Mitt Romney has made some remarks at a fund-raising dinner which have apparently shocked America and the entire western world to the core. His campaign is said to be reeling in disarray. Readers of this blog will know that I am no fan of Romney. So what did he say to create this furore?
He said:
‘There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax.’
Almost half the American people receive government hand-outs and pay no income tax? That’s truly shocking. For sure, Romney should not have lumped the truly vulnerable and deserving with the increasing number of those who could work but are somehow not participating in the growing jobs market. Dependency culture is a complex phenomenon and needs a sensitive tuning fork rather than a tin ear. But even so, the general point that too much of America is being sucked into state dependency – and that by increasing their number Obama is effectively gerrymandering the election -- remains a powerful one.
He said that the Palestinians have
‘no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish... I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way.’
Absolutely correct. Both the Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah make it crystal clear over and over again that they want to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. That’s truly shocking.
He said:
‘If I were Iran, if I were Iran—a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb." I mean this is where we have—where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.’
Absolutely correct. While other ‘dirty’ bombs are all-too possible from chemical or biological materials, the prospect of a portable Iranian nuclear device in the hands of Hezbollah is clearly one potentially nightmarish outcome for America if Iran is not stopped from developing nuclear weapons. That’s truly shocking.
He said:
‘The president’s foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception he has that his magnetism, and his charm, and his persuasiveness is so compelling that he can sit down with people like Putin and Chávez and Ahmadinejad, and that they'll find that we're such wonderful people that they'll go on with us, and they'll stop doing bad things. And it's an extraordinarily naive perception.’
Absolutely correct. The outcome has been, as we have seen from the chaotic empowerment of Islamist fanatics in Libya and Egypt by Obama and other western leaders resulting in the recent murder of the US ambassador to Libya and other mission staff—to which the Obama administration responded with yet more kow-towing to the fanatics -- that America’s Commander-in-Chief has put America and the entire free or would-be free world in even greater danger. And that’s truly shocking.
The most shocking thing of all, however, is that the mainstream US media don’t think any of these things is shocking. What they think is shocking is that Romney told the truth about them.
They don’t think it’s shocking that Obama’s disastrous foreign policy has empowered the mortal enemies of the west and weakened both America and the free world. They think it’s a shocking gaffe that Romney has said so. How dare he!
They don’t think it’s shocking that the Obama administration has bent over backwards to sanitise and effectively condone genocidal Palestinian rejectionism of Israel. How could they? They themselves to a greater or lesser extent endorse this racist Palestinian programme of ethnically cleansing the Jewish people from their own rightful and historic homeland, and never publish the elementary truth that the actual cause of the Middle East impasse is not the absence of a Palestine state but the Arab and Islamic aim of eliminating Israel. So they find it a shocking gaffe that Romney has actually called this for what it is. How dare he!
They don’t think it shocking that nearly half of US citizens are dependent on state hand-outs while worklessness is increasing among those eligible for work and while the US has developed a $16 trillion national debt. How could they? For some of them it has become an article of faith that the poor are powerless to affect their own circumstances; for others, it is an equivalent article of faith that a politician must always suck up to all voters and never tell any of them any hard truths that might jeopardise their vote. So they find it a shocking gaffe that Romney has done just that. How dare he?
The really shocking thing is that the laughably cartoonish spin put on these remarks by the far-left Mother Jones website is accepted as the obviously correct position by the US mainstream media (but not necessarily by the American public, which does not see life through the same warped prism – another fact the US media would find too shocking to believe).
This is the same media, let’s not forget, which effectively put Obama into the White House in the first place by systematically refusing to publish the overwhelming evidence of his extremist background, friends and attitudes, not to mention the glaring untruths, evasions and unprecedented lacunae in what was published about him. As a result America elected its first far-left, anti-west, Black Power fellow- traveller to the White House – thanks in large measure to the American mainstream media, which today is similarly intent on airbrushing his disastrous record out of the picture and instead demonising his opponent.
Romney has not one opponent in this presidential election, but two: Barack Obama and the American media which carries his bags for him.
Now that really is shocking.
