Retroactive History

This is brilliant — Ed Gillespie, a senior campaign advisor for Mitt Romney, said on Meet the Press today that Mittens retired retroactively from Bain in 1999.

He actually retired retroactively at that point. He ended up not going back to the firm after his time in Salt Lake City. So he was actually retired from Bain.

This is something like a Catholic marriage annulment, yes? You can be married for 20 years, then the Church declares that the marriage never happened.

The Bain flap really is pulling the rug out from under Romney, since his plan was to run on his business experience. He didn’t want to run on his record as governor — there’s that “Romneycare” thing he doesn’t want to talk about — so he was going to play big shot business guy. And that’s being yanked out from under him. This is not to say the GOP won’t be able to patch together another run for Mittens to stand on. But, really, the day when CEOs were looked at as demigods is long passed.

See also Krugman, “No Bain, No Gain.”

10 thoughts on “Retroactive History

  1. Boy, I bet there are thousands of politicians who wish they’d “Retroactively Retired.”

    If he retroactively retired, why was his name on top of the masthead?
    Sloth?
    A three year oversight?
    A series of errors?

    Not exactly something that inspires confidence in most voters – I except the 25-30% of cave-dwelling knucle-dragging maniacs and morons, who’d vote for anyone with and “R” next to his/her name, even Bernie Madoff – if he only weren’t Jewish.

    And the question still remains, if Mitt wasn’t in charge – who was?

    Too bad Ol’ OJ’s still in jail, or he could spend his time on the golf courses of the country, looking for “The REAL CEO of Bain!”

    “Retroactive Retirement!”
    LOL!!!
    Too bad Dick Nixon didn’t think of that one, huh?

  2. “LONDON (RNS) —Two centuries after profiting from the venture, the Church of England has apologized for its role in the global slave trade. The Church’s general synod voted 238-0 Feb. 8 to acknowledge its involvement in human trafficking and to apologize to the descendants of its victims 199 years after Britain’s Slave Trade Act of 1807 outlawed the practice.

    One case was cited in which the Church of England’s missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Foreign Parts, owned and operated the Codrington Plantation in Barbados and used a red-hot iron to brand its slaves with the word “society” on their chests.”

    What’s that got to do with Mitt? If the Church of England can see that they were responsible for what was done by entities they controlled and profited from two centuties ago, how can Mitt disown Bain’s activites for a period of time when he was sole shareholder, and on official documents, CEO and Chairman?

    The GOP can (and should, within reason) hold Obama accountable for his policy decisions AND the policy decisions by Obama appointees. Fine. Who selected the people at Bain? I don’t care how you slice it. Either Obama isn’t remotely to blame for 99.99% of what goes on in the executive branch, or by the reasoning that ‘The buck stops here.’, meaning Obama’s desk, Romney has to account for what happened at Bain for a period of time he was sole owner, and chief executives were all hand-picked by Mitt.

  3. The Great Orange Satan has a good entry titled “Romney’s Olympics” that shows why the Utah games succeeded: we taxpayers shoveled money into every pothole on Utah’s roads, developed sites and paid for all manner of private benefits. I suppose they were retroactively self-funding.

  4. I wonder how long it will take for the right-wing noise machine to trot out the old “community organizer” chestnut again. As in, “at least Mittens had a career he could ‘retroactively retire’ from, as opposed to our community-organizer small-p president”

  5. Too bad for the employees at many of the companies Bain cannibalized, the worker’s were never “Retroactively Rehired.”
    Here’s a nice description of what Bain was up to:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/romney-s-bain-yielded-private-gains-socialized-losses.html

    Why didn’t anyone ask that other snake in human form, Ed Gillespie, whether, after Rimney is sworn in if he wins, he’ll start a “Retroactive Rehiring Program” for the people whose jobs and lives were destroyed by Captain Mitt and his band of greedy “‘Sommelier’ Pirates?”

  6. Remember MSNBC(dot) com?
    Well, take out the MS – they’ve now split. It’s now NBCNews(dot)com:*

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/15/microsoft-nbc-news-dissolve-msnbc-joint-venture_n_1675071.html

    Interesting to see what will happen to that website, and what MS comes up with for their own website.

    *Note: This only affects the website – as far as I remember, Comcast owns the TV channel completely, since MS sold it’s share to NBC a while back.

  7. “I wonder how long it will take for the right-wing noise machine to trot out the old “community organizer” chestnut again”

    If things keep going bad for W-Mitt they will be back on Rev. Wright like stank on Sh#t, I’ve already heard calls for the Kenyan to release his college transcripts in response to the demand for W-Mitt’s tax returns! Soon they’ll be requesting DNA samples from anyone remotely related to the president, just in case, and rightfully so, something about him just don’t seem right, just can’t put my finger on it!!!!

  8. John Cole pointed out it’s a lot like the Mormon ritual of baptizing the dead.

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