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Say That Again With a Straight Face

sowellread — Sat, 05 May 2012 09:07:08 +0000

A roundup of this week’s best “I can’t believe he just said that” moments.

The Catholic Monopoly

Paul Ryan addressed criticism from the U.S. Conference of Bishops of his safety-net-eviscerating budget proposal:

I suppose that there are some Catholics who for a long time thought they had a monopoly of sorts – not exactly on heaven, but on the social teaching of our church.

Well, yeah. “Some Catholics” — bishops — indeed have “a monopoly” on church teachings. The Holy See is not a democracy, and they don’t call the Pope infallible for nothing. The bishops felt compelled to follow up with a letter reminding Ryan that “bishops who chair USCCB committees are elected by their fellow bishops to represent all of the U.S. bishops on key issues at the national level. The letters on the budget were written by bishops serving in this capacity.”

Ironically, in his dissent Ryan sounds most like a group of Catholics on the opposite end of the spectrum: the American nuns recently reprimanded by Rome for taking public positions that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” (Specifically, this included not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination.) Like Paul Ryan, one group of nuns was shocked, just shocked, that the Vatican would try to pull rank:”The presidency of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious was stunned by the conclusions of the doctrinal assessment.”

Though I have immensely more sympathy for the sisters than for Paul Ryan, both cases prompted the same thought: You get what you sign up for. Was there ever an expectation of anything beyond top-down leadership from the notoriously hierarchical Catholic Church? At the same time, Ryan is not the only one showing hypocrisy here. Out of one side of its mouth, the Church condemns the nuns for focusing on social justice over hot-button issues like abortion; on the other, it castigates Ryan for inefficient attention to social justice.

A Failure of Leadership

Ric Grenell, Mitt Romney’s newest foreign policy spokesman, resigned this week, after sparking a firestorm on the right over his advocacy for gay rights. Though the Romney campaign insisted it tried everything to convince him to stay, it never defended Grenell from attacks from social conservatives like Brian Fischer of the American Family Association, who wrote on Twitter, “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead” and later bragged that the resignation was a victory over the “homosexual lobby.” Grenell made the following statement to the press:

While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyperpartisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a nonissue for him and his team.

It’s particularly rich to accuse the president of “weak leadership” when Mitt Romney didn’t have the backbone to stand up to the bigoted base of his own party. Great leaders don’t stand back and watch their troops get shot down by friendly fire. Chris Barron, a co-founder of the gay rights group GOProud, asked, “Does anyone in the world doubt that if had been an evangelical or a Mormon or a Jewish person that the Romney campaign would not have defended that person?”

Most of the pundits and bloggers who addressed the incident were fairly disgusted with the Romney camp, but some media outlets felt compelled to note that Grennel’s sexual orientation wasn’t the only controversial thing about him. Politico wrote that, while the initial headlines blamed the resignation on anti-gay sentiment, “Grenell’s off-color and massively off-message tweets, along with his reputation for imperiousness at the United Nations, drew scrutiny almost immediately after his selection was announced.” The tweets in question, which Grenell scrubbed from his Twitter feed shortly after joining the Romney campaign, were indeed offensive and sexist; they included advice to Rachel Maddow to “take a breath and put on a necklace” and such Gingrich-related musings as “Do you think Callista’s hair snaps on?” For liberal-leaning blogs, the tweets were actually the bigger story, playing as they did into the narrative of the Republican “war on women.” Yet it’s a stretch to attribute Grenell’s resignation to some brief faux-outrage from ThinkProgress. The Times quoted the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans as claiming Grenell “was essentially hounded by the far right and far left.”

Hello, false equivalency. To imply that the “far left” made a difference in the Romney campaign’s decision not to vigorously defend Grenell is ludicrous. Romney couldn’t care less about Democratic criticism of his advisers. This is a man who welcomed to his campaign these controversy-steeped figures:

John Bolton, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, who once opined that, if the UN building “lost ten stories today, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was derailed by his belief that a preponderance of federal legislation — including the Civil Rights Act, Roe v. Wade and the Voting Rights Act — was unconstitutional.
Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s strict immigration law (currently being challenged at the Supreme Court) whose ties to white supremacist groups have drawn condemnation from the left. (Kobach has apparently been downgraded from official adviser to “supporter” on the Romney website.)

When it comes to standing up to his party’s base, Romney flips and flops like the mushy “Massachusetts moderate” he’s accused of being. He limited his reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” remarks to a mild, “It’s not the language I would have used.” On May 12, he will deliver the commencement address at Liberty University, which was founded by Jerry Falwell, whose fundamentalist beliefs included the notion that AIDS was “God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” To misogynists and homophobes, attention must be paid. To the nearly fifty percent of Americans who support gay marriage . . . well, they’re on their own.

Drowning Public Education in the Bathtub

Into the annals of cluelessness, let us enter the latest dispatch from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. AEI scholar Andrew Biggs, who is described by the Washington Post as pontificating “that nobody wants people to lose their jobs unnecessarily but that it was right for the federal government not to do more to save these positions, because state and local governments had become bloated,” has this to say about government workers:

It strikes an emotional chord with people if we have teacher layoffs, but we have hired a great many teachers in the past several decades.

Perhaps we’ve hired a great many teachers because we’ve also added a great many schoolchildren in the past few decades. There were 64 million children in the U.S. in 1990; today, there are more than 76 million. What does Biggs think all those teachers are doing, just standing around? The average elementary class has 23 students — how many more would Biggs propose to pack into each classroom? The same Washington Post article that quotes Biggs notes that, despite the conservative gnashing of teeth about the expanding government leviathan, “state and local governments have shed 611,000 employees — including 196,000 educators” since the beginning of Obama’s term. Paul Krugman points out that, had public employment increased at the same rate as under George W. Bush, we would have 1.3 million more government workers.

So if teacher layoffs strike an emotional chord, maybe it’s for a good reason.

Smells Like Desperation

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is the head of the self-proclaimed “Young Guns,” a group that aims to foster the “next generation of conservative leaders” and includes such GOP luminaries as Paul Ryan. Now it’s reaching out to women in an attempt to counteract Democratic charges of a conservative “war on women.” Its goal, as described by Politico, is “to try to better understand the language and viewpoints appeal to women.” The new group’s name?

YG Woman Up!

Here’s some advice for Cantor & Company: Playing off a lowbrow, sexist term like “man up” — which implies that real men are braver and stronger than the rest of those pansy sissies — is perhaps not the best way to appeal to women. And adding a bright pink, cursive-script logo doesn’t do much to move past stereotypes either.

“You’re an Idiot, Vote for Me”

Romney backer Hank Brown, a former Colorado senator and former president of the University of Colorado, spoke to reporters last week about the college-age vote. “President Obama gets an ‘F’ for failing our youth.” He continued:

Four years ago, the president was able to fool a number of our college students into supporting his campaign, and the result has been the highest level of unemployment for youth in our country’s recorded history.

Nothing wins the youth vote like implying twenty-somethings are stupid, gullible and easily played by conniving politicians. If all else fails, insult the intelligence of the voters.

Liberals, Those Freedom-Hating Marxists

I suspect conservative pundit Dennis Prager is a big fan of those “Left Behind” books. For all I know, he may also agree with the Mayan prediction of a 2012 apocalypse; that’s how prone to hyperbole this guy is. The next election, Prager says, is “a plebiscite on the definition of America.” If we re-elect President Obama, the great experiment in democracy will be over:

Americans will have decided that America’s value system — “Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum” — should be replaced . . . . “E Pluribus Unum” is to be replaced by multiculturalism. For leftism, the very words “American identity” conjure up chauvinism, if not fascism. For these reasons, this election is not just a choice between a Democrat and a Republican. It is between Americanism and leftism.

Really, how do you respond to that? I’d offer Prager a tinfoil hat, but I’m afraid he’d show up at the door with a rifle in one hand and a copy of the Constitution in the other.

And Your Little Dog, Too

Finally, there’s this quotation from Michele Bachmann, who was asked when she planned to endorse Mitt Romney (which she did on Thursday):

As the line says in “The Wizard of Oz,” “All in good time, my pretty.”

When you already have a reputation for being, ah, unhinged, maybe it’s not the best idea to bring up the Wicked Witch of the West.

Bachmann’s “Crazy Eyes” cover

The original “Crazy Eyes”

The Republican Party’s anti-gay bias

globalequality — Sat, 05 May 2012 03:22:48 +0000

Op-Ed By Michael Guest, for the Washington Post (Print edition will be published on Sunday, May 6)

Michael Guest, the first openly gay ambassador confirmed by the Senate, was the U.S. ambassador to Romania from 2001 to 2004.

Only Ric Grenell can explain the “personal reasons” that compelled him to leave Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. If his departure was influenced even the slightest by the anti-gay attacks that followed his appointment, I sympathize.

In 2001, when I, an openly gay career Foreign Service officer, was sworn in to serve as U.S. ambassador to Romania, I and many others hoped that the Republican Party’s obsession with demonizing gay and lesbian citizens was at an overdue end. George W. Bush had chosen me, after all, and a secretary of state known to have advocated for “don’t ask, don’t tell” had sworn me in.

It wasn’t long before that hope was shattered. For months I received bags of hate mail, much of it from writers who identified themselves as “loyal Republicans.” A Republican congressional aide called soon after my arrival in Romania to ask whether my partner’s “socks and underwear” had been transported at taxpayer expense. It quickly became clear to me that the organizations that decried my nomination, or even called for it to be rescinded, shared a Republican membership base.

Grenell surely knows, as I do, many Republicans who believe that their party should be more open to gays and more accepting on issues of gay rights. But where are those voices, and what influence do they have? Republican Party leaders continue to allow principles of fairness and equality — so important at the founding of the GOP and, indeed, our country — to be hollowed out.Over the first three months of my tenure as ambassador, I thought seriously of following the path that Grenell, in the end, took. At times, the graphic spite and incivility of letters I received made me cry. I knew that my life and that of my partner would be easier were I to move on to less-public responsibilities.

I stayed in the job because I was a career professional and because our country’s interests after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were so important to me as an American. I knew that anti-gay voices at home had not eroded my access to or influence with Romanian officials. I knew that I served at the president’s pleasure and that, if political pressure ultimately became unbearable, the man who had selected me could ask me to leave.
I also knew that giving in to the anti-gay crowd would make it only harder for the next gay man or woman to be nominated. That alone gave me the strength to endure those wrenchingly difficult months. I hope Grenell’s decision to leave the Romney campaign will not carry the same impact within his party.

Too many voices have sought to lay Grenell’s departure at Romney’s door. That seems too far a stretch to me: Romney appointed Grenell on merit, and I salute his decision to do so. Gay Republican friends tell me that Romney has no personal animosity toward gay people. They quickly add that gay people other than Grenell are serving in Romney’s campaign.

But Romney’s slowness to comment amid the noise since Grenell’s resignation raises questions about his principles, as well as the quality and depth of his leadership. That’s what should concern us most in this sad affair. We should expect Romney to go further in making clear that issues of sexual orientation will have no bearing on any personnel decisions he makes, whether in his campaign or, should he be elected, in the administration he would lead.

The larger political backdrop to Grenell’s departure remains troubling to those of us who are gay. For far too many years, the Republican Party has harbored the drowners-out — the voices most responsible for ensuring that fair and equal rights of America’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens are a question, not a fact.

Those voices, and the discriminatory policies they have helped anchor in law, make it hard for many of us to imagine voting Republican at the national level. They have also riveted our country’s attention, in tabloid fashion, to a needless debate that only distracts from efforts to strengthen our country’s peace, prosperity and cohesion.

Grenell’s decision to step down may prove to be little more than another chapter in that story of shame. But surely Republican Party leaders have an obligation to challenge the anti-gay bias that’s been allowed to thrive within. The GOP’s prospective presidential nominee carries that obligation as well.

Bryan Fischer Agrees - Romney's A Wimp

Sandi Behrns — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:13:58 +0000

When I wrote yesterday of the Ric Grenell affair, I made the point that if Romney can’t stand up to the likes of Bryan flippin’ Fischer, perhaps his ability to stand up to anyone should be questioned. Today, Fischer made the argument for me. Transcript and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch (emphasis mine):

Fischer: Let me ask you this question, people have raised this question, if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership. I don’t think for one minute that Mitt Romney did not want this guy gone; he wanted this guy gone because there was not one word of defense, not a peep, from the Romney camp to defend him. They just went absolutely stone cold silent, they put a bag over Grenell’s head, they even asked him to organize this phone conference and they didn’t even let him speak at the conference that he organized.

Wow. I can’t imagine what outcome Fischer is hoping for in this election, but this kind of thing certainly won’t help Romney.

At any rate, it’s an excellent cautionary tale. Had Romney stuck to his principles, he may have offended a few social conservatives — but by kowtowing to them, he’s betrayed a much deeper flaw.

Randomness, and not . . .

rsd2423 — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:24:34 +0000

The Washington Post continues circling the porcelain pony, ever faster. There are many reasons but none is more animated than WaPo’s very own Queen of Hearts, Jonathan Capehart, who is all atwitter over the “firing” of Romney foreign policy advisor, Ric Grenell who is opening gay and advocates same-sex-marriage. While the reporting from real journalists suggests that Grenell found himself unprepared for the tempest that is a presidential campaign, Capehart, his colleague Ruth Marcus (who enjoys no fealty to truth) and other leftists are attributing his resignation to Republican bigotry. Never mind that he was hired with full knowledge of his person; or that he came highly recommended by John Bolton and other prominent Conservatives.

As the maxim goes, Leftists will tell a lie, even if the truth would serve them better. So, in Ric Grenell’s won words:

“While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign,’’ Grenell said in a statement. “I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a nonissue for him and his team.’’

Is Eric Holder an even worse “public servant” than Joe Biden? While Biden has been demonstrably wrong on every significant public policy debate since his election to the Senate as a child, Attorney General Holder has made decisions that weren’t simply stupid, but rather, fatal! And now, he’s angling to be held in “Contempt of Congress” which will assure that the majority receive the information he has declined to proffer and he will lose all control of the process. He’s not too bright . . .

And, could President Barack Hussein Obama and Secretary Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton handled the Chen Guangcheng matter any worse? Running in utter fear of the Chicoms, they have clearly proclaimed for all the world’s dissidents pursuing freedom and liberty, that it’s not worth fighting for. Only the Muslim Brotherhood peaks their attention. any others, “never mind.”

Grenell Was the Canary in Mitt's Mine

Embattled Farmers — Fri, 04 May 2012 05:13:06 +0000

All through the primaries, GOP voters were told that the silver lining of unlikable Mitt’s getting the nomination was that he could beat President Obama because he would appeal to moderates. The base might not like him, but the candidates they preferred couldn’t win in November.

But if Mitt deserved such moderate support he would have stood up for Ric Grenell, whom who hired as his foreign policy spokesman, but wouldn’t defend against vicious attacks simply because Grenell is gay. It doesn’t matter if Mitt’s personal beliefs are more reasonable if he won’t act on them.

If you wouldn’t vote for Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann, you shouldn’t vote for Mitt.

Whether the bat-shit wing of the party wins by nominating one of their own (Santorum, Bachmann) or by intimidating a less radical candidate (Romney), the result is the same — they win.

The extremists own Mitt now and will throughout his term if he’s elected. He won’t want to face a primary in 2016.

Ric Grenell was the canary in Mitt’s mine of moderation. He didn’t survive.

Andrew Sullivan Weighs in on Mitt and Ric Grenell

Embattled Farmers — Thu, 03 May 2012 02:18:31 +0000

From “The Muzzling of Ric Grenell,” Andrew Sullivan, The Dish:

“He’d been part of organizing a conference call to respond to Vice President Biden’s foreign policy speech,now known best for the “big stick” remark. So some reporters were puzzled as to why Grenell…was not introduced by name as part of the Romney team at the beginning of the call, and his voice completely absent from the conversation. Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up.

“Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up. Their response to the far right fooferaw was simply to go silent, to keep Grenell off-stage and mute, and to wait till the storm passed. But the storm was not likely to pass if no one in the Romney camp was prepared to back Grenell up. Hence his dilemma. The obvious solution was simply to get Grenell out there doling out the neocon red meat – which would have immediately changed the subject and helped dispel base skepticism. Instead the terrified Romneyites shut him up without any actual plan for when he might subsequently be able to do his job. … And it’s a mark of Romney’s fundamental weakness within his own party that he could not back his spokesman against the Bryan Fischers and Matthew Francks.

“A couple other thoughts. How many gay conservatives oppose marriage equality – now, apparently, a litmus test (though it wasn’t for Cheney)? I cannot think of any. … So if all gay Republicans who support marriage equality are banned even from speaking on other topics entirely (like Iran or Afghanistan, where Grenell is a fire-breather), who’s left? The answer, I’m afraid, is no one. Grenell was prepared to stay silent on gay issues entirely and do his job. But that wasn’t enough. Romney’s anti-gay agenda is therefore deeper and more extreme than Bush’s.

“I might add that the private conversation among many Republicans in this town is that this was unjust and unfair. The Romneyites are correct when they say they tried to talk him out of it. But they kept and keep their views quiet. The gay-inclusive elements in the elites simply do not have the balls to tackle the religious right. And this is particularly true of Romney, as this case now proves. The Christianists gave Bush a pass on social issues because of his born-again Christianity. They trust Mormon Romney not an inch. And this week demonstrates without any doubt that Romney will therefore not be able to deviate from their wishes an iota. He has no room to maneuver. The notion that he could be a moderate on social issues in office is, alas, a pipe dream.

“Remember: Grenell was told to be silent solely because he was gay. He was accused in National Review of being a potential fifth columnist for Barack Obama, simply because of his support for marriage equality, which he was never going to speak in public on anyway. His job was to speak on national security, a job for which he was very well prepared and very, very neoconservative.

“But the bigots won.” Emphasis added.

Nothing To Be Proud Of

Embattled Farmers — Thu, 03 May 2012 00:09:07 +0000

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is congratulating himself for helping to hound Ric Grenell, who is gay, out of his job as foreign policy spokesman for Mitt, two weeks after he was hired.

Boasted Fischer on his right-wing talk radio show: “It’s very clear from the Washington Post that he resigned because of pressure that was put on the Romney campaign by the pro-family community. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is a huge win, and it’s a huge win for us in regard to Mitt Romney, because Mitt Romney has been forced to say, ‘Look, I overstepped my bounds here, I went outside my parameters here, I went off the reservation with this hire, the pro-family community has called me back to the table here, called me back inside the borders of the reservation.’”

This is just disgusting. Grenell was the openly-gay spokesman for our U. N. mission under Bush 43, and no one questioned his qualifications for this job with the Romney campaign. It was all about his being gay.

If Mitt can’t stand up to a sick little Nazi like Bryan Fischer, how is he going to do against Iran or North Korea or China or Russia?

And if Fischer thinks his fellow Americans should be denied work because they are gay, what is he proposing they do? Should they just starve to death?

Americans are fighting and dying against this kind of thinking among Islamic extremists. When and how are we going to deal with our own extremists?

Mitt Romney and Bryan Fischer deserve each other. The American people deserve better.