I am loosing track of who is being serious in this thread and what they are talking about.
So to be clear, you think that Reid accusing Romney of not paying taxes was the thing that was so stupid that it deserves mocking and you weren't being sarcastic?
FWIW, as something of a political moderate (I think both parties are driven a great deal by self interest and cynicism) I didn't think it was all that bad (assuming that I was right about what you were talking about). I thought as political attacks go it was creative and it was a double threat . On one hand, it was a parody of Romney saying he doesn't have anything to hide while he hides stuff. And on the other hand it went after a legitimate issue, wealthy people can pay very low tax rates using various legal loopholes and other less legal techniques. My wife recently read a biography of Getty and she mentioned to me that in some years he paid no income taxes.
It would have absolutely been in bad form if Obama had made the attack. Reasonably enough the president should be a little above some of the dirtier aspects of politics and this kind of thing at least moves into the gray zone of what is acceptable, but when Reid did it my general reaction was, "that's a good political ploy". At the very least, Fox News had to struggle a bit to come up with what were kind of lame responses.
I thought Slate had an interesting article on the fact that Romney hadn't released earlier tax returns. Their idea, based on no corroboration whatsoever was that Romney had money in Swiss bank accounts before the US successfully pressured the Swiss bankers to share some information about their customers with the US government. Just before the change went into effect the US government gave people with money in Swiss banks a one time get out of jail free opportunity to come clean and pay their taxes before the US government got access to the Swiss banking records for Americans. The Slate author's idea was that Romney took advantage of the get out of jail free opportunity and he would rather not admit that openly. The Slate author admitted to not having any facts to support his idea but I still thought it was some creative theorizing and it might be an example of exactly the kind of thing that Reid was looking accomplish with his ploy. So in the cynical, self serving, corrupt game that is American politics, well done Reid.
ETA: I disagreed with you because of your characterization of Reid's attack as stupid, but I did agree that it deserved parodying. If the attack by Root had not gone into birther land I think his attack would have been a reasonable way to respond to Reid's ploy. As it was, when Root's attack went into birther land it was going to look, reasonably enough, like routine whacko anti-Obama stuff which has essentially no credibility outside the narrow world of anti-Obama whackos.
