Romney channels Bush; Vicious bully pulls wool over America's eyes

Romney, Bush II: A certain case of sheep and goats (Wiki Commons)

This is not what I planned to write today. But I find there is nothing that is more important than this: an explication of why Romney is a sterling successor to George W. Bush as the Republican Party's fair-haired boy.

Oh, sorry. Did I mention fair hair in the same sentence as Romney? Why yes, I did. I guess that is likely to put one in mind of the now well-documented physical assault by a young Mitt on another student at the private school they attended. The other student was presumed gay. Who knows, who cares? But it was very obvious that he had long blond hair, flopping nonchalantly over one eye. A sort of Beach-Boys-Go-Hippie look, one might suppose. Interesting. Unique. And isn't that what boys do in their teens, try to be unique?

Not the Suits-in-Waiting, apparently. It was simply too much for old card-carrying rich snot Republican bigwig wannabe junior master of the universe Mitt Romney. So he led a posse, pinned the blond-haired guy down and cut his hair off.

Excuse me, but that constitutes assault with a deadly weapon in my book.

But aside from that, it is probably actually a bit worse--although not much--than Dubya's so-called prank of stuffing firecrackers into frogs' mouths, lighting the firecracker and tossing the frog into the air to see it explode. Not worse, though, than another of Dubya's tricks, branding frat pledges with a coat hanger. Again, that seems like assault with a deadly weapon to me. But in an article about the hanger business, one of the victims said it was almost a relief after the beating he'd taken earlier from his putative "brothers."

What was Romney's excuse for his youthful assault on another student (which he ludicrously referred to as hijinks), I wonder? TV kids' shows when G. Porgie was a boy were not nearly as violent as they got later, and adult TV was pretty tame, too. So it would be hard to blame the influence of the media for their sadistic tendencies. Same for Mitzi.

Oh, my. I am SOOOOO sorry. I punned on Romney's name in a way that could be construed as, well, gay.

I would spend some time wondering how anyone, even a Teapublican, could fail to see that electing vicious men, who had been vicious boys, to the presidency is a bad idea. But there's no need to ponder just how vicious Romney's predecessor in unwarranted aggression was; a quick look at just today's headlines from a few publications reveals that viciousness is the heart and soul of the Republican mindset.

Here's a brief roundup of things currently favored by Republicans:

•  Capital punishment.

• Rounding up, detaining and exporting starving South Americans who will do anything to try to provide for their families, including sneaking into a nation they can see is as hostile as it used to be wealthy.
• Keeping tabs on citizens who simply want a responsive government, such as the Occupiers, and beating them up at will.
• Tossing society's watchdogs, the journalists, into jails in larger numbers than ever before.
• Cutting essential humanitarian services instead of taxing the idle rich...even when one of the richest pleads to be taxed.
• Allowing virtually unchecked gun purchases for any reason by any person, sane or not--criminal or not.
• Demanding that all sexuality in the nation be performed as if by Puritan missionaries.
• Ensuring that the vast knowledge of the globe on which we live is parceled out according to the beliefs of terrified fundamentalists boobs, or denied altogether.
• Reversing such few bona fide attempts at government-backed equality between the sexes as there are.
• Taking control by fiat of women's health.
• Ensuring that more babies are born to mothers who cannot feed them by denying birth-control information and services.
• Consigning, in some states, victims of rape to the position of bearing their attacker's young.
• Destroying such few unions as are left, the only slim glimmer of salvation from virtual serfdom for working Americans.
• Demonizing anyone who uses the word socialism.
• Making heroes of unconscionable reprobates like Rush Limbaugh.
• And on and on.

And you'll notice I didn't even mention Afghanistan or Iraq, or the death and misery dealt there and the insupportable destruction of young Americans sent to fight and/or be maimed for little Georgie's vendetta against a dictator his father failed to bring down, and the ludicrous search for Bin Laden, whose whereabouts were probably known higher up the Washington food chain than anyone really cares to consider.

In the face of all of the above, or even half of the above, or even a quarter of the above, is it possible to understand how any decent human being could cast a vote for George W. Bush or Mitt Romney? No, it is not. A vote for Dubya was...and a vote for Romney is...tantamount to condoning any sort of viciousness of which mankind is capable. And frankly, a few kinds that were added when the Bush-Cheney Cabal seized power and are now therefore in the arsenal of the Republican governance machine.

Can anyone really imagine giving that power to Romney? He's just as vicious as Bush, and worse, he has the brains and comportment to hide it a bit better. A bit. If you ask me, his intent is written all over him. You don't even have to listen to whatever he mumbles about now; his character and pathway through the universe were set in the hallway of a private school when he viciously led an attack--and assault with a deadly weapon--on another student who was different from Romney and Co.

Viciousness, need one say, should not be the major emotional component of any sitting president, except possibly in Russia, and I figure they've got that all right.

Is HuffPo the new Faux News? Should we ask AOLianna Huffington?

Arriana Huffington in 2003: These days, her news image is tarnished. (Wiki commons)

If a news outlet offers a forum for comments, does it have a responsibility to post those that criticize that forum and/or its editors?

Yesterday, Huffington Post picked up a Reuters story about guns on campus in Texas. In the article, reference was made to the Texas shootings of more than four decades ago in which thirteen people were killed. What the Texas legislature is considering is a disheartening turn of events, but also disheartening is the mindlessly fundamentalist approach the writer took to telling the story. This approach is apparently tacitly supported by the editorial policies of Reuters and possibly Huffington Post, as well, which chose not to post comments critical of the bias in the report.

Subtle, but harmful bias

In noting the Texas legislature’s possible intent to allow concealed weapons on campus, the Reuters article reported that the discussion comes “nearly 45 years after Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the UT Tower and fatally shot 13 people and an unborn child.”

No, Charles Whitman shot thirteen people including a pregnant woman. He did not shoot an “unborn child” unless that unborn child was strolling across campus trying to bum a smoke. Aside from the fundamentalist bias inherent in that sentence, it is completely illogical. An unborn child is not, by definition, a person who can be shot independent of  its host, its mother. Whitman probably did not, from his heights, say to himself, “Ooh, there’s a woman who has an unborn child within her. I think I’ll shoot them both,” and then aim a bullet at the mother’s head and the fetus. He may well have hit the fetus, but it was the woman―the person―whom he sought to kill. The fetus was, if you will, collateral damage.

Nor is there anything inherently more evil about killing a woman carrying a fetus than in killing a woman not carrying a fetus. Because the mother’s body is integral to the existence of the fetus ―until delivery, with the umbilical cord severed and tied―the murder of the pregnant woman was legally one killing. One. The mother. The woman. One woman.

And that is how the law regards it. In order to be purposely killed by gunfire―by a sniper or a whackjob student on a mindless rampage―a person must be exactly that, a person, a being with an independent life, a name, a presence on the planet not dependent upon another being’s circulatory system.

Muddying otherwise clear waters

The debate about when, spiritually, a fetus becomes a person who can be murdered by medical procedures carried out upon the mother’s body need not enter into a discussion of who Charles Whitman killed. He killed thirteen people, period. One of them was pregnant. Whitman did not kill thirteen people, one of whom had a great aperture in her belly through which a tiny person escaped from time to time and went on his/her merry way, sitting under a spreading chestnut tree on campus and discussing great books or last night’s varmint huntin’ party and beer-guzzlin’ soiree. (This being about Texas, the latter is more believable, if any of it is.) It that were true, he would simply have killed fourteen people.

Reuters (or Huffington Post; it is impossible to know if the article ran as submitted or if HuffPo edited it) chose to put a fundamentalist spin on a straight report about a modern-day quandary. (Well, it’s only a quandary in Texas; most of the rest of us know it’s a crappy idea to allow concealed weapons on campus.) By doing so, they tarnished their image. They have revealed themselves as partisan and untrustworthy. 

It would do no harm to the anti-choice crowd to have stated the legal facts―Whitman killed 13 people―nor would it be a boon. It would do no harm to the pro-choice crowd to say that he killed thirteen people, one of whom was pregnant, nor would it be a boon.  Using either a simple thirteen people, or even the somewhat more yellow phrase “thirteen people, one of whom was pregnant” does not polemicize the situation…a situation on which Case Closed was written 45 years ago, when Whitman was killed by a police bullet after killing thirteen people. Not fourteen. Not thirteen and a fetus.

CORRECTION: Other sources contend Whitman killed fifteen people and a fetus, and one of those sources calls it an unborn child. The mother lived. So it was possible for Reuters/HuffPo to say that Whitman killed 13 people (though apparently it should have been 15) and a fetus. But they have still polemicized the issue by failing to note that while the fetus was destroyed (and I can find no information on whether it might have been viable on its own, or not), the mother survived. Clarification, in order not to obfuscate, is essential in a news report, and Reuters/HuffPo failed miserably at that, with the added fillip that they polemicized an issue that might still--regardless of the status of a pregnancy--have been reported straight and honestly.

Both by their sins of omission and commision, Reuters/HuffPo has needlessly polemicized an article that purported to be about the wisdom of allowing concealed weapons on campus. It has done itself/themselves and their readers a disservice. It has made the anti-choice people seem sneaky; it has dragged the pro-choice people into a superfluous discussion that need not ever have occurred, at least not based on this report.

Reuters/HuffPo (or is it AOL?) has now joined the ranks of the dishonest and discredited, the mindless polemicists of a Faux News stripe, only worse. Faux News is so viciously rightwing no one can mistake its intent; until now, HuffPo has been less rabid, although clearly slightly liberal. Has it altered its stance? Is there now no mainstream internet alternative to the ravings of the bagger/birther crowd?

I’d say time will tell, if HuffPo moderators had let the critical comments appear.

As it stands, HuffPo is now on my personal watch list, and henceforth I will read it with a critical eye and a fine-tooth comb, exposing as many of its manipulative, partisan so-called news reports as I can.