This is not how you silence critics claiming that you’re an out-of-touch tightwad.
Water skiing? Come on Mittster! Water sports are not good for guys running for president, you should know that.
All we need is some video of Romney looking suave while water skiing so we can recreate this infamous ad.
Here’s a short clip from The O’Reilly Factor in which the eponymous host responds to liberal economist Robert Reich’s recent appearance on The Daily Show.
The full video of the exchange between Bill O’Reilly and partner-in-crime Lou Dobbs wasn’t embed-able in WordPress, but you can find it here.
During his appearance on The Daily Show last week, Reich made the point that since there are no more “American” companies – only multinational corporations – there is no longer any incentive for the private sector to invest in American education, infrastructure, or research and development. As such, the government should step in and make those investments.
What seems like a pretty rational point to me was struck down as the communist drivel of a secret devotee of Karl Marx.
Papa Bear has never been a model participant in the public discussion, of course, but this particularly ridiculous ad hominem attack deserves mention because of the droves of Fox Newsers that will be repeating the attack on a loop.
Robert Reich is a communist.
Robert Reich secretly adores Karl Marx.
But that’s a standard practice legitimized by O’Reilly and his ilk.
“I’m not a communist and I don’t secretly adore Karl Marx,” Reich said in a post on his blog. Here’s how he continued.
Ordinarily I don’t bother repeating anything Bill O’Reilly says. But this particular whopper is significant because it represents what O’Reilly and Fox News, among others, are doing to the national dialogue.
They’re burying it in doo-doo.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offered some promising news about primary campaign coverage in 2012 in a report released yesterday:
While a focus largely on political matters—topics such as horse race, strategy and fundraising—made up most of the coverage, the numbers were lower than four years earlier. Taken together, coverage of personal issues, public record and policy positions received about twice the emphasis in 2012 as it did in 2008 (28% in the 2012 race, 11% in the 2008 Republican primary race and 15% in the 2008 Democratic primary race).
It seems that there’s been a very substantial jump in the amount of non-horse-race coverage of the primary campaign, but this jump could be attributable to a few external factors. The fact that there was only one nominating contest likely left a horse race gap to be filled by additional coverage of policy and personal issues. The nature of the Republican contest may also have contributed. The near-constant replacement of front-runners likely translated into an abnormally high level of candidate introductions, personal background pieces, and postmortems of campaign scandals.
Another interesting finding from Pew indicates that Mitt Romney has been covered somewhat more favorably than President Obama since the beginning of primary season:
The public has been offered a mixed view of Romney, one that has emphasized his wealth, his record as a private equity executive and focused on the difficulties he has had as a campaigner in persuading conservative primary voters to embrace him. In the case of President Obama, the public has been exposed to a mostly negative portrayal. That, in substantial part, is a function of the fact that for many months he has been the target of multiple Republican candidates attacking his record and his competence as they sought to take his job.
Despite this finding, Mitt Romney is still insisting that there is a “vast left wing conspiracy” against his candidacy being played out in the media.
“Many in the media are inclined to do the president’s bidding,” Romney said last week during an interview with Breitbart TV. “And I know that’s an uphill battle we fight with the media generally.”
I guess he hasn’t seen the report yet.