Mitt Romney, Jon Stewart, and the Non-Existant War on Job Creators

Mitt Romney has a habit of falling under the bus, not only for his delightfully out of touch with regular Americans ways, but also because of the line of work he was in before getting grandfathered into politics. Mitt Romney’s perception in the public is kind of a distillation of America’s strange relationship with wealth and work and nepotism.

And in an earlier post, one of our writers suggested that pundits like Jon Stewart who criticize Mitt Romney are hypocrites — after all, Stewart hosts a blockbuster, immensely popular show on Comedy Central and brushes elbows with everyone up to the president — how can he possibly criticize someone being rich, with his fancy mansions and large paycheck?

On the Mitt Romney v. Jon Stewart debate, our post quotes a Yahoo contributor, one who engages in a common logical fallacy — the straw man attack. According to the quoted writer, Mitt Romney is rich, and Jon Stewart clearly has a problem with rich folk— unless it’s his own money!

“Romney and Stewart have prospered by pursing happiness. Romney was made happy by building up companies and providing thousands of people with jobs.”

“Stewart was made happy by mocking Romney for doing so, not perhaps realizing that if it is bad for Romney to be rich, it might be bad for him to be rich as well.”

Except… Mitt Romney did not make his fortune “providing people with jobs.” If we’re talking about Bain Capital here, Romney’s record is decidedly ‘less’ about creating jobs, and more about trimming them to save a buck before cashing out a company’s last assets and shoving it into bankruptcy.

Stewart may be wealthy — but the kind of thinking referenced in the Yahoo post is a common and very wrong one. No one is against wealthy people becoming legitimately wealthy, and no one wants to take their money. Jon Stewart is wealthy indeed, but he also uses his show nightly to campaign for better treatment of workers, fairer taxation, and more accurate media coverage of issues like… Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

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