Dear Mitt and Ann Romney America Waits for Your Apology For Playing Victim

Dear Mitt and Ann Romney America Waits for Your Apology For Playing Victim

Mitt Romney’s “I know you are, but what am I?” strategy, declaring President Obama the real perpetrator of a “war on women,” got an assist from CNN Democratic analyst Hilary Rosen Wednesday, when she questioned whether Romney should use his wife, Ann, as his expert on women’s issues when she “never worked a day in her life.” As feminists have known thanks to the silly Mommy Wars over the last 20 years, every mother is a working mother. Rosen, who is herself a mom who also works outside the home, has now apologized, as has every prominent Democrat from President Obama to Debbie Wasserman Schultz to David Axelrod (and probably FDR, from the grave).

But Republicans still won’t shut up about it. An aggrieved Ann Romney even told Fox News, “I will tell you that Mitt said to me more times than I can imagine, Ann, your job is more important than mine,” and added that as the mother of five grown boys, “I know what it’s like to struggle.”

Well, I’d like to demand that Ann Romney apologize to all women for equating the “struggle” of a wealthy mother who had full-time household help to that of a poor or working-class job-holding mother, who must choose between her job and her children when a child gets sick. How dare you, madam? Have you no shame? I’d like to demand that Mitt Romney apologize for his wife’s remarks, too. I’d like to hear every prominent Republican denounce Ann Romney for her heinous insensitivity to non-wealthy mothers who must work outside the home.

leave it to wacky conservative to have fainting spells as soon as someone points out that someone who is a millionaire's wife does not have it as hard as the average American mom. Ann Romney Can't Fix Mitt's Women Problem

The underlying, legitimate, and not-at-all-novel point Rosen was making -- that the wealth of the Romney family has insulated them from many ordinary people's struggles -- was immediately lost in the cacophony of criticism. If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that motherhood is divine and noble and saintly. (As a mother myself, I would know just what perfect human specimens all moms automatically are.) In a classy, modern touch, Ann Romney, in her Fox interview, also praised "all the dads home raising kids," thereby elevating the discussion, if only momentarily, from the retrograde notion that only women can or should raise children.
....His claim that women have been the disproportionate victims of job loss was widely criticized; his gestures to his wife as his ambassador to the women's vote made him sound like he viewed women as a foreign, distant community. His policy adviser, on a conference call specifically convened to promote the idea that it was Obama who was waging war on women, couldn't say where he stood on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Obama's landmark legislation on women's pay discrimination. This came in the wake of months of debate about access to contraception, "slutgate," vaginal probing, and so on, all of it thoroughly toxic for Republicans hoping to appeal to women voters. Recent polls have shown Romney losing the women's vote by nearly 20 points, but in trying to turn that around, he seemed to be wading into a type of identity politics he was ill-equipped to manage, and fumbling as a result.

The worse struggle the Romney family has ever faced is deciding what car to tell the chauffeur to bring around depending on which mansion they were living in at the time. Only a conservative who has never cleaned a floor, dug a ditch or emptied a bed pan would whine about how hard they have it.

Barney Frank Destroys Pretend Patriot Allen West

There have been plenty of diaries on Allen West calling members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus "communists."  Yes, this one is tangentially related to that.  However, Allen West's comments won't take center stage here.  Instead, the always astute and sharp Barney Frank's reply will be front and center.  It's really a shame that he'll be gone from Congress at the end of the year, but hopefully the utter destruction he rains on Republicans will continue.

Frank started by first slamming West and the GOP:

    "Not even Joe McCarthy would have said anything so stupid and dissociated from reality," Frank said in a call with The Huffington Post. "It's an indication of the significant deterioration of the Republican Party as a responsible entity that an ignorant, mean guy like Allen West is considered one of their stars."

He then gets considerably more serious, pointing out exactly what the intention of West, and others, is when they compare their political opponents to communists:

    "It is exactly the opposite of those of us in the Congressional Progressive Caucus who are in support of freedom, in support of democracy, in support of people's basic rights and civil liberties," he said. "Communism is really a reference to some of the worst human rights abuses of our time ... It is meant to delegitimize people and allow no basis for debate. It's a very nasty label."

    He added, "I very much object to being associated with Stalin or Khrushchev."

It is that second point that is most important.  So many on the right want to shut down the debate because they know the outcome once that debate happens.  Those atop the Republican Party see what has happened during their primary season.  As they have lurched even further to the right they alienate more and more voters.  The Republican establishment finally has their candidate, but only after he had to tack hard right to win the nomination.  That damage is done and no amount of shaking the Etch-A-Sketch is going to change that.

Frank hit the nail on the head.  The real problem is not Allen West.  It is that the Republican Party has descended so far into the abyss that someone like Allen West is a leader and is mainstream within the Republican Party.  That is what we must keep our eye on.  Yes, Allen West is the one who made the remarks.  However, he is just one of many capable of making them in the modern-day Republican Party.

West currently collects veterans benefits courtesy of those "communist" he complains about. He also collects a salary as a Congressman which all taxpayers pay for and has access to health care benefits subsidized by those "communists", whoever they might be. West is not a hypocrite, he is a poster child for hypocrisy. He baths in contradictory wacky myths. he obviously hates American values and traditions of decency.  In short West is not a man he is wart that leeches off America's greatness as he feds at the trough like a pig.