"Four and Twenty Tax Returns Baked into a Pie"

In the ongoing high stakes "Stump the Chef" game, some missing tax returns had yet to turn up in the Romney kitchen cabinets.  Health inspector Harry Reid made a surprise visit to Chez Romney following a tip there might be vermin in the house.   At the very least some moldy food in the form of ten years worth of head chef Romney's IRS documents.

They aren't in the refrigerator or under the sink, so could they have been baked into the pie cooling on the window ledge and which the kitchen cabinet crew plans to savor themselves, not serve up to the voting public.  People are hungry for news.  They're starving for facts and he who holds the key to knowledge - i.e. Kingpin of the Kitchen Romney sneers, (reminiscent of the wonderful John Huston movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) "Taxes, taxes? I don't got to show you no stinkin' taxes."  Let them eat stone soup, or should that we stonewall stew?

As the plot unfolds, the question remains, as the little old lady asked looking under the lettuce on her fast food burger in the famous commercial: "Where's the beef?" or in this case, where are the tax returns, Mr. Romney?

Any good chef knows if you leave key ingredients out of a recipe, you'll be courting culinary disaster.  As all presidential candidates who've come before him, including Daddy George, Romney needs to dish up those returns, if he hopes to have a chance on the big cook-off in November.  It's not up to food detective Reid (as some suggest, most recently San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders), to provide the missing ingredients for the campaign stew.  His is but to sniff around the kitchen and see what's fit to eat. Locked cabinets and barred doors do not engender trust in public servants protecting the health and safety of the dining public nor in said dines themselves. 

It's no longer about whether or not he actually paid taxes for ten years, nor how much; it's now all about the secrets in the kitchen.  Is this next few weeks going to be a rerun of Kitchen Confidential on steroids?

Don't blame Harry Reid for asking the tough questions. Blame the Romney kitchen crew and the top chef himself for hiding the most basic of information from the dining and voting public.  Could it be he doesn't want the truth to come out about how little a multi-millionaire pays in taxes compared to the average American? Maybe he's afraid they'll do the math and see that the only way the rich get richer is for the poor to get poorer. And that's the crux of the Romney tax plan:  Water down the soup and make the chumps pay more for it.

As James Carville famously put it: "The only person who has seen Romney's taxes is John McCain and he took one look and picked Sarah Palin."