There is a linked thread to conservative statements and events over the past years concerning the fact our president is African-American. The sad fact is that at the end of the day too many conservatives can not get over the fact President Obama is black. That he is far brighter and more capable than the vast majority of his detractors only further enrages his white male critics.
Over and over I have posted about birthers, complainers over college records, and the backward teabaggers who spit and shout. The one element that unites them is racism.
Many have been wondering why Mitt Romney went completely off-script on Tuesday night and Wednesday while lying about President Obama, and misrepresenting the facts.
More and more people today are coming to the same conclusion as to the reason.
Racism is the reason, and the way conservative Republicans hope to employ it to win a presidential election for Mitt Romney.
Racism is not new for Mitt Romney or his Mormon Church which he was a bishop in for many years. Until 1978 Mormons had a policy against ordaining black men of African descent to the church’s priesthood. Being a Republican Romney might recall that President Lincoln freed the slaves during the Civil War.
So it is not hard to imagine how engrained racism is within the very fabric of Romney, and why his actions this week were so easy for him to perform.
The latest poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life helps fill in the blanks.
Unbelievably, the poll finds that the percentage of Republicans who believe that Barack Obama is Muslim, not Christian, has doubled since October 2008. It was actually a little higher in August 2010, right before the GOP administered its midterm “shellacking.” But in the most recent Pew poll on the topic, in July 2012, an astonishing 34 percent of “conservative Republicans” and 30 percent of all Republicans described the president as Muslim.
Overall, 17 percent of registered voters say Obama is Muslim while 31 percent say they don’t know what religion he is; only 49 percent know the truth, that he is Christian.
How is it possible that almost four years after we elected Obama president, the number of Republicans who think he’s Muslim could double, and that less than half of all registered voters know what religion he professes (in a country where religion matters)? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because virtually every Republican politician has either encouraged or tolerated the far-right lunatic fringe, from crackpot “birthers” who insist the president wasn’t born here, to Romney campaign surrogates like John Sununu who just last month insisted the president “needs to learn what it means to be an American.”
###
But Alex Pareene had a smart rejoinder, noting that the backdrop of rioting Muslims attacking American embassies (which continue in Yemen today) “is the sort of thing that will make certain voters more, shall we say, sympathetic to the candidate who is more shameless about hating Muslims. Romney understands this and is willing to capitalize on it.” He’s right. I’m counting on more Americans being appalled by Romney’s shamelessness than reassured by it, but it’s always risky to bet against the effectiveness of GOP fear-mongering.
Romney has made clear that he’s never going to pivot to the middle to win over independent voters; he obviously thinks his only path to victory is firing up the backward, racist and xenophobic elements of the GOP base. Now we know that strategy has succeeded in doubling the percent of conservatives who think the president shares a religion with people they see, one dimensionally, as the enemy. Well played, Mr. Romney. We’ll see where it gets you in November.
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 
May I compliment you, honestly, I like serious approach to debates,so often people’s debates are just not deep enough to be productive.
I brought up HC as an example of facts; to prove that we liberals (a loose term in my case) support our opinions with those. I gladly admit that the HC problem is so broad and multifaceted; it would be hard to narrow it down to just one set of solutions
I said” (operation)…if performed here it would be…” meaning here, in USA.
By “fact” I meant not the usual meaning of the word, but rather the philosophical definition of a fact, as in “a proposition or something (like a state of affairs, or a certain universally accepted consensus) that makes proposition true.” It can be subjective, of course,and true only for a certain group of people. For example “pedophilia is immoral” is a fact in philosophical definition of the word, but only for some people, for others, now and especially thru history, it is not (hasn’t been) true.
I believe that Romney‘s actions and character traits are disqualifying him as potentially good president. Some might not believe that they do. But well, November is soon enough, we will see what the majority of people think.
It was really a pleasure, and an enriching debate, I do thank you. Much more can be said and discussed, I am sure the blog owner would kindly allow it, but I am leaving for 2 weeks, and hate to type off the phone, so I have to bow out, with regret. Surely will have a pleasure to talk later on some other topics Gregory never fails to bring up for us.