I was curious to note this US report:
Speaking in the safe havens of Fox News Thursday morning (Aug. 2), Romney spokesman Eric Ferhnstrom compared Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attempt to embarrass Romney into releasing his tax returns to "McCarthyism."
No, I think you've got that wrong there, sir. McCarthyism was about what were almost entirely fabricated allegations. This is about asking Romney to clear up the potentially false allegations that first he paid not tax for ten years and second had to use the 2009 tax amnesty to regularise his offshore tax affairs by making late declaration of what had been tax evasion.
Now those accusations could of course be entirely unjustified. But given that we know Romney had extensive offshore interests and given we know he had a tax rate of 15% in 2010 both have that element of something called plausibility which very little had in the McCarthy era.
So I think it's pretty fair of the US people to want to know the answers to the questions. After all, who wants a tax cheat in the White House?
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Fairly par for the course – the Right wing never like their own instruments to be turned against them. If you start to criticize their enormous accumulation of unearned wealth, you’re accused of playing the class war and the politics of envy – how they must have hated Warren Buffet for letting the cat out of the bag by saying there was a class war, and the rich were winning it!
And how about the blizzard of untruthful nonsense unleashed against Obama – that he’s a Muslim; that he swore the oath of allegiance on a Koran (despite clear TV close-up shots at his Inauguration, of the battered Bible that belonged to Abraham Lincoln); that he was not born in the USA, and that he is not a US citizen etc. – all palpable (and essentially racist) nonsense, insppired by the Goebbels theory of politics “If you tell a lie often enough, and beig enough, it will eventually be believed”.
The truth is that most Right-wing politics operates on two underlying givens:
1) The argument from nature = Right-wing political ideas are “natural”, and any other political views are therefore aberrant, and unnatural, and so doomed to fail. Deriving from this is a “surface” politics = “things as they are” = reality, and so also a complete ahistoricity, since whatever is now must, by definition be correct. This allows the Right to take on radically different viewpoints at different times, and still claim they are “natural”, when in fact they are the product of deep underlying economic and societal trends (The corrollary of this is that Left wing politics does understand these deep currents, and is therefore wedded to a historical view of politics – a circumstance that, alas, often results in the Left being blind to current realities)
2) The “double double standard” = the Right is allowed double standards, the Left is not
But to return to the Mitt Romney issue – asking his to fess up on this is perfectly reasonable, and a million miles away from the brutal and dishonest thuggery of McCarthyism, which led to some artists and actors committing suicide because they couldn’t find work. Of course, we in the UK benefited mightily from this influx – think Sam Wanamaker and the revived Globe Theatre, and his excellent daughter, Zoe – all three adornments to our culutre, and all because Sam had to flee the US because of McCarthy.
McCarthy’s America was just as dumb as Hitler’s Germany, in driving out much of its major talent – Einstein and Thomas Mann, to name just two – and a Romney/Tea Party Presidency bids fair to be just as dumb and disastrous as McCarthy. God preserve us!
Who wants a tax cheat in the White House?
The one percent!
Of course, if the USA was enlightened enough to follow the Nordic system of publishing tax returns under FoI, there would be no issue here!
Can’t see Romney legislating for that if he wins, somehow!!
Isn’t Romney breaking with tradition all presidential candidates have had to publish their tax returns for a number of years. Paul Krugman’s article makes interesting reading in this respect:- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/opinion/krugman-mitts-gray-areas.html