RICORUN DISCLAIMER — I, RETIRED SPOOK, DID NOT WRITE THIS. THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY AMAZONA WHO ASKED ME TO PUBLISH IT FOR HER.
Picking up on the theme of the Lawrence O’Donnell video posted by Cluster in the previous thread, The Huffington Post accurately reported a comment made by Tagg Romney after Tuesday’s debate:
Mitt Romney’s eldest son weighed in on the second presidential debate on Wednesday, joking that the debate’s contentious nature made him want to “take a swing” at President Obama.
During an interview with North Carolina radio host Bill LuMave, Tagg Romney said that hearing the president call his father a liar made him want to “jump out of [his] seat and … rush down to the debate stage and take a swing at him.”
He continued: “But you know you can’t do that because, well first because there’s a lot of Secret Service between you and him, but also because this is the nature of the process, they’re going to do everything they can do to try to make my dad into someone he’s not. We signed up for it. We’ve gotta kinda sit there and take our punches and then send them right back the other way.”
A young man felt defensive of his father after seeing his father called a liar on national television, and joked that his emotional response was to “take a swing at him”. This is not a story.
Yet David Sirota, a Denver Liberal, claims it is, and has done his best to make it a story. Worse, to make it story not about a man joking about an impulse, but about an entire landscape of alleged racism.
Racism? But of course.
Sirota has a radio show in Denver, Rundown, in which he and conservative Michael Brown offer points of view from both sides of the political aisle. As the spokesman for the Left, Sirota explains that this comment could not have any foundation OTHER than racism, and on the radio show Thursday (during a segment when Brown was not there to insert a touch of sanity into the proceedings) he expounded on this at great length.
I listen to the show sometimes, and have so far found Sirota to be rational and inoffensive as he has explained his Liberal perspective on many topics. But this week he not only veered wildly from this approach to political news, he devoted about half an hour to his insistence that Tagg Romney was coming from a position of what he repeatedly called “white privilege”. He lied, and he invented wild-eyed theories about what would have happened if a black man had said this about a white candidate.
The lies: That Tagg Romney had “fantasized” about doing harm to the president, and that he had said he wanted to “punch him in the face”.
He repeated the claim that the young Romney had been “fantasizing” about this horrible act of violence, implying that Romney had engaged in an ongoing fantasy and had not just spontaneously described his frustration at watching his father attacked by using a very mild metaphor of “taking a swing at” the attacker. Sirota not only repeatedly, insistently, characterized this as a desire to engage in real violence, as a desire to inflict harm on the President, but as a “fantasy” of Romney’s.
In fleeting moments of what I can only consider inadvertent honesty, he did use the word “impulse” a couple of times, but always returned to the theme of “fantasizing” about doing harm to the President.
He also claimed that Tagg Romney had elaborated that he “wanted to punch the President in the face”.
He repeatedly identified Tagg Romney as being a major spokesman for the entire Romney campaign, trying desperately to link Mitt Romney to this overwrought portrayal of seething rage and elaborate fantasies of violence against the President. It was quite shameful.
Not content to lie about what Romney said or a wholly imagined “fantasy”, Sirota spun even more wildly into typical Leftist rhetoric, expanding this comment into an elaborate explanation and condemnation of what he called “white privilege”, going on at length about his claim that this stemmed from a callous assumption that privileged whites can say anything they want to or about black people. The convoluted effort to make this a racial matter would have been funny, if it had not been such an illustration of the toxicity of the far Left and its irrational obsession with branding everything said by a conservative as coming from a well of racial hatred.
And then Sirota elaborated even more, repeatedly claiming that if Obama had a son who made this kind of comment about a white opponent, it would result in a “race war”. He was apparently quite impressed with this phrasing, as he repeated it several times.
I originally thought to just write this rant off as a Left-leaning commentary that got out of control, but Sirota mentioned that emails were already coming in, and was quite smug about generating such opposition to this outrageous statements. And then he put them in writing, in an article in Salon. So this was not just a Bidenesque blurting of poorly considered emotion. It is a true and accurate representation of the beliefs of a spokesman for the Left, one who identifies himself as such in his radio show bio, whose very presence on this show is as one giving the point of view of the Left.
I mention it because it is a sign that these bizarre distortions of fact into a stew of lies, accusations, and outright insanity are not limited to the fringes of Leftist lunacy, but are mainstream Left. Sirota has been a voice of moderate, rational, Leftist philosophy, and to see him fly so far off the rails, into such a detailed and emphatic racist temper tantrum, with such nasty accusations that spiraled from attacking Tagg Romney to trying to implicate his father and the whole campaign in the invented race-based issue to substituting an invented “fantasy” for a spontaneous comment to wild-eyed assertions of out-and-out “race wars” if the racial identities were reversed, made me realize how pervasive and deep-seated this vicious projection of so many vile characteristics is, and what a major component of Leftist philosophy it is.
Sirota never questioned his assumptions. He never once took a breath and examined what he had been saying and tried to sort out what was real from what had bubbled up from his own belief system and world view. He just freely intertwined his own bigotries with the simple comment by Tagg Romney, and created a whole scenario, in which the actual comment played such a minor role it was lost in the hate-based hysteria of claims of violent fantasies and race wars and white privilege.
I think the most toxic heritage of the last four years will be the creation of sanctioned hatred and racism. I believe that prior to the callous decision of the Left to create, nurture, encourage and incorporate claims of racial hatred and to apply this to every perception of every word and action of the political opposition, this kind of seething rage was limited to the lunatic fringes of the movement. But it is now so mainstream in the Left that it has become the default response to anything any conservative says, about pretty much anything. We, as a nation, can recover from economic disaster, and with the right leadership we can deal with threats from our enemies. But I think it may take generations to heal the wounds created by using race as a weapon to turn people against each other, to brand people as morally inferior, to spawn hatred and distrust and even violence.
I understand that the Left’s use of race in the despicable ways they do has the added advantage, in addition to that of Divide and Conquer, of providing to those who use it a short cut to the Higher Moral Ground—-by applying these vile characteristics to others, they can assume moral superiority, without actually DOING anything to justify it. But the harm done to the nation is frightening.
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I agree with Amazona. The racial divide in this country is wider than at any time in my life and it is primarily due to liberal elites white guilt and the lefts maniacal desire to use race as a club against anyone who opposes them. Obama’s election was suppose to heal that divide and instead has exacerbated it to an unhealthy and dangerous level.
Obama’s election was suppose to heal that divide and instead has exacerbated it to an unhealthy and dangerous level.
I think we may eventually discover that that was the goal all along. Think about it — what has Obama or anyone close to him done to promote racial harmony? Nothing, absolutely nothing.
I love this Ann Coulter meme. We elected Obama out of guilt, and to heal the racial divide.
It appears everyone right of center suffers from Romnesia. Bush, Paulson, TARP, Iraq, WMDs, CDOs, McCain suspending his campaign to save the economy by going on Letterman, Palin (beloved on the right, baffling to the center), millions of jobs lost – no, it was because he’s black and that will cure racism. It wasn’t the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression, it was his skin color and we all wanted to be hip by voting for it.
Yeah, everyone thought the election of a black man would send all the self-admitted proud racist neo-nazis into hiding, and the closeted ones would learn the error of their ways.
Doioioioing.
How old is Tagg, anyway? This kind of thing would be really cute if he was, like, ten.
“McCain suspending his campaign to save the economy by going on Letterman”
Tell us, creepy assclown, was obAMATEUR saving the economy by going on Letterman, the View, Jazzy, etc. etc.?????
Uh, obAMATEUR did promise to “heal” the racial divide. But sadly, all he has done, he has turned it into a canyon with GUTTER politics at its worst. Class warfare…the same.
Your “American Idol” of a pResident is a dismal failure.
It wasn’t the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression
Not even close. Unemployment got to 10.1% while inflation and interest rates remained at or near historic lows. Reagan inherited double diget UE, inflation AND interest rates.
“Reagan inherited double diget UE, inflation AND interest rates.”
Reagan turned it around in short order…..
What is obAMATEUR’s excuse????
Oh yeah, Bush, kiosks and ATMs.
Pathetic.
The impact of this radio show is impossible to understand without the audio. Sirota’s smug preening over the outraged emails, his comment that they “proved” he was “doing his job”, the repeated themes of racism, the repeated lies about what Tagg Romney said and the imaginings of what he meant, the claims of some weird “fantasies”—-it was really quite disgusting.
But the thing is, it speaks to the Liberal mindset. It is a great example of the Liberal view of conservatives, of white people, of their feverswamp wallowing in a racism that exists only in their own minds—it is an education in LibSpeak.
And it turns my stomach.
While our liberal Democrats have tended towards increasing kookiness for decades, I think the real break down came in the run up to the 2004 campaign – Bush was riding high with the war going (apparently) well and the economy rapidly improving and so as the merest cynical ploy to gin up an issue the Democrats turned to the then moribund anti-war movement. Signified by Michael Moore, the Democrats invited the furthest fringe of the left to the political table – and there they remain to this day.
They invited in people who seriously asserted that the levees in New Orleans were dynamited; people who seriously asserted that Bush was planning a fascist coup rather than allow an election; people who seriously asserted that GOPers tampered with ballots in Ohio to ensure a Bush win. Conspiracy theory nuts – but the Democrats welcomed them and their adhesion did give a lot of “oomph” which would otherwise have been lacking in 2004. They failed in their goal, but the problem was that the kooks remained in the Democrat party.
Fast forward to 2008 and these hard leftists were strong in the Democrat nominating process and thus ensured that Obama would be nominated – because he was the only major Democrat not tainted with having voted for Bush’s “illegal” war in Iraq (I wrote about this in September of 2007 when I predicted – while he was at 5% or so in polling – that Obama would be the 2008 Democrat nominee). Remember how we all saw that picture of an Obama campaign office with the Che poster prominently displayed? Do you really think that in Clinton’s Democrat party that sort of thing would have been allowed? Heck, no! Liberals, indeed – certainly willing to take support from the sort of people who would put up a Che poster, but not the sort of people dumb enough to put junior-league Leninists on the payroll! That was the writing on the wall for all to see – Obama became the 2008 nominee not because he was a good candidate but because he was the nominee of the hard left who had taken over the Democrat party in the wake of the 2004 campaign (the fact that we recently found out about a former SDSer being employed in the DNC is just more icing on the leftist cake). It was the purest luck for Obama – and the left – that Obama got nominated when the GOP was at a nadir of political respectability and then went on to nominate a weak opponent for Obama.
The reason we’ve seen more overt leftism over the past four years – typified by the accusations of racism whenever a GOPer opens his mouth – is because the hard left is in control over there. And one thing I’ve learned about the hard left is that they actually believe that we GOPers are racist to the core. That our whole purpose of life (when not trying to steal money from the poor, that is) is to keep the non-whites down (wasn’t it Michael Moore who once opined that GOPers wake up in the morning wondering which minority to screw over that day?). They honestly believe that the reason we’re opposed to Obama is because he’s black. In their world, the divisiveness of 2012 is because of us – if we would just stop opposing Obama then things would be fine because the only reason we oppose him is because we can’t stand the fact of a black man in the White House. Honestly, there’s no other reason they can think of – Obama’s policies being scripted by leftism and thus clearly for the benefit of all, there can be nothing but blind, unreasoning racial hatred to explain our opposition.
Now, if we defeat Obama, what happens? One thing you can be sure won’t happen is a voluntary surrender of power by the left in the Democrat power. They’ll just say that Obama lost because racist Amerika destroyed him (a side line will be that Obama wasn’t leftist enough – that if he had just been a bit more hard core leftist, it would have been able to overcome the racists). They’ll then be looking in 2016 for someone of impeccable leftist credentials to run against Romney – and the person they pick might well be Obama (after all, after four years of racist, capitalist Romney ruining the nation, our leftists will figure we’re ready to apologize and re-elect the man who could have saved us if we hadn’t been so racist in 2012). It certainly won’t be Hillary – though she will try in 2016. The only thing we can hope for is that the non-leftist Democrats split off and form a third party, eventually to replace the Democrats outside of the leftist bastions such as San Francisco and Santa Monica.
I agree that if Obama loses, the media narrative will be that America is racist, and holds black men to a higher standard. They will say that Obama was a successful President, more so than most white presidents, but a black president has to be über successful to win reelection in such a racist country. The headlines are already written and speaking of that, did you hear Romney’s line at the Alfred E Smith dinner re: the media? It was priceless – he said that the mornings headlines re: the dinner were already written – Obama embraced by Catholics, Romney dines with rich people.
Mark, you are correct when you say that many on the Left truly believe that “…the only reason we oppose him is because we can’t stand the fact of a black man in the White House. ..” But to some degree this is our fault, because we have done such a terrible job of explaining our political ideology.
Oh, we are all over moral ideology, social issues ideology, but we never manage to get into the core ideology of the Right—its conviction that the Constitution of the United States is the best—and only legal—way to govern the country.
When we focus on gay “marriage” we give the Left a perfect opportunity to claim that we are anti-gay. When we talk about abortion, important as it is, we allow the Left to shift the focus of THEIR attacks to claims of wanting to inhibit the rights of women.
What would be the impact of a focus on the very form our government should take? I don’t see a very effective response to a focus on the Constitution.
I think if we want to undermine a Leftist counterattack in 2016 we not only have to allow the nation’s economy to come back—-because that is the role of government, to ALLOW people to run its economy, not to run it for them—–we also have to spend 4 years in an intensive education program, explaining the Constitution, explaining the 10th Amendment, explaining how and why the country is supposed to be governed from the bottom up, not the top down, and using its new economic vitality to illustrate how well this works.
If people don’t understand the basic structure of government, and make political decisions based on a preference for one over the other, instead of on emotion-based “issues” then we will always have an uphill battle, because the Left excels at emotional manipulation.
We know they have perfected this tactic because they, and we, know they would never win if they were to run on their true ideology. Yet we let them get away with it by never challenging that ideology. We timidly skirt around it, with words the Left can ridicule, such as “Marxist” and “socialist”, but we never explain them, we never put them in context, and we never compare the core ideologies to each other and ask people to make a choice based on that instead of on whether Cousin Annie can call her partner her “wife”.
You want civic education taught to all Americans? Join the club. Karl Rove has declined the invitation by stating “As people do better, they start voting like Republicans – unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.”
Awww, the freakzo thinks he gots himself a new ‘gotcha’. Ain’t he just the cutest thing EVER, all focused on Identity Politics and personal smearing and all?
But let’s take a look at the entire quote, shall we? And as we do, we will clearly see the intent of the Bush administration—because this quote comes from the beginning of the first Bush administration, evidently found in a frantic search for something else to slam Bush about——and clearly shows an agenda of promoting education.
Now I have heard Rove talk about a lot of things, for a lot of years, and one of the main themes of the Right has always been the need for better education. It is the Right which has always had the best educated in terms of understanding American history, the Constitution, current political issues, etc., as opposed to vast knowledge about the problems of transgendered mentally challenged Eskimos or the advantages of Marxism, bastions of the “intellectual” Left. The Left seems to be divided between the overly educated academic types and the uneducated. So, knowing Rove’s style as I do, I can feel confident that he was being sarcastic in that comment, jibing at the “intellectual” component of the radical Left.
But here—let’s take a look.
“A little while after I met with Kent Conrad, I spoke on the phone with Karl Rove, who has been the chief political strategist for Bush’s entire career in elected office. Obviously, Rove was thinking past the tax cut, to a whole first-year program for Bush that could strengthen the Republican Party considerably. “Take a look at our agenda,” Rove said. “Education. This year, we picked up seven points in the suburbs over ’96. Our education plan allows us to make further gains in the suburbs. It will also allow us to make gains with Hispanics and African-Americans. The tax cuts will make the economy grow. As people do better, they start voting like Republicans — unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing. Look at the course of the campaign. There’s a lot of data. If you give people the choice between a tax cut and more government services, they’ll choose the tax cut. The more Bush talked about an across-the-board cut, the more support for it grew. People do have a desire for basic services–schools, helping the less fortunate — but not for unrestricted government.”
But you just keep scrabbling around, freakzo, looking for some more smears you can try to associate with Bush. I’m sure the Left appreciates your efforts to illustrate the accuracy of the Romney gibe that Obama advised Pope Benedict to blame every problem on John Paul II. People like you have to be desperate to find something, anything, to distract from the miserable failure that IS the Obama regime.
freakzo, you and your ilk here on the blog prove my contention that the Left, at least, is abysmally ignorant of even the basics of “civic education”. Hell, you guys can’t even tell us the underlying political ideology of the Left. You can’t even DEFINE “political ideology”, wandering off into the weeds about, you know, like, fairness, and, you know, like “management” of uteri and vaginas.
Even while you are smirking over your Rove comment, you manage to duck any reference to actual, you know, like, “civic education”.
But here is a great opportunity for you to show off YOUR vast “civic education” and explain your own political ideology and why you find it such a great fit with that of the radical Left.
Or are you ready to admit that you really HAVE no political ideology, other than a compulsion to simply attack all that you identify as being on the Right?
As if I need any more proof of the ignorance and idiocy of the Left base, the TV is on in the other room and just in the last half hour they have run the same ad several times, claiming that when Mitt Romney said he wanted to end FEDERAL funding to Planned Parenthood he really said he wanted to end Planned Parenthood, period.
They seem pretty confident that their female base will believe this utterly stupid, outrageous, bizarre lie.
They probably also believe that under Romney, employers will be working to DENY ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE FOR WOMEN !!!!!!!! (Still haven’t had that one explained, as it sounds pretty complicated. I am envisioning a Spy vs Spy character following every woman around and leaping out of the bushes to intercept any woman who dares—DARES, I TELL YOU!!!!—–to try to ACCESS HEALTH CARE!!!!
But hey, who can know the IQ of its base better than the minders who put together this kind of pap? They must be aiming at the Hofstra students who declared that Obama HAD won that debate—hours before it happened—–or their intellectual/educational equivalent.