Until the Secret Service confirms and catches the thieves who claim they have presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s past tax returns, let’s just treat this story as an Agatha Christie thriller. Besides, we desperately need a break from the bombast of the past two weeks by Romney and Obama teams who have confused the daylights out of the voters by mixing truth with fiction.

Fact checking is not their forte, nor is it the media’s, especially Fox News. So, who was lying and who was telling the truth will never be known. Plain poppycock is what the voters got, heaped by spousy lovey-dovey lines “I love my husband, so vote for him,” appeals by Ann Romney and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Fiction is more satisfying, solid, substantial and supposable than truth. So, suspend your belief; pretend you’re reading Agatha Christie’s novel Who will be the President? that opens with a man called Willard Mitty. He’s running for the president of United States. The white males are pitching for him, as are the white billionaires furiously pumping billions in his election fund. Most of the dough is going into anti-Barry Hussein TV advertisements misleading the voters with lies. It’s paying off! Mitty the millionaire is slotted to defeat Barry the ‘secret Moslem.’

Only one thing stands between Mitty and the White House. His tax returns. He won’t show them to the public. But why? Is he scared his millions, some hidden in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and in Swiss banks will make him lose the November election?

The next chapter in Christie’s novel moves to Nashville, Tennessee. We see Hercule Poirot, the ace detective investigate a claim by anonymous hackers alleging that they broke into an accounting firm called PW Hoopers and stole copies of the Republican presidential nominee’s tax returns.

The firm denies the alleged heist at their office, asserting that their systems have not been compromised and that no data has been stolen. But the burglars tell a different story. They have posted a message on the internet claiming to have sent a letter to Hoopers as well as to Mitty’s political offices demanding $1 million as ransom. The Belgian-born sleuth Poirot wants to make sure that this is not a prank being played on the presidential hopeful.

So how did the thieves actually break in? They claim to have climbed to the 4th floor of Hoopers with the kind assistance of a person working in that office. Overnight they accessed Mitty’s several years of tax returns, hurriedly copied them and left.

With his cane and a magnifying glass, Poirot, the orchid-loving detective, sketches the crime scene on a paper, studying each escape route and the file servers, set up on the 4th floor of the accounting firm. Could the thieves have managed to kidnap the files as they claim? Poirot almost has the answer but the readers must wait until the last chapter still under construction by the ‘Queen of crime’ Agatha Christie.

All that the readers know at the moment is that the kidnappers are threatening to send encrypted copies of the tax returns to all the news media outlets unless Mitty coughs up $1million as ransom. “If he does not want the encrypted key released to the public to unlock these documents on September 28 of this year then he must pay the ransom.”

Will Mitty pay or won’t he pay the ransom is an answer we will have to wait for.

Enough of fiction. Let’s now move to the real world where in 50 days we will indeed know who will be the next president of the United States.

After making a grand speech at the Republic National Convention in Tampa, Florida, where Romney actually appeared ‘human,’ the guy is holed up in Vermont taking lessons on how to defeat Obama during the presidential debates in October. Mitt is a bad speaker with poor interactive skills. He’s a robot who can’t shake off his rich kid image no matter how hard he and wife Ann try to convince America that they are an ‘ordinary Joe & Jane’ couple.

Michelle Obama too went down the same road last week at the Democratic National Convention at Charlotte, North Carolina.
She told a fawning audience that the dumpster-diving Harvard student Obama’s most prized possession was a coffee table he salvaged from a rubbish dump and the worn-out shoes he wore were two sizes smaller than his size and the car he drove was fit for the junkyard, not the road. “We’ve learned that both parties like God and moms, particularly moms with humble roots… Let the fight begin,” a sarcastic Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times.

President Obama’s acceptance speech was electrifying. The bumper sticker of the Democratic Convention was: GM is still alive; Osama is dead. Obama indeed saved the auto industry from bankruptcy including a million jobs of auto workers. General Motors (GM) is today rated as number one car manufacturing company in the world with the highest sales. But while Obama and Vice President Joe Biden criticised Romney for sending jobs overseas, they failed to tell the audience that GM plans to do business with Indonesia and has already allocated some $150 million to build a production facility in West Java. The new plant is scheduled to open and begin building automobiles sometime next year.

No wonder one in three Americans staunchly believes that America is not headed in the right direction. The August dismal jobs report adding a mere 96,000 jobs is further testimony. My two cents solution: unless American business firms stop outsourcing jobs overseas or hauling in hordes of Indians and Chinese technocrats to work in the US for less salary and perks, the unemployment rate will never improve. The two-way street has to be shut down. Romney will not do it, instead he will open up more streets like this; while Obama wants to do it but his plans get a shellacking by the Republican-controlled Congress.

Last word: If Mitt Romney’s tax returns were in truth burglarised and got leaked before the elections, he’s roast! Obama will get a walkover to the White House for a second term. It wouldn’t be bad!

anjumniaz@rocketmail.com