Barack Obama, then a U.S. senator, spoke at a 2007 ministers' conference about the LA riots, Hurricane Katrina, and improving the lot of African-American communities all over the country. Some conservatives thought he sounded "too black" or "too angry."

Click here to view “Obama’s ‘Other’ Race Speech

By Emily Theroux

“Attacking Obama for Jeremiah Wright Is So 2008.”

That was the snappy headline posted last May on Keith Boykin’s blog, Fighting Words. A Republican super PAC planned to hire an “extremely literate” pitchman, Boykin said, “to argue that Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as a ‘metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln'” when he took a stand in support of same-sex marriage. The kicker? Attack ads linking the president with his controversial former pastor.

Word leaked out, however, and the PAC announced that the scandalous plan had been scrapped.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Boykin was incensed that anyone would admit they found “literate” blacks unusual — or characterize Obama as “metrosexual.” The group  wanted to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do” in 2008, Boykin noted. “That is, they plan to lead a campaign of good old-fashioned race-baiting.”

“When asked whether Wright is off-limits in the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney said he hadn’t ‘read the papers yet,’ according to Los Angeles Times reporter Maeve Reston. Perhaps that should come as no surprise since the presumptive GOP nominee has already tried to link Obama to Wright, as he did in a radio interview with talk show host Sean Hannity in February. And though the official Wright ad campaign will never see the light of day, the racist undertone will persist through November. This is part of a dog-whistle campaign to reach out to those crazy conservatives who think Obama is a radical socialist Muslim Kenyan with no birth certificate and no right to be president.”

Willard "Mitt" Romney

A fellow BET blogger quoted GOP candidate Mitt Romney‘s famous last words on the matter: “I repudiate that effort. I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America,” Romney told the press.

Now, Mythological Mitt has repudiated something he’d insisted five months ago was beneath his stellar standards. Before embarking on a new plan of attack designed to hit Obama hard with the GOP’s perennial backstop when the going gets rough — the race card — the Romney campaign issued a preemptive statement  denying any involvement with his henchmen’s “October surprise.”

Mitt may have delegated this new hit job to right-wing media mavens, but the scheme has Willard’s Mitts all over it. He must have been cracking all kinds of stupid, robotic jokes last night, when The Drudge Report, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity teamed up to do his dirty work, by going flat-out, race-baiting “Goddamn America!” Jeremiah WRIGHT on his opponent’s unsuspecting a$$.

Drudge: ‘Curious tape’ will ‘ignite accusations of racism

Matt Drudge

Yesterday afternoon,  conservative newsbreaker Matt Drudge dribbled out Twitter-hints designed to foster a feeding frenzy on the right. “Curious tape dropping tonight. NOT from MOTHERJONES. Will cause controversy, ignite accusations of racism — in both directions!” read the first Drudge clue. “Internal debate at news network about airing tape tonight, on eve of debate… MORE” came out an hour or so later.

Andrew Kirell of Mediaite chipped away at the teased Drudge story, finding several edits of what he suspected to be the tape in question, as well as a 2007 blog post by Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times that included a transcript of Obama’s speech. The video, recorded on June 5, 2007, at the Hampton University Annual Ministers’ Conference in Virginia, had been posted online for the past five years.

Then-Senator Obama spoke eloquently and without a teleprompter, using the metaphor of “a baby born with a bullet in its arm,” to a mother who had just been shot in the stomach in Compton, to discourse about despair in the African-American community — over the L.A. riots 15 years earlier, over second-rate schools, low-paying jobs, and substandard housing. He riffed about Hurricane Katrina, black prison inmates, and college students. He cited programs that would create jobs and improve transportation and health care; about investing in minority-owned businesses and ending the Iraq War.

Obama spoke with the relaxed “urban” drawl he’s been known to use when speaking to black audiences, but what of it? The longer version of the tape featured powerful, stirring oratory, not anger, and included Obama’s shout-out to the Rev. Wright, only months before the pastor’s infamous videos appeared online. Someone going for a “dangerous,” “edgy,” backbeat failed miserably by adding cheesy boom-box bass effects to the beginning and end of the tape.

Tucker Carlson c. ’07: ‘This isn’t a dog-whistle. It’s a dog siren.’

Tucker Carlson, ABC/Getty Images

“This isn’t a dog-whistle,” intoned Tucker Carlson, who “broke” the tale of the recycled Obama tape yesterday on his website, The Daily Caller. “It’s a dog siren.”

“The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America.

“The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.”

This characterization is absurd. Calling a speech delivered by a black politician to a black audience “racially charged” seems like hyperbolic fear-mongering to me — unless, of course, Carlson is expressing that kind of aggrieved mindset prevalent in people who cry “racism” whenever a black man raises his voice.

“THE ACCENT. THE ANGER. THE ACCUSATIONS. THE SHOUT-OUT TO REV. WRIGHT, WHO IS IN THE AUDIENCE“ was emblazoned across the top of Drudge’s site when he posted “The ‘Other’ Obama Race Speech.”

Sean Hannity

“Tape of Obama pushing class warfare surfaces on debate eve,” read Hannity’s preposterous headline when he posted the video on the Fox News website last night. “STATE of the RACE,” the tape trumpeted in garish, 150-point crimson type. The mainstream media, Hannity noted, had been ignoring this Obama bombshell “for years,” yet Tucker was flogging it as an “exclusive.”  The truth was that both Fox and Tucker had debuted the tape when it first emerged in 2007.

Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich’s take on Obama was already cranked up and ready to roll. (I’ve added italics to the code words pointed out by Rachel Maddow in this extraordinarily condescending, openly racist diatribe. This guy needs to retire from public life. His rhetoric is disgusting.)

“I’m assuming there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand — whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play … basketball for awhile. I don’t watch ESPN; I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythms are. But this is a guy who is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, happens to be a partial, part-time, uh, president.  I mean, he really is like the substitute referees in the sense that he’s not a real president. He doesn’t do any of the things presidents do. He doesn’t worry about any of the things presidents do. But he has the White House; he has enormous power. He’ll go down in history as president —  and I suspect he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.”

It was good old white-boy Newt who originated the term “Food Stamp President” and hatched the brilliant plot to falsely accuse Obama of removing the work requirement from welfare — the same “lazy parasite” canard suggested by the sleazy Romney slogan “Obama isn’t working.”

What do Romney’s hate-mongering surrogates think the tape reveals about Barack Obama? Surprise! Back in 2007, he was “way more black than he seems to you now,” said Rachel Maddow. He went to black churches. He even talked black sometimes. Fancy that: He is more than a figment of Sean Hannity’s delusional imagination; he doesn’t always follow Insannity’s black-socialist-president script.

As it turned out, the October surprise flopped badly, even on the right. Noah Rothman of Mediaite pronounced it “The Obama Tape Dud” and said it only served to indict the 2008 press corps. “What do conservatives think they will accomplish in 2012 by consistently and incessantly submitting evidence which proves the press failed in their jobs in 2008? … Republicans would do well to focus on the issues of 2012, because the Democrats, the media and persuadable voters have moved on long ago.”

Quin Hillyer of The American Spectator’s Spectacle blog also offered his perspective: “(C)ertain allowances for edginess always have been (made) to black speakers before black audiences — a slight double standard, to be sure, but one that slavery and Jim Crow provide at least semi-reasonable excuses for, and one that is less damaging than actual policies (quotas, etc.) that enshrine discrimination into law.”

The MittWit’s life of unquiet desperation as the walls close in

Three months ago, Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar boasted that the Romney campaign would remain in what journalist Ben Smith dubbed “the Mittness Protection Program” by continuing to avoid vital questions about his policies or “core beliefs.” Instead, Mitt would filter his utterances through conservative conspiracy websites like Drudge and  Breitbart.com.

“When this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans receive their news. … We no longer allow the mainstream media to define the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign, is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the conservative movement.”

So how’s that Drudgy/Techie thing goin’ for ya, Mitt? Whoops! It’s almost debate time. Download a few more of those pre-programmed zingers, and do try to hide your desperation. It’s going to be a long, tetchy hour-and-a-half.

Illustration by Lance Theroux

By Emily Theroux

The decks are beginning to creak aboard the ship of fools that the GOP insists cannot be sunk. The legendary iceberg looms in the dark water dead ahead, but the captain and crew have had too much $100-bill bubbly to see disaster coming.

When the USS Mittanic put out to sea after the Republican primaries yielded a lackluster contender no one was really thrilled by, the shipbuilders who were funding the crusade to purge Barack Obama from office thought they had come up with a sure bet. Willard “Mitt” Romney wanted the presidency so badly that his fat-cat donors figured, once they had ponied up to install him in the Oval Office, he’d be happy to “dance with the ones that brung him.”

America faced a stalled economy, with Barack Obama at the helm. Everyone with a conservative blog and half a brain or less believed “Nobama” was a foreign, socialist, Muslim, job-killing tyrant who was universally hated by his “subjects.” How could they be so sure? Because Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Erick Erickson, and Rush Limbaugh told them so, and that handful of towering intellects had yet to be conclusively proven wrong.

Romney, the former “Taxachusetts” R.I.N.O., had instantly reversed every principle or ideal that he had ever claimed he held, declaring in the most withering tone he could muster that he had been “a severely conservative Republican governor.” He’d be putty in the hands of the Brothers Koch and Karl Rove, who were running the show. What could possibly go wrong?

As it turned out, just about everything.

In a recent interview, David Koch discussed wealthy donors “investing” in political candidates with the expectation of receiving some kind of return, now that the Citizens United case has made such a breach in the democratic process possible.

It had never occurred to the campaign’s high rollers that their enormous cash stash might not be enough to close the deal and actually buy the American presidency outright. (That was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as are a lot of the things I write — which I feel I need to declare, since this campaign’s have become so surreal that readers are starting to take parody and satire as accounts of actual events.*)

GOP masterminds had all the bases covered, including getting so many Republican state legislators elected in 2010 that voter ID bills have already been passed in 33 states. Their goal was to disenfranchise black, Latino, poor, and college-age voters, in case Mitt began to straggle behind the president in the polls.

They had even had the foresight to establish a movement called True the Vote, a conservative “voter vigilante” organization whose website is packed with right-wing lies. The group plans to sic one million volunteers on polling places in poor and minority neighborhoods all over the country. Their goal, in plain English: bullying Democratic voters by singling them out, challenging their identification even if the state has no law requiring photo IDs, telling voters they’re in the wrong place, or they don’t have the proper paperwork, or the election happened yesterday — whatever intimidates people enough to make them leave without making it into the voting booth.

Do what you have to do to get where you need to go; that’s Citizen Rove’s motto. Leave what your parents taught you at the door when you agree to work for totally unscrupulous people. It doesn’t matter how you play the game. Winning is everything. Failure is not an option.

If Romney can’t get there by following the rules, he’s not above winning ugly.

‘Republicans don’t fall in love; they fall in line’

Yet it still wasn’t clear that their plan would work. The GOP had put up the best candidate in the bunch, and by mid-September, the public disliked Mitt Romney so much that he was clearly losing.

Ever since the Mother Jones website linked to Mitt’s Big Bloopers Reel a week and a half ago, and all of that rot that proverbially starts at the fish’s head began to ooze out, a really big stink ensued on the far right. The religious fundies were hopping mad, praying that God would smite the listing vessel with something godawful, maybe a North Atlantic typhoon. That would fix those Beltway Republicans for the mortal sin of dredging up Romney again from the dustbin of history, brushing him off, and dressing him in mom jeans and a blue checkered shirt that he didn’t take off for the next four months.

But that’s the way it’s done in the Greed and Opulence Party, whose entitled members feel they can afford to be magnanimous. For the current campaign’s “winner,” they almost always choose the previous campaign’s loser. For some reason, the GOP put stodgy old Bob Dole up against ever-popular incumbent Bill Clinton in 1996, and sure enough, as Ann Coulter warned at the outset of the current cycle, “He lost.” They ran John McCain in 2008, eight years after he had lost the nomination to George W. Bush (who, even though his father had been president before him, happened to be the first “D.C. neophyte” that the GOP had nominated since Ronald Reagan recaptured the White House  from Jimmy Carter in 1980).

Mitt Romney embarked on his general election voyage in 2012 as the also-ran of 2008. This blueprint for failure has caused disastrous results for Republicans, yet for some reason they refuse to abandon it. The party keeps going with the “safe” moderate and then expecting him to hang a sharp right and morph into a firebrand wingnut ideologue. As hard as he tries, Mitt-bot’s demeanor and delivery are so mechanical and repellent that nobody’s buying it.

Now, the Romney/Ryan campaign is imploding before the presidential debates have even begun. The rats are deserting the ship left and right. Normally blustery N.J. Gov. Chris Christie’s allegiance to the current GOP nominee sounding iffy; he crooned Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” at the convention, and the other day he admitted to a reporter, “We had a bad week. If the election were going to be held tomorrow, that would be a problem.” Christie added that the campaign still had 42 days to catch up, but he didn’t sound that convincing.

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, who once worked for Saint Ronnie,  clambered into one of the first lifeboats, pronouncing Romney “incompetent” one day and then bumping her criticism up several notches the next day to “a rolling calamity.” Her emergence from the elephant herd handed the press a colorful metaphor for kicking off MittWit’s upcoming bus tour.

• Tim Pawlenty resigned last week, trading in his leading role in the sinking of the USS Mittanic for a cushy sinecure as a banking lobbyist.
• Obama is currently 8 points ahead in Ohio, the state that no Republican who won the national election has ever lost.
• Remember those folks at NASCAR that Mitt trashed, cruelly mocking their cheap plastic ponchos? A new Zogby poll showed that 49 percent of NASCAR fans now favor Obama, while only 42 percent would vote for Romney.

“The Romney campaign has the stink of death right now,” warned Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis, who seemed to be keeping a safe distance from the sinking clown show.

Politico satire taken seriously by pundits because this campaign is so crazy, it almost could be true

Roger Simon of Politico, inspired by the bedlam the Romney campaign has become mired in, turned the tragicomic Plight of the Right into a wickedly funny satirical riff on a quote that appeared in The New York Times. The speaker, GOP operative Craig Robinson of Iowa, had described the stinking rift that has sprouted like a dank mushroom in the ill-fated Romney/Ryan union. Here’s an excerpt:

“Paul Ryan has gone rogue. He is unleashed, unchained, off the hook.

“‘I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him,’ Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, told The New York Times on Sunday.

“Coming from a resident of Iowa, a state where people are polite even to soybeans, this was a powerful condemnation of the Republican nominee.

“Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, ‘If Stench calls, take a message’ and ‘Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.'”

I came across Simon’s piece late last night, after somebody posted it on Twitter. I clicked on the link, began to read it, and couldn’t stop laughing at the hilarious picture Simon had evoked in his Ryan parody. My first thought was that it had to be satire because it couldn’t possibly be true. Unfortunately, not everybody realized it was a joke.

• Paul Krugman of The New York Times, who apparently fell for Simon’s account of PowerPoint’s origin as “a way to euthanize cattle,” blogged about Politico’s fantastic Ryan “scoop,” calling the V.P. hopeful’s alleged tantrum “just bad behavior.” Upon learning that he had been unintentionally “scammed” by a political column that Politico didn’t label “satire,” Krugman revisited his own column and used a heavy hand with the strike-through key. One reader retorted in the comments section that Krugman was “just dumb as bricks” for falling for Simon’s spoof; another branded Krugman “a sore loser.”
•  Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC absolutely couldn’t resist the opportunity for a lengthy on-air snark-fest at Ryan and Romney’s expense.
• Tommy Christopher of Mediaite —who did, to his credit, express some trepidation about using unattributed Ryan “quotes” — apparently succumbed to how newsworthy they would be, if true. “For what it’s worth, I believe the quotes are real,” wrote Christopher, who later posted an indignant update.
• Comedy Central‘s Dennis DiClaudio called “the Stench” one of those “affectionate nicknames” that politicians (“namely,” Dubya) bestow on each other, like calling Rove “Turdblossom,” or Vladimir Putin “Pootie-Poot.” (DiClaudio attempted to save face by printing a Photoshopped picture of Paul Ryan and Peggy Noonan having finger sandwiches.)

BuzzFeed reported that conservative blogger Jammie Wearing Fools, who apparently wasn’t punked by Simon’s spoof, offered the embarrassed pundits a way out: “Satire should actually be funny,” Jammie opined.

Bloggers, of course, weren’t the only night owls online in the wee hours. The Twittersphere pounced on the story, and within three hours, the hashtag #TheStench was trending at No. 3 in the U.S.

“Over at Politico, where the story originated,” I posted on my blog-in-progress, “the attribution may be a little murkier, but ‘the dirt’ is so funny that Tweeters (who aren’t constitutionally capable of sitting on their hands when a good joke is idling) had no other choice than to just take #TheStench and run with it.

Still photo and videotape* courtesy Mother Jones

*Videotape, Part 1 ………………………………………………. *Videotape, Part 2

By Emily Theroux

“Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,  I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. … Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

— Matthew 25: 41-45, The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats

* * *

Malingerers, moochers, freeloaders … the ugly, racially charged words roll in with the wholesome manure-reek of Mitt Romney’s imagined heartland, where the bounteous harvest is in, “the 53 percent” pay their taxes, and true patriots don’t take nothin’ from nobody. Unemployed bottom-feeders who don’t want to work for a living — that’s how the “severe conservatives” Mitt emulates have characterized the “least of these,” the poor, sick, hungry, and downtrodden whom Christ taught his followers to care for.

Almost half the American populace “are dependent upon government,” Mitt tells an audience of fellow zillionaires. The objects of his derision are folks who, he asserts, “believe they are victims” or “believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing” and other perks of deliberate parasitism on the taxpayers’ dime.

If you voted for Barack Obama for president in the 2008 election, that’s how “Willard of Oz”, as Chris Matthews crowned him, perceives you.

During the months after May 17, when a videotape was surreptitiously recorded of Romney addressing a $150-a-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla., bits and pieces of it surfaced on YouTube without attracting much attention. Then James Carter IV, former President Jimmy Carter’s activist grandson, gave a copy to investigative reporter David Corn, who posted a salient snippet of it on the website of Mother Jones magazine.

Viewers were astonished to hear the GOP candidate speaking in a straightforward but glib and cynical tone of voice — a total departure from the practiced, artificial wheedle he employs on camera or the sanctimonious platitudes he dishes out at campaign rallies. You may notice that he sounds slicker (and, if possible, even more calculating and ruthless) than you previously imagined. After listening for a moment, you realize that this new, no-nonsense tone is something you’ve never heard before: the unaccustomed sound of Mitt Romney telling the truth — to people he doesn’t look down on, about people he does.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what, all right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That it’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. … And they will vote for this president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Mitt thinks his job, I repeat, is “not to worry about those people.” (Shades of Lady Ann, Rafalca the Austrian warmblood, and #YouPeople!) Willard Romney had written off 47 percent of the public — a stupendous number of people to hold in utter contempt — with the sole purpose of pandering to a handful of rich donors. The gobsmacking “tale of the tape” went viral within hours, ricocheting around cyberspace. Two days out, the one-minute video had been viewed 7.1 million times, the second-highest number of YouTube hits ever on a political story. (Katie Couric’s 2008 interview of Sarah Palin topped the list, with 24.4 million views.)

While far-right radio talkers didn’t wait for a cue to defend the standard-bearer they had once conditionally accepted, reviews of Romney’s “performance” by mainstream pols and pundits were withering:

• “A sneering plutocrat” (Jonathan Chait, New York magazine)
• “Thurston Howell Romney” (David Brooks, The New York Times)
•  “Arrogant and stupid remarks” (Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard)
• “Not big, not brave, not thoughtfully tackling the issues … An intervention is in order” (Peggy Noonan, WSJ)
• “An increasing problem with him being able to connect with voters” (Mark McKinnon, GOP strategist)
• “The worst presidential-candidate gaffe since Gerald Ford announced in 1976 that ‘there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe'” (David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter)
• “You don’t win an election by disparaging just about half of the electorate” (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, on Fox News)
• “Inaccurate, insensitive, almost callous in (his) disregard for the American people ” (Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania)
• “You trashed the very people who are your margin of success” (Chris Matthews, MSNBC)
• “A magnetic moral compass that has no true north” (Alex Wagner, MSNBC)
• “That’s not the way I view the world. … (B)eing on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in.” (Scott Brown, GOP senator from Massachusetts, who “grew up in tough circumstances”)
• “(T)he vast majority of those who rely on government are not in that situation because they want to be” (Linda McMahon, Connecticut Senate candidate)
• “We’re losing” (Jim Dyke, veteran GOP strategist)
• “This is what it looks like for the wheels to come off” (Rachel Maddow, MSNBC pundit, Rhodes scholar, national treasure)
• “Mitt Romney is not the face of Mormonism” (Dr. Gregory Prince,** Mormon historian and author)
• “I’d say Romney’s performance will help to determine most of the close Senate contests” (Larry Sabato, University of Virginia political scientist)
• “My feeling is maybe you haven’t gotten around a lot” (Barack Obama, President, USA)

Lord Willard writes off people ‘who don’t pay taxes.’ Does he?
Un-freaking-believable! Lord Willard Romney’s blowing off half the nation because of the GOP’s misleading “new orthodoxy,” popular during the Republican primary season, which suggests that 47 percent of Americans “don’t pay any taxes” or don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. The way Romney explained it to what Eddie Murphy once termed a “roomful of rich dummies,” I don’t think even Mitt knew what he meant.

The now-infamous 47 percent statistic (which Mitt mangled into his own inaccurate Obama vote percentage) actually refers to a taxpayer analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, showing that 46.4 percent of American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. “The households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and low-income families with children,” two New York Times reporters explained. “Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8 percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes, discounting the elderly.”

“Many people don’t pay income taxes because they’re so poor they don’t make enough money to be able to pay income taxes,” former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “But they pay payroll taxes, they pay state taxes, they pay excise taxes. This man apparently feels that if you’re not a part of his social class or you don’t have his economic status, that somehow you’re a parasite.”

Another reason that a larger percentage of people pay less in taxes is that Republican fiscal policies have provided tax incentives to low-income workers — including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the child tax credit, which enable low earners to offset a portion of their income tax obligation with exemptions similar to the mortgage interest and property tax deductions that benefit middle-class workers.

Erick Erickson, above, of the right-wing blog RedState, angered by the Occupy Wall Street movement, started the "We Are the 53%" Tumblr to provide a site where conservatives could express their views.

Since Obama’s inauguration, however, GOP legislators have become so resentful that they’ve turned against their own policies, including the EITC, originally passed by Gerald Ford and later expanded by Ronald Reagan. This deduction was intended to help “lift people out of poverty” and provide them with an incentive to keep working at tough jobs that paid very little. But when President Obama’s stimulus bill and other tax legislation expanded EITC benefits and extended relief from the “marriage penalty,” Tea Partiers viewed it as providing lazy “moochers” with unfair advantages. (The right-wing “We Are the 53 Percent” movement was founded to express such sentiments, after the Occupy Wall Street movement caught on nationwide.

A final question, after slogging through the videotape: Isn’t Mitt himself one of the 47 percent he dismisses, by his own definition? He doesn’t have a job. (Translation from Republican: He’s a lazy POS.) He pays neither income tax nor payroll tax. (In other words, he’s the paragon of “victimology.”) And because he refuses to release his tax returns, 100 percent of Americans remain in the dark about whether he really pays the measly 15 percent capital gains tax on his investment “income” (already the biggest scam in the annals of tax avoidance — and yet the wannabe Veepster, Paul Ryan, wants to eliminate this loophole altogether!).

As it turns out, CNN Money published a story about this very subject after the “Mittastrophe” tape went viral. “The Tax Policy Center estimates that 4,000 households with incomes over $1 million ended up with zero federal income tax liability in 2011,” Jeanne Sahadi wrote. “Another 14,000 made between $500,000 and $1 million.” Mitt Romney admitted to his Boca Raton audience that he is one of them.

Release the tax returns!!!

Colbert: ‘He dropped the R bomb: redistribution. Which is just fancy talk for a black guy’s coming for your stuff’
The Romney campaign has apparently done some tape-sleuthing of its own, digging up another golden oldie: a grainy recording of then-Illinois State Senator Obama, speaking at a 1998 Loyola University conference on Chicago city government. Obama had the misfortune to have uttered the word “redistribution,” albeit in a completely different context from that of the current GOP “Romneyhood” feeding frenzy over the designs of the poor on rich people’s’ “rightful” lucre.

It didn’t matter that Obama was really talking about “fostering marketplace competition” and business innovation, not rampaging serfs pillaging the fortunes of their feudal lords. Mitt’s team pounced anyway, diced and spliced the tape, and excerpted the sliver they wanted from the part might have resonated with the great unwashed 47 percent. Bingo! You stay classy, Romney-O!)

Will the scum-suckers, leeches, and other assorted parasites that Lord Romney so viciously disdained, when surrounded by his “peerage,” buy the new, improved “Moderate Mitt” who came out last night as the candidate of “the 100 percent”? No, if you ask me. Will the wingnut blowhards breaketh wind? Too early to call.

I say let’s Occupy Romneyworld and throw him to the crocodiles circling the sorry carcass of his candidacy in the moat below the castle walls.

* * *

* Click the following links to view Part 1  and Part 2 of the videotape, which was recorded surreptitiously at a May 17 Romney campaign fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Videotape courtesy Mother Jones.

** “When the news of Mitt Romney’s Florida video broke on Monday evening, I was incensed — but not for its political implications,” wrote Dr. Gregory Prince, Mormon historian and author who knew the candidate personally. “His arrogant and out-of-hand dismissal of half the population of this country struck me at a visceral level, for it sullied the religion that he and I share — the religion for which five generations of my ancestry have lived and sacrificed, the religion whose official mantra is ‘to take care of the poor and needy throughout the world.’ My first impulse was to rent an airplane towing a banner: ‘Mitt Romney is Not the Face of Mormonism!'”

In a future column, I’ll discuss the people who actually do receive government checks – and ask why in hell Mitt Romney thinks he has any right to look down his nose at them.

Mitt Romney defends his criticism of President Obama, after four diplomats were killed during protests in Benghazi, Libya. Photo by Charles Dharapak/AP.

By Emily Theroux
With only eight weeks to go before the 2012 election, tensions are ramping up in Rightwingistan. Mitt Romney, sadly, got no bounce from his disastrous convention, while President Obama soared with a 12-point spike in the polls among independents. And even more humiliating for Mitt, Fox News released the poll results.

By September 11th, conservatives were wringing their hands. Nothing they could think of seemed to be selling this bill of goods to any undecided working-class voters who weren’t dyed-in-the-wool racists. (One white Virginian, who voted for Bush twice and firmly believes Obama is a Muslim, told a reporter that she wouldn’t vote for Romney because he didn’t know “everyday people” like her and would only help the wealthy. Surprisingly, Obama will get her vote. “At least he wasn’t brought up filthy rich,” she observed.)

Pastor Terry Jones

Rush Limbaugh was desperately goading Mitt to “get tough” with Obama, and Mitt’s pal Bibi Netanyahu was saber-rattling about Iran, suspiciously close to the November election. A show of “force” was needed on the world stage to bring independent stragglers into the GOP fold. When Florida’s infamous, Koran-burning pastor, Terry Jones, proclaimed this year’s September 11 anniversary “International Judge Muhammad Day,” and talked up the YouTube debut of a crude, anti-Muslim video, Romney saw his chance.

When the video appeared in an Arabic translation, outraged Muslims tuned in to horrifying, “cartoonish” depictions of their beloved Prophet Muhammad as “a child of uncertain parentage, a buffoon, a womanizer, a homosexual, a child molester, and a greedy, bloodthirsty thug,” wrote David D. Kirkpatrick  in The New York Times.

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens

News of the blasphemy spread quickly online.  Furious protestors ran riot in  Libya, attacking the American consulate and killing four American diplomats, including the widely respected U.S. ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. It was the first time since 1979 that such a high-ranking diplomat had been murdered in the line of duty. In Egypt, protestors scaled the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and burned the American flag.

Mighty Mitt, hearing that a statement condemning “religious incitement” had been issued by the embassy in Cairo,  rushed in to seize the day. Before Stevens’ body had even been identified or his family notified, Mitt  issued an ill-advised proclamation of his own (despite the fact that he had vowed to refrain from politicking on the September 11 anniversary):

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Never mind that the embassy’s statement was issued six hours before the protests began. Obama apologized for America again! was Mitt’s take on it, and he was sticking to it. Obama loves Muslims. (Good line; reinforces the canard that Obama is a Muslim.) How dare “the Obama regime” target the “good-guy” American filmmakers instead of the evil Muslim protestors?

Then Mitt just sat back and waited for the fireworks to explode.

Faced with mounting criticism, Romney dug in
This morning, after the negative reviews of his rash reaction started flooding in, Mitt stepped to the microphone again and, instead of making amends, shocked the political establishment by doubling down:

“When our grounds are being attacked and being breached, the first response should be outrage Apology for America’s values will never be the right course. We express immediately when we feel that the president and his administration have done something which is inconsistent with the principles of America.”

“A terrible course for America is to stand in apology for American values,” Mitt later told a reporter. (What does that even mean? Whose values – his? The entire substance of his attack on Obama was based on a deliberate, compound falsehood. The embassy didn’t issue an apology; their statement was an attempt to stave off the violence they saw coming well before the attacks; and Obama had no direct involvement in what they said.)

Did Mitt Romney jump the gun in issuing statements “that were laced with politics,” asked NBC’s Peter Alexander?

“I don’t think we ever hesitate when we see something which is a violation of our principles,” replied a testy but self-righteous Mitt.

Romney clearly deplores “bad form” more than he appreciates good substance.

Mitt’s foreign-policy moves ‘craven,’ amateurish
The far right performed as expected. The following snarky Fox tweet was par for the course:

Somebody get some bandages and salve for Obama’s press corps — Romney just delivered a thumping.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) September 12, 2012

Michelle Malkin, Breitbart.com’s John Nolte, and Dan Calabrese, writing for CainTV, piled on.

But moderate and even conservative members of the mainstream press — and members of the GOP establishment — took a much dimmer view of the way the candidate handled this contretemps.

• “They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up,’ said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an ‘utter disaster’ and a ‘Lehman moment’ — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.” — Ben Smith, BuzzFeed Politics
• “Likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign” — Mark Halperin, Time magazine
• Romney hasn’t been “doing himself any favors. Sometimes, when really bad things happen, hot things happen — cool words, or no words is the way to go” — Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter
• “Irresponsible”; “a bad mistake” — Chuck Todd, MSNBC
• Romney’s attack “does not stand up to simple chronology” — Jake Tapper, ABC
• Romney’s actions “ham-handed” and “inaccurate” — Ron Fournier, National Journal
• “The Romney campaign’s politicization of the embassy attacks is even worse than I expected” — Blake Hounshell, Foreign Policy
• “Who told Mr. Romney to issue a political broadside against the commander-in-chief the day after a U.S. ambassador was murdered?”  — Joe Scarborough, MSNBC
• “Tolerance of a religion that represents 1/7th of the world’s population is a very wise policy” — former ambassador to NATO  R. Nicholas Burns

“I can’t remember in foreign policy, anything like this,” said Democratic strategist Bob Schrum, who served as a consultant to numerous Democratic campaigns. “This guy seems to have an instinct for saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in politics. He came across as craven and incompetent on national security. This is a disaster; this guy’s just not ready for prime time.”

As progressive radio host Joe Madison said, “This man is stuck on stupid.”

Is Mitt Romney even qualified to be Commander-in-Chief?
My question: Should someone with Romney’s personality flaws even be under consideration for the sensitive job of leading the most challenging foreign policy operation in the world? He lacks both experience and any respectable source of  advice. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t even have what my father, a Dallas native, used to call “kitty brains” — in this case, the instincts to choose a running mate who knows his way around the world. Romney has no habit of critical thinking, no facility for introspection, and no empathy for other people — and there’s not a diplomatic bone in his body. To my mind, he’s not at all “presidential.” All he’s got going for him is a boatload of money — and good hair.

Foreign policy involves a great deal more than braying chauvinistically about “American values,” shooting big guns, and deciding where and when to “put boots on the ground,” as the Bush/Cheney debacle should have taught the people who don’t understand how critical it is that they not vote for a redo of eight years of  sheer folly.

Someone said today that this was Mitt Romney’s three A.M. phone call. Thank God he didn’t have his finger on the nuclear trigger, or Benghazi might have been reduced to radioactive rubble last night.

By Emily Theroux

“Romney isn’t using birthers and bigotry against Obama. It just looks that way,” wrote Will Saletan of Slate in “Pin the Tale on the Honky,” his send-up of the Mittstorm-of-the-Week: the deplorable birther “joke” that Willard told last Friday during a Michigan campaign stop.

“No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised,”  Mitt snarked, just before Twitter went wild with writers furiously typing “#futureMittjokes.”

RNC propagandist-in-chief Reince Priebus has the unenviable job of following in Mitt’s footsteps to scrape up whatever fresh heap of elephant dung the candidate deposits on the campaign trail each time he rolls out a new crock of “strategery.”

“Have we really gotten to the point where we can’t have any levity at all in politics?” Reince wheedled, in defense of the indefensible, on CNN’s State of the Union.

His shaky premise didn’t hold up to minimal scrutiny. Mitt’s descent into the cesspool of birtherism was a calculated effort to turn the page on Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” imbroglio before it engulfed the GOP ticket. How better to put out a conflagration about women’s reproductive rights than to change the subject to race, the third rail of American politics?

Asked by Candy Crowley during the same program whether he thought Romney’s birther comment was “code” for “appealing to the white vote,” Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland replied, “Look at the number of Republicans that have signed bills that make it harder to vote. When you have a party that … makes totally false ads up saying the president is trying to undo welfare reform, I think you’re going to see a lot of … coded messages from the Romney-Ryan campaign that it (are) not in keeping with an America that is … becoming more diverse.”

Priebus tried again the next day on Morning Joe to shrug off Romney’s deliberate dog whistle to white Obama haters — targeted by an opportunistic pol who’s stooped to humoring bigots in order to reach a new strategic goal. In order to win in November, Romney must now capture at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure that will not only be extremely difficult to attain, but which will only snag Mitt “a slim national majority” if Obama isn’t able to improve on his 80 percent share of the 2008 minority vote.

‘Tweety’ eats Reince’s Wheaties (on somebody else’s show)
When one of Joe Scarborough’s panel members, Chris “Tweety” Matthews, artlessly chomped Reince’s Wheaties over Romney’s shameless racial pander (camouflaged though it was as a lighthearted comedic “Mitt Moment”), nobody there was laughing. Joe, Mika, Tom Brokaw, and the gang were clearly anxious as hell over how Tweety’s outburst might look to viewers and critics. They kept trying to “shush” the garrulous Hardball host or, failing that, to succeed at talking louder than his rant.

Funny that the crowd in Michigan last Friday didn’t laugh, either, as Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC pointed out. “They cheered,” he observed, as if Mitt had made an important policy pronouncement. They applauded the new knowledge that Romney was willing to go there, to be on record as not merely the Republican who was running for president but the white man who was running to win back the White House for white voters.

Priebus muttered, “Garbage,” under his breath at the end of the cable segment — to which Matthews countered, “It’s your garbage.” A headline for the right-wing site Townhall.com’s story about the on-air tiff, however, read, “Chris Matthews Loses It, Calls Reince Priebus Garbage.” Neither combatant had characterized the other person as “garbage,” but only what he had said.

You can bet that the headline will go viral in the Nutbag-o-sphere, especially since blogger Katie Pavlich’s “story” consists of one paragraph referring indignantly to what she believed to be unwarranted criticism of “Mitt Romney’s joke about a birth certificate.”

How low will Mitt go to attain his 61 percent goal?
Unfortunately, Mitt will find no easy path to cobbling together a national majority, after burning almost every bridge once open to him among black, Latino, and women voters. That, of course, all went up in smoke when he talked trash to the NAACP, excoriated the DREAM Act, and paid lip service to everything from passing a “fetal personhood” bill to shutting down Planned Parenthood. Now, Mitt needs to woo and win three out of every five white voters, and he’s not polling anywhere near as well as Obama does (at nearly 60 percent) among the very “college-educated plus” white women who feel the most threatened by the Republican “war on women.”

What Romney needs, therefore, is the stereotypical Republican: the white, older, working-class male seething with racial resentment, whom Mitt believes he can rely on to vote against his own economic interests rather than reelect the hated “Obummer” —

• despite the Romney/Ryan plan to raise his taxes so they can even further reduce the taxes of people so rich and greedy, they’ll croak before they’ve even touched their principal, even as he dies a virtual pauper;
• despite their plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system that will start out costing him $6,300 more a year for health care than he pays now, and escalate in each successive year he’s still alive;
• despite  their plan to turn Medicaid into a block-grant program , so that when his wife needs nursing home care and he can’t afford long-term care insurance, he has no way to pay for it.

Everybody knows that the “MittWit” has become so desperate to break away from President Obama in the polls that the only pathway to the presidency he can envision is appealing to the “basest, racist” instincts of the lowest common denominator. White male voters may not be wild about Mitt Romney, but they hate Barack Obama so much more than they love anything — even America — that they’re willing to vote for literally anybody else.

Hordes of  ‘zombie voters’ prepare to descend on polls
If the simple fact that Mitt Romney’s face is as white as a KKK bedsheet doesn’t win over his target voters, he can always fall back on the kooky pop psychology of the Great Voter Fraud Hoax of 2012. This theory is held by purveyors of the myth that hordes of unregistered impostors are prepared to show up at polling places and “impersonate” registered voters if Americans fail to take drastic measures to stop them. These imaginary “vote-scammers” — sketchily described as urban blacks signed up fraudulently during voter-registration drives conducted by federally funded agencies, or “illegal aliens” who purloin dead people’s Social Security numbers — are so widely feared by the far right because they “tend to vote for Democrats.”

The infamous ACORN case, which led to 22 convictions in seven states after temporary workers registered ineligible or fictitious voters, involved cases of registration fraud, not impersonation fraud. “Mickey Mouse has been registered hundreds of times but Mickey has never turned up on Election Day to vote,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of political science and election law expert.

Yet Republican alarmists insist that, as GOP presidential candidate John McCain said during a 2008 debate, fraudulent registrations collected by ACORN were “one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”  (The Congressional Research Service “found no instances” of anyone who was “allegedly registered to vote improperly “by ACORN actually “attempting to vote at the polls.”

Even though voters are less likely to be victimized by “voter fraud” than they are to report sighting a UFO, the GOP embarked in 2011 on a nationwide effort to “shut down” this virtually nonexistent phenomenon. (News21, a national investigative reporting project, revealed earlier this month that only 10 instances of voter-impersonation fraud have occurred nationwide since 2000 — a period when 146 million people were registered to vote. The infinitesimal amount of in-person voter fraud that actually occurred equaled one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.)

Nevertheless, 34 states since 2011 have proposed or passed laws requiring that voters show state-approved photo ID cards at the polls. In other states, early voting days and extended voting hours have been curtailed — including Ohio, where Republican Secretary of State John Husted attempted to prohibit early voting in Democratic-majority counties while encouraging it in Republican-majority counties. Progressive pundits soon shamed him into abandoning his shamelessly partisan plan. In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott even tried to purge “non-residents” from the state’s voter rolls, until an analysis of a submitted list of 2,700 names revealed that 87 percent of the people on the list were minorities.

If Republicans can’t persuade more angry white men to turn out for their lackluster candidate, the Mittster still has one more ace up his sleeve. Anticipating a dearth of minority and female voters, Republicans recruited what they claim will be one million “True the Vote” poll-watchers. Should any straggling minority Dems make it through the gauntlet of GOP speed bumps and onto the threshold of the voting booth, this volunteer goon squad has promised to kick in, kick butt, and even Romney’s troubling odds.

GOP Convention attendee gets ugly with CNN employee
Just as the 2012 Republican National Convention’s roster of evening speeches was getting under way, former MSNBC anchor David Shuster tweeted: “GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African-American CNN camerawoman + saying ‘This is how we feed animals.’ ”

Needless to say, this atrocious racial slur is not terribly surprising, given the venue, the occasion, and the decidedly “hostile environment” in which this professional journalist was required to work. It is, however, horrifying, degrading, and barbarous. This person must have felt emboldened by some sort of group camouflage to publicly target another human being that way, surrounded by people he imagined would harbor as much racial animus as he did.*

At least they looked as if they did. Out of 4,411 GOP delegates and alternates attending the 2012 convention, only 46 of them (a paltry 2 percent) are black, according to two Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters who collaborated on a story about the party’s struggle with diversity. By contrast, they noted, African-Americans comprise 26 percent of the 4,000-plus delegates slated to attend the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

I don’t care how many Nikki Haleys, Ted Cruzes, Artur Davises, and Mia Loves the GOP hustles onto that convention stage for the sake of appearances. All I could see on my TV screen was a vast, monolithic ocean of white privilege, flecked with clusters of jingoistic balloons.

* Update, 8-30-12: Yesterday, the racist peanut assault incident at the GOP convention was clarified by numerous new press accounts. Two “older than middle-aged white men” rather than one, of just the sort I described above,  collaborated on tormenting the CNN camerawoman. A number of pundits criticized CNN for apparently “hushing up” the incident because the channel has recently embarked on a campaign to appear the least biased of the three major cable news networks.

Just before the two white goons pelted Patricia Carroll with peanuts and called her a zoo animal, a Puerto Rican delegate included in the convention’s program, as part of the party’s effort to put on a false show of  “highlighting diversity,” was shouted down by the crowd, with chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, after beginning her remarks in Spanish.

By Emily Theroux

Democrats are calling “no exemptions for rape victims” the “Akin Plank” of the 2012 Republican Party platform — no matter how peevishly Mitt Romney demands that rape cases remain exempt from the GOP’s customary call for a constitutional ban on abortions.

In the irony to beat all ironies, “Governor Ultrasound” — Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, who wanted to be vice-president so badly that he dropped the “mandate” from the ultrasound bill that had made his nickname a household word — ended up chairing the GOP’s platform committee. Having flubbed his shot at national office, McDonnell re-upped the anti-exemption plank during the same week that GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin made the rape issue a bigger headache for Romney’s chosen veep candidate than it probably ever would have been for McDonnell.

Todd Akin/AP

Akin, the Senate wannabe, opened a copious can of worms this week on the topic that never fails to trip up Republican candidates, primarily because they can’t stop bringing it up. The resulting abortion flap has entangled GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and brought the Republican “war on women” roaring back to life.

The buzz about Missouri Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill was that she really wanted to run against Todd Akin, so she ponied up for GOP primary ads calling Akin “too conservative.” After winning the primary, Akin spoke two bewildering words during a St. Louis TV interview that could help McCaskill and the Democratic Party hang on to their Senate majority: “legitimate rape.”

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors,” Akin said, that pregnancy resulting from rape is “really rare. If it’s a ‘legitimate’ rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

A puzzled America heaved a collective sigh and chorused: WTF?

‘Real women’ (i.e., decent ones) ‘ don’t get pregnant from rape’

Paul Ryan

Things only got worse when Akin tried to explain, to the dozens of reporters who subsequently besieged him, what in God’s name he was talking about. Aiming for specificity, he fell back on religious-right claptrap from legislation he had co-sponsored in January 2011 with numerous House members, including Paul Ryan — H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion” bill, designed to severely restrict government funding for abortions covered by the rape and incest exemptions provided by the 1976 Hyde Amendment,  a semi-truce between abortion rights supporters and pro-life forces that has defined rape and incest for the past 36 years.

By redefining rape  as “forcible rape” and incest as “incest “with a minor”, GOP culture warriors could exclude from taxpayer-funded coverage all abortions of pregnancies resulting from:

• Statutory rape (sex with underaged partners, whether forced or “willing”);
• Coerced rape (any rape that occurs without the victim’s consent or against her will, whether the rapist is a date, an acquaintance, a stranger met in a bar, or an ex-husband or ex-partner);
• Rape of a woman with limited mental capacity or mental instability;
• Rape of an unconscious woman or one impaired by drugs or alcohol;
• Incest with anyone over 18 years old.

Akin’s notion that female physiology prevents  “forcible” (i.e., “legitimate”) rape from resulting in pregnancy came from a 1972 article written by Dr. Fred Mecklenburg, then a medical school professor. Ever since Mecklenburg argued that a traumatized rape victim “will not ovulate even if she is ‘scheduled’ to,” anti-abortion activists have based their argument that no rape exceptions to abortion bans are necessary on Mecklenburg’s theories, which are partly based on horrific experiments conducted at Nazi death camps.

I gathered that Akin (who, incredibly, sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology) wasn’t speaking entirely for himself and didn’t mean “okay” when he said “legitimate.” What he did mean, however, was equally offensive and a classic example of circular reasoning. Women who claim they were impregnated during rape weren’t really raped, the theory goes, because it’s nearly impossible for a woman to get pregnant during “forcible” rape — the only kind of unwanted sexual assault that ever befalls virtuous women wearing proper, unprovocative attire.

If your “forcible” attacker isn’t holding a knife to your throat, and you really resist him by issuing unholy screams, kicking him in the “man-parts,” or resorting to strategic eye-gouging (things a woman who wasn’t “asking for it” would always do), then some mysterious bodily mechanism dispensing spermicidal “secretions” kicks in, and voila! — you don’t get knocked up!

Terry O'Neill of NOW

Therefore, as Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, summarized the theory’s flawless logic, if a woman does get pregnant, then by definition, “she cannot have been raped.” (This lunacy is even more disheartening when you factor in the National Women’s Law Center’s grim statistics: At least 32,000 American women per year are impregnated by their rapists (very likely a lowball number, since an estimated 54 percent of rapes aren’t reported .)

What conservative politicians don’t appear to know about human anatomy is staggering. The “forcible rape” canard is junk-science propaganda devised by anti-abortion radicals and partisan quacks like Dr. John Willke (once president of the National Right to Life Committee), who were enlisted to boost the religious right’s agenda. Willke, who has written several books about this theory and is considered something of a “guru” to the pro-life movement, is another of Akin’s unnamed sources of medical expertise. During his last presidential run in 2008, Mitt courted and won Willke’s endorsement.

Akin’s pro-life demagoguery is part of a coordinated attempt to “redefine” rape, incest, threats to a pregnant woman’s life, the inception of human life, contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and similar issues over which the GOP’s evangelical Christian wing continually pressures the party to slide rightward. Akin’s “House-mate,” fellow culture warrior Paul Ryan, with whom the Missouri Tea Partier has co-sponsored dozens of anti-abortion bills, is up to his ears in this anti-women crusade – and Romney is trying to keep women voters from finding out about it.

‘Bruises don’t define rape; the lack of consent does’
House Republicans, as ever consumed with controlling women’s bodies instead of creating jobs, proposed their failed bill in order to keep women they perceived as rape-victim “posers” (my term, not theirs) from trying to trick Medicaid into paying for “non-exemptible” abortions. The Old Boys’ Club of conservative white men who control Congress believe that women who claim to have “gotten pregnant from rape” really engaged in something that ardent pro-lifers privately term “consensual rape.”

H.R. 3’s sponsors were cagey enough to refrain from putting that explosive terminology in the bill, but the language of “forcible rape” proved so horrific to women’s rights advocates and the public that activist groups MoveOn.org and EMILY’s List started an online petition campaign to pressure the House to remove it. “Bruises and broken bones do not define rape,” the petition stated. “A lack of consent does.” Republicans had to delete the offending definition entirely. (The propagandists had been saying it for so long, they had no idea how bizarre and scary it would sound to normal people.)

Not all rapes may technically be “forcible” — but do pro-lifers really believe they shouldn’t be classified as rape? Would they want their teenaged daughters to bear the children of adult predators — or of their own grandfathers, brothers, or uncles — which happens entirely too often, in families of all social classes? A national study found that the majority of rape-related pregnancy cases “occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often-related perpetrator.” One-half of all pregnancies in under-aged girls are caused by adult men. That sounds frighteningly “forcible” to me.

These caveats are “distinctions without a difference” in the convoluted world view of Ryan, Akin, et. al., who believe that all abortions should be criminalized. The only exception that Ryan says he makes is for emergency abortions performed solely to save the life of the mother — even though he voted for H.R. 358  (called the “Let Women Die Act” by women’s rights groups), which would permit hospitals to refuse to perform emergency abortion procedures on women who would die without them.

‘Legitimate Rape-gate’ exposes Ryan’s radical social agenda

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney desperately wanted the “GOP war on women” trope to evaporate. Indeed, without the constant media attention to abortion and birth control, the gap in women voters’ approval between Romney and Obama had shrunk to only 15 points — before “Legitimate Rape-gate” propelled the issue onto the front burner again.

Establishment Republicans jumped all over Akin, calling his statement “dumb” because it exposed their backroom culture-war machinations and Paul Ryan’s involvement in them. Desperately hoping to isolate the Romney/Ryan ticket from “AkinPain,” the party blamed it all on the poor sucker whose comments had gone viral. Karl Rove unceremoniously yanked every cent of expected Crossroads GPS funding from the campaign coffers of the party scapegoat. GOP poobahs, from Mitch McConnell to Scott Brown to Kelly Ayotte, called for Akin to abandon his Senate run. But a defiant Akin skipped out on the official deadline for quitting the election, vowing to soldier on alone.

The “Double-R” Republicans at the top of the ticket were also quick to throw Akin’s candidacy under the bus. “Indefensible!” chortled Tweedle-Rom, flanked by Tweedle-Ry, during a local TV appearance. Mealy-Mouthed Mitt did all the pandering so Forcible-Rape Ryan wouldn’t have to publicly contradict his own orthodoxy.

“A Romney/Ryan administration wouldn’t oppose abortion in instances of rape,” Mitt wheedled, madly spinning an issue that, by the following day, had become a Mitt-averse plank of the Republican Party platform. The entire country knew that Mitt was “at odds” with his own party’s national platform.

Throughout Mitt’s sanctimonious denunciation — as if Akin were alone in his insensitivity to American women — a sheepish Veepster gazed gratefully at his personal “white knight,” the only man on earth who could prevent a hostile takeover of Ryan by his own past.

My husband, Lance, and I watched as Mitt, like the perennially apologetic father of Dennis the Menace, groveled to half of the electorate over Little Paulie’s wayward baseball. Lance put words in Mitt’s mouth:

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Wilson. My son will pay for the broken window.”

Union members demonstrated against Mitt Romney's vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, in Las Vegas. (Photo: BuzzFeed)

By Emily Theroux

On Twitter, Rupert Murdoch called Mitt Romney’s V.P. pick an “almost perfect choice,” and a Fox News fanboy dubbed him “the rock star of American politics.”

So why does Witless Mitt appear to have a classic case of buyer’s remorse?

Wayward Willard apparently made the most important decision of his entire presidential campaign in full panic mode. His press secretary, Andrea Saul, had just committed the cardinal sin: forgetting to lie about “Romneycare.” During a Fox News broadcast, Saul was asked about a pro-Obama super-PAC ad in which a laid-off steelworker said that, after his former plant was shut down by Romney’s Bain Capital and he lost his company-sponsored health insurance plan, his uninsured wife later took ill and died. Observing that, if the family had lived in Massachusetts, they would have been covered by Romney’s universal health care law (a forbidden subject in MittWorld), Saul effectively implied that “Obamacare” was a pretty good deal for America.

Erick Erickson

A Full Fringe Freakout ensued. Erick Erickson of Redstate.com sent out The Tweet of Doom: “OMG. This might just be the moment Mitt Romney lost the election. Wow.” Laura Ingraham informed her TRN radio audience that, although she “might be the skunk at the picnic,” she had to say it: “Romney’s losing.” Rush Limbaugh mercilessly castigated Saul on Clear Channel. And Ann Coulter imploded on Hannity, demanding Saul’s head on a platter by the following morning. (As of press time, Saul still had her job.)

Mitt had already grown desperate to change the subject from relentless questions about his unreleased tax returns. Seeking immediate surcease, the Much-Maligned Mittster discovered all possible means of egress were marked “No Exit.” Terrified of spending all eternity with two or more raving partisans in Sartre’s cramped version of hell, Mitt jumped at his first chance to get back in the wingnuts’ good graces. Harry Reid, he could deal with, but being on the outs with El Rushbo & Co. was no freaking Pee-Wee boxing match.

The Mittbot clicked into autocorrect. Salvaging his doomed campaign became paramount; careful deliberation gave way to frenetic  forward motion. He had to do Something Big — and very distracting. Spurning the advice of seasoned pros with far better political instincts than his own, the one-term, faux-conservative governor flashed his only wild card, two weeks before the GOP convention was slated to begin in Tampa.

Whose budget plan — Ryan’s? Of course not — Romney’s!

Paul Ryan

The presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee, Mitt announced, was Paul Ryan, 42,  the wonkish seven-term Wisconsin congressman of “Young Guns” renown (along with Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy). Ryan, an extreme social and fiscal conservative who serves as chairman of the House Budget Committee, has championed the obliteration of women’s reproductive rights and gay civil rights. He favors uncompromising, hard-right fiscal policy, devotes countless hours to manic P90X fitness workouts, and secretly worships at the bizarre altar of the fanatical ideologue Ayn Rand.

A post on Erickson’s blog gave Mitt props for picking Ryan — and also let him wriggle off the hook for Saul’s unforced error: “Contrary to some people’s opinions, Romney has run a stellar campaign. He can’t help it if Eric Fehrnstrom and Andrea Saul have had some brain-dead moments …well, maybe he could. There is no such thing as the perfect campaign.”

But almost immediately, mainstream reporters began clamoring to sort out how Ryan’s signal political achievement — his 2010 “Road Map for America’s Future,” a radical budget plan that would convert Medicare into a voucher system — would affect the campaign. That led to edgy, defensive bravado on Mitt’s part (Paul who? Who said anything about Ryan’s plan? Hey, I’m the candidate here. My plan’s not exactly chopped liver, ya know. )

Then why appoint Paul Ryan V.P.? they queried. This perfectly reasonable question visibly stunned Romney. His heretofore choreographed campaign began unraveling. His own budget plan remained vague and sketchy like the rest of his policies, but the Ryan plan was something the press — and unfortunately, the public — could sink their teeth into.

Mitt the Whiner

Once again, the Romney campaign backed away from focusing on the economy (his only imaginable path to victory) and started flailing away at Democrats on the stump with an ever-shifting drumbeat of lies and innuendos: Obama wants to keep soldiers from voting. Obama’s going to take the ‘work’ out of welfare reform. Biden is a racist. (Why? He said an unregulated Wall Street would put us “in chains.” Chains = slavery, no matter the context. He used the word “y’all,” so he must have been talking about race. Or something.) Resign, Biden! (Sez Sarah Palin.) Obama’s campaign is based on division and anger and hatred. (Dog-whistle translation: Obama is a scary, angry black man. Be afraid. Be very afraid.) Obama is being mean to me. Obama and Axelrod, go back to Chicago so ‘us decent Americans’ can take our country back!

(Romney himself once said, “There’s no whining in politics.” It’s available on videotape for anyone to see. So why is this man still whining, when it makes him look like such an insufferable ass?)

When the #MittHitsTheFan, GOP insiders remember to duck

Several days after Romney’s announcement, it emerged that, after publicly praising his veep pick, some three dozen GOP strategists and operatives  met individually with Politico reporters to express serious reservations about Ryan’s potential effect on Romney’s candidacy as well as Senate and House contests. “Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington,” Politico’s resulting scoop revealed. “Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.”

Mark McKinnon

“(T)he most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election,” the Politico article, co-written by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Martin, stated. Some even think the Ryan pick is “a disaster for the GOP” and might cost Republicans the Senate if voters latch onto “MediScare” again. “Very not helpful down ballot — very,” a top Republican consultant told Politico.

Why on earth would Mitt choose a candidate who’s going to tar down-ticket Republicans with the same “class warfare” brush — the “Medicare menace” that enabled a Democrat to win an upstate New York district that had voted Republican since before the Civil War? The risk-averse Romney should have refrained from prodding the dry tinder of districts whose GOP representatives are backing as far away from Ryan as possible, before a spark of doubt among an aging populace bursts into a conflagration.

Meanwhile, wrote a Daily Kos blogger, “The Florida papers are destroying Paul Ryan” — in a state that Romney desperately needed to win. ” So much so that a distraught and panicked Village (a term used by progressive bloggers to denote the mainstream media) believes ‘Mitt Romney is in big, big trouble’ for selecting the man who wants to pull the plug on Grandma.”

The only GOP strategist brave enough to speak to Politico for attribution, former Bush senior adviser Mark McKinnon, called Mitt’s decision “a very bold choice”  that meant “Romney-Ryan can run on principles and provide some real direction and vision for the Republican Party.” Then McKinnon added his single caveat:  “And probably lose. Maybe big.”

Ryan’s list of negatives continues to mount:

• “Willard’s Choice” has doubled the number of rich white men atop the GOP ticket. (Mitt could have picked Pawlenty or Portman — two boring white men — but that would scarcely have budged the Etch a Sketch.)
• Because Ryan proposed eliminating the capital gains tax and Romney’s income is derived almost entirely from investments, Romney would pay virtually no taxes under Ryan’s plan. (Way to pick a winner, Mitt!)
• In the 14 years since Ryan left Wisconsin for Washington, only two of his many proposed bills have ever been passed. One renamed a post office; nobody remembers the other one.
• Romney’s ratings haven’t received the customary “bounce” from his veep announcement.
• #MittTheTwit didn’t rack up any  points bad-mouthing Palestinians in Israel. Only six percent of American Jews answer “Israel” when asked what most influences their presidential vote, says Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast — who adds that Romney (the perennial outsider who never has a clue) probably lost the remaining Jewish vote by choosing Ryan. (The economy, health care, a positive view of government spending, and fear of the Christian right top the list. And get this, Mitt: “Almost 80 percent of American Jews think it’s fine for a woman to have an abortion for any reason.” Giving birth control to teens ranks right up there, too — and support for school prayer is a definite minus. Sorry, Willard — you’d be a lot more popular if you were still governor of Massachusetts!)
• According to the Gallup poll and reason.com, “a clear majority, 58 percent, of Americans” have never heard of Paul Ryan. Snooki, Kim Kardashian, or Donald Trump would have been more readily recognized by the typical American voter. (And maybe Chris Christie, if he keeps insulting people on a regular basis. He might even get his own reality show.)

Union demonstrators protest Ryan’s Vegas star turn

Out on the campaign trail, hecklers interrupted Ryan’s debut campaign appearance at the Iowa State Fair, where the veep candidate showed his snarky side while dodging reporters’ questions. “We’ll play ‘Stump the Running Mate’ later,” he snapped at an NPR reporter. “I’m just going to enjoy this fair right now.”

The following night, the man of the hour attended a GOP fundraiser at billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. The event, however, attracted more than big bucks. Outside, several hundred union protesters filled the plaza, according to Alternet. Protestors carried signs reading  “Romney/Ryan Road to Ruin,” “Paul Ryan Hustling for the 1%,” and “This is What Democracy Looks Like!”

John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, had come to Vegas for his union’s annual convention, BuzzFeed reported. “Romney Hood, Ryan Hood, not in our neighborhood,” Gage chanted.

The GOP strategists may not see eye-to-eye with the 99 percenters, but they are definitely worried about the added angst of a Ryan candidacy. “Everybody loves Paul Ryan. Everybody supported the Ryan plan,” one party insider told Politico in D.C. “But nobody thinks Ryan should be the tip of the spear.”

By Emily Theroux

It’s been a wild fortnight, as the Brits would say, in America’s homegrown “killing fields.”

Two shooting rampages have bookended the nightmarishly brief span of a mere two weeks, leaving the national psyche reeling from a surfeit of firearms carnage. On Sunday morning, the cable news channels were firmly focused on Mitt Romney’s propaganda prizefight with former boxer Harry Reid over whether the GOP candidate had paid any taxes during the past decade.

Meanwhile, at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a neo-Nazi white supremacist named Wade Michael Page allegedly opened fire on a dozen worshipers, killing half of them before being shot in the stomach by police and “finishing himself off” with a self-inflicted shot to the head. Amardeep Kaleka, the son of the temple’s slain leader, Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, later said Page appeared to be deliberately picking off male members of the congregation who wore their uncut hair wrapped in turbans, in accordance with Sikh religious practice.

The mainstream press sat up that afternoon and took notice, however briefly — which, with the exception of CNN, appeared to be just long enough to ascertain whether any white people had been killed in Wisconsin. Here’s how I imagine the chit-chat in the afternoon news meetings went down: “Sikhs, you say? A 500-year-old monotheistic religion with 30 million members worldwide, approximately 500,000 of whom live in the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, those strange lefties who keep track of racist hate groups. It says right here: ‘Sikhs are not Muslims.’ Bet Wade Michael Page thought they were. So what are we looking at? Brown-skinned ‘other’ victims; tattooed skinhead member of the white-supremacist Hammerskins; disgraced ex-soldier; punk-rock musician “hate band” member; and drunken loser of a shooter who is already ‘history’ himself. Well, we all know what happened there. No pretty young white girls killed or kidnapped. Nothing to see here. Bummer — toss it to the bloggers!”

Riddhi Shah, who practices a related Indian religion known as Jainism, wrote an opinion piece in The Huffington Post asking why the American media appeared to care less about this attack than the one that had stunned the nation two weeks earlier in Colorado. The Week, a roundup of online news and opinion, offered four possible reasons:

1. Sikhs are being treated as second-class victims.
2. The relative randomness of the Aurora shooting is scarier.
3. The Oak Creek shooting wasn’t as dramatic.
4. It’s just media fatigue.

My vote, I’m afraid, remains largely with Numero Uno — not because the mainstream media are racist, but because I truly believe they peg their coverage primarily to readership and ratings. Round-the-clock coverage had already been designated to the Olympics; did TV viewers really want gymnastics superseded by wall-to-wall cable broadcasting devoted to members of an obscure religion that most Americans — including, very likely, their killer — confused with Muslims?

Unlike the cases of Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes, and even Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, the Sikh temple shooting by Wade Michael Page is reportedly being investigated by the FBI as a domestic terror incident. (Fox News, by the way, wasn’t at all pleased that the Hassan shooting case was classified as a “work-related” incident — and they’re not too keen on the shooting of non-white Sikhs warranting the domestic terror designation they expected for Hassan. The difference is that, while Page may have actually committed a hate crime targeting members of a specific ethnic and religious group, Hassan shot  co-workers of no particular race, creed, or nationality.)

Jared Lee Loughner sorry he ‘failed’ to kill Gabby Giffords

Two days after the Sikh temple tragedy, Arizona mass murderer Loughner — who killed six people and seriously wounded then-Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — resurfaced to plead guilty to his crime.

During the tense weeks after Loughner’s arrest, pols and pundits alike buzzed with speculation about whether the shooting rampage had a political motive. The gunman appeared to have targeted a Democratic congresswoman who had barely won reelection in 2010 in a blazing red state. At issue was the fact that 2008 GOP veep candidate Sarah Palin had included Giffords among 20 “vulnerable” Democrats whose districts Palin believed had a good chance of falling to their Tea Party opponents. Palin’s infamous “Don’t Retreat; Reload!” map featured what resembled a gun sight hovering over each “targeted” district.

As it turned out, however, Jared Lee Loughner was a schizophrenic who was probably too preoccupied with listening to the cacophony of incoherent voices inside his head to have been paying much attention to the rantings of wingnut radio haters.

All Loughner had to reveal this week was how sorry he was that he had “failed,” as he had in most of his past endeavors, in his mission of killing Gabby Giffords. (Loughner also admitted that he likes the menial jobs he is assigned in prison, because even he can succeed at them.)

Gov. Rick Scott vows to defend Florida’s  ‘Docs vs. Glocks’ law

Somewhere along the short and winding road from Aurora, Colorado, to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Florida’s trigger-happy governor, “Sheriff Rick” Scott, stepped out into the public square, six-shooters blazing, for yet another “Second Amendment remedies” showdown: a solemn oath to appeal Florida’s controversial “Docs vs. Glocks” law, which makes it a crime for doctors to ask patients if they own guns.

“The NRA’s gun for hire” (as Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones’ national security reporter, tagged him), Florida firearms lobbyist Marion Hammer told The Tampa Tribune, “Patients don’t like being interrogated about whether or not they own guns when they take their child with a sore throat to a pediatrician, nor do they like being interrogated in an emergency room when their Little Leaguer broke his leg sliding into first base.”

“First, do no harm” is rapidly being replaced by “Shoot first; ask (no) questions later” in the clinic and urgent-care waiting rooms of America. While you’re filling out the standard physicians’ questionnaire about past illnesses and unhealthy habits (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and fast food dripping in trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup), doesn’t it stand to reason that your doctor might also want to know about “risk factors” unrelated to stuff you consume — such as whether you sleep with a loaded 9mm handgun under your pillow? Or how about locking up that unsecured Uzi before it occurs to your 5-year-old to play “show and tell” with his little neighborhood friends?

Until a federal judge tossed the 2011 Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act out of court on the grounds that it violated doctors’ First Amendment rights, this bogus bill was capable of costing inquisitive physicians their medical licenses and a $10,000 fine, according to Weinstein. Since the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in June, NRA supporters now fear that the feds could “coerce the names and habits of gun owners out of doctors’ medical records,” as one Florida gun-rights advocate told a local newspaper.

Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger of North Miami Beach, one of a group of physicians who successfully sued the state over the law, considers the governor’s quest dangerously quixotic.  Scott has already spent more than $880,000 in taxpayer funds, fighting largely unsuccessful court battles over conservative causes, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “My fear is the state will appeal and keeping wasting money to fight windmills,” Wollschlaeger told a McClatchy Newspapers reporter last month. “This is an ideologically driven, politically motivated vendetta by the NRA that has to stop.”

Motormouth Mitt confuses ‘Sikh’ with ‘sheik’ at Iowa fund-fest

It couldn’t have been more ludicrous if Mitt Romney had attempted the tried-and-true tongue-twister “the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” at his recent Iowa fundraiser. Mitt made more moolah than any candidate’s ever pulled in at a single cash-bash in Iowa history — almost $2 million. (Looks like he’ll just have to undergo a news cycle’s worth of media humiliation to get his karma out of hock.)

Philip Rucker of The Washington Post took up the challenge of Mitt mockery, writing that, after getting the tricky articulation right Tuesday morning, Mitt muffed his lines at the Iowa fundraiser, where “he instead talked about the ‘sheik temple’ and the ‘sheik people’. Sheik is an Arabic honorific, whereas Sikh is a religion with roots in South Asia.”

Without a videotape, Mitt could just as easily have been talking about the  “chic people” — just doing a little bit of “framing” for his well-heeled audience. The outcome of this increasingly surreal election, after all, depends on how Mitt “sheiks” the dice.

Ann Romney/Photo illustration by Samuel Wynn Warde

By Emily Theroux

Across the digital divide that polarizes online political adversaries into two camps — “libtards” and “wingnuts” — the Leftie cyber-rabble prowled the #Interweb, brandishing “twitchforks” and calling for Marie “Ann”-toinette’s head. The #TwitterRumble went down shortly after Ann Romney called all those pinkos “you people” on national TV.

On Twitter, clashing hashtags trended ever higher — among them, #MittHatesThisHashtag (because, e.g., “he can’t make it stop asking for his tax returns”) and #YouDidn’tBuildThat, a gag line favored heavily by @Reince, @GOP, and @NRCC, the last of which tweeted this zinger: “We didn’t build this tweet. Somebody else made that happen.” (No one said conservatives couldn’t ever be clever — as long as you remember to count out #Wittless Mitt, whose brain has remained “severely scrambled” ever since Eric Fehrnstrom ran corrupted Al Green files from iTunes during Mitt’s last #Etch-a-Sketch erasure.)

I haven’t found a similar hashtag yet for Willard’s imperious wife — although #YouPeople think of everything, even #FreeStuff ! Here’s a good one — Dogs Against Romney @Grrr Romney: BREAKING: Dogs across America have volunteered to help Mitt Romney find his tax returns (photo). http://pic.twitter.com/jCKNeIMH #YouPeople aren’t #Anglo-Saxon.

Back to Lady Ann, who lost her patience in a very public forum over yet another request that #The Mittholder release more tax returns. At first, Ann played along when Good Morning America‘s Robin Roberts grilled her about money (which is so tacky!). The couple’s’ philanthropic donations, she conceded, consist of  a modest 10 percent standard tithe to their church (chump change for the fabulously wealthy.) “Do you think that is the kind of person that is trying to hide things, or do things? No,” Ann asserted, as if someone who “gave back” so bounteously couldn’t possibly ponder a little #BarelyLegal tax avoidance, if not white-collar shenanigans, to make back his investment in the hereafter.

What Ann Romney said next dripped entitlement

Then Roberts pried just a tad too long, and Ann lost it.  “We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and … how we live our life,” she snapped.

The Cybertubes lit up like a Roman candle over what virtually everyone heard her say. Like Ross Perot 20 years earlier, Ann Romney had apparently had the execrable taste to utter the words “you people” (the subject of a longtime movie meme, “What do you mean, ‘You People’?) — and even worse, she said it to an African-American TV anchor. (Whether her intended target was “you media people” or “you class warmongers” became grist for the late-night irony mill.)

Mrs. Romney stumbled a little over the tactless taunt, almost choking back the “you” part, but I, for one — along with Joan Walsh of Salon.com, several bloggers, and countless anonymous comment posters — definitely heard the “ooh” sound after the “y–.”

Even with the “you” left out, her statement dripped entitlement. She sounded snarky, put-upon, rude, and arrogant when saying her husband had disclosed quite enough, and nobody was getting a single page more.  As of the latest count, at least 20 prominent conservatives and a National Review editorial begged to differ. All of them called for the very arrogant Romneys to release their tax returns for multiple years. “There’s no whining in politics,” said Republican strategist John Weaver. “Stop demanding an apology; release your tax returns.”

The cardinal rule of blog threads: ‘Never feed the trolls’

One extremely persistent “fib-flogger” spent the weekend haunting the Salon comments section, repeatedly posting  some variation on the following theme:  “Pardon me? This article is based on Joan Walsh’s claim that Ann Romney used the term ‘you people’ during an interview. ABC, the network that actually did the interview, reviewed the tape, and it’s (sic) verdict: ‘Our ruling after reviewing the original audio is that she did not include the you.’ And The New Yorker agrees. Joan Walsh was wrong. Joan Walsh should apologize. See how simple that is?”

I really did try to refrain from posting a reply, but it was a losing battle. I ended up storming the rhetorical Bastille with a rant that I’m hoping might have pleased my late father, a professor of symbolic logic and the philosophy of science:

I see how simple it is, and that’s the problem. Your argument is fallacious.

The flaw in your reasoning is that you continue to assert that ABC’s decree about what Ann Romney said was a matter of fact, not self-serving opinion, and that Joan Walsh was therefore wrong — even though ABC had neither the objectivity nor the omnipotence to make that stubborn little word, however badly it was enunciated, vanish into the ether.

Your implication that because the interview was hosted by ABC, their “verdict” must be correct, represents a “false attribution to a biased source.” Tacking on another media outlet’s opinion offers evidence that you are additionally making an “appeal to authority.” (If a big TV conglomerate and a glossy magazine say so, they must know better than we mere mortals do. That would make them the final arbiters of empirical truth — which is complete nonsense.) Opinions are like ***holes; everybody has one.

(FYI: Each time you repeat this post, you include, “And The New Yorker agrees.” It wasn’t The New Yorker; it was New York magazine. Please, before copying and pasting yet again, correct your template.)

 

No hiding Mama Romney’s ‘Leona Helmsley’ snobbery

Ann Romney’s attitude came across loud and clear, whether she said “you people” or, as New York magazine suggested, “(stumble) people” — which reminds me of Rick Santorum’s pathetic attempt to convince his critics that he really said “blah” people, not “black people,” the last time Republicans tried to backtrack when one of their anointed “misspoke.” (This Old English term has, since the Watergate era, been appropriated by politicians caught making demonstrably false statements they soon live to regret — not because they didn’t mean whatever weasel words they used, but because all those people who are now howling in indignation about such “untruths”  might actually have voted for these idiots, had they simply kept their lying mouths shut).

Mitt Romney is running for president, not Holy Roman Emperor; he has no “divine right” to unilaterally change the conventional rules about what information voters are entitled to see — at least not if he wants to win. If the Romneys have nothing to hide, then why have they remained so adamant about concealing their financial records from voters in every election since Mitt’s failed 1994 attempt to take down Teddy Kennedy?

Sorry to have to break it to you, Princess Ann, but if your husband wants to be president of all of the people, “how you live your life” is probably going to be more of an open book than a permanently sealed ledger of potentially dodgy financial dealings, stashed in the offshore bank vault where you both deposited what was left of your moral compass so many moons ago.

Crikey! Romney adviser makes racial ‘gaffe’ in London

This just in from across the pond: The Atlantic Wire, ThinkProgress, and Slate have reported that an unidentified Romney foreign policy adviser made an astonishing observation about his boss to Britain’s Daily Telegraph: “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that ‘the special relationship’ is special. The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.” So Mitt’s “special” — and frankly, #WeAreGobsmacked, as they say in the Old Dart.

The Telegraph warned readers that the adviser’s statement “may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity,” as this obvious diplomatic neophyte suggested that “Mr. Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr. Obama, whose father was from Africa.”

The Romney campaign’s reaction to The Telegraph’s story was categorical denial. “It’s not true,” declared Romney’s press secretary, Andrea Saul, in an email to CBSNews.com. “If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of Gov. Romney or anyone inside the campaign.”

As you might have expected, Saul “did not comment on what specifically was not true” — or whatever became of that hapless policy advisor, who must have come down with the equine epizootic from flying over in cargo with Ann Romney’s dancing horse. Hysterical at the thought of Rafalca having to tangle with Edward Gal, the gay dressage champion, the poor sucker didn’t know what he was saying. (Can’t say I’ve seen him around the Olympic stables lately, either.)

And the rest, comrades, is revisionist history!

One intolerant cretin who spoke his mind in the comments section of The Atlantic Wire story actually had the cojones to inquire:  “Does the writer have no clue?  Romney’s adviser was speaking of the long historic ties between the U.S. and the U.K. which Obama has downgraded. … What is racist is denying the fact that the U.S. was settled primarily by English followed by other Europeans who remain the overwhelming majority.” (I wouldn’t be so sure about that; 2040 and the demise of “majority-white ‘Amercia’ ” is just around the corner, if we can make it past 2012 without a second Civil War.)

Of course, Genius-Boy just couldn’t resist topping off his #ReverseRacist shout-out with: “The multiculturalists may want to change this fact by flooding these countries with Third World immigrants but that doesn’t change history.”

“You know what’s really clueless?” I asked him (rhetorically, of course, as I would hate to run into “his kind” some night in a dark alley). “Denying the fact that President Obama is also ‘part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage.’ The president is a 13th-generation direct descendant from genuine Mayflower Pilgrims, as Anglo-Saxon as someone with your prejudices might ever feel comfortable meeting — including his maternal ancestor, Deacon John Dunham of the Plymouth Bay Colony.

“Can Mitt Romney say that? Can you?”

By Emily Theroux

When aggrieved conservatives — those harboring “white resentment” over perceived preferential treatment of minorities — denounce African-Americans as “racists,” they are generally not referring to any actual assertions of “anti-white” sentiment by their targets. The predominantly older group of white Republicans who hate Barack Obama’s race, while insisting they only hate his policies, are, not surprisingly, the same folks who rail about affirmative action and government handouts. Having grown weary of being branded racists,  they’ve resolved, as blogger Imani Gandy of “Angry Black Lady Chronicles” explains in exasperation, “to define racism as ‘including race in the consideration of anything’ — and therefore that means all liberals are racists.  ‘We win,'” they jeer. ‘What are you going to do about it?'”

Joe Williams

Just dare to mention the words “white people” in passing, and the right’s favorite bullies will track you down with hysterical rhetoric designed to sabotage your career by mounting a coordinated campaign of zero-sum character assassination. The white rage complex can annihilate black pundits with words alone, as former Politico reporter Joe Williams recently learned the hard way.

What Williams calls “the Right-Wing Noise Machine” will not stand down, in fact, if anyone on the left brings up this demographic, not without unleashing the full force of their collective virtual artillery — a week-long barrage of hate tweets, blog bombs, and unmanned drone texts.

‘Politico didn’t hesitate to cave to right-wing pressure’

Ann Romney

Breitbart.com, The Daily Caller, and FishbowlDC.com tag-teamed Joe Williams’ “white folks” quote — distorting what he said about presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney being “comfortable around people like him” into Romney being “uncomfortable around black people.” To further muddy the waters, the bloggers produced a detailed study of the reporter’s Twitter feed, in which he made questionable (supposedly private) remarks about his employer and retweeted a snarky penis gag a friend made after Romney’s wife, Ann, joked about her husband’s “stiff” demeanor: “I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out.” The bloggers, of course, the ones who could demagogue in their sleep, said Williams had written the tweet.

After the wingnut blogosphere succeeded in making a fine fricassee of Joe Williams’ professional credibility, Politico suspended him almost without blinking. “Politico didn’t hesitate to give in to right-wing pressure and call into question this man’s stellar journalistic career,” observed Nida Khan at The Huffington Post.

Eliot Spitzer

Over the past few weeks, Williams has begun appearing almost nightly on the Current TV cable show of a fellow “outcast,” former N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer. After the New Unzipped Mitt’s controversial speech before the NAACP convention, where black leaders lustily booed the candidate’s testy “Obamacare” slurs, Mitt jetted off to a Montana fundraiser to boast about the reaction he had gone there to provoke. “If they want more stuff from the government,” he told his upscale audience (emphasis mine), “tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff. But don’t forget, nothing is really free.”

“Politico’s Joe Williams was fired for saying that Romney couldn’t relate to black people. If he’d said that tonight, he might still be employed,”Andrew Sullivan summed up in a post titled “Can I Have My Job Back Now?”

‘Mittmobile’ detours into murky ‘foreign’ terrain

Rush Limbaugh

Believe it if you dare, but Mythological Mitt tried to deflect the Bain barrage (and persuade members of his own party to back off the drip, drip, drip of tax-return demands), by resurrecting Barack the Magic Muslim’s “Back-to-Birtherland bio” — without Donald Trump’s help this time. (Mitt still lost the round; he actually consulted instead with Senor “Oxycontin Rush” — a genuine pharmacological phenomenon, BTW — for advice on dirty-tricks strategery.) Mitt may rue the day he embraced El Rushbo’s proffered “Tall, Dark, Shiftless ‘Furriner’ Who Never Worked a Day in his Life” routine. Wimpy Willard was too “chickenhawk” to deliver on Limbaugh’s bully-boy script himself, so he got Big John “The White Rhino” Sununu (please note the silent “h”; they pronounce it “RINO”) to reenact Rush’s hard-boiled role instead.

John Sununu

Sununu badly flubbed his cameo, calling out Obama’s imaginary cluelessness about “how the American system works,” placing him in the firmament of  the “political-slash-felon environment” of Chicago, and declaring that the president needed to “learn how to be an American” (a charge he later retracted, apologizing for questioning the president’s patriotism).

Meanwhile, Meandering Mitt took a risky detour onto the “extraordinarily foreign course” he claims Obama is following. Limbaugh chimed in, stating unequivocally that, “It can now be stated without equivocation — without equivocation — that This Man HATES This Country.” Sununu and his birther retinue soon crawled back under their customary rock and managed to stay there, at least for now. (A comment on Breitbart.com read, “Sununu and Romney, both young men during the Vietnam war, found a way to escape serving their country. Now they are lecturing others on how to be American? Shame on you pathetic losers!”)

As for deflecting attention from Mitt’s Jumbo the Elephant-sized tax impasse, the mission’s histrionics merited a resounding FAIL. A total of 15 conservatives are now clamoring for the Blue-Blooded Blunderbuss to release his tax returns without further incident or delay.

Multimillionaire Mitt keeps his eye on the prize
The freedom of opportunity that Mitt extols (primarily for “wellborn,” patrician white guys like him) to scale the lofty peaks of achievement, success, and entrepreneurialism is not really an option for the underprivileged, the way he’s always looked at it.  Mitt shouldn’t be forced to divulge whatever advantages and hypocrisies and moral shortcuts inhabit his tax returns, offshore tax havens, and Swiss bank account — not to mention the mystery gazillion-dollar IRA that would have taken a “working stiff” 73,000 years to amass (its grand total jealously guarded by the Trust Fund Manager from Hell, who hasn’t imparted one iota of info about them to poor, bullied Mitt in 25 years!).

So Romney wants America’s “huddled masses” — including Barack H. Obama — to just back off and allow him the huge head start he is accustomed to, so he can add the bauble of the U.S. presidency to the priceless collection of mansions, boats, dressage horses, and other hidden pleasures that he and his immediate family enjoy. Don’t pass “GO”, don’t collect $200; just keep your eye on the prize, Mitt, and exclude all the unworthy riffraff you possibly can — especially the “Halfrican” (Rush’s word, not mine), Kenyan, Indonesian Muslim who’s been blocking Mitt’s path to glory since early 2007, when both of them announced their candidacies — the privileged, entitled white man and the genial, pragmatic black man who saw his own opportunity flicker in the 21st-century political groundswell and seized it, before the flimsiest outside chance in American history could flame out just as abruptly as it had appeared.

‘But the God I don’t believe in is a merciful God’

Louis XVI of France

What would Jesus do? Don’t even ask — but I’m sure it would have a lot more to do with camels wedging their massive humps through the eyes of size 8 embroidery needles than rich guys breezing past the Pearly Gates, brandishing their “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. Mitt’s birthright, indeed, includes the precious liberty once afforded to France’s last “absolute monarch,” Louis XVI, an ineffectual ruler who tried but failed to remedy widespread hunger among the disgruntled masses, as well as make a stab at repaying a soaring national debt brought on by inadequate tax revenues and the enormous costs of  foreign wars (Aux armes, citoyens!) — in the brief decade before the impatient rabble rose up and chopped Louie’s entitled freaking head off.

Mitt, on the other hand, believes he’s earned the cherished freedom he so covets from being “shamed” by lesser mortals’ envy or unAmerican sniping or Marxist denigration (Glenn, take a bow!) into sharing one thin dime of his stupefying fortune with anyone — except for an obligatory pittance to the Mormon high mucky-mucks whose sole utility to Mitt is to make sure he squeezes through the eye of that needle with all of his secret lucre intact.

(And how about Joe Williams — what would he think? Sadly, I haven’t been able to ask him, since he closed his Twitter feed when the Politico controversy began, and nobody new — that would be me — can follow him.)

In Joseph Heller’s magnum opus Catch-22, Yossarian asked Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife what the hell she was so upset about when, as he reminded her, “‘I thought you didn’t believe in God.’ ‘I don’t,’ she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. ‘But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.’ Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose.’“Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us,’ he proposed obligingly. ‘You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?’”

Deal — if only the God I don’t believe in would find a new job for Joe Williams, working for reasonable people, as soon as possible, and keep Mitt’s greedy fingers from getting a good grip on the brass ring. After all, he’s greased his palms with so many other people’s accumulated misery. I think just a little dab of heavenly Brylcreem would do him, like the jingle said — and if we’re lucky, do in his ill-advised campaign for good.

Keeping the White House white, withholding new ingredients from America’s historic melting pot — no matter who’s been scheming to restore the tradition and for whatever nefarious reason — was a really rotten idea in the first place.