Blogs For Victory

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.