Thank you, Harvey Edwards!

@justemily14 BREAKING NEWS "OCT 25, " AN AMERICAN ATTACKED ROMNEY " harveyedwards.blogspot.com/2012/10/vote-f…RT Thank you, Harvey Edwards #P2 #OBAMA2012 #WOMEN
— HARVEY EDWARDS (@Harvey_Edwards) October 25, 2012

Debate II: ‘Mittitus Interrupt-us’

Above, 'the picture of the night,' according to the website I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists. 'I think this picture sums it up,' wrote blogger Icarus. 'Romney interrupting Obama in the debate again, with no respect or deference for the president. This picture is a perfect caricature of Romney during his entire campaign. 10k bet?'

By Emily Theroux

After watching the second Obama/Romney debate, a town-hall brawl staged at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, I felt as if I’d disappeared down Alice in Wonderland‘s rabbit hole into the “sea of tears” and come up gasping for air in Orwell’s 1984.

Nothing the Republican standard-bearer said made sense.  Up was down. Black was white. Truth and lies were indistinct, mutable, virtually interchangeable, because that’s how Mitt likes it. Chaos and dissension permit him to dominate the conversation, manipulate the viewers’ perceptions of his rival, and falsely cast himself as upholder of righteousness, captain of industry, foreign policy virtuoso, and champion of the middle class — which bamboozles the unwary as long as the debate moderator buckles like a doormat and Romney’s opponent remains loath to call a flip-flop a dirty, deliberate lie.

Moderator Candy Crowley (Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

This time, however, no one — with the possible exception of the 82 absurdly indecisive and largely uninformed town-hall questioners — was taking Mitt the Impaler’s smug, derisive nonsense lying down.
The moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, fought back valiantly against Mitt’s dizzying displays of entitlement, pique, condescension, disrespect, and refusal to observe the rules of the debate.

President Obama showed up this time firing on all cylinders — the actual 2008 campaigner, come back to life. While Willard “Myth” Romney kept coming at him — throwing hissy-fits of petulance when Crowley or Obama had the temerity to stand up to him, ominously stalking the stage while alternately seething and smirking, hurling contempt, and flinging invective — it was clear that Mitt wasn’t quite sure what hit him.
Obama was present, engaged, wry, witty, assertive, even aggressive when necessary, without relying on Joe Biden’s fallback posture during last week’s vice-presidential debate with Paul “Lyin’ ” Ryan — laughing in his opponent’s face every time he lied. From the moment when Obama first said, “Candy, what Governor Romney said just isn’t true,” I knew it was only a matter of time before Mitt the Wazzock (a name which shall live in infamy Across the Pond) lost his loosely corralled marbles and launched into the primary-tested “Mitt the Twit” arrogant-bully persona taken viral by tweeting Londoners last summer.

The Mittster, by contrast, was defensive and offensive in turn, rattled, domineering, snappish, pouty, and a complete churl. My relatives in South Carolina have an expression for such boorish behavior: Mitt acted, as my mother used to say, “like something on a stick.”

Fox ‘questioned the questions’ undecided voters asked
Not that you could tell Obama trounced Romney from the wingnut drivel that inevitably followed the debate. The fools on Faux News were spinning Romney’s embarrassing performance so furiously that some actually concluded that the sorest of sore losers won the debate!
You could have set your alarm clock by Fox’s — and, I’m afraid, CNN’s — escalating paint-by-numbers idiocy.

Brit Hume, Fox News

• Color #1: Brit Hume, the Fox “straight news guy,” observed, “I thought Mitt Romney was the same Mitt Romney we saw in Denver two weeks ago” (no mention of the cold, unalterable fact that Mittens was lying like a used-car salesman and insolently hectoring the sitting President of the United States — nor that he was devastated by the president’s comebacks to his preposterous lies, and Crowley’s “fact-checking” of Romney’s mischaracterizations of Obama’s reaction to the Sept. 11 attack on the American consulate in Libya). Hume did conclude, however, that Obama ” will probably be declared the winner of this, on most cards.”

John King, CNN

• Color #2: John King of CNN fell into the predictable mainstream trap of trying so hard to keep from being accused of “liberal media bias” that such journalists end up creating a “false equivalency” between the comparatively rational Democrats and the extremist “insurgent outlier party” that the GOP has devolved into. “I think Gov. Romney did a very good job prosecuting against the incumbent’s record,” King proclaimed. (That assessment becomes meaningless when you’ve delved into Romney’s symptomatic pattern of deceipt long enough to realize that what appears to the uninitiated as “a very good job” is merely a very thorough pack of lies.)

Sean Hannity, Fox News

• Color #3: Sean Hannity raved about Romney’s debate “win,” calling Romney’s performance “the most-devastating indictment of the Obama economy that we’ve seen. CBS snap poll 65-34 Romney tonight.” (This was not what other journalists said about the CBS poll. The Washington Post said Obama won 37 percent to 30 percent, while 33 percent described it as a tie; they also reported that a “snap CNN/ORC poll” said Obama won, 47 percent to 39 percent. Other mainstream sources agreed.) Hannity also called Romney’s failure to make the case that Obama “didn’t call the attack in Libya an act of terrorism” (when he clearly did) the debate’s “best moment.”

Romney retaliates with imperious, hit-and-run debating style

“Romney came across as a kind of irritating know-it-all who doesn’t operate well when he’s challenged,” said Jonathan Alter to Chris Matthews, in what had to be the understatement of the evening.

At one point, Romney charged Obama with a 14 percent drop in oil production and a 9 percent reduction in gas production this year on federal land — because, he said, the president halved the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands and in federal waters. “This has not been Mr. Oil or Mr. Gas or Mr. Coal,” he snarked.

Then, after Obama called Mitt’s attack “not true,” the Republican started in on Obama with a manic, rapid-fire inquisition that astonished viewers with its sheer impertinence, as well as by Mitt’s absolute refusal to let Obama finish a response or get a word in edgewise.

“So how much did you cut ‘em by?” (Obama, again: “It’s not true.”) “By how much did you cut ‘em by, then? (Obama: “Governor, we’ve actually produced more oil on —”)

“No-no,” Mitt snapped, as if shushing an impudent child or dismissing an “illegal” Mexican gardener. “How much have you cut on licenses and permits on federal land and federal waters?” (Obama: “Governor Romney, here is what we did. There are were a bunch of oil companies —”) “No, I had a — I had a — I had a question —” (Obama: “No, you — no, you — you — you want —”) “— and the question was, how much did you cut them by?” (Obama: “— you want me to answer a question, I’m —”) “How much did you cut them by?” (Obama: “I’m happy to answer the question.”) “All right, and it is?”

OMG, MittWit! I nearly cried out. Did you remember to take your meds today?!!?!

Obama actually managed to articulate a paragraph about refusing to let oil companies squat for 20 to 30 years without drilling on public lands. Then more crossfire ensued over whether oil production was up (Obama) or down (Romney) on federal land. Finally, Mitt bashed Obama with this doozy: “I don’t think anyone believes that you’re a person who’s going to be pushing for oil and gas and coal. You’ll get your chance in a moment,” the challenger informed the incumbent, “because I’m still speaking.”(Obama: “Well, Governor, if — if you’re asking me a question, I’m going to answer it.”) “My — and the answer is I don’t believe people think that’s the case, because I — I’m — that wasn’t a question.” (Obama: “Okay. All right.”) “That was a statement.”

Photo by Getty Images

Un-freaking-believable! Mitt Romney was just as testy, disdainful, and disrespectful toward President Obama as he was to Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum — “swatting him away,” as Chris Matthews put it. Noblesse, in Romney’s case, does not oblige. (“Excuse me; I’m still speaking … I’m not finished … Anderson? Anderson? … Let me complete!”) The baby of George and Lenore Romney’s family, MittForBrains can be insufferably whiny and demanding when he doesn’t immediately get his way.
“Candy, I’m used to being interrupted,” joked Barack Obama, Leader of the Free World.

And dissed. A “white pride” voter was allowed to attend a Romney campaign event over the weekend wearing a navy-blue T-shirt emblazoned with the following legend: “Put the White Back in the White House.”

Sadly, ever since Obama’s first State of the Union address, when the execrable South Carolina congressman, Joe Wilson, shouted out, “You lie!” to the first black president of the United States, such staggering effrontery has precipitously eclipsed the audacity of hope.

Debate results indisputable: Mitt slept in doghouse last night
After the fireworks ended with Obama’s “47 percent” grand finale, Ann Romney’s subdued behavior was telling: No congratulatory kiss and hug for hubby.

By morning, fortunately, cooler heads than the talking ones on Fox News prevailed. Although they weren’t effusive in their praise, the Morning Joe team on MSNBC gave Barack Obama some credit for winning the debate — while ascribing to Mitt Romney a heap of blame for losing it.

Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough, who called the debate “Romney’s missed opportunity,” made it clear that he didn’t like Mitt’s autocratic and dismissive debate posture (although Scarborough’s condescension toward Candy Crowley was almost as irksome as Romney’s poised-to-go-viral comment about the “binders full of women” that he falsely claimed resulted from his own efforts to recruit “qualified women candidates” to hold cabinet positions and agency posts in Massachusetts).

“You don’t run over a female moderator,” said Scarborough. “And you don’t run over the president of the United States.” The general consensus, he added, dictated “that you treat the president with deference.”
About Mitt Romney, Morning Joe sidekick Mike Barnicle opined, “He behaved as if he were a CEO and this was a hostile takeover.”

Let’s hope he doesn’t see dollar signs in American voters’ eyes and decide, once he wins the election, to ship all of our jobs to China.

The right's October 'Obama drama'

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."

By Emily Theroux

"Attacking Obama for Jeremiah Wright Is So 2008."

That was the snappy headline posted in mid-May on Keith Boykin's blog, Fighting Words.  A group of Republican strategists funded by Joe Ricketts, a conservative billionaire, 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 April in support of same-sex marriage. The kicker? Attack ads relentlessly linking the president with his controversial former pastor.

Word leaked out, however, and a Ricketts aide issued a statement announcing 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, Joyce Jones, 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 (who said he believed nevertheless that Obama's campaign had "focused on character assassination")  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. (My guess is this debate was hardly a matter of professional scruples; Moe, Larry, and Curly were more likely grappling over which bastion of journalistic integrity got first dibs on impressing the Twitterati and the international press with it the night before the first Obama/Romney debate.)

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 '07: 'This isn't a dog-whistle. It's a dog siren.'

Tucker Carlson

“This isn’t a dog-whistle,” intoned Tucker Carlson, who claims he “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.

As for describing "a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America," welcome to not-so-distant American history, a dismal 400-year adolescence during which our white, European ancestors "settled" an already inhabited continent by virtually annihilating one free people via exposure to Old World infectious disease epidemics, warfare, massacres, broken treaties, mass displacements, and forced assimilation. European colonizers also "imported" another free people into centuries of the cruel, inhuman forced labor that is chattel slavery. Follow that up with another century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, grinding  poverty, horrific and random lynchings of black men and boys, and an utter lack of recourse to a legal system that permitted white people to literally get away with murder.

And then just consider all the ways in which Caucasians have historically used the power structure of their dominant culture to exploit, brutalize, disempower, intimidate, humiliate, and dehumanize African-Americans by codifying such actions into law. This systematic form of oppression and marginalization is something that so-called black “reverse racists” (generally, people who say something true that genuine racists don't want to hear) cannot possibly visit upon white "resenters."

“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 of Fox News

"Tape of Obama pushing class warfare surfaces on debate eve," read Hannity's preposterous headline when he posted the much-maligned video on the Fox News website last night. "STATE of the RACE" the tape trumpeted in garish, 172-point crimson type, a proprietary addition from Tucker. The mainstream media, Hannity noted, had been ignoring this blockbusting Obama bombshell "for years," yet Tucker was flogging it as "an exclusive." Tommy Christopher of Mediaite burst the wingnuts' bubble with his withering review:

"The ultimate punchline in this long comedy bit of a story, though, is that the speech Hannity says 'so-called unbiased journalists have been trying to hide for years' was actually aired by Fox News. In the ultimate act of newsturbation™, you had Sean Hannity exposing the coverup of a speech his own network aired, interviewing Tucker Carlson about a speech he had also covered in 2007."

'Other Obama Race Speech' & Barack's intrinsic 'blackness'

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 qu-, you know, 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, substi- , 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 “shiftless parasite” canard suggested by the sleazy Romney slogan “Obama isn’t working.” Obama's lazy, and sleepy, and other. For all Newt knows, this shiftless, inscrutable man could even be a zombie. He's not a real president. Everyone knows real presidents ain't got that rhythm, and they sure can't croon like Al Green.

Rachel Maddow

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. The 2007  Time-Warp Obama 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. He cares what happens in poor black communities still ricocheting from the effects of generations of discrimination that may never end (and he cares more about black people than he has ever been able to get away with exhibiting since he became president of all the people — even Tucker Carlson).

"This will be remembered as the day Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge, Tucker Carlson, and much of the right wing prepared to board their white resentment mothership, only to have it crash and burn," said Mediaite's Christopher.

As it turned out, the October surprise flopped badly, even on the right. A crack team of leftish bloggers and journalists helped the DNC tweet the race tape down as "lame" before it even went live. RNC chairman Reince Priebus declined to plunge right in and mix it up with Democrats.  Christopher's conservative colleague Noah Rothman pronounced it "The Obama Tape Dud" and said it only served to indict the 2008 press corps, which Rothman believes failed to adequately vet Obama.

"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? The tape in question is newsworthy. It should have been covered in 2008. But it was not and that election is behind us. 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 offered his conservative perspective: "(C)ertain allowances for edginess always have been allowed 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 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, the memorial website of the late, great Andrew Breitbart, once a Drudge protege.

"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. Never before – in a way that has taken Democrats off stride – have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a new political reality. 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.