Andrew Sullivan: "Romney wants to take credit for all the successes at Bain while he was CEO, but also refuses to take responsibility for the actions of his own company"

We are witnessing the failures of America's elites...which, in my opinion, applies to Democrats and Republican business and political leaders.  Read this:

Romney, Republicans And Responsibility by Andrew Sullivan 

It has always seemed to me that a core principle of Anglo-American conservatism has always been personal responsibility. We are all human and we all screw up all the time - but taking responsibility for both good and bad decisions is a prerequisite for democratic accountability in a free society. George W Bush famously summarized the GOP's current view of such accountability and responsibility by saying that in eight years, he had only one accountability moment - and that was the 2004 election. The authorization of a war on empirically false grounds, the resort to illegal torture, the tens of thousands of civilian deaths from the Iraq occupation: none of this was or is Bush's responsibility, according to the GOP. Bush even made a joke about the WMDs at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.  

This flight from responsibility is also, alas, baked deep in today's one percent, and marks them as very different from their wealthy predecessors in the American elite for much of the last century. The bankers whose recklessness precipitated our current recession see no reason to take responsibility for the misery their gambling and greed bestowed on so many others. Indeed, they shamelessly lobby to remove any constraints on their reckless ways, continue to gamble with glee (see JP Morgan), and continue to hand themselves bonuses and salaries out of any proportion to the benefits they bring to society as a whole.  

And the financial elite is mirrored by the political elite. Those directly involved with or openly supportive of war crimes under Bush and Cheney - far from being held accountable - were given op-ed columns at the Washington Post and sinecures at AEI. A vice-president who openly boasted of torturing prisoners just held a fundraiser for the current nominee. No one in the cabinet responsible for Abu Ghraib resigned. The Republicans refuse to take any responsibility for the massive debt we  accumulated since 2000 and have, indeed, tried to shift the entire responsibility onto Obama's shoulders...

Full article