by
John Nolte
Even though -- according to a number independent fact-checkers -- Obama has been running around for the past month using $100 million in ads to hit Mitt Romney with lies; even though Obama's top surrogates have been using the word "felon" to describe Romney -- The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is now demanding that Romney shut up.
We saw this in 2008, where the
desperate and desperately corrupt media attempts to silence legitimate
criticism of Obama by equating and tying that criticism to racism,
crazies, and extremists. And what this is is nothing more than a form of
New McCarthyism -- where you smear and terrorize and marginalize those
you disagree with by drawing a very long and very dark line from what
they've said or what they believe in to scary, freaky, wacko, lunatics
who might be dangerous.
Here's Milbank at work. Tell me this isn't a bald-faced act of McCarthyism against Mitt Romney:
On an official Mitt Romney
campaign conference call this week, former New Hampshire governor John
Sununu tested the latest effort to paint the commander in chief as
disloyal to his country.
“I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” the Romney surrogate said.
Sununu, challenged, later apologized for the words — but not the sentiment. And that’s not good enough.
It’s not good enough because
Sununu, like other prominent Republicans, is winking at those
conservatives who continue to make the claim, often race-based, that
President Obama is something un-American, something “other” than the
rest of us. On Thursday, two days after Sununu’s attack, Romney himself
said that Obama lacks “an understanding of what it is that makes America
such a unique nation.”
Sununu and Romney are
legitimizing people such as Cliff Kincaid. Also on Thursday, Kincaid
convened his annual conference at the National Press Club for
conspiracy-minded conservatives, this one about Obama and “Radical
Islam.”
What?
First off, Sununu apologized, something
Obama never did for the "felon" claim that fired from the mouths of two
of his top surrogates. And I don’t remember Milbank ever needing
smelling salts in 2008 as Barack Obama traipsed around the country
declaring George W. Bush's deficits "unpatriotic."
What Milbank is up to here is not
commentary nor is it opinion. It's a brazen and un-American attempt to
protect Obama from perfectly legitimate criticism of his failed record,
extremely unpatriotic (by Obama's own definition) deficits, and an
abject and dangerous failure to understand how the American style of
free markets work to make us all prosperous.
To make a leap from something Sununu
apologized for and Romney's speaking of the truth to nut-job conspiracy
theorists is no different than making a leap from Obama's
anti-capitalist, anti-free market, oppressive equality clap-trap to
communism.
Were I to dare write an opinion piece
doing to Obama what Milbank just did to Romney, you can bet McCarthyists
like Milbank would freak out and scream RacistLiarExtremist!
But here's the thing. The line between
Obama and the likes of extreme leftists like Bill Ayers and the Occupy
movement is plain as day and not at all a piece of fiction like the
McCarthyist smear Milbank just hurled. We don’t have to make anything up
to tie Obama to violence and lunacy because Obama endorses and enjoys barbecue with it.
Late last week, it was obvious the left was resurrecting this tactic. Let's just hope that unlike John McCain, Romney doesn’t fall for Milbank's tired old McCarthyist Handbook.
No comments:
Post a Comment