Mitt Romney More Reaganesque Than Previously Realized

Reaganesque? Ol' Mittens? The Man With the Golden Tongue? Sure, he's got the hair, and the complete lack of devotion to anything resembling fact or verifiable truth, but really, Reaganesque? Yes, Mitt Romney is "Reaganesque," by which we mean "balls-deep in murdering nuns and Latin American death squads."

Now wait a minute, you are thinking, that is a little far-fetched, tying Mitt Romney's Bain Capital to rightwing Latin American death squads, the kind that raped and killed American nuns, murdered an archbishop in his pulpit, and filled mass graves with the bodies of their political enemies right on the grounds of the US Embassy in Honduras. Yeah, unfortunately, it apparently is not far-fetched at all.

 HuffPo brings it, in about a thousand paragraphs tying together previous reporting from the LA Times and the Boston Globe that show Romney went to Salvadorean founding families for the initial startup funds for his precious Bain. And those Salvadorean families had directly financed (or even pulled the goddamn triggers themselves) assassinations of leftwing activists in Guatemala, in just one tiny example from HuffPo's smorgasbord of Bain-related Death and Terrorism.

In 1990, Orlando de Sola, [Roberto] D'Aubuisson and founding Bain investor Francisco de Sola allegedly assassinated two left-wing activists then in Guatemala, according to a report by that country's government, which cited its intelligence sources. The activists had just held a meeting with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was attempting to broker a Salvadoran peace deal.

Francisco de Sola later pleaded his and his cousin Orlando's innocence to the U.S. ambassador. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights looked further into the killings and concluded that elements of the Salvadoran right were indeed the mostly likely assassins, but said that it couldn't confirm the guilt of the de Solas or D'Aubuisson. It deemed the investigation incomplete and called for a deeper look. The three men were never charged.

Francisco de Sola is now president of the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development. His assistant, Ada Chang, said that he was traveling and unavailable to comment, but she confirmed to HuffPost that he had been accused of murdering the two leftists in 1990.

There's ever so much more over at HuffPo. For further reading, if you'd like to find yourself in an Internet black hole, may we suggest googling such fun phrases as "Battalion 316," "contras murder nuns," "John Negroponte" and "Roberto D'Aubuisson." We guarantee a good time will be had by all, or at least a weepathon and massive shame stroke.

So, these are the people Mitt Romney tapped for the initial funds for his small-business startup. So what? Who cares? You can't fight Communism or found Bain Capital without breaking a few eggs, all right? And by "eggs," of course, we mean "human skulls."

Anyway, according to Mitt Romney -- and in fact we are not kidding -- the rightwing death squads and torture in Central America throughout the '80s were not directed by Roberto D'Aubuisson and his ARENA party, funded by pretty much all Mitt Romney's initial Bain investors, but instead were all Fidel Castro's fault.

Romney, however, has shown no public remorse for signing up such investors, although the concept of culpability is not foreign to him. When he returned to Miami in 2007, he condemned those who had financed torture and other human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil war -- just not those he was connected to.

"These friends didn't just help me; they taught me," Romney said. "Ricardo's brother had been tortured and murdered by rebel terrorists in El Salvador. Miguel himself had been chained to a floor in Guatemala for weeks and tortured. And their torturers were financed by Fidel Castro. I learned from these friends about the human cost when Castro has money."

You have to admire ... haha, no. No you don't.

[ HuffPo ]