Mitt's Mistake

His Anti-European bigotry.

It is one thing to be solidly Patriotic and American. It is another to blame so called european socialism for any evils in the world or this country.
I wonder if Mitt realizes that on all the upward mobility indexes France now does better than the US. There is more opportunity in France than in the US. Arianna Huffington comments that this is a bit like saying the US is better than France in croissants and afternoon sex.

And I wonder if he realizes that unemployment rates in Germany and France are lower than in the US?
When American 'exceptionalism' ignores economic realities to serve a political conclusion like this, it is intellectually dishonest.

Europe is not an 'entitlement' society. Europeans work. They also have a better standard of living than a lot of places in the US. These overly broad generalizations are really scary from someone who wants to run the free world.

Lets look at Mitt's honesty then shall we.

He claims that at Bain he 'invested' in some winners and some losers. What was he really doing at Bain, a company he founded. Is it an arbitrage sort of company that ran companies into the ground to sell off assets that had more value sold separately than the sum of the whole of their parts? kind of like a clunker car that needed a paint job but was worth more if you sold out the parts separately? Nevermind the people who lost their jobs? Were these companies looking at litigation liabilities so reorged rather than pay legit liabilities? Were these companies whose Boards he butt heads with and didn't like? There is always more to the story.
Did he get kickbacks from acquiring companies after the dogged ones that were hostilely taken over were run into the ground?? His answer on what exactly happened here seemed insulting to our intelligence- like no one else knows how companies work. His statements that Obama doesn't know how the economy is run is really insulting. You don't have to be a consultant with a Harvard JD to know how companies work or how the economy runs. If you think like Santorum you don't even have to go to college at all apparently. People who start companies don't all go to Harvard. Bill Gates dropped out. I think Steve Jobs did as well. So much for Harvard MBAs.

Mitt's honesty.
Look at his attack ads against Newt- it is really not fair to say that he has no control over the Superpack attack ads against Newt when all his friends run the superpack for him. Point taken. Some distance. It is also not exactly accurate to say Newt profited 1.6 mil. on the fannie mae freddie mac mess because you cannot attribute the entire earnings to a consulting firm to one individual- they should say gross corporate earnings which might be splitting hairs and make the point anyway because they got the desired result of Newts wiggle room response in which he protests it wasn't for lobbying- as he defined what the definition of 'is' is.

I really do not believe that Mitt lived in any apartments in Le Havre France that had no indoor plumbing or running water. France has rigid habitability living and building codes like anywhere and in the late 1960s or 1970s they had in Le Havre a large modern city with modern post war structures that met codes. Mitt acts like being a missionary IN FRANCE, is like going to some third world jungle or carribean outpost. It's ridiculous. It's like someone saying I was a missionary in Philadelphia- we had to do our own laundry over a rock by the river. France is one of the most sophistocated modern cultures on the planet. Le Havre was and is a thriving port city. It's absurd. Someone should get the tape where he told Morning Joe that he was a missionary in Le Havre France and lived in apartments with no running water and go try to find the person he claims he lived with. Ask him- do you recall the name of any family you lived with who did not have running water when you were a missionary? This feeds into his ridiculous attempt to portray Europe as the anti-Christ feeding to the jingoistic American imperialist impulses and bigotry against those 'cheese eating surrender monkeys.' Really really offensive.\
Maybe he found a poor family who had their water shut off because they couldn't pay the bill.
There are poor people in every city. Everywhere. Doesn't mean they need the Book of Mormon.