Photo of the year: AZ Gov. Jan Brewer upbraids an a$$hole

As most of the men are, as described by Andrew Breitbart, eunuchs, America will have to be saved by strong conservative women.

“When Mitt Romney Came To Town” Film: Operation Inoculation

Mitt Romney knows he has one large electoral problem, and it’s his time spent as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s. If there’s one thing the left and Obama know how to demagogue against (disingenuously, perhaps, but that’s for another day), it’s big-business “Wall Street Fat Cats”. But that specific line of attack only really hurts him with the left-wing Democrat base, which he need not worry about. It’s the Republican base he has to fear, even though it has traditionally resisted this attack, as “Wall Street Greed” has traditionally been seen by conservatives as an ugly but necessary part of free-market capitalism.

To that point, this 25-minute short film, “When Mitt Romney Came To Town”, is an intriguing case in what may be one of the most sophisticated Presidential campaign “black-ops” we have ever seen. The film tells the story of a few examples of Romney’s “creative destruction” at Bain Capital, through the eyes of blue-collar workers whose jobs were eliminated due to the “corporate raiding” of Mitt’s firm.  Watch for yourself, and you’ll see this takes a decidedly left-wing tone: it says, essentially, “Romney destroyed the lives of thousands of poor helpless blue-collar workers”. It’s a tone that, while dramatic, does not really resonate with the Republican base, which generally accepts the thesis that bankruptcy and “creative destruction” are a legitimate part of the free market. So the question is: why would Newt Gingrich be so foolish as to use this film to try to rally the conservative base against Romney? 

While countless conservative commentators have rightly chastised Gingrich and Rick Perry for promoting the left-wing populist angle used in this film to attack Romney (conservatives do not want their candidates to be seen as attacking capitalism), most have gone a step further and given Mitt Romney the ultimate weapon in securing the Republican nomination: they’ve told conservative voters to LAY OFF BAIN! Only Sarah Palin, in her numerous Fox News appearances in recent days, has refused to declare Bain “off-limits”, and has advised voters to take a close look at Mitt’s record – in particular, his claims of job creation, and his possible use of his corporate takeovers to attract government subsidies and bailouts. In fact, last night on Sean Hannity’s program, she used the key word that I think explains what’s going on here: inoculation.

Which gets me to my theory: this film was subversively created by the Romney campaign itself, in order to achieve this desired result of inoculation on Bain. The reason he needs to create the meme out there that “an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism”, is because of the aforementioned Governor Palin, and her rallying the Republican base around the cause of Crony Capitalism. The Tea Party base of the party is now wise to the concept of statism, cronyism, corporatism, and corruption coming from the big-business side of the economy. The type of capitalism Romney engaged in with Bain is a problem with the Tea Party base not because he put people out of work (many types of capitalism involve the elimination of jobs), but because the businesses and jobs themselves were not a factor at all in the business decisions of Bain, just collateral damage that, on the aggregate, has been extremely harmful to America. Jobs, and the businesses themselves, were irrelevant to the partners at Bain. What Bain and other corporate raiders actually do is not “turn around failing companies. It’s the search for opportunities on balance sheets, stock prices, and regulatory environments, to exploit through political connections and complex financial instruments, to create paper profits, and damn the consequences.

It’s a complex discussion that can take volumes to fully explain. But what Romney’s campaign has discovered it needs to hide is the fact that the profits at Bain usually could not occur without the exploitation of political contacts, regulatory loopholes, and questionable complex financial tactics. So while Newt and Perry were foolish enough to take the bait on this film’s apparent attack on capitalism itself, Palin will continue to try to drag them back from the edge of self-destruction by rescuing the narrative. Romney’s problem is a Crony Capitalism problem, and he knows it. That’s why it’s no coincidence, this film was produced by Jason Killian Meath, a former business associate and 2008 campaign leader for Mitt Romney himself. Romney’s team, consisting undoubtedly of many brilliant and experienced tactical political operators, is loving the effect this film is having. Mission accomplished? We’ll see how successful the savviest political minds, including Governor Palin, are at rescuing the narrative.

Written for TammyBruce.com: “A Warning From Canada for the GOP”

Inspired by the Republican Party primary process, the regime of Barack Obama, and the words of Sarah Palin, here is my latest piece written for TammyBruce.com, which you will find here at its original location: “A Warning From Canada for the GOP”. Listen every weekday at 1pm Eastern to two hours of uninterupted independent conservative unruliness, streaming here at Talk Stream Live.

UPDATE: Click here to listen to Tammy Bruce discuss this column on her nightly podcast (5:45 clip).

A Guest Post by Canadian TAM Flaggman

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing these past few days among Palinistas over the former V-P candidate’s apparent defense of Donald Trump’s machinations and Ron Paul’s fanatical followers. These two positions are clearly harmful to the Republican Party, which makes it clear to me: Sarah Palin sees the GOP itself as the problem, not the solution, in this election cycle. When she warns the GOP against isolating Trump and the Paulites, she’s not endorsing a Trump independent run or a Paul presidency per se. What she is doing is firing a shot across the bow on behalf of the Tea Party, saying to the establishment: don’t you dare go dismissing constituency groups within the Republican Party. If it’s Trump and Paul now, it’s the Tea Party next, and that is simply not acceptable. This gives us pause to reflect on a little Canadian political history to see what can happen when the grassroots of a what is supposed to be a conservative party are ignored, humiliated, and isolated.

The 1970s and early 1980s in Canada were run, essentially, by Barack Obama, in the person of the America-hating incompetent-socialist demagogue leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. When he finally got tired and walked away in 1984, he left the country pining for a conservative renaissance, and Brian Mulroney rode that sentiment to leadership victory in the Progressive Conservative Party, and a landslide in the polls later that year. Despite running as a conservative warrior, Mulroney was the ultimate insider, foisted on the party membership from the Toronto-Montreal legal establishment, and rather than peeling back the Trudeau experiment, he expanded upon it by further nationalizing the health care system, adding a 7% tax-on-everything, and leaving us with crushing deficits that led Canada to the edge of credit rating downgrade. In the 1993 election, with the Conservative-in-name-only Mulroney abandoning ship, and the socialist Liberal Party running on a platform to the right of the Progressive Conservatives, the results came in: the PC Party, the purported conservative side of what was essentially a two-party system, was destroyed. It held on to just two seats in Parliament, and never recovered. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in Canada today is a result of the gutting and scuttling of that party by small-c conservatives in the ensuing years, forming it eventually into today’s ruling Conservative Party of Canada.

How does this relate to Palin’s comments on Trump and Paul? The key is what happened from 1984, when our McCain-Romney figure (Mulroney) took over, until 1993, when his party essentially disappeared. On two fronts, Mulroney ignored his base. In Quebec, Canada’s second-largest province, the big-government federalist encroachment so enraged the French-majority voters that they left to start their own separatist party that nearly ripped the country apart via referendum in 1995. In Alberta, Canada’s energy-producing behemoth, the big-government encroachment so enraged the rugged individualists of the West that they founded a new party, the Reform Party of Canada, which was essentially our Tea Party movement of the 1990s. (Not coincidentally, Stephen Harper was a founding member of the Reform Party after abandoning Mulroney’s PC’s.)

The splintering of the PC party, a direct result of the establishment placing a higher priority on centralizing federal power than on promoting the will of the grassroots, led to 13 years of corrupt and aimless Liberal Party rule, while the grassroots worked tirelessly to organize and establish itself as a viable national alternative under Harper. But now that a principled conservative party is in charge (not that it doesn’t have its share of RINOs, but that’s for another day), we have a principled government in Canada that, with the majority mandate earned in the 2011 election, is finally beginning to peel back the layers of federalist socialist intrusion into the lives of Canadian citizens.

So don’t dismiss Palin’s apparent defense of Trump and Paul-bots as nonsensical rantings or bitterness. The splintering of the Republican voting base could open up the danger of another decade in the wilderness, and Palin knows this. It’s not so much the loss of Trump-ites (of which there are few) or Paulites (of which there are a few more) she is concerned about. It’s the attitude of dismissiveness by the establishment that could ultimately result in the loss of the Tea Party constituency – and that would be a disaster for the Republicans. And the implication is this: if the Republican establishment tries to force an American Brian Mulroney on the grassroots, the Republican party will be be no more. And the rebuilding under a different name could begin at any time.

-Neil Flagg is a Toronto-based businessman, blogger, Conservative Party of Canada member, and TAM. You can follow him on Twitter @NeilFlagg

A Glimpse Into the Future

The Fundamental Restoration has begun…2012 is going to be fun.

Rep. Lt.-Col. Allen West & Governor Sarah Palin at Rolling Thunder, DC, 5-29-2011

(From the Rolling Thunder photo gallery at SarahPAC.com. )