The Vulture Has Landed

Maybe Rachel Maddow was right last fall when she said Mitt Romney was embracing his inner Thurston Howell III (Maddow correctly listed him as the GOP front-runner but back during Romney's first pre-New Hampshire pre-coronation). Or maybe it's a genetic thing. Maybe there's a "rich asshole gene" or perhaps the absence of a chromosome enabling carbon-based life forms to smoothly interact with other carbon-based life forms.

Whatever the reason, Mitt Romney is either unwilling or unable to suppress his preppie bona fides and he couldn't make himself and his true mission more obvious than if he rode the campaign trail from coast to coast in a 24 karat solid gold yacht with the hollowed-out corpses of Haitian immigrants hung over the gunwale as lifeboats. Indeed, Romney is so thoroughly a bloodless corporate product of Wall Street that I can perfectly imagine him giving The Talk to his five military-dodging sons as a Powerpoint presentation. "And in pie chart B, you see the birds forming a merger with the bees in pie chart A..."

Romney gave us another fat and flat Tim Wakefield knuckle ball to hit out of the park right after winning the Florida primary when he told Soledad O'Brien that he wasn't "concerned for the very poor." Romney doesn't care about us hitting one out of the park because he and his fellow vultures Paul Singer and Harold Simmons own the park and have moved the outfield fences back about 100 yards. As with George W. Bush and his Norm Crosby campaigns of 2000 and 2004, it doesn't matter what Romney says, anymore.

He could grease the wheels of his campaign bus with the blood of welfare and SNAP recipients and sell all their children to the child sex slave trade in Saipan and the perennially clueless Republican voters will still come out for him even though it's obvious that Romney's biggest strength and asset is a racist hatred of Barack Obama. How else can one explain Romney's vinyl and transitory appeal among voters who've been victimized by the same corporate tactics that made Willard Romney one of the wealthiest men in America, one whose net worth is twice that of the last eight presidents combined?

But however hated Mr. Obama is by the right wing for his biracial heritage, it's hard to imagine even the pro-Big Business Obama, who's raking in corporate cash faster than Halliburton during an oil war, being as or more corporate-friendly than Mitt Romney, a guy who makes Simon Legree look like a bleeding heart liberal volunteering at a Buddy Dog kennel.

Let's revisit what Romney said in his populist pratfall about being concerned for the middle class and not the very rich or the very poor:

Romney seems to be forgetting about the very poor who, until recently, used to be part of the middle class but were delayed victims of the iceberg into which George W. Bush had steered them. When Romney said he wasn't so concerned about the very poor because they have a generous safety net, it brought to my mind Barbara Bush saying with a chuckle that things for the refugees of Hurricane Katrina taking refuge in the Houston Astrodome "were working very well."

It brought to mind her equally blue blood son George W. Bush insisting that everyone had access to health care because all they had to do was walk into an emergency room (in spite of it being ten times more expensive than a doctor's office visit).

And then comes Romney, a man who feels the need to quadruple the size of his La Jolla mansion because its current size isn't adequate for his needs (what's he planning on doing with all that space? Indoor tennis courts? Launching his private shuttles?), a man not concerned with the very poor that he helped create by costing this nation he's running to lead countless thousands if not tens of thousands of jobs, a man who arrogantly and truculently told a heckler in Iowa last summer, "Corporations are people, my friend."

Mitt Romney is a man with red ink instead of blood, graph lines for veins and arteries and a ledger for a soul. He's a corporate homunculus who acquired his vast and ill-gotten fortune by paying far less in taxes than most anyone reading this thanks largely if not entirely to capital gains dividends being capped at 15% and offshoring his money as faithfully as American jobs in tax-free havens such as the Cayman Islands.

Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein in that parking garage in the early 70's to "Follow the money." Sure, we could do that. Romney is largely funded by fellow vultures and corporate raiders Paul Singer and Harold Simmons. But, moreso than ever before, we don't even have to do that because Mitt Romney is the money.