The Chronicles of Mitt: May 21, 2012

  Hello, human diary. It is I again, Mitt Romney, your better.

Today has apparently been Attack Mitt Romney day. Once again, my opponents have been bringing up my record at Bain Capital'despite my previous insistence that they are not allowed to do that. I must say, this behavior is astonishingly low class. I have always endeavored to keep my campaign positive (after all, anything negative can be funneled instead to the Super PAC, and that has been working out rather well), but to have opponent units attack my record as a proud and successful profit center seems outrageous indeed.

First off, the entire point of my Bain Capital days was to find companies that were not the right height, acquire them, and then make them the right height. Part of this was, naturally, the process of giving them what we called a proper corporate "haircutting." We would identify the portions of the company that had undesirable amounts of money, cut that money, then give that money to ourselves. It may have been true that some of the companies were, in hindsight, not able to weather the immense amount of money-trimming we subjected them to, but that is because they did not properly plan for someone taking them over, loading them up with debt, paying themselves vast sums of money from the debt, and leaving them to fail under the burden of that debt. I was merely playing the role of any good financier in teaching them that lesson; if anything, they should be thanking me.

If anything, I believe this only makes me more qualified to occupy the presidency, not less. My old Bain chums and I demonstrated that we could maximize short-term gains at the expense of long-term profitability, which is what this country sorely needs more of. I demonstrated the ability to earn vast sums of money while simultaneously skirting debts and leaving the government to bail out the rest; this is hardly a simple trick to pull off, and I believe that alone is deserving of a Nobel prize in, well, something. (I would seriously consider applying for a Nobel, if there was more than a piddling sum of money involved in winning one.) If there was ever a time when America needed a chief executive who knew how to raise some sorely needed extra cash for the country by, say, selling off certain states, or by implementing something my economic planners are calling "compassionate slavery," it would be now.

I have often said (as did my Republican predecessor unit in the White House, a certain Fellow Who Shall Not Be Named) that government needs to be managed more like a business, and less like a, well, government. Government needs to be less concerned with how many individuals have jobs, and how well retired ex-workers might be doing, and more concerned with placating the stock market and ensuring a healthy profit. I have asked the staff to draw up a new campaign message, something to the effect of "I want to do for America what I did for Ampad," but they seemed pessimistic as to the prospects. I suppose I could simply fire them. Hmm. More thought on this will be required.