Willard “Mitt” Romney cruised to an easy victory in Florida last night crushing Baby Huey by over 15 points to win Florida’s 50 delegates to the Rescumlican National Convention.
Here I must correct a previous error for it seems that in the interregnum between this campaign cycle and 2008 the Rescumlican Party has finally amended its rules and are now requiring proportional allocation of delegates instead of the winner-take-all in all primaries, caucuses or other contests held prior to April Fools Day. All, except it seems, Florida where the Florida Rescumlican party moved it’s primary date up in the calendar and insisted on winner-take-all in an effort to steal the thunder in the early primaries and perhaps, in so doing, anoint a future President.
What this means is that the Mormon will have to fight harder for the nomination and that the struggle will be protracted, perhaps long enough for a viable “I-am-not-the-Mormon” alternative to emerge. Be that as it may, the victory last night was welcome news to the sons of Brigham Young as Romney swept Gingrich and the remaining field winning 46.42 percent of the vote to 31.93 for Gingrich, 13.34 for the faltering Santorum, 7.01 for the Luddite Ron Paul and 0.41 for the now departed Governor Rick Perry of Texas.
Perry pulled out of the race just prior to the South Carolina vote sensing his support evaporate as Gingrich sucked all the scum out of the pond. As he departed he gave voice to a refrain that, if Romney should prevail, will reverberate from the mountains of the pacific coast to the canyons on the now occupied Wall Street. Perry, gasping his last words, said that Romney, in his days with Bain Capital, proved himself to be not a great creator of jobs and economic growth but a practitioner of a vulgar form of “vulture capitalism” that proved on close examination to be a mere parasite sucking the blood out of the national economy. This is a charge of some substance and will dog the Romney campaign throughout the primaries as the tea baggers and ideological purists excoriate his record and, should he eventually emerge the Rescumlican nominee, the campaign in the general election as the liberals and the political center turn their guns on him.
Perhaps Willard has no legs. The critique of Romney’s economic record has spilled beyond his record as a public official which will be, in due coarse, problematic enough. For in the Florida debates Willard was continually bombarded about his personal taxes.
Every time Willard is asked about is personal taxes he begins to jump like a frog in a frying pan. Finally, after repeated inquiries his said that he pays “something like 15%” of his income in income taxes. In truth it is more like 13.5% while the average schlock pays 18% in federal income taxes. How is it that the Mitt pays less in income tax than his secretary? Because, it turns out, almost all of his income is now derived from investments and capital gains which are taxed not at the old rate of 45% but 15%. With deductions the Vulture Capitalist has been able to pear it down further to 13.5%. This is the reason that the Son of Brigham Young has been so reticent about his fortune. There have been some attempts to draw attention to this at subsequent Rescumlican debates but there is a problem here.
The problem for Baby Huey and the others is that Mitt stands before the nation not as the Greed Meister in their eyes but as a living demonstration of the success their several revisions of the tax code have made possible. Romney is, in a word, simply a living symbol of the success of Rescumlican economic policy. The peculiar problem for Baby Huey, however, is that under proposals put forth by le infant terrible Romney would be relieved of his tax burdens for Gingrich and other Rescumlicans would eliminate income from investment and capital gains altogether. This awkwardness serves to dampen the Romney critique in the primaries but his critics in the general election, being less greedy, will offer no such quarter.
The question, which the primary in Florida had hoped to solve, is: do any of these fools have what it takes to prevail in November? In the meantime the skillet keeps boiling as one frog after another pokes out his ugly head.
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