$100 billion a year comes by taking Medicaid,
which is the health care program for the poor as well as
food stamps, and housing vouchers.
-Mitt Romney on CBS News, 8/29/12

Abuse survivors and folks who have had their jobs shipped overseas or are working for less than a living wage desperately need these safety nets.  When pressed tonight during a live CBS News interview, Mitt Romney said with an evil, ruthless look on his face that he would eliminate Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers.  He intends to ship these fiscal obligations to the states which he knows damned good and well they can’t afford absent federal government support.  It was perhaps the first honest thing he’s said during the campaign, and I hope it bites him in the ass.

How the Republicans Built It

It is rare for major newspapers like the New York Times to write an editorial as blunt and blistering as the one they published about Tuesday night’s Republican convention:

It was a day late, but the Republicans’ parade of truth-twisting, distortions and plain falsehoods arrived on the podium of their national convention on Tuesday. Following in the footsteps of Mitt Romney’s campaign, rarely have so many convention speeches been based on such shaky foundations.

. . .Voters looking for a few nuggets of truth would not have found them in Tampa on Tuesday.

Wow!  One of those nuggets of truth is that the Romney/Ryan economic strategy caused a spike in unemployment in New Jersey and “never had the revenue boom [Gov. Chris Christie] promised from tax cuts.”

Greed & Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney & Bain Capital

Sally Hayes Kaiser, who does an awesome job of ferreting out the record that belies Republican rhetoric, posted Rolling Stone’s cover story on Facebook:  “Greed & Debt:  The True Story of Mitt Romney & Bain Capital” which has the on-line headline:  “The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney:  Government documents prove the candidate’s mythology is just that.”

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney’s initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had “no value as a going concern.” Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

The article is well worth reading despite being complex.  In a nutshell, Mr. Romney made about $250 million at Bain Capital.  He pocketed $4 million in consulting fees in the early 1990s to write the book on how to get Main Street to bail out Wall Street while giving the guys who drove the bus off the cliff huge bonuses.

Sound familiar?  This is the strategy that got our economy in the sewer looking up at the toilet.  Mr. Romney’s crafty bit of corporate welfare forced a whole lot of people onto welfare.

Now, this greedy bastard ~ who shipped so many living wage jobs overseas ~ wants to deprive the poor of their own safety net ~ a net they wouldn’t need if he and his cronies in the 1% weren’t so fucking greedy.

If your name isn’t on the Forbes list and you support the Romney/Ryan ticket, I can guarantee you that you are being manipulated to vote against your own self-interest.  You need to closely examine the record underneath all that rhetoric.  I was at the table when that brilliant piece of evil strategy was crafted, but I can guarantee you I didn’t collect any $4 million.  If I had, maybe I would have examined the rhetoric a little more closely and been less naive.  I will atone for that sin until the day I die.

Unless you are a member of the LDS faith, I will unfriend and/or unsubscribe anybody I discover supports the Romney/Ryan ticket.  You don’t have enough sense to benefit from my wisdom or to protect your own self-interest.  I don’t suffer fools.

Update:  While I was writing this post, HuffPost published, “Paul Ryan Address: Convention Speech Built On Demonstrably Misleading Assertions.”  Other media outlets quickly joined the “Lyin Ryan” bandwagon ~ including Mormons for Obama and Fox News:

Republican National Convention, Day 2 [Mormons for Obama]

Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words [Fox]:

Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the  greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single  political speech. On this measure, while it was  Romney who ran the  Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of  new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are  rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s  mouth.

What The Republicans Didn’t Say In Tampa [HuffPost editorial by Howard Fineman]:

During George W. Bush’s presidency, more than $3 trillion was added to the debt. Paul Ryan voted for most of the measures that made up that total. In his speech on Wednesday, he made passing reference to the Bush spending, but not to his own role.

Ryan Launches Campaign Theme of Lying About Everything [Andy Borowitz, New Yorker]:

“The question was, how many whoppers could you pack into one speech?” the  campaign adviser Tracy Klugian said. “All I can say is, when Fox News accuses a Republican of lying, you know you’ve witnessed something historic.”

The true, the false, and the misleading: Grading Paul Ryan’s convention speech.  [Washington Post blog]

CNN Fact Check: Did Ryan get Obama’s GM speech right?  [Rep. Ryan falsely suggested Pres. Barack Obama was responsible for the closing of a plant in Wisconsin that actually closed on Pres. George W. Bush’s watch.]

ThinkProgress Live Blogs The Republican National Convention [ThinkProgress’ minute-by-minute fact-checking account] 

Related posts:

Kitchen Table Economics:  Balancing the Budget Isn’t Rocket Science — You Can Do It with a Few Clicks of Your Mouse

Romney Accepts Nomination: “I Bought It” [New Yorker]