Daily Beast's Idiot of Last Resort Michael Tomasky: Boy, Mitt Romney Sure Was Racist By Letting Black Voters Know That He Was Competing Against Barack Obama, Huh?

No link.

How dare this racist note that there is only one president, and so, when he says he's running for "president," he actually in fact means to replace Barack Obama?

Michael Tomasky on Mitt Romney the Race Baiter at the NAACP by Michael Tomasky Jul 12, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

With his incendiary speech to the NAACP, Mitt crossed an ugly line. No longer simply spineless and disingenuous, he’s now become a race-mongering pyromaniac. Plus Mansfield Frazier on Romney's diversity problem.

Until yesterday, I thought of Mitt Romney as a spineless, disingenuous, and supercilious but more or less decently intentioned person who at least wasn’t the race-mongering pyromaniac that some other Republican candidates of my lifetime have been. Then he gave his speech to the NAACP, and now I think of him as a spineless, disingenuous, supercilious, race-mongering pyromaniac who is very poorly intentioned indeed, and woe to us if this man sets foot in the White House as anything but a tourist.

...

That speech wasn’t to the NAACP. It was to Rush Limbaugh. It was to Tea Party Nation. It was to Fox News. Oh, he said some nice things. And sure, let’s give him one point for going there at all. But listen: You don’t go into the NAACP and use the word “Obamacare” and think that you’re not going to hear some boos. It’s a heavily loaded word, and Romney and his people know very well that liberals and the president’s supporters consider it an insult. He and his team had to know those boos were coming, and Romney acknowledged as much a few hours later in an interview with . . . guess which channel (hint: it’s the one whose web site often has to close articles about race to commenters because of the blatant racism). Romney and team obviously concluded that a little shower of boos was perfectly fine because the story “Romney Booed at NAACP” would jazz up their (very white) base.

Blame the media for making such a big deal of it? Come on. When a candidate’s staffers are preparing a speech, they know very well exactly what line the press is going to lead with. Speeches are written with precisely that intent (or if they’re not, someone is sleeping on the job). The mention, for the record, was couched, with appropriate plausible deniability, in the middle of a list of five things he’d do to get the economy humming again. (Speech text here.) Point three concerned reducing government spending and bring down the debt: “To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.”

So far the only evidence of the "incendiary" nature of the speech is the mention of "ObamaCare," which is racist, despite Democrats now embracing that term.

The context is crucial, and the fact that it was mentioned in passing certainly does not absolve Romney because it was just one item on a list.

Is he really suggesting that blacks don't know he has vowed to repeal ObamaTax? Or that it is racist to mention a known part of his platform to one racial group, for fear of offending him?

Who's the racist, again?

By the way: What's the big deal if blacks boo? He's acting as if any time you say something a black person doesn't like, it's ipso facto racist.

Again, that's racist.

Let’s imagine that in 2008 Barack Obama had spoken, oh, to the American Legion—that is, a strongly Republican assemblage—and had spoken of being anxious to get to Pennsylvania Avenue so he could end “Bush and Cheney’s wars.” In fact he did speak (via video) to the American Legion in 2008, and he talked about needing to end the wars, but he sure didn’t use any loaded phrases that he and his speechwriters knew would piss his audience off. Part of the difference is a clear difference in character between the two men. And part of it, of course, is that in our political discourse, pissing off veterans is as bad a mistake as you can make, while pissing off black people usually adds value.

So he... announced his agenda to a crowd that didn't like it. But he didn't use the racist term "Bush and Cheney's wars," or something. (By the way, this idiot seems to have forgotten that Obama pledged -- on paper, at least -- to end only one of Bush's and Cheney's wars. The other one he vowed to fight, fight, fight, but in the "right way.")

Eh, just hit-whoring. Say something as stupid as you can imagine to drive traffic. It's intellectually dishonest; it's just carney-barking.

That's why there's no link. Use your adult words, Mikey.

Laura Adds:

he actual subtext of that speech is 'what's good for all Americans will be good for black people, too.' No race-obsessed-victim-fetishist wants to hear that.

I saw some black commentators say yesterday that even though they disagreed politically with Romney, they appreciated his candor and thought it was courageous of him to not attempt to blow smoke up their asses.

This must be terrifying for the Left.

Thanks to @slublog.

Is Obama A Racial Pyromaniac Too? Is he deliberately provoking blacks by calling ObamaCare "ObamaCare"?

It's so stupid anyway, I don't know why we even have to point out it's factually wrong besides.

thanks to @drewmtips for that.

posted by Ace at 10:15 AM

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