Selective Forgiveness for Republican Candidates for President
First, let me say that I don’t have a favorite among those left. I don’t like any of them much at all. However, I have noticed a tendency in voters to forgive some character flaws over others.
Newt Gingrich comes with a lot of baggage. Everybody knows it. It has been aired for a number of years. Yet, people can’t forgive him even when he asks for forgiveness. The thing they can’t seem to forgive is his multiple marraiges. That’s okay, but it’s not the only character flaw that determines if a person will stay true to his word in other matters.
Mitt Romney has a lot of baggage; more than people realize along with a ruthlessness about how he deals with competition that looks like it might win over him. Not mention his perpetual campaign that began in 2007 and has not ceased since. In addition to that ruthlessness, he can’t seem to stay on one side of an issue; any issue. Some call him the Flipper but it’s worse than that. He often reminds me of those blow bop dolls that kids like to punch. The doll reels backward, forward, and to the sides before it finally rights itself, ready for the next punch only to repeat the cycle. Once we can finally sort out where he actually stands on an issue, there is still his ruthlessness against his opponents to consider. Remember Fred Thompson? Here’s what the Romney camp for 08 did to Fred Thompson, in Thompson’s own words:
[...] Days after I got into the presidential race in 2007, I was greeted with a website, “PhoneyFred.org,” described in the media at the time as an “anti Fred Thompson smear site.” You couldn’t really tell who was behind it, but we learned of it from the Democratic National Committee, which made ample use of it. We assumed that they had created it. However, a reporter at the Washington Post (of all people) decided to find out who was behind the site. After a lot of effort, she traced it to an executive of TTS Strategies, a South Carolina consulting firm run by J. Warren Tompkins, one of the most notorious hardball political operatives in the country.
Politicians of opposing campaigns were known to get the “Warren Treatment.” He ran Bush’s 1980 campaign, in which anonymous flyers and telephone calls accused John McCain of fathering an illegitimate black child.
In 2007, he was running Mitt Romney’s campaign in South Carolina, where Mitt was behind the rest of us in the polls. Of course, when confronted, both Tompkins and Mitt were “shocked” to learn that a rogue employee (who ran Tompkins’s office) was running such a website (out of the office), and the site was taken down immediately. One of the more benign and amusing things the site accused me of was being a “flip flopper.” I kid you not. [...]
Do read the rest of the article. The part quoted is near the end of the article which is mainly about Herman Cain. Like Fred, I don’t know if Romney’s campaign was behind the torpedoing of Cain(whom I did support) but it does remind one of what Romney is capable of. Now that Gingrich has somewhat burst Romney’s bubble of inevitablitiy, it will be interesting going forward.
By the way, Santorum has a lot of baggage, too. Google Santorum scandals and you’ll see. I won’t spend a lot of time on him because he doesn’t seem to be getting much traction after Iowa. So does Ron Paul. Google him, too.
It does remind one of the old cliche about living in glass houses and throwing stones.
But character flaws should be expected. These men are only human, after all. There is no perfect human being save one who died for our sins and sins we still commit. Depending on our worldview some sins are worse than others, though God nor Christ ever differentiated between one or another.
Fred’s article about Cain does make one wonder about things when Romney chose the very same firm that torpedoed Fred to manage his campaign again this time around (emphasis mine).
[...]“We knew coming here that Romney would have a bull’s-eye on his back but now it’s the size of the Target sign,” said J. Warren Tompkins, a South Carolina GOP strategist advising Romney’s campaign. “You’ve got to worry about that. We’ve got to survive here, but if you do the probability of getting the nomination is pretty good.” [...]
I’m not exactly advocating for either Gingrich, Paul, or Santorum over Romney but neither am I discounting them just because the media wants Romney. Given that the ‘inevitability bubble’ has burst, this primary season could get real interesting if we stop this selective forgiveness some their transgressions while beating up others for theirs. Hopefully, if we can manage to do that, we can have the least of the leasser evils that have been foisted upon us.
SC schools GOP: Newt is acceptable to tea partier conservatives
Our native state teaches the now Stone Mountain of Georgia-roosted gamecock a personal lesson: Newt is acceptable
Mike DeVine Law Gamecock is humbled.
That so many voters that have earned my respect for so many years have chosen to support Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney convinces me that Mitt is not so much better than Newt, that a vote for the former Speaker is not acceptable. Newt is a worthy fighter… and the crow and humble pie ordered here, here and here… needed more sugar and salt, respectively, thank you very much.
I still plan to vote for Mitt on Super Tuesday, but I don’t dismiss the primary voters of my native home state lightly. If Newt can give up the vague Bain Capital attacks and show mature discipline over the next months, he can win my enthusiastic support for the nomination and, of course, in the general election.
Romney ought to have to prove himself worthy to bear the mantle of the Party of Lincoln and Reagan as much as Gingrich ought.
May the best man win, I will be open to the idea that we need a street fighter just now, and …much more later…
The SC GOP Primary: Vultures, capitalists, evangelicals and gamecocks
Palmetto State poised for pragmatic pick over preening vulture anti-capitalists
South Carolinians have seen too many shuttered textile plants never visited by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital to fall for Newt-Perry slurs that blame the buyers of companies already failing due to the internal policies of the sellers or external policies of governments.
Vultures eat the dead. Bain, under Romney, saved jobs worth saving in the private sector (unlike the now government motors taxpayer -funded welfare “jobs” saved by President Barack Obama at a loss) by salvaging the identifiable living and the profits earned saved and created jobs, sight unseen:
The problem with the entire discussion is that jobs are being used as the only measure of the “good” done by Romney. Profits are also good as they allow companies to grow and as they return capital to investors who can then fund the creation or growth of other companies. Indeed, despite our being surrounded by Keynesian-thinking politicians who believe that nothing is as important as consumers having spending money, the indirect benefits to society of profits to investors are arguably at least as large as the indirect benefits of employment.
We have to assume that conservative movement leaders like the former Speaker of the House and a twice re-elected governor of the Lone (jobs-producing in the 21st Century so far) Star State are familiar with the the economic fundamentals that define free market capitalism and that constitutes the foundation of modern day American conservatism. Hence this2000 conservative epiphany-defined gamecock’s disdain for Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry when they launched their respective efforts in my native home state by hurling the “vulture capitalist” epithet at the successful former CEO of Bain Capital and related companies, savior of the post-911 Salt Lake City olympics, and balancer of Bay State budgets.
Achieve King’s dream with equal treatment – Gamecock@The Charlotte Observer
Originally published January 16, 2007 in The Charlotte Observer.
Achieve King’s dream with equal treatment
Misguided liberal policies assume blacks are inferior victims
MIKE DEVINE
Special to the Observer
“Daddy, why would somebody want to shoot a preacher?”
That was a precocious little boy’s first reaction upon seeing the headline of The Spartanburg Herald announcing the assassination of the 39-year-old leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.
No holiday cries out for a progress report more than the one President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1983 and that America celebrated yesterday. Where do we stand nearly 39 years after King’s death on April 4, 1968?
Brandon Woolfolk, a 23-year-old African American junior at UNC Charlotte presently working as a hotel clerk, told me last week that “One change is that back then blacks feared whites. Today, they fear other blacks.”
The “Bain” of Obama and other anti-Romneys: Mitt wins SC
Mitt’s free market capitalism brand is the best bet to drink at an Obama re-election denial tea party
The depths of Great Depression II and the historic 2010 tea partier conservative-driven Republican Party mid-term landslide encouraged dreams of a Reagan-like 2012 GOP nominee to retire President Barack Obama to a resumption of his autobiographical writing career.
The crashing sounds of Bachmann’s looseness with the facts, Cain’s knowledge gaps and Perry’s non-creative vulture mis-sighting-destruction awoke this South Carolina gamecock from Utopian REM eye-battings to the reality of imperfect choices absent Gippers and Silent Cals.
Iowans, social conservatives and that Romney continues to live
Apportioning blame in case Ronald Reagan Jr. is not the 2012 GOP presidential nominee
After the historic tea partier-inspired conservative Republican landslide that was the Election of 2010, we had every reason to believe that Reaganites-a-plenty would be vying for the opportunity to retire the disaster that is President Barack Obama.
Surely there are scores, if not hundreds, of articulate, experienced and reliable conservatives on fiscal, social and national security issues who posses the skill sets to campaign and govern effectively? Maybe they exist, but we haven’t seen them in Des Moines, Dubuque or Davenport of late.
Obama DOJ thinks S.C. Blacks too stupid to get photo IDs?
The Palmetto State’s new law actually provides free state-issued photo identification cards to all that need them just like the laws of all the other states with such laws that the Department of Justice either pre-cleared or decided not to contest.
So what is the difference between the South Carolina law as opposed to the laws of Georgia (also upheld by their state’s highest court), that DOJ approved and Indiana (also upheld by the nation’s highest court) that DOJ declined to contest?
It is not the language of the respective laws, all of which avoid any semblance of a Jim Crow-style poll tax by, not only providing for the issuance of free photo ID voter registration cards, but also by authorizing a proactive educational campaign as well as allowing for non-photo ID voters to cast provisional ballots on Election Day that can be authenticated later with photo IDs obtained after Election Day.
Despite the above, no less than former President Bill Clinton has characterized photo ID laws as a “return to Jim Crow”, but I digress. I defer:
The court’s liberal lion, then-Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote for the majority that Indiana’s law “is unquestionably relevant to the State’s interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.” Indiana offered free voter ID cards to all citizens, so the inconvenience of picking up an ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles wasn’t an undue burden and was reasonably balanced by the state’s interest in reducing fraud, Justice Stevens wrote.
So, could it be that South Carolina’s sin was the passage of their law too soon after the failure of President Barack Obama’s economic policies became apparent and too soon before his re-election bid?
Holder’s assistant deputy AG in the Civil Rights Division claims in his pre-clearance denial letter that the new law “abridges” the right to vote of an alleged 81,938 “minority citizens who are already registered to vote [in S.C.] and who lack DMV-issued identification”, thus rendering them “effectively disenfranchised”; and that the state has not yet finalized the proposed procedures to implement the issuance of free photo IDs and an education campaign necessary to “mitigate” the new law’s “discriminatory effects”.
DeVine finds Class warfare/envy-produced long-term unemployment defines 2011
DeVine Law Gamecock’s Stone Mountain of Georgia roost-view of what matters most about the news, politics and law of 2011:
Unemployment and the Economy
If enough Americans give up on finding a job, the regularly reported unemployment rate (U-3) could fall to Zero percent. As it happens, the current U-3 rate of 8.6% would stand at over 11% if the labor force were as large as it was in 2007. The more comprehensive U-6 rate measuring all those that are unemployed and those only able to find part-time work is now at Depression Era levels over 17%, which rate doesn’t count self-employed individuals nor those that have dropped out. Over one in five American men are no longer in the labor force.
Jobs Plans, Occupiers and Class Warfare
Three years after President Barack Obama and super-majorities of his fellow Democrats in Congress enacted their Stimulus-Dodd-Frank-ObamaCare-GM takeover/UAW Bailout-Solyndra, anti-Keystone Pipeline and anti-Boeing jobs in right-to-work states, Gulf Oil and ANWR oil-drilling moratorium agenda; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stands at an anemic 1.8%.
Does GOP want to own Obama’s 20,000 lost Keystone jobs?
Claiming fatigue from kicking cans down the road, Speaker of the House John Boehner engineered a rejection of a Democratic Party-controlled Senate-passed bill that would have cleared the way for the Canadian Keystone Pipeline project that President Barack Obama has delayed for three years of “study”.
The bill, which also extends unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut for 60 days, would have authorized construction on the oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf unless the President explicitly rejected the project before March 1, 2011.
US, Atlanta crime down. Government as criminal up?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that crime in America is down, but too many in state and federal governments wouldn’t know a crime if billy club-wielding New Black Panthers intimidated white voters outside of a polling booth on election days. But just let an election registrar ask a black person for a photo ID before they vote for sheriff and the “return of Jim Crow” is at hand, according to a former President of the United States and faux civil rights “leaders.”
Moreover, the current President of the United States has even deemed the police as criminals when they questioned a man trying to jimmy his way into a Harvard professor’s house. Only a “Beer Summit” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue got Barack Obama’s mind right about such crime-identification stupidity.
Into this milieu comes the just released FBI’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report which finds Metro Atlanta crime rates generally down in the first six months of 2011 as compared to the first half of 2010.
Recent Comments