The Left's Celebration of Nihilism

One of the biggest, longest knee-slappers of the progressive idiots at Lawyers, Gun and Money, and elsewhere, is their supposed superior "knowledge" of nihilism. The dolt "Malaclypse" especially loves to hammer the point about how "the dumb Donalde" doesn't even know what nihilism means! Doh! The problem? Well, the idiots themselves don't actually know what it means, can't describe or explain it, and only object to the term because it must apparently hit close to home, or something.

Anyway, I'm getting a kick out of Lawrence Auster's discussion of the topic, at View From the Right, "BENEATH LIBERALS’ SELF-CELEBRATION, THE DESPAIR OF NIHILISM." It's a response to comments, so click the link for the whole context, but this part is good:

...Mr. Hechtman makes a good point. But I should have made clear that when I speak of liberals’ despair, I do not mean that they are consciously, literally in despair. Of course, on the level of their conscious experience, they are full of themselves and their “wonderful” existence. They are soaring in an afflatus of triumph. They are in a state of ecstatic disbelief that Tony Blair’s pledge fifteen years ago to “sweep away those forces of conservatism” has come true, so fast and so thoroughly.

But just beneath their surface joy, there is ever-increasing disturbance. How do we know this? Consider the fact that the more power liberals enjoy over society, and the more conservatives surrender to the liberal agenda (e.g. on the issue of homosexuals in the military), the angrier the liberals become, the fuller of fear and loathing of conservatives they become, the more they feel that conservatives threaten them, and the more they want to silence, suppress, and punish conservatives.

What explains this ever-growing turbulence and hatred in the souls of liberals, at the very moment of their world-historic triumph? It is the fact that their entire existence is based on rebellion against the order of being, or, more simply, against God. As a result, the more power and fulfillment they have, the more they are divided from the order of being, and the more the tension within them grows. Therefore they feel increasingly threatened by—and are compulsively driven to crush—any remaining sign of the Truth which they have apparently defeated. In their minds, it is conservatives that symbolize belief in the hated God and the hated order of being. So it is conservatives (or rather the fantasy demonized image they have of conservatives) that the liberals must destroy.

If this explanation sounds implausible to you, ask yourself why, if liberals are so happy and victorious, they are becoming more fearful, hate-filled, and tyrannical, instead of enjoying and relaxing in their triumph?

Back at the post it goes on like that, and then Auster replies to one more commenter:

Also, to avoid misunderstanding, when I speak of nihilism, I do not use it in the conventional, incorrect sense of “not believing in anything.” There is no human being who does not believe in anything. If “not believing in anything” is the definition of nihilism, then there is no such thing as nihilism. No. Nihilism is the denial of objective moral truth. Our contemporary nihilists believe in and enjoy all kinds of things, but they don’t believe that there’s any objective moral truth backing up the things they believe in.

I'll bet good money that freak leftist B.J. Keefe would blow this off as some "Greater Wingnuttia" hysteria. See, for example:

I was not typing "Blargh" in response to your effort to twist the definition of nihilism to fit your own preconceived notions. It was in response to everything else.

Oh, and don't miss the rest of the commentary at Auster's.

BONUS: When called out in the past on the "meaning" of nihilism, I almost always link to the definition at Dictionary.com, especially "1. a complete denial of all established authority and institutions" and "3. a revolutionary doctrine of destruction for its own sake..." And some real life examples here.

EXTRA: "Navigating Past Nihilism."

Romney Surrogate John Sununu: 'Can You Imagine How Dumb This President Is?'

The Hill has the full clip, "Romney surrogate: ‘Can you imagine how dumb this president is?’" (Via Memeorandum.)

“Can you imagine how dumb this president is?,” the former New Hampshire governor asked Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday night. “Introducing the concept of felony into the discourse, when this president comes out of Chicago politics, where felony and politics are sometimes a synonym?”

Sununu said that Obama is the one who has ties to felons.

“This is a president whose next-door neighbor was Tony Rezko, and President Obama’s first big revenue were real estate deals that had odd coincidences in time and space with a felon, Tony Rezko,” he continued. “This is a president whose political training was jowl to cheek with politicians like convicted felons like [former Illinois Gov.] Rod Blagojevich, and this president is dumb enough to introduce the concept of felon into the discourse, with a guy as clean as Mitt Romney.”

More at Memeorandum.

Mitt Romney Had 'Absolutley No Involvement' in Bain Management After Departure in 1999

This whole Bain blow-up is looking pretty ridiculous for the despicable smear merchants of the radical left. See Big Journalism, "Two Obama Supporters Verify Romney Left Bain in 1999, Why Won't Politico's Dylan Byers?"

And CNN's John King spoke with Bain Managing Director Steve Pagliuca, who said that Mitt Romney "had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure."

See also Weasel Zippers, "WaPo Fact Checker Gives “Three Pinocchios” To Obama’s Claim Romney A Possible Felon, Says They Are “Blowing Smoke Here”…"

It's not a hard issue: "Mitt Romney Left Bain Capital in February 1999." But progressives have nothing else, so they smear and lie and call people libelous names. Those Obama apologies are in order.

Mont Blanc Avalanche Kills Nine

Telegraph UK reports, "Three Britons killed in French Alpine avalanche." And, "Climbers triggered Mont Blanc avalanche which killed three Britons."

Also at the Los Angeles Times, "French Alps avalanche kills 9 on Mont Blanc."

Penn State Hid Sex Abuse Crimes

At the Wall Street Journal, "Penn State Concealed Sex Abuse, Report Says":

A scathing report that excoriated top Pennsylvania State University officials, including legendary football coach Joe Paterno, for failing to protect boys from a sexual predator sent a warning to other universities about the need to fully disclose suspected crimes on campus.

The report, released Thursday by former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh, also highlights the risk colleges face when they attempt to protect their sports programs from controversy.

The 267-page report, commissioned by university trustees after allegations surfaced about abuse by former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, said top Penn State officials, including former President Graham Spanier and the late Mr. Paterno, "failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade."

The report indicated Penn State had a lax reporting system for crimes or suspected crimes, and thus failed to carry out its requirements under a federal law called the Clery Act, which mandates universities collect information about allegations and warn the campus community about threats. The report also said university officials made decisions designed to protect its revered and highly profitable football program.

RTWT.

Plus, at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Crush the Paterno statue." And at the Scranton Times-Tribune, "Paterno knew and did nothing."

More at the Boston Herald, "Penn State football deserves two-year banishment."

New Kelly Brook Bikini Pics

At Egotastic, "Kelly Brook Bikini Pictures Deliver the Sweet Curves to the Boot."

And at London's Daily Mail, "That didn't take long: Kelly Brook cools down in the sea in a flirty and frilly swimsuit."

Mitt Romney Left Bain Capital in February 1999

It got pretty ugly yesterday while I was out in Beverly Hills.

The Obama campaign --- and practically the entire radical left commentariat --- took after Mitt Romney, with even top Obama spokewoman Stephanie Cutter calling the former Massachusetts governor a "felon."

The Wall Street Journal had this background last night, "Timing of Departure From Bain Capital Emerges as Point of Dispute" (via Google):

A controversy over Mitt Romney's ties to Bain Capital erupted anew Thursday, with news stories suggesting the Republican presidential candidate continued to play a management role at the private-equity firm well after he has said he had stepped down.

But federal officials said the apparent discrepancy—stemming from differences between campaign financial disclosures and regulatory documents—wasn't unusual. A top shareholder might be listed on Securities and Exchange Commission forms as an executive even if he has no role in day-to-day management, said the officials, who asked not to be named because they didn't want to be drawn into a political battle.

Harvey Pitt, a former SEC chairman, said agency guidelines required Bain Capital to list Mr. Romney as executive at that time because Mr. Romney still owned controlling shares. "He had to be shown on those filings until his ownership of Bain shares was severed," said Mr. Pitt, a Republican who headed the SEC from 2001 to 2003 and is not affiliated with the Romney campaign.

People close to Mr. Romney said the seeming contradictions between financial disclosures and SEC reports result from a misinterpretation of Mr. Romney's departure terms from Bain Capital. He took a leave of absence from the investment firm in 1999 to run the struggling Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics, and didn't sign his retirement contract until May 2001, when it became apparent he wouldn't return to the company, these people said.

Mr. Romney has stated in federal election disclosure reports that he left Bain Capital in February 1999. Several documents Bain Capital filed with the SEC list him as president, chairman or chief executive for Bain Capital-related entities through January 2002. A Boston Globe story Thursday cited those SEC reports, as did earlier stories by Mother Jones and the Talking Points Memo website.

The Romney campaign and Bain Capital said Thursday that the candidate made no management or investment decisions for the firm after February 1999. "Due to the sudden nature of Mr. Romney's departure, he remained the sole stockholder for a time while formal ownership was being documented and transferred to the group of partners who took over management of the firm in 1999. Accordingly, Mr. Romney was reported in various capacities on SEC filings during this period," Bain Capital said in a statement Thursday.

And here's the headline at Business Week, "Romney Kept Bain Ownership After Leaving in '99." And also at Fortune, "Documents: Romney didn't manage Bain funds" (via Memeorandum).

Team Romney demanded an apology, seen at Fox News, "Mitt Wants Apology for 'Felony' Claim." And see Weasel Zippers, "Romney Campaign Demands Apology From Obama Over “Felon” Comments — Update: Obama Camp Says They Will Not Apologize…"

And FWIW, here's the report at the New York Times, "Campaigns Trade Salvos Over a Romney Role at Bain After 1999."

We'll see how it goes today. I don't think Romney can afford to take the high ground; this is such an intense attack that the response can't be, er, outsourced to subordinates. Romney's got to go toe to toe with Obama on this. It's the only way.

More later.

Millions of Field Mice Overrun Central Germany

Here's a change of pace for you, at Der Spiegel, "Worst Plague in 30 Years: Field Mice Overrun Farms in Central Germany":

Millions of field mice are overrunning the central German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, much to the concern of local farmers. The rodents are devastating food crops, cutting yields by up to 50 percent. Getting birds of prey to hunt the critters didn't help, and now farmers want to be allowed to use a banned rat poison.

Under normal circumstances, you might think the 12-centimeter (5-inch) long field mouse looks innocent, or even cute. But farmers in the central German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt wouldn't agree at the moment. The furry rodents are currently wreaking havoc in the states, which are suffering the worst field mouse plague in over 30 years.

Farmers in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are complaining that millions of field mice are devastating their food crops, including corn, barley and winter wheat. "They are eating everything," said Matthias Krieg, who manages an agricultural firm near the town of Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt. "Not even the sugar beets are safe." Farmers estimate that they may have to write off an average of 10 percent of their crops as a result of mouse damage, and up to 50 percent in extreme cases.

Farmers already noticed an increase in the field mouse population in 2011 and began to take counter measures. According to Reinhard Kopp, a spokesman for the Thuringian Farmers' Association, agriculturalists set up hundreds of perches in their fields to lure birds of prey to kill the mice. But the operation was only moderately successful. "The birds got so fat from eating all the mice that they almost couldn't fly any more," Kopp said. "But they still couldn't keep up."

Farmers in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt say that other measures used to control pests -- such as placing poisoned bait at the entrances to their underground nests -- will not be sufficient either: The crops are now too tall to allow farmers to locate the nests.

Continue reading.

Monica Crowley at the Wednesday Morning Club of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Beverly Hills, July 12, 2012

My apologies on the picture quality. I've been having problems with my camera, especially with the aperture and shutter speed settings, and the manual vs. automatic features. I'll work on that (maybe even junk this camera for a new one). I guess these are a lot better than nothing.

In any case, the talk was very straightforward. Dr. Crowley spoke for about 30 minutes or so, staying close to the material in her new book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback. I've still got a couple of chapters to read, but the book offers a devastating critique of Barack Obama and the progressive left's assault on America since January 20, 2009. Dr. Crowley offers a wealth of detail in the book, including an almost encyclopedic recap of the president's past statements and current hypocrisies. Her theme is upbeat, though, positing that the road to American renewal lies in the cheerful restoration of American exceptionalism and optimism --- the fight of "The Happy Warrior," as Dr. Crowley likes to call it. And she models that happiness in person, and throws in a lot of good humor as well. In concluding her talk, Dr. Crowley indicated three key elements of renewal: (1) Throw the progressive bums out, especially Barack Obama, who can't be allowed a second term, lest he have the chance to finish the destruction that he started; (2) after kicking out the Obama redistributionists, we need to propose a set of commonsense policies designed restore economic prosperity (in all its facets, including healthcare, deregulation, etc.); and (3) Americans need an "attitudinal" adjustment, a vigorous (and optimistic) reassertion of the core values and beliefs that have fostered our prosperity. What Obama has been able to do is legitimize hardcore anti-Americanism by packaging old-left America-hatred in a spiffy 21st century wrapper. Through stealth and trickery, the left has fobbed off European-style dependency and decline. But take heed: success in combating the Obama legacy won't come overnight, because the left "never sleeps." We have to push back twice as hard in a multi-front war, political, economic, cultural, and international. It's going to happen, but it'll take time.

Dr. Crowley took a few questions and then the audience adjourned to the book signing in the foyer. It was an excellent event all around.

Monica Crowley: 'What the Bleep Just Happened?"

I'm heading out now to hear Monica Crowley speak to the Wednesday Morning Club of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. Jamie Glazov has the background, "Monica Crowley Speaking in Los Angeles, July 12, 2012."

I didn't know, but Crowley holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University, and was a personal assistant to former President Richard Nixon from 1990 until his death in 1994. She's discusses some of the things she learned from Nixon at this interview with Sean Hannity at the clip.

I'll have an update on the event tonight.

And get the book: What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback.

Mitt Fights Back

The left has just begun to smear, but after a good start on responding to the despicable left-wing character assassination machine, Mitt Romney started to fall down on the job.

Here's this from the New York Times, "Conservatives Push Romney to Deliver Counterpunch":

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney and his team of advisers built a reputation during the Republican primaries as tough street fighters skilled in the tactics of political warfare. They quietly took pride in tearing apart Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and the rest of their rivals.

The aggressive posture ultimately became one of Mr. Romney’s selling points, particularly among conservative voters who were searching for the candidate tenacious enough to take out President Obama in the general election.

But now, even with polls suggesting he is battling Mr. Obama to a draw at this stage of the race, Mr. Romney finds himself confronting concern that he is not nimble and aggressive enough to withstand the Democratic assault against him.

The president and his re-election campaign have managed to turn the focus of the race in recent days to taxes, outsourcing jobs and Mr. Romney’s bank accounts — almost everything except the weak job-creation figures released last week.

That has stirred worries among some Republicans that Mr. Romney is allowing himself to be defined by the Obama forces and that he lacks the kind of powerful counterpunch the base of the Republican Party is craving.

Now deep into his second run for the White House, Mr. Romney has shown consistent discipline, sticking doggedly to his strategy of making the election about Mr. Obama’s stewardship of the economy and for the most part avoiding being baited into traps set for him by rivals.

“If you’re responding, you’re losing,” Mr. Romney told Fox News on Wednesday, his voice betraying no air of concern.

But the latest Democratic offensive has become so intense that the Romney campaign will start a new wave of television commercials on Thursday, aides said. In a rapid-fire era of presidential politics, when candidates have the ability to respond at a moment’s notice, the restraint of the Romney campaign over the last two weeks has opened a round of second-guessing about his insistent focus on the economy...

Good. Here's the website, MittRomney.com/truth.

And from Daniel Halper, at the Weekly Standard, "New Romney Ad Calls Obama Liar, Dishonest."

Excellent. The key now is not to let up. Forget that line about how responding is for losers, or whatever. A winner will have a vicious rapid-reaction team that hits back twice as hard. Leftists are f-king liars and thugs, and Obama is king of 'em all. Take 'em out.

Mitt Romney's Speech to the NAACP

Pundette has this, "Romney's NAACP speech":

That Mitt Romney got booed yesterday during his speech to the NAACP shouldn't come as news to anyone. The surprising part, for me, is that he didn't pander to his audience or soften his message, but instead uttered an inconvenient truth: that President Obama's policies have made things worse for black Americans "in almost every way." The speech strikes me as a sincere appeal for black votes, as well as an appeal to conservatives like me...

And me too. It's a good speech. And Romney was right to go before the NAACP with a message of traditional values.

RELATED: From Dan Riehl, "Tommy Christopher, Rachel Maddow Expose Their Racism In Misguided Romney Attack" (via Memeorandum).

The Total Hypocrisy of the Obama Administration

Here's Michelle Malkin on Hannity's last night:

PREVIOUSLY: "Barack Obama's Tax Shelters."

Freedom to Blog Update July 12, 2012

Alex Pareene published a ridiculously slimy account of the Brett Kimberlin controversy Tuesday, "Brett Kimberlin versus right-wing bloggers." Pareene is perhaps the prototypical progressive Internet sleezeball. A former blogger at Gawker/Wonkette, he's famous for attacking Michelle Malkin with crude Asian whore ping-pong ball slurs. Patterico has the epic smackdown, "Salon Does Damage Control for Brett Kimberlin":

Pareene describes Kimberlin’s victim’s as people who “receive a great deal of joy from pretending to be the victims of unprovoked and terrible persecution.” Ask Aaron Walker how much joy he received when he and his wife lost their jobs, he was arrested, and spent money defending against frivolous actions from Kimberlin. It was not “joy” I experienced when Kimberlin’s site published photos of my house and my address; when he filed a state bar complaint against me; when he attempted to file frivolous criminal charges against me with the California Attorney General and the stalking unit of my office; or when he complained to my office numerous times about me.

And so on and so forth.

Pareene mentions Kimberlin’s main defense to the bombings — that some of the witnesses were hypnotized — without mentioning the damning evidence against him, such as his possession of timers and explosive materials consistent with those used in the bombings. Nowhere is there a mention of the wrongful death judgment obtained by Carl DeLong’s widow, or the fact that Kimberlin refused to pay it while collecting over a million dollars from the Tides Foundation, Barbra Streisand, and other liberal marks.

There is so much more I could talk about, but I have to get to work.

This piece pretends to be journalism, but it isn’t. It’s cover to Brett Kimberlin, pure and simple. Pareene repeats Kimberlin’s allegations and doesn’t bother to talk to any of his victims.

It’s Gawker-style “journalism,” at Salon.

Pareene interviewed Brett Kimbelin, but not one of the conservatives who claim intimidation by the Kimberlin network. Robert Stacy McCain has more, "East Coast Opium Kingpin Alex Pareene Writes About ‘Standard-Issue Right-Wing Character Assassination’ of Kimberlin."

Plus, Bob Belvedere has an update on the saga, "The #BrettKimberlin Report D+46: Alex Pareene – Amateur."

And Pareene's laughing about it on Twitter, "Liberal bloggers make jokes about SWAT-ting."

I'm still amazed at those arguing that the Kimberlin story isn't partisan. Once again, there are a couple of progressives who see this as a First Amendment fight, but most on the left have blown this off as some conspiracy cooked up by the crazed conservatives on Twitter.

In any case, back over at the source of this, see Aaron Worthing, "Exclusive: The State’s Attorney Has Given Brett Kimberlin a License to Perjure Himself and He Used it in Kimberlin v. Norton."

I've spoken to my attorney and I'll be updating on Scott Eric Kaufman's campaign of workplace harassment and intimidation.

Luke Bryan Apologizes for Reading Words to National Anthem at All Star Game

I've never seen anyone read the lyrics off their wrist, but this guy did, and it was too obvious.

ABC News reports, "Singer Luke Bryan Apologizes for National Anthem Controversy."

And London's Daily Mail has the video, "Did country singer check his hand for National Anthem lyrics during All-Star Game?"

Michelle Fields and Sandra Smith Discuss New American Crossroads Ad 'War On Women' on Hannity's

It's a powerful ad.

Mitt Romney and the New Gilded Age — Really!

I was writing tongue in cheek when I snarked about how "this year the left is so utterly bankrupt that all they can do is hit Republicans as vicious, undeserving throwbacks to the (so-called) economic obscenities of the Gilded Age."

But it's true!

See #OWS cheerleader and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at the Nation, "Mitt Romney and the New Gilded Age":

The election of 2012 raises two perplexing questions. The first is how the GOP could put up someone for president who so brazenly epitomizes the excesses of casino capitalism that have nearly destroyed the economy and overwhelmed our democracy. The second is why the Democrats have failed to point this out.

he White House has criticized Mitt Romney for his years at the helm of Bain Capital, pointing to a deal that led to the bankruptcy of GS Technologies, a Bain investment in Kansas City that went belly up in 2001 at the cost of 750 jobs. But the White House hasn’t connected Romney’s Bain to the larger scourge of casino capitalism. Not surprisingly, its criticism has quickly degenerated into a “he said, she said” feud over what proportion of the companies that Bain bought and loaded up with debt subsequently went broke (it’s about 20 percent), and how many people lost their jobs relative to how many jobs were added because of Bain’s financial maneuvers (that depends on when you start and stop the clock). And it has invited a Republican countercharge that the administration gambled away taxpayer money on its own bad bet, the Solyndra solar panel company.

But the real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, 
and the losers are most of the rest of us. The system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election—and with it, American democracy.

The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers. The 750 peo-
ple at GS Technologies who lost their jobs thanks to a bad deal engineered by Romney’s Bain were a small foreshadowing of the 15 million who lost jobs after the cumulative dealmaking 
of the entire financial sector pushed the whole economy off a cliff. And relative to the cost to taxpayers of bailing out Wall Street, Solyndra is a rounding error.

Connect the dots of casino capitalism, and you get Mitt Romney. The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of
15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people.

Another goodie allows private-equity partners to sock away almost any amount of their earnings into a tax-deferred IRA, while the rest of us are limited to a few thousand dollars a year. The partners can merely low-ball the value of whatever portion of their investment partnership they put away—even valuing it at zero—because the tax code considers a partnership interest to have value only in the future. This explains how Romney’s IRA is worth as much as $101 million. The tax code further subsidizes private equity and much of the rest of the financial sector by making interest on debt tax-deductible, while taxing profits and dividends. This creates huge incentives for financiers to find ways of substituting debt for equity and is a major reason America’s biggest banks have leveraged America to the hilt. It’s also why Romney’s Bain and other private-equity partnerships have done the same to the companies they buy.

These maneuvers shift all the economic risk to debtors, who sometimes can’t repay what they owe. That’s rarely a problem for the financiers who engineer the deals; they’re sufficiently diversified to withstand some losses, or they’ve already taken their profits and moved on. But piles of debt play havoc with the lives of real people in the real economy when the companies they work for can’t meet their payments, or the banks they rely on stop lending money, or the contractors they depend on go broke—often with the result that they can’t meet their own debt payments and lose their homes, cars and savings.

It took more than a decade for America to recover from the Great Crash of 1929 after the financial sector had gorged itself on debt, and it’s taking years to recover from the more limited but still terrible crash of 2008. The same kinds of convulsions have occurred on a smaller scale at a host of companies since the go-go years of the 1980s, when private-equity firms like Bain began doing leveraged buyouts—taking over a target company, loading it up with debt, using the tax deduction that comes with the debt to boost the target company’s profits, cutting payrolls and then reselling the company at a higher price.

Sometimes these maneuvers work, sometimes they end in disaster; but they always generate giant rewards for the dealmakers while shifting the risk to workers and taxpayers. In 1988 drugstore chain Revco went under when it couldn’t meet its debt payments on a $1.6 billion leveraged buyout engineered by Salomon Brothers. In 1989 the private-equity firm of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts completed the notorious and ultimately disastrous buyout of RJR Nabisco for $31 billion, much of it in high-yield (“junk”) bonds. In 1993 Bain Capital became a majority shareholder in GS Technologies and loaded it with debt. In 2001 it went down when it couldn’t meet payments on that debt load. But even as these firms sank, Bain and the other dealmakers continued to collect lucrative fees—transaction fees, advisory fees, management fees—sucking the companies dry until the bitter end. According to a review by the New York Times of firms that went bankrupt on Romney’s watch, Bain structured the deals so that its executives would always win, even if employees, creditors and Bain’s own investors lost out. That’s been Big Finance’s MO.

By the time Romney co-founded Bain Capital in 1984, financial wheeling and dealing was the most lucrative part of the economy, sucking into its Gordon Gekko–like maw the brightest and most ambitious MBAs, who wanted nothing more than to make huge amounts of money as quickly as possible. Between the mid-1980s and 2007, financial-sector earnings made up two-thirds of all the growth in incomes. At the same time, wages for most Americans stagnated as employers, under mounting pressure from Wall Street and private-equity firms like Bain, slashed payrolls and shipped jobs overseas.

The 2008 crash only briefly interrupted the bonanza. Last year, according to a recent Bloomberg Markets analysis, America’s top fifty financial CEOs got a 20.4 percent pay hike, even as the wages of most Americans continued to drop. Topping the Bloomberg list were two of the same private-equity barons who did the RJR Nabisco deal a quarter-century ago—Henry Kravis and George Roberts, who took home $30 million each. According to the 2011 tax records he released, Romney was not far behind.

* * *

We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection...

I expect we'll be hearing a lot more of this "Gilded Age" bullshit.

Must-See TV: Romney Adviser John Sununu Schools MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Outsourcing

"You're struggling, Andrea, you're struggling."

PREVIOUSLY: "Barack Obama's Tax Shelters."

VIDEO: Ohio Freight Train Derails

Gnarly.

See the background report at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "Ohio freight train derails, causing fiery blast."

The Obama Administration's Growing Welfare Dependency Regime

From Tuesday night on the O'Reilly Factor: