Demagoguery for the New American Century: the Romney Blood Libel Against Democrats

[arendt]

Blood libels are sensationalized allegations that a person or group engages in human sacrifice, often accompanied by the claim that the blood of victims is used in various rituals and/or acts of cannibalism. The alleged victims are often children.

Some of the best documented cases of blood libel focus upon accusations against Jews, but many other groups have been accused throughout history, including Christians, Cathars, Carthaginians, Knights Templar, Witches, Christian heretics, Roma, Wiccans, Druids, neopagans, native americans, communists, and Satanists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

It can't get any clearer than this. A GOP presidential candidate stands up before a rabidly reactionary forum (CPAC) and spews hate-speech at anyone who would dare support the Democrats. This candidate is not some backwoods ignoramus. He is the son of a GOP governor, who himself was a presidential candidate. Romney is a very rich and well-educated man who understands exactly what he is saying.

Is anyone in the GOP outraged?

Au contraire. Today, the rightwing radio network is floating trial balloons that Romney should be McCain's VP candidate. Just what America needs - a shameless, self-bankrolling, gutter politician who could out slime and out smarm Nixon and never break a sweat. The double-think of the man is monumental: Manichean divisiveness giving covering fire to transparent psychological projection and Darwin Award levels of reality-testing.

But, even more importantly: Is anyone in the Democratic Party outraged?

By making the demagogic claim that anyone who opposes the GOP is (to paraphrase) "aiding the enemy in a time of war", Romney has made a Blood Libel. Not even bothering with insinuation, he is openly claiming that the Democrats are solely and willfully responsible for our young men dying in foreign wars of convenience and pillage that the GOP started. How is saying Democrats intend to sacrifice our young men and women in Iraq to further their depraved political ends any different than the Blood Libels of child sacrifice made by anti-Semites? How is tying Democrats to Moslem fanatics (who themselves are victims of a Blood Libel) anything but more of the same?

(NOTE: I have no intention of spreading this rat-bastard's slander by quoting him. We have already heard what this shameless, reptilian excuse for a human being said tens of times from our propaganda network in the space of a day.)

The takeaway from this should be: you don't play nice or compromise with people who use lynch mob agitprop like this. You treat people like this with the Brian DePalma (Untouchables) Rule: he puts one of your guys in the hospital; you put two of his guys in the morgue.

Unless, of course, you are a lapdog-liberal media zero or a DLC member.

Case in point: I had the misfortune to listen to Tom Ashbrook's (Media Whore - Libertarian) radio show, in which Romney's Blood Libel Speech was discussed. Ashbrook asked his punching-bag house liberal, Jack Beatty, his opinion of the Romney speech. Instead of slamming Romney as a dangerous demagogue, Beatty just poo-pooed him - saying that he was so unpopular "even the GOP don't trust him". He carefully avoided discussing the content of the Blood Libel, thereby implicitly accepting it as legitimate political discourse. It was a minor gem of disgraceful spinelessness by Beatty.

It is this constant refusal to challenge the GOP framing of the political debate that has estranged the progressive wing of the Democratic Party from the Democratic leadership and the "liberal"(sic) corporate media.

Where, please, is the organized Democratic Party response and the individual candidate ripostes to this calumny? After ten years of letting this toxic rhetoric debase our politics, why do the Dems put up no resistance to being labeled the national scapegoat for every GOP-generated disaster? For that matter, where is the hue and cry from the corporate pundit class, who called down a Congressional resolution on MoveOn for merely using the word "betrayal"?

----

So, I ask you all - both as individuals, and as supporters of candidates - what are you going to do to make Mitt Romney as despised as George W. Bush? American democracy - even prior to its current, nearly dead state - can't afford to let a Bush-with-brains/Nixon-with-money sociopath, like Romney, anywhere near high political office.

As we all know at DU, we are pretty much on our own. But, if we make enough trouble, our leadership may recognize that people will reward them for the political equivalent of putting down the rabid dog that is Mitt Romney.

arendt

P.S. If anyone in Massachusetts knows where and when we can confront this lycanthrope with an organized demonstration, please tell me.

[arendt]

1. Is everyone preoccupied with the HRC/BO thing? Nobody wants to talk about Mitt the Shit? n/t

[Cirque du So-What]

2. K & R

Excellent points - one and all. You've inspired me to write my rep (D) and my senator (the D one) and the DNC, asking them not to take Romney's demagoguery lying down. Mitt the Shit may be out of the race, but I hope his words somehow come back to bite Insane McCain in the ass all the way to election day.

[arendt]

3. Kick n/t

[arendt]

4. Kick n/t

[alarimer]

5. I was thinking about this today.

And wondering why, when Romney says there will be another attack if a Democrat is elected (it does not apparently matter which one), the Democrats do not respond. After all, 9/11 happened on bush's watch. It was, in some sense, his fault. Yet he never gets the blame and when Democrats are concerned about civil rights (but never concerned enough not to vote for the Patriot Act), they are called soft on terror.

That speech of Romney's was about the most despicable thing I have heard all year.

[scarletwoman]

6. I heard that bit -- just in passing, from the TV in the break room at work.

I had one of those head-snapping-around WTF? reactions, but no time to really think about it, since I was on my way out of the break room to get back to my desk.

Such framing -- Dems=terrorists -- is standard fare for CPAC. I've been following reports about this annual convention of rabid reactionaries for several years now. These people all live in a such a weird Bizzaro world, it's truly difficult to fathom how they manage to function at all without completely devolving into inscrutable manifesto-writing serial killers.

Thank you for writing this. I guess my own outrage meter has been slung into the red zone so many times over the past many years that I feel rendered inarticulate. Thank you for maintaining the strength and presence of mind to articulate.

Rec'd, of course.

sw