..."Be vewwy, vewwy careful. We're hunting Romneys"
Feel free to color me noid-a-para, but this whole "Harry Reid and The No Taxes At All" affair stinks bad of version 2.0 of "Dan Rather and the George Bush Went AWOL".
Here's how it works...
#1: The only way for Mitt Romney to escape his TT (tax trap) is to somehow muddy the waters with the holy grail of Republican Rubes... the Low Information Voter.
The TRUTH is... he's paid an unbelievably low tax rate for years, but if he can somehow convince the Low Information Voter said Low Tax Rate is still a lot of CASHOLA... and that Democrats are assholes... and maybe HE's the victim... then, and only then, maybe he can flip the script.
But, how to do that?
Well...
#2: Someone in the Romney camp plays the six degrees of separation game and gets a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend to whisper in Harry Reid's ear.
"No taxes. No taxes AT ALL."
The source is credible enough. And the claim is explosive. But its anonymous and the only actual proof... is Romney's actual taxes.
#3: Harry Reid takes the bait, makes a federal case about it.
#4: Speculation grows... more demands are made... Dana Bash steps in... we step in... "NO TAXES AT ALL" become the relevant buzzwords.
#5: Mitt Romney plays the victim... RELEASES a few years (maybe as few as two or three) from the time in question and low and behold... he's paid something like 7 MILLION DOLLARS in taxes those years.
Now, YES, it's a .0000000003% rate, but the disclosure contradicts the specific claim of NO TAXES AT ALL and suddenly the COGENT argument that "Mitt Romney took advantage of a vastly unfair tax system" gets buried under the new frame... NO TAXES VS. MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TAXES.
(And now the frame becomes Harry Reid Bully Liar and Both Sides Do It.)
This #5 gambit, of course, is exactly the George Bush and The National Guard con. Was George Bush AWOL... probably, maybe, likely.
But the issues was utterly neutralized when the story became AWOL VS. FAKED DOCUMENTS FROM SUPER LIBERAL CBS NEWS.
Do what you will, but as one who sits around all day eating red vines and thinking up the weirdest shit possible, this appears to be hearsay on hearsay on hearsay from anonymous sources... all designed to be the back door out of Mitt Romney's great tax dodge.