“Fox News Adopts George Zimmerman”: Few Have Done More To Help Trayvon Martin’s Shooter Than Sean Hannity
The case may be Florida v. George Zimmerman, but it might more aptly be called Florida v. George Zimmerman and the conservative media, as the accused killer has found devoted defenders on the airwaves of Fox News and in the digital pages of conservative blogs.
Few outside Zimmerman’s defense team have done more to help him than Sean Hannity, who on Friday declared that Zimmerman had already won the trial. “As far as I’m concerned, this case is over,” the Fox host said after playing testimony from a witness who said he saw Trayvon Martin beating Zimmerman “MMA style.” The day before that, Hannity said on his radio show that the judge should dismiss manslaughter, let alone the second-degree murder charges.
“So the question is why are we here? And the answer to that question is purely political. Politics influenced the decision, the media influenced the decision,” Hannity said, succinctly revealing why the conservative media has found itself vocally defending someone who admitted to killing teenager Trayvon Martin. It goes like this: Liberals and the media made hay out of the fact that Zimmerman was initially not charged in the killing of Martin. Liberals and the media are bad. Therefore, Zimmerman must be good.
Hannity and others have sought to portray Zimmerman as the real victim here, of a left-wing media “lynch mob,” a term used by Ann Coulter, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips, David Horowitz, and conservative watchdog Accuracy in the Media, among others. When NBC aired an edited 911 call that made Zimmerman look racist, that was all the proof conservatives needed.
And if reflexive hatred for the media wasn’t enough, add to the volatile mix gun rights and perceived racism against whites. “Mr. Zimmerman — who, again, the New York Times refers to as a ‘white Hispanic’ and the rest of the media has now picked that up, ’cause that fits the template. You need white-on-black here to gin this up,” Rush Limbaugh said last year on his radio show. Hannity couldn’t help but bring up the New Black Panthers in an interview with Zimmerman, which focused on how unfortunate it was that the defendant’s name had been dragged through the mud.
Zimmerman’s father wrote an e-book calling the NACCP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other African-Americans the “true racists.” The CBC, for instance, is “a pathetic, self-serving group of racists … advancing their purely racist agenda.”
Indeed, Zimmerman and his family have often egged on the right-wing media’s support, adopting their language about the dreaded MSM. “The media is very good at putting their own spin on what they want the narrative to be,” Zimmerman’s brother Robert said in court earlier this month. “I’m not employed by NBC, CBS, ABC or anybody else. So I don’t have bosses, I just try to be as honest as I can.” In fact, Zimmerman got himself in trouble for being too close to the conservative media when his legal team quit last year, citing a phone call to Hannity that they had not authorized.
At times, things have gotten ridiculous. Fox News even recently speculated that Martin could probably kill someone with the Skittles bag and Arizona Iced Tea bottle he was carrying.
Meanwhile, conservative blogs set to work painting Martin as a dangerous thug. The Daily Caller obtained Martin’s Twitter feed, selecting tweets that made him look most intimidating. For George Zimmerman, his lawyers are not his only defense team.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 1, 2013
“Stalag America”: John Boehner Wants Someone Jailed Despite No Evidence Of An Actual Crime
Given the recent trifecta of what has,to date, added up to mostly false but politically effective allegations of scandal involving Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice, transparency within the walls of the Obama White House has very much come into question.
But when it comes to the GOP leadership in Congress, there can be no such question of transparency as their behavior could not be any more open or obvious.
Indeed, the Congressional Republicans have been crystal clear in revealing that they could not care less about getting to the real truth of any of the upsetting issues now before the American public, just as they have no interest in focusing on these events for the purpose of making government better for the American people. Their concern is clearly, openly and unabashedly focused on the political opportunities they perceive to be available to them now that they’ve been able to successfully focus the public’s attention on these alleged scandals and away from critical issues of substance.
The problem is that the all too transparent political goals of these people have the unfortunate byproduct of shining a light on the stunning degree of hypocrisy being practiced by these so called leaders. Should you require quantifiable proof of this, I offer up Speaker John Boehner’s comments of this morning as Exhibit A.
While speaking to the press about the IRS matter, Mr. Boehner bellowed, “My question isn’t about who is going to resign. My question is whose going to jail over this scandal?” The Speaker then bounded from the stage leaving his words to hang in the air.
Ah…the drama….the intrigue…the utter and complete disregard for the American justice system spat from the lips of the most powerful man in the United States Congress.
While the Speaker demands to know who is going to jail over the IRS fiasco, the rest of us are, apparently, falling behind as we are still trying to find out what—if any—criminal laws have been violated. You see, Mr. Speaker, in this country one is supposedly required to be convicted of actually violating a criminal law before prison time is to be handed out as punishment—even when this rather fundamental rule of law proves to be an inconvenient impediment to your fundraising activities.
If Boehner has the answer to the somewhat relevant question of whether or not the behavior at the IRS jumped the line between really bad judgment and highly inappropriate behavior into the sphere of criminality, he elected not to share the specifics with us during this morning’s press conference. That was an unfortunate choice as the federal government is about to spend a whole bunch of taxpayer money to ascertain if there was any actionable criminal activity.
If Speaker Boehner has already conducted the investigation and concluded that somebody (we don’t know who) needs to get put in prison, he might consider sharing his findings with the FBI. And if Mr. Boehner has not conducted such an investigation, maybe he could see the benefit of at least pretending to honor the American justice system and keep his lust for incarceration to himself until we know if there is actually a crime.
Most of us will agree that there was clearly wrongdoing in the ranks of the IRS in how they improperly targeted applicants seeking 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status. For anyone who may be struggling to accept this, I would suggest reading the Inspector General’s report of what occurred which is now available for your full review.
While the IG account points to serious managerial errors and confused employees over at the IRS, nowhere in the report do we find any allegation of criminal behavior —just as we see that the IG could find no evidence that anyone from outside the agency (translation: the White House) was involved.
This is not to say that there was no criminal behavior.
It is to say that, at this point, while the Inspector General was able to uncover the instances of improper behavior that clearly reveals a serious problem, no criminal activity has yet to be alleged.
Still, given the gravity of the infractions, the Attorney General has ordered the FBI to investigate the Internal Revenue Service to determine whether there was, in fact, a criminal violation of the law. But as this investigation has likely not yet even begun (it was just announced this morning), one struggles to work out how Speaker Boehner has managed to conclude that someone needs to go to jail.
I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that Boehner has no real grasp of one of the most fundamental principles of American law—that would be the one that requires that those suspected of criminal activity must be charged with a specific violation, tried and proven guilty before we begin clamoring for jail time.
I say I shouldn’t be surprised because this is a Speaker very well versed in blocking the passage of laws but not particularly knowledgeable in the procedures involved in actually making law—a process that would require him to actually understand the law.
This is a Speaker who cares deeply about making dramatic pronouncements—such as what he shared with the nation this morning—in the hope that his declarations will inspire his political base to make large contributions. If clamoring for someone to go to jail—despite any evidence of criminal activity—is what it takes to bring in the big bucks, the notion that we might hope for a more measured and informed tone from so powerful an elected official is a detail that is, apparently, to be ignored and discarded.
At this moment, I am reminded of something disgraced Congressman Bob Ney wrote in his book, “Sideswiped—Lessons Learned Courtesy Of The Hit Men Of Capital Hill.” For anyone who may not recall, Mr. Ney was one of the Members of Congress swept up in the Jack Abramoff scandal and convicted on corruption charges. Given Ney’s history as a convicted felon, I will leave it to the reader to determine how much credibility to give him when reading what he had to say about Speaker Boehner.
What Ney tells us in his book is that Boehner has always been far more concerned with fundraising and having fun than he was with doing the business of the people.
“Many felt his money-raising focus would make up for his lack of concern about legislation — he was considered a man who was all about winning and money…He was a chain-smoking, relentless wine drinker who was more interested in the high life — golf, women, cigarettes, fun, and alcohol.”
As The Washington Posts further reports:
“Ney goes on to say that Boehner was lazy, took thousands of dollars in booze, food and golf games from lobbyists, and repeatedly slid around ethics rules: “John got away with more than any other member on the Hill” because he was well-liked and well-protected by his staff.”
While it is fair to consider Mr. Ney’s own criminal history when weighing the value of this information, it all sounds about right to me.
Still, what Mr. Ney does not address is Speaker Boehner’s obvious disregard for avoiding the transparency of his own disturbing brand of hypocrisy.
In 2004, Julian Bond—then President of the NAACP—gave a speech that, according to the IRS letter received by Mr. Bond in October of that year, included “statements in opposition of George W. Bush for the office of presidency.” The letter also stated that Bond had “condemned the administration politics of George W. Bush in education, the economy and the war in Iraq.”
Because of Mr. Bond’s speech, the IRS informed him that they were reviewing the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status awarded to the NAACP.
Note that Mr. Bond never told his audience who to vote for in the presidential election nor, for that matter, did he support or oppose any candidate running in any election. Indeed, his statements were quite tame by any comparison to the pronouncements emanating from Karl Rove’s Crossroads USA 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) organizations not only on a regular basis but more specifically during the 2012 presidential election cycle.
Bond had this to say at the time his organization was targeted by the IRS:
“It’s Orwellian to believe that criticism of the president is not allowed or that the president is somehow immune from criticism.”
And yet, the IRS proceeded to run the NAACP through the mill, claiming at every turn that it’s investigation was, in no way, politically motivated.
In the end, the NAACP retained their tax-exempt status.
In light of Speaker Boehner’s indignation aimed at the current IRS issue, how does one avoid asking how we missed Mr. Boehner’s demands for jail time when the NAACP was the target of an improper IRS investigation during the Bush term of office?
I would agree completely with the Speaker that any criminal activity discovered in the investigation that is soon to get underway should be resolved with charges and, if appropriate, the punishment Mr. Boehner so fervently seeks. But how does Boehner have the nerve to call for jail time based on his assumption that somebody somewhere must have done something criminal when he didn’t offer so much as a peep when workers at the IRS engaged in similar—if not identical—behavior in 2004 when a Republican sat in the White House?
I would remind Speaker Boehner that Americans are not stupid. If someone has engaged in a criminal act, we will demand justice. But we do not go around clamoring for jail time for a crime that even you, Speaker Boehner, have yet to determine has taken place.
I would also remind the Speaker that the copy of the Constitution he pretends to carry with him at all times is really quite clear on this point.
You should actually try reading that copy of the Constitution, Mr. Speaker, rather than simply pledging your fealty to the Founder’s expression when it suits you only to reject it when it becomes inconvenient. I think we’d all be considerably better off if you actually understood just how incredibly inappropriate it is to demand jail time where no criminality has been revealed before storming off the stage to create the maximum dramatic effect.
Of course, I do recognize that it is difficult for you to find the time for this what with the volumes of fundraising letters you will be signing in order to fully capitalize on your highly offensive and irresponsible behavior.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, May 15, 2013
“Victimhood”: Ignoring One Wrong And Vilifying The Other, Republicans Decide To Care About Big Government Overreach
Government officials and employees responsible for the allegedly inappropriate scrutiny of right-wing groups applying for non-profit, tax-exempt status as “social welfare organizations” (taxpayer subsidized, supposedly non-partisan 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) groups) should be investigated and, if appropriate, disciplined, fired and/or charged under criminal statutes.
Government officials and employees responsible for secretly subpoenaing the phone records of AP reporters ought to similarly be investigated and, if appropriate, disciplined, fired and/or charged under criminal statutes — though it is likely that the government has already given itself legal dispensation to carry out that sort of invasive, seemingly extra-Constitutional, certainly un-American intimidation of whistleblowers and journalists alike.
That said, it’s been predictably amusing over the past 24 hours or so, witnessing the outrage – outrage! – of right-wingers over the very things that they not only didn’t give a rat’s ass about when the same, and often much worse, was carried out by the Bush administration, but that they actively supported at the time.
“They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently hypocritical, among other things,” writes Bob Cesca at The Daily Banter, noting that “Democrats have almost universally condemned the actions of the IRS, as they’ve done when the congressional Republicans and, naturally, the Bush administration used the nearly unlimited might of the government to engage in similar investigations — or worse.”
“Republicans,” he writes, “spent eight years defending, applauding and enabling Bush abuses on this front, while subsequently cheerleading the congressional Republicans as they carry forward the politics of intimidation and government overreach into the Obama era.”
Cesca goes on to list “10 Examples of Bush and the Republicans Using Government Power to Target Critics”, beginning with the Republican-supported Big Government assaults on Planned Parenthood, ACORN (which succeeded in putting a four-decade-old community organization out of business), and on even the ability of perfectly legal American voters to simply cast a vote in their own elections. He also reminds us of the abuse of the Bush Dept. of Justice which, specifically, targeted Democrats for prosecution, and for the firing of U.S. Attorneys without cause, other than they were not partisan enough for the tastes of the Bush White House.
But while the Obama administration deserves appropriate scrutiny and investigation and accountability for whatever its part in both the developing IRS and DoJ/AP scandals, let us not forget some of these certainly-as-bad, arguably-worse scandals related to both the IRS and the DoJ — from during the Bush administration — that Republicans not only didn’t give a damn about, but often applauded for most of the past decade…
6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, but high-profile Republicans like Joe Scarborough had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he’s suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that’s funded by Exxon-Mobil.
7. The Bush IRS Collected Political Affiliation Data on Taxpayers. In 2006, a contractor hired by the IRS collected party affiliation via a search of voter registration roles in a laundry list of states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. This begs the obvious question: why? Why would the IRS need voter registration and party affiliation information?
8. The Bush FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Targeted Civil Rights / Anti-War Activists. In 2005, an ACLU investigation revealed that both the FBI and the JTTF surveilled and gathered intelligence about a variety of liberal groups including PETA and the Catholic Workers, along with other groups that it hyperbolically referred to as having “semi-communistic ideology.”
9. The Bush Pentagon Spied on Dozens of Anti-War Meetings. Also in 2005, the Department of Defense tracked 1,500 “suspicious incidents” and spied on four dozen meetings involving, for example, anti-war Quaker groups and the like. Yes, really. The Bush administration actually kept track of who was attending these meetings down to descriptions of the vehicles used by the attendees, calling to mind the pre-Watergate era when the government investigated 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam War.
10. The Bush FBI Targeted Journalists with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yesterday, it was learned that a U.S. attorney, Ronald Machen, subpoenaed and confiscated phone records from the Associated Press as part of a leak investigation regarding an article about a CIA operation that took place in Yemen to thwart a terrorist attack on the anniversary of bin Laden’s death. Well, this story pales in comparison with the Bush administration’s inquisition against the reporters who broke the story about the NSA wiretapping program. In fact, the Justice Department considered invoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the archaic sequel to the John Adams-era Alien and Sedition Acts. The Bush FBI seized phone records — without subpoena — from four American journalists, including Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. How do we know this for sure? Former FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I’m delighted, personally, that the Republican Party and its adherents have finally decided to be outraged about actual governmental abuses of power. I’m even more delighted that they may now be focusing some of that outrage on actual abuses (as opposed to all of the pretend “scandals” they’ve been pretending to be outraged about over the past four years). But it will be all too convenient if the only such abuses they ultimately concern themselves with are the ones that affected their own special-interest groups, rather than those that have illegally and/or unconstitutionally affected the interests of all Americans for at least the past decade and more.
It will be a shame if the result of all of this is that the 501(c)(4) and (c)(3) racket that exploded in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United atrocity goes unexamined and un-overturned. As is, the IRS was doing a dreadful job in cracking down on that particularly obvious scam, and it’s almost certain that all of this will only make the appalling taxpayer-subsidized abuse by purely political groups masquerading as non-partisan “social welfare organizations” even worse.
But it will be even more of a shame if the Big Government abuses of power under the Obama administration are dealt with as special cases that occurred in a vacuum. They did not. They have been happening for years, under the Bush administration and now under the Obama administration. (For that matter, the IRS abuses now in question happened while the agency was headed up by George W. Bush’s appointee.) All of those Big Government abuses deserve oversight and governmental action and legislation to ensure that none of them can ever happen again in the future.
Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen in a political atmosphere where one party (the Republicans) and its supporters have chosen “victimhood” as a personal political philosophy and a wartime footing against their perceived enemy (the Democratic Party) as a point of personal pride, rather than displaying any interest whatsoever in actually governing on behalf of the American people or in ending the opportunities for the very Big Government abuses they decry — but only when it affects them.
By: Brad Friedman, The National Memo, May 15, 2013, Originally posted at The Brad Blog
“When The IRS Targeted Liberals”: Outrage Only Occurs When Lines Between Politics And Social Welfare Are To GOP’s Liking
While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the “scandal.” First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.
The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it’s not the first time such activity has occurred.
“I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. “I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern.”
The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. “Jesus [would say], ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,’” rector George Regas said from the dais.
The church, which said progressive activism was in its “DNA,” hired a powerful Washington lawyer and enlisted the help of Schiff, who met with the commissioner of the IRS twice and called for a Government Accountability Office investigation, saying the IRS audit violated the First Amendment and was unduly targeting a political opponent of the Bush administration. “My client is very concerned that the close coordination undertaken by the IRS allowed partisan political concerns to direct the course of the All Saints examination,” church attorney Marcus Owens, who is widely considered one of the country’s leading experts on this area of the law, said at the time. In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.
And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, “a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code,” the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.
Meanwhile, Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed two ethics complaints against a church in Minnesota. “You know we can’t publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I’m going to vote for Michele Bachmann,” pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Center in Minnesota said in 2006 before welcoming her to the church. The IRS opened an audit into the church, but it went nowhere after the church appealed the audit on a technicality.
And it wasn’t just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” then-chairman Julian Bond said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”
In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: “It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide.”
Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the “No. 1 climate criminal.” The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace’s tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.
As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, “This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical.”
Indeed, the year before that, the Senate held a hearing on nonprofits’ political activity. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the IRS needed better enforcement, but also “legislative changes” to better define the lines between politics and social welfare, since they had not been updated in “a generation.” Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)4′s sufficiently to this day, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules.
Those cases mostly involved 501(c)3 organizations, which live in a different section of the tax code for real charities like hospitals and schools. The rules are much stronger and better developed for (c)3′s, in part because they’ve been around longer. But with “social welfare” (c)4 groups, the kind of political activity we saw in 2010 and 2012 is so unprecedented that you get cases like Emerge America, a progressive nonprofit that trains Democratic female candidates for public office. The group has chapters across the country, but in 2011, chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada were denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Leaders called the situation “bizarre” because in the five years Nevada had waited for approval, the Kentucky chapter was approved, only for the other three to be denied.
A former IRS official told the New York Times that probably meant the applications were sent to different offices, which use slightly different standards. Different offices within the same organization that are supposed to impose the exact same rules in a consistent manner have such uneven conceptions of where to draw the line at a political group, that they can approve one organization and then deny its twin in a different state.
All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, May 14, 2013
“The Courage Of Convictions”: Dear Mr. Romney, I Want More Free Stuff From The Government
Dear Mr. Romney, I was hoping you could tell me how to get more free stuff from the government, and I see that you took up that question after your speech to the NAACP last week. You were speaking to a group of white people in Hamilton, Montana, and you told them that, at the NAACP, you had said that you were “going to get rid of Obamacare.” You said that they “weren’t happy” about that. And you said that if people want “more free stuff” from “the government,” they should “go vote for the other guy.”
Well, I want more free stuff from the government, but, actually, if you want free stuff from Obama, you’d be better off as a banker than as a black person.
Maybe you heard that Obama’s TARP and stimulus programs already gave $4.5 trillion in bailout money to the big banks and investment houses on Wall Street. There’s a lot more if you count loan guarantees and emergency lending from the Federal Reserve.
If I had gotten any of that free stuff, like your friends on Wall Street did, I could have done what they did—use those public funds to pay myself really well.
Some of your friends are praising you for your “straight talk” to the NAACP, for having the courage of your convictions and letting the chips fall where they may. But actually you didn’t tell the black people they should vote for the other guy because they want free stuff. Instead, you told a white audience afterwards that’s what black people should do.
Some people, like Matt Taibbi at RollingStone.com, thought your post-NAACP remarks were “shockingly offensive” and “cynically furthering dangerous and irresponsible stereotypes in order to advance some harebrained electoral ploy involving white conservative voters.” I can see his point.
But at the Center for the Study of Mitt Romney, they found that this isn’t the first time you said that people who want “free stuff” from the government should “vote for the other guy.” (Actually it was Rachel Maddow who found this.)
A few months ago, Rachel reported, you responded to questions about contraception access by saying, “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy.” You also complained that Obama was trying to buy students’ political support by offering them “free stuff.”
Rachel thought she could see a pattern here: “If you’re a woman who wants access to preventive care you might not otherwise be able to afford, Romney sees you as wanting ‘free stuff.’ If you’re a young student who can’t afford higher-ed tuition, Romney assumes you expect ‘free stuff.’ And if you’re a black person who wants your family to have access to affordable healthcare, Romney thinks you too are just looking for “free stuff.”
Of course, there’s another way to look at all this. You could say we are taking on the responsibility to see that everyone gets decent medical care, whether or not they can afford it. We want our friends and family and neighbors and co-workers who are uninsured or underinsured to be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick. We want the same thing even for people we don’t know. That’s the way minister Leslie Watson Malachi of People for the American Way explained it.
One other thing—it’s not just black people who will benefit from Obamacare. Most of the beneficiaries will be white—just in case the white people in Hamiltion, Montana got the wrong impression from your speech.
By: Joe Wiener, The Nation, July 14, 2012
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