Posted on 09/28/2012 8:35:21 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Former president George W. Bush isnt exactly doing Mitt Romney any favors on the messaging front. As the current face of the Republican party, Mitts single biggest challenge has been distancing himself from his image as a business tycoon who got rich by outsourcing American jobs and then keeping big chunks of his fortune in Swiss bank accounts and invested in the Cayman Islands.
On election week, George W. will rub the sketchy Cayman Islands playboy image right in Mitts face.
BuzzFeed points out that W. will give the keynote address to the Cayman Islands Alternative Investment Summit, which goes down on Grand Cayman Island November 1-2, less than a week before the presidential election. The other keynote speaker will be the UKs most famous billionaire playboy, Virgins Richard Branson, who owns his very own island not so far from Grand Cayman.
The Summits site says the event will bring together the worlds leading institutional investors, fund managers, academics, economists and regulators in the Cayman Islandsthe worlds leading domicile for investment fundsto discuss and debate the fundamentals of a vibrant future for the alternative investments industry.
To most Americans, this is a pretty simple equation: Cayman Islands + alternative investments = sketchy.
George Ws Cayman keynote is just the latest in a long string of reminders about Romneys ultra-rich status and possibly sketchy behavior and hes not getting a lot of help from the people around him.
Just last week former GOP candidate Tim Pawlenty left Rommeys campaign in a high-profile departure to become a lobbyist for the banking industry, and promptly said that banks should just be allowed to regulate themselves. Last week Romney released his 2011 tax returns which showed him paying a 14% tax rate, and if the hackers who claim to have stolen his earlier records werent bluffing and havent been paid a ransom, they may release even more of Romneys returns tomorrow.
Accidental or not, somehow the messaging around Mitts millions seem to be the most consistent the GOP is able to construct around Romney.
He won that war by himself by fighting it like Patton, in the Green Berets.
Man those gooks loved him, except the bad ones.
Gay George Takei ... err Capt. Nim in Army of the Republic of Viet Nam acted like he was West Point in that movie, what a great Army that was. I wonder what they are doing now.
How about that gook kid,? Yum-chum I think it was,
Didnt seeing him look so lost make you want to fight in VN with the Duke?
He probably owns a business now.
One point in that movie got me, when I was a kid:
Aldo Ray, when he was lecturing David Janssen - “PPsH-41 - Russian Communist...ammunition - Czechoslovakian communist... SKS rifle - Chinese Communist..”
Trying to impress on him the global nature of the threat that we were (and still are) facing.
I thought that was a pretty powerful scene. The other scene which really bothered me was when Peterson got slung up against the punji wall.
I was probably 12 or 13 the first time I saw that movie. My old man was still alive, and I remember watching it with him on television - he was WWII Airborne, combat-wounded in the Ardennes in Jan 45.
“..He probably owns a business now....”
Or wound up fighting for Victor Charlie, more likely.
There’s a flick from the 80s, “The Killing Fields” with Sam Waterston. There’s a scene there where he’s in a truck with Cambodian government soldiers, joking with them. One of them has a Mercedes Benz hood ornament.
He winds up seeing that same guy in Khmer Rouge black pajamas with a Kalashnikov a little later.
That’s actually a pretty brutal movie.
Hittin’ the sack brother.
Worked all day, making OT to pay the bills.
Going to have a beer or two, and crash.
Hale out.
I didn't see that movie till I was in college and saw it listed in book I bought that made fun of the worse movies ever made. Then I watched for it.
By then I had taken a history course in college and researched and wrote a term paper on the French Indo-china War where the French got their butts kicked. So I was interested in why that war turned out to be such a disaster for the US (even with the Duke) and I read many books on it since those days. It goes back to Kennedy.
When I was about seven Jonny Quest came on prime time and it became my favorite show for years. It only lasted a year due to high production costs (cartoons were hand drawn art in those days) but it had good ratings and it was repeated hundreds of times on TV. I been watching it again on Boomerang the past few weeks. Still love that show, but only the 1960s episodes, the 1980s ones were crap.
I loved that movie. Read many books on the Khmer Rouge and told many newly hired kids about what happened there.
Ironically it was the victorious VC army that invaded Cambodia and STOPPED the Khmer Rouge massacre. That shows you how war is rarely back and white. It wasn't the US it was the VC, obviously under a united VN name. The Vietnamese and Cambodian communists didn't get along. Didnt the US object to that invasion at the time in a typical knee-jerk reaction? I remember my Dad saying :"See ? Those damn VC are at it again. Just like I warned."
Yes, I have met boat people here.
Your rhetorical radiator is overheating.
Do you mean to say that you disagree on a point or two? Avoid personal remarks, and you will be more credible as well as more charitable.
Let me put it this way, the R party will have no future as long as it hangs on to the fantasy that GWB+CO were a unappreciated success. There is a reason why GWB was not asked to speak at the RNC, where Clinton was hailed by Dems at the DNC primetime as the model of success. Its like Clinton is the Dems Reagan and Bush is the Rs Carter.
Republicans know to hide GWB based on polls yet learned little. Its still the same leadership in congress and Romney as far as we know agrees with everything GWB did.
Cleaning is long overdue.
Again. sorry about the ‘you’ in my comment to you,
I was getting some personal grief at the time from another and I shouldnt have added a term like that that made my response to you sound like a personal comment on ‘you. It was a heated moment.
I believe your response back to me was correct in correcting me.
You're a gent for the gracious apology.
I'm not really as far from your view as you apparently thought. I just think in the long view, the lag between cause and effect is automatically distorted by honesty-free journalists and effeminate historians. Clinton's economic "boom years" were the result of investments made during Reagan and GHWB, which Clinton did his best to dismantle. Clinton's legacy came home to roost on George W's watch. Bush had cubic yards of policy trash to take out when he took office, and the Senate Dems prevented him from appointing a secretary of anything until after April 2001. In addition to the tax increases Bush trimmed back, thanks be to Clinton for gutting our intelligence and military, giving us 9/11 a few months later.
Just as important, Clinton had put Baby Cuomo in charge of threatening bankers with jail if they didn't give mortgages to enough deadbeats. That disastrous bit of Communism was the seed of the destruction of the U.S. economy. GWB had tried several times to stuff Fannie and Freddie back into the box, but couldn't get past the Senate. I believe, as you probably do, that he's accountable for not playing hardball and not going over the press's pointy heads to the American people. Most conservatives could see that any deals with Democrats were a dangerous con game run by traitors.
And every President, including St. Reagan, who failed to bring Ted Kennedy's 1965 immigration strategy to a halt has a black mark on his record.
Leadership is hard, and life is short. W should have declared war on the Islamists, culturally and militarily. He had some dumb ideas about peaceful Islam and "compassionate" spending, and should have used his veto pen on the budget. We have learned a lot since then, as evidenced by who was nominated as the Republicans' VPa militantly pro-life, free-marketing budget cutter.
But just imagine if 9/11 had happened under Zippy. (He gave us an idea on Sept. 11, 2012.) In foreign affairs, he is gutting GWBs military and persecuting Christians, Jews, and families around the world as fast as he can. In economics, he has repeatedly strangled the market recovery that would have begun automatically under GWBor any President not taking action calculated to kill it (as FDR did).
One way to look at it is, when we get yet another President who lacks GWB's virtues of honor, courage, intelligence, civility, patriotism, and humility, we'll miss them, whether or not we recognize those virtues as his. It's a pity one man can't have more of them at once.
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