The message of the day from the Romney campaign is that the president is a practitioner of "cronyism," so, therefore, Willard's still entitled to keep his tax returns secret, and he's still entitled to fib about how and when he left his job at Bain and so forth and so on.

Oh, Willard, how soon you forget those of us over whom you governed.

Again.

At the end of 2006 up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), just as you were preparing to leave the job you had actually stopped doing two years earlier, and just as you were preparing your extended stumble across the national stage, you got caught larding various local government boards with 200 friends of his from the local Republican party. One of these people was my old Wingo Square running buddy Eric Fehrnstrom, the man who personally revived sales of the Etch-A-Sketch, who found himself with a nifty gig on the Brookline Housing Authority until the Boston Globe went and harshed everyone's mellow by pointing out that this put Fehrnstrom in line for a nice little pension package,

And then there's the Salt Lake Olympics, which forced Willard into his retroactive retirement from Bain Capital, so he could finish the job of converting an international bribery scandal into a festival of old-fashioned American taxpayer-supported crony capitalism. In 2002, investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele published a piece in Sports Illustrated exposing in damning detail how, in "saving" the Olympics, Romney and his pet organizing committee kept their friends fat and happy....

Is this a great country or what? A millionaire developer wants a road built, the federal government supplies the cash to construct it. A billionaire ski-resort owner covets a choice piece of public land. No problem. The federal government arranges for him to have it. Some millionaire businessmen stand to profit nicely if the local highway network is vastly improved. Of course. The federal government provides the money. How can you get yours, you ask? Easy. Just help your hometown land the Olympics. Then, when no one's looking, persuade the federal government to pay for a good chunk of the Games, including virtually any project to which the magic word Olympics can be attached. For the past few years, while attention was focused on the Great Olympic Bribery Scandal-in which Salt Lake City boosters dispensed as much as $7 million in gifts, travel, scholarships, medical care, jobs and other goodies to IOC members (and their relatives and companions) to ensure that Utah's capital city would be chosen to host the 2002 Winter Games-private and public interests have siphoned an estimated $1.5 billion out of the U.S. Treasury, all in the name of those same Olympics.

Not that he wasn't grateful.

This is not to say that the recipients are unappreciative. Mitt Romney, SLOC's president, has acknowledged the U.S. government's contribution by saying, "We couldn't have done it without them. These are America's Games."

You're welcome. Don't mention it.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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