George Will: Romney hiding something bad in his tax returns

George Will says on ABC's This Week that Mitt Romney is hiding something bad in his tax returns:

WILL: Look, what Mitt Romney has said is he has released, and I quote, "all that's necessary for people to understand something about my finances." Now, the something is a pregnant word. And people are going to say there's -- the cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.

Then repugican blowhard Mary Matalin joins in and says absolutely nothing other than repugican talking points. All the other people on the show have their biases, but you can tell they're also giving analysis. There's zero analysis from Matalin. It's all talking points she got from the Romney campaign. It's not clear why anyone has her on at all if she's unwilling to even give a little original thought.

MATALIN: He -- let's -- can we put some real facts on the table? Because we keep saying we -- this, that, and we don't know. We know the facts. He took a leave of absence to go run the Olympics in 1999. He never returned to Bain. He filed everything with the SEC that was absolutely by the law, letter and spirit of the law that the SEC required....

George Will responds to Matalin, as does former shrub-darth 04 chief strategist Matthew Dowd:

WILL: But, Mary, Mary, is it not what you call a "real fact" that Mitt Romney gave to the McCain campaign, when it was considering him as a running mate, 23 years of tax returns?

MATALIN: So what -- what if we -- let's say he -- he gives 23 years, we could put two decades of tax returns out. Is that going to produce two jobs? Is it going to produce anything toward a mandate, anything toward the debate about what this is about? Is the charge -- is the charge that he's hiding...

(CROSSTALK)

DOWD: Mary, you know -- you know -- you know, if -- if that was -- that if you -- I said that's truth serum in that cup, and you were advising a candidate like Mitt Romney in this instance, you would say, "We've got to get this out there." You would say, "We've got to get this out there to deal with this."

Dowd then goes on to repeat a point I made the other day - it's ironic for Romney to call Obama a liar when Romney started off his campaign by using an out-of-context quote to make it look like Obama had said a phrase that's actually attributed to John McCain:

DOWD: To me, the problem is the president is doing exactly what he needs to do because he wants to cover up on a failed record. He's doing exactly what he thinks, the ends justify the means, I'm going to attack this guy, tear him down, and that's what I need to do, because the direction of the country is bad.

But Mitt Romney -- this is like karma to me. Mitt Romney did the same exact thing that Barack Obama is doing to him. He did it to Newt Gingrich. And he -- he's saying the exact same thing that Mitt Romney is saying. It's like, you're taking my record out of context. I can't believe you're saying -- he did the same thing to Rick Santorum.

So now, all of a sudden, he's running against a -- in a general election against a very professional group of people, against a very astute politician, against a Chicago machine who's doing the same thing he did, and now he's sitting there saying, "I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe you're doing this."