About a month ago, I stated the following here (among other things) about Frank Rich’s complete takedown of the Republican Presidential Primary field, in his New York Magazine feature, entitled: “The Molotov Party”…
…You really have to read the entire piece by Rich to appreciate just how brutal this guy can be when he puts his mind to it….
Over the past 24 hours, in “Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?” Rich outdoes himself, yet again, as he provides readers with a litany of inconvenient facts and bone-crushing opinions about the former Massachusetts governor that—if Mittens, himself, ever read the article--might even give him pause as to whether or not he should continue his run for the presidency, this year.
Even Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, could learn a few new tricks from Rich’s ”reality-based brutality,” just posted online, prior to its hardcopy debut in the February 6th edition of New York Magazine.
Here’s Rich questioning the Mormon church’s political actions over the past few decades, noting that Romney has been “both a leader and a major donor” of that church in his lifetime.
He states: “To ask these questions is not to be a religious bigot but to vet a candidate for the nation’s highest job. Given how often Romney himself cites his faith as a defining force in his life, voters have a right to know what role he played when his faith intersected with the secular lives of his fellow citizens.”
…The questions are not theological. Nor are they about polygamy, the scandalous credo that earlier Romneys practiced even after the church banned it in 1890. Rather, the questions are about the Mormon church’s political actions during Mitt Romney’s lifetime—and about what role Romney, as both a leader and major donor, might have played or is still playing in those actions…
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…As we learn in The Real Romney, Mitt Romney has performed many admirable acts of charity for members of his church in dire straits. But the flip side of this hands-on engagement is whether, in his various positions in the church, he countenanced or enforced its discriminatory treatment of blacks and women, practices it only started to end in earnest well after he had entered adulthood. It wasn’t until 1978, when he was in his thirties, that blacks were given full status in his church—an embarrassing fact that Romney tried to finesse in his last campaign by speaking emotionally on Meet the Press of seeing his father join Martin Luther King on a civil-rights march. (The Boston Phoenix would soon report that this was another lie about his past.) In the seventies, Romney’s church also applied its institutional muscle to battling the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment for women. And these days, no major faith puts more money where its mouth is in battling civil rights for gay Americans.
Its actions led Stuart Matis, a faithful graduate of Brigham Young University who’d completed his missionary service, to commit suicide on the steps of a Mormon chapel in 2000 in anguished protest of his dehumanized status within his religion. Unchastened, the Mormon church enlisted its congregants to put over Proposition 8 in California in 2008. Mormons contributed more than $20 million to the effort and constituted an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the campaign’s original volunteers. Romney, who endorsed gay rights when running as a moderate against Kennedy in 1994, has swung so far in the other direction that he ridiculed gay couples when pandering to South Carolina Republicans a few years ago. (“Some are actually having children born to them!” he said with horror.) Did some of his yet undivulged Mormon philanthropy support the Prop 8 campaign?
Once again, I won’t recite Rich’s entire piece -- but it’s loaded with obscure facts and comments by and about Romney that’ll either make your skin crawl or cause you to laugh out loud, or both -- since that would do a major disservice to the guy’s work. Again, HERE’S THE LINK to it. Check it out for yourself. I’m sure many will agree that there are few people in the fourth estate better than Rich when it comes to, “literally” (without even using a single expletive), ripping off someone’s head and pissing down the opening that used to be their neck, on the one hand; and, at the same time while doing so, also picturing them drinking a cup of Earl Grey from fine china while putting their words to paper.
7:03 AM PT: This diary has elicited some rather eye-opening commentary, down below. Of particular note, I strongly recommend that you read the annotated remarks from Kossacks cany and David Mizner (HERE and HERE, respectively).