Tax day for Romney comes too late

By Charles Pierce
Esquire
readersupportednews.org

Okay, we all know he's had a very tough week, but how the hell is this stuff supposed to help?

Or, conversely, why the hell didn't they release this stuff six months ago?

That Willard Romney is G.I. Luvmoney, and that the Luvmoney clan generally finds eight bazillion ways around the U.S. tax code, was established long ago. Therefore, that he paid an effective tax rate that was lower than that of, say, the average firefighter, is a surprise to absolutely nobody.

If he'd have released the 2011 return in the middle of the Republican primaries, it would have been a story at most for a couple of days. None of those other buffoons had either the credibility, or the intellectual firepower, truly to make an issue out of it for longer than that.

Now, though, the Romney campaign puts this stuff out in the middle of an ongoing barrage of ridicule based on the stand-up act he did down in Boca and, instead of simply being a minor dust-up in his inexorable march to the nomination, it's another brick in the wall, especially since he and his party seem to be arguing sub rosa that very poor people aren't kicking in their fair share.

Now, smarter people than me are going to pick through the 2011 return, pointing out all the little ways that smart rich people can game the system, and all that information is going to come out, not in the context of an ongoing clown show, but as further reinforcement of everything that's causing virtually the entire political system to cough up a hairball at the mention of your candidate's name.

There's been more than a little speculation that Willard already has checked out of this whole running-for-president business. (Those of us in the Commonwealth — God save it! — can testify that his interest in matters political can wane pretty quickly.) And there's more than a little hilarity being had on the Intertoobz over the fact that the people running the Romney campaign received some pretty handsome incompetence bonuses.

But this little exercise, at 3 p.m. on a Friday, makes me wonder if some people working for this campaign haven't bet on the president and teased the Over. They spent the entire campaign handling the issue of Romney's tax returns badly. And then, at exactly the wrong moment in the history of the campaign — at exactly the perfectly wrong moment in the history of the campaign — they toss a dead fish out there as an obvious distraction, but a distraction that begs to be picked apart and the bones used to beat their candidate over the head a little more.

I'm not kidding. Jack Molinas went to prison for arranging things this way.