To hear the right tell it, both sides are exactly the same. They have Rush Limbaugh, we have Bill Maher. They have Ann Coulter, we have Hilary Rosen. They neglect to tell you that they have Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Allen West, Steve King, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Ted Nugent and Newt Gingrich. I could name several dozen more Republicans that have made wildly offensive comments, but I have better things to do with my day.
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I don’t blame the Republicans for the “both sides” narrative. If I were a Republican, I try to distract from the a**holes that speak for my party too. I do, however, blame the mainstream media, who have never met a Republican talking point they didn’t take at its word. Case in point? One time Democratic staffer, George Stephanopoulos who asked if President Obama should cut ties to Bill Maher for saying that “Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work.”
Here’s the video:
That’s why Stephanopoulos makes the big bucks, it’s that ability to lightly scratch the surface of an issue.
Before I do the job that Stephanopoulos should have done, I will concede a few points:
Both Hilary Rosen and Bill Maher’s statements about Ann Romney were true, although in-artfully stated. Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life, giving her choices that the majority of women in this country have never had. She has had health issues, but she will never understand the financial pressures that accompany health issues for most Americans.
Bill Maher has made a career out of being politically incorrect (i.e. offensive).
No matter what Bill Maher says, he has a lot of catching up to do before he begins to match the level of Rush Limbaugh’s misogyny. Not only did Limbaugh call a private citizen a slut and a prostitute, he has over two decades of calling women everywhere, Nazis.
Bill Maher gave $1 million to President Obama’s Super Pac.
To my knowledge, the donation to the Super Pac is the only “tie” that the President has to Maher. Should he give back the donation? Well, it’s not his to give. One of the very few rules about Super Pacs is that the candidate doesn’t have direct access to the money. Sure, this rule is soft, but as Republicans make that demand, they are conceding that the rule is soft, thereby pointing out another serious flaw in campaign financing, an issue that was almost completely designed by Republicans. They’re getting themselves wrapped up in a little Catch-22, which will come back to bite them in the ass. Allow me to take one of the first (completely metaphorical) nibbles.
Mitt Romney also has a Super Pac, along with several other conservative Super Pacs that will be investing in a Romney win, but for now, we’ll only focus on one. It’s called Restore Our Future. So far, there is $43 million in Romney’s Super Pac as opposed to just $6.5 million in Obama’s Super Pac, Priorities USA. Romney has eight donors who have given $1 million or more. Obama has just two. Maher is the second largest contributor to Priorities USA, following Dreamworks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave $2 million.
Now let’s take a look at some of Romney’s big donors, and just to keep it apples to apples, I’ll only look at the $1 million plus people.
The top donor to Restore Our Future, at $3 million, is Bob Perry of Perry Homes, who is a known homophobe.
The second listed donor, at $1 million is Edward Conrad, who at first created a dummy corporation to hide his identity but later “came out.” Conrad works for Romney’s old job killing company, Bain Capital.
The next two, both at $1 million, are Eli Publishing and F8 LLC, neither of which even appears to exist. They both have Utah addresses, but they seem to be empty buildings. Which do you find more offensive, poorly chosen but true words, or dummy companies set up to skirt the law?
Next is Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies. Mercer is a hedge fund manager with a history of running shady attack ads against political opponents, while hiding his identity.
Then we have another hedge fund manager, John Paulson, followed by Julian Robertson, a tax dodger and another hedge fund manager, Paul Singer.
Am I suggesting that Romney should give back the money to his donors? No. Campaign laws are what they are, for now. With today’s lazy mainstream media, President Obama has one major disadvantage with his Super Pac (other than the fact that it’s woefully underfunded compared to Romney’s), his largest donors are public figures. Their words and actions are themselves newsworthy, even before they wrote hefty checks to help reelect the President. Their gaffes are in tabloids. Romney’s donors, on the other hand, are shady, in every sense of the word. It takes a little bit of work to uncover their secrets and motives. Stephanopoulos would rather sleep in.
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It’s way too easy in this country to get conservatives to go wherever they are led. It appears to be in the structure of their brains. See “Fear, Rigidity, and the Decline of America” at http://thepoliticali.blogspot.com/2012/04/fear-rigidity-and-decline-of-america.html.