Gov. Rick Perry, who called on Mitt Romney to cough up his tax returns when they were running against each other, stopped short Tuesday of pressing the presumptive Republican nominee to produce more records.
Perry said candidates for public office should be “as transparent as you can be with your tax returns and other aspects of your life,” but he wouldn’t directly answer whether Romney should produce more than the two tax returns he has promised to give the media.
Instead, Perry pivoted to President Obama, saying he should make his college transcripts available for public inspection.
“I certainly think it is inappropriate for the president of the United States to not [make] his college transcript and his law school transcripts public, that he should make those available,” Perry said. “I’m all about transparency.”
Pressed again to say whether that meant Romney should produce more tax records, Perry would not specifically recommend he do that as other conservatives have.
Newsflash: No one really cares very much about this. Like Gov. Perry, I’ve thought since the primaries that Romney ought to release his returns, but it’s far from a deal breaker if he doesn’t. We know far less about what Barack Obama really thinks than we know about what’s on Romney’s old tax returns, but what we do know about Obama is sufficient to find him unfit for the presidency and to fire him from it. This week, for instance, we learned why Obama does not respect business success, and that when the going gets tough, Barack Obama gets up and leaves. America doesn’t like and doesn’t respect quitters.
The Texas Tribune, which reported this story, is trying now to work with the rest of the mainstream media and turn this into a twist on Perry, who in 2010 demanded that Democrat gubernatorial challenger Bill White release his tax returns. There are differences here, though, between that race and this one. Perry has been consistently transparent for decades; White had not been. In that race demanding transparency was apples to apples. In the presidential race, if Obama had been similarly transparent then he might have case against Romney, but the fact is Obama has been a master of disguise and the mainstream media has not called him out on that at all. The media pester Romney on his taxes, and now even pester Rick Perry about Mitt Romney’s taxes, but give Obama a pass on, well, his entire life.
Nice try, Trib. But I still remember how patently unfair that publication was when a certain Democrat unleashed a whopper of a gaffe and the Trib at first failed to cover it, and then blamed it all on conservative bloggers who were covering it.
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