Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney is retiring, and no one is more upset than the very press that savaged him when he ran for president in 2012.
They attacked his religion, his wife’s multiple sclerosis, and accused him of hating dogs and being a gay basher in high school. It didn’t matter what was true or how bigoted the comments were, all’s fair when the legacy media try to wreck a Republican.
The man they now consider a vanilla, nice guy was destroyed for having "binders full of women" he wanted in his administration. The press still treats that as a "gaffe," though the Washington Post admits it was actually more than 15 pounds of resumes of women he wanted to consider hiring.
What a monster.
A Newsweek cover described him as: "Mitt Romney: A Candidate With a Serious Wimp Problem." New York Times columnist Charles Blow mocked Romney for wearing "magic underwear," an anti-Mormon comment Blow ended up apologizing for. Sadly, he wasn’t the only bigot in the press that campaign.
In other words, they did anything they could to destroy Romney for daring to run against their anointed one – President Barack Obama.
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Now, more than a decade later, they celebrate Romney. Politico warned that, "Romney’s exit threatens a collapse of Senate’s middle." The Washington Post highlighted, "Romney’s stark indictment of GOP cowardice."
Time magazine explained how documentary footage of the senator, "showed a goofy grandfather, a decidedly decent man, and an earnest pol who just wanted to help his country."
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All of this was timed to author McKay Coppins’ forthcoming biography titled, "Romney: A Reckoning."
Wow, if you didn’t know better, you’d think the news media spent decades adoring the man. And you’d be wrong.
Lefty journalists manipulate every Republican primary to get the farthest left candidate they can find, Arizona Sen. John McCain, who they called a "maverick," both Bush presidents and Romney. But the second they actually get nominated, the legacy media gut them like they are fileting a tuna.
The attacks on Romney were especially disgusting since so many were centered on his Mormon faith. And from the same lefty news media had done the exact opposite in 1960 when Catholic John F. Kennedy ran for president.
When the Democrat JFK sought the presidency, he had the press on his side. A Sept. 2, 1960, Post editorial went after anti-religious "bilge," saying it, "debases the political process and does irreparable damage to the fabric of social unity."
Two days later, a Times editorial made a similar argument and criticized "small-minded and prejudiced persons who have a neurotic compulsion to feel superior to somebody or an urge to blame some racial or minority group for their own individual failures or misfortunes."
Fifty years later, Romney’s campaign was nearly swamped by such attacks. This time, the Post used a June 18, 2011, editorial to appear to argue against prejudice, but … it noted, "There’s plenty about Mormonism that might strike a non-believer as strange or objectionable." And one staffer dug back before the Civil War to write of a massacre committed by Mormons.
The Post wasn’t done. It slimed back into Romney’s high school records from 1965 to claim he had "troubling incidents" and had once pranked a student by cutting his hair. Barberism!
Except the Post tried to make it into gay bashing. Somehow, long before hardly anyone exited the closet, Romney was magically targeting a student who "was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality."
Then there are the attacks on Ann Romney, who has multiple sclerosis and rode a horse as part of her therapy. ABC, NBC and CBS morning and evening news shows mentioned the horse, Rafalca, 14 separate times. It was part of depicting the Romneys as rich and out of touch. As opposed to reporting on a heroic woman battling MS.
Or when Posties at The Reliable Source cheered how First Lady Michelle Obama wore a "princely $6,800" jacket to a reception. Only Post Politics writer Suzi Parker asked in another piece, "Does Ann Romney wear her $990 designer shirt while driving one of her two Cadillacs?"
This is the same kind of ridiculous thinking that the press embraces on every issue. They celebrate the elite going to Davos to talk climate change and bury the fact that they use private jets to do it. They hate on rich conservatives (or just Republicans in Romney’s case) but love mega-billionaires like George Soros because he gives to their side.
There are no double standards in the news media. There’s only one standard. Democrats are good, if they vote liberal, and Republicans are bad. Except when they bash Republicans.
It’s a strategy decades old. But seldom is it so blatantly obvious. It’s not Romney’s fault for wanting to exit on a high note. Only, the reason he got it was because newsies realized he would come out swinging against his own party.
I hope Mitt remembers the adage that, when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
