.”

Romney has defended the “creative destruction” dynamic of his Bain years as an essential component of a healthy economy-- when efficiencies are imposed upon legacy industries, jobs are often lost as new operating methods are introduced.

The film was made independently and offered around. Newt's Super PAC bought it-- saving the Democrats the trouble-- as a way of getting back at Romney for the sleaziest campaign of the GOP primary. I'm surprised Huntsman, Perry and Bachmann didn't all chip in to make sure it would be aired. I bet the Romney people are pissed off at the last minute $5 million contribution from sleazy Vegas gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson that allowed the purchase of the film.