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Friday, May 11, 2012

A Crime is Forever.
Posted by jurassicpork | 1:09 PM

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Greg the Gut and Eric Bollweevil of Fox "News" (henceforth known as the temporary official propaganda arm of the Kolob star system) hit a new low yesterday.

While paying lip service to the Washington Post "hit piece" on Mitt Romney savagely attacking a gay student with a pointed, sharp object in 1965, the right wing hosts not so subtly turned the conversation around to a completely unrelated, irrelevant and hardly equivalent matter: President Obama's drug usage as a young man. But Gutfeld and Bolling couldn't stop at that. No, after saying that Willard shouldn't be held accountable for a crime he'd committed (which today would be a felony and a hate crime, at that) in 1965, Gut and Bollweevil decided on the spot that Obama's drug use in the 70's and admitted by Mr.Obama in a 17 year-old book was fair game. Then the right wing part of the panel turned into an high tech lynch mob when Bolling said, without any basis, that the future president of the United States was a drug dealer.

There's so much that's wrong with this video that space and time forbids unpacking this right wing pogrom's assertions. But this goes to show how hysterical Fox is becoming over the inevitable re-election of Barack Obama. While I don't condone illegal drug use of any sort, one must make allowances for the culture of the time (and no, I don't consider homophobia and violent attacks on gays to be a legitimate part of any nation's culture). One must also make an allowance for the fact that the future leader of the free world was a fallible human who got some idiocy out of his system. Mr. Obama even wrote in Dreams of My Father that by the time he'd matriculated at Columbia University, he'd "stopped getting high."

In other words, the president learned from his mistakes and when his academic career was kicked into a whole new and much more serious level, he cleaned up his act and knuckled down.

Contrast that with the Mitt Romney/John Lauber incident of 1965. Mitt Romney targeted a closeted student who was rumored to be gay and cravenly assembled a posse to back him up like some right wing, spittle-flecked Scott Farkas because he lacked the balls to take on even a defenseless gay boy one on one, and viciously attacked him with a pair of scissors.

As stated in yesterday's post by Jurassicpork, Willard Scissorhands didn't suffer any disciplinary action whatsoever while the victim was expelled from the same Cranbrook prep school for smoking a cigarette outside of any of the buildings, meaning that, while every one of the students were supposedly equals in the cream of society, some were more equal than others and that definitely included the son of the current Governor of Michigan, Mitt Romney.

While the President of the United States learned from his mistakes and realized that mild drug use led to no advancement, Romney in his hastily-constructed denials and ersatz apologies yesterday in the Fox universe has obviously learned nothing. While his campaign (and Fox, in the echo chamber reverberating and getting amplified between themselves and the Romney campaign) is denying or downplaying these incidents of cruelty and homophobia as minor and unsubstantiated, the timing of the WaPo article (which benefited from no less than five sources, one of them a former GOP county chair, who were there and witnessed the Lauber/Romney attack) plainly due to the Obama administration, Romney still showed in no uncertain terms that he simply doesn't get it.

Being an acolyte of a glorified cult that's seen more than its share of hatred and criticism, you'd think that even coddled Romney would have some insight as to what it feels like to be singled out for persecution and derision, especially since numbers more than suggest there are more gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the US than there are Mormons.

This is part and parcel to the mindset of the sociopath that is Mitt Romney: An utter inability to feel any empathy for the victims of any crime or prejudice even when he himself must have been the object of prejudice and ridicule. It's obviously way beyond Romney's capability to imagine what it would've felt like to have a "posse" of angry students hunting him down and pulling his Mormon fundie undies in a vicious wedgie simply because he was a Mormon.

And Fox "News", in its conveniently-constructed echo chamber that goes from the Romney campaign to Fox to right wing bloggers and back to Fox again in their ongoing, pathetic attempts to manufacture consensus, obviously never asked this question and are themselves incapable of seeing the hypocrisy of holding against the president minor infractions that hurt no one and written about 17 years ago while declaring that Romney's own high school "hijinx" are off limits and irrelevant.

Plus we can be assured that even growing up into a middle-aged, supposedly more mature man, Romney essentially bullied a commission that was mandated to protect LGBT students from bullying by threatening to cut their funding while Governor of my home state of Massachusetts. Willard claims this was all done in the name of fiscal responsibility but it doesn't wash when one remembers the fascist GOP in Romney's home state of Michigan essentially trying to do the same thing with Matt's Safe School law. Obviously, Romney never learned from his mistakes at Cranbrook and, if anything, has doubled down on his vicious homophobia.

Hatred and homophobia are never irrelevant. And the fact that people in the LGBT community in the 60's weren't protected by civil rights laws doesn't make Willard's cruel, sociopathic and despicable acts against gays and the disabled any less crimes against humanity.
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