The new loaded synonym for “dissent” is “bullying,” which the Left is busy stripping of intrinsic meaning, much as they long ago denuded terms like “racism,” “sexism,” and so forth. “Bullying” now means you’re winning a political contest against liberals.
For example, the Huffington Post quickly jumped aboard the suspiciously well-engineered “Mitt Romney is a bully” narrative choo-choo with an article entitled, “Mitt Romney Bullied LGBT Youth Commission As Governor.” The rapidly disintegrating hit piece about Romney’s prep-school days published by the Washington Post is specifically mentioned at the beginning of the article, followed by quotes from a couple of gay activists who don’t like Romney.
So what did Mitt “Brutus” Romney do to “bully” the LGBT Youth Commission when he was governor? Eventually, the Huffington Post gets around to telling us that Romney was unhappy that his name “appeared on a press release touting a gay pride parade,” so his chief of staff told the commission chairwoman that Romney was thinking about replacing them with “another youth commission whose purview would be all of the state’s youth, not just gays and lesbians.”
The horror! But wait, it gets even more terrifying, because a few hours later the Haircut Commando changed his mind, decided that doing away with the commission was “too harsh,” and settled for putting some restrictions on “the way the commission could use the approximately $1.2 million it received in state funds.” You know, the sort of thing every governor in the history of the United States does all the time.
Gay activists, unsurprisingly, thought he ended up cutting too much money from some programs they favor. Alarmed that Romney still harbored dark desires to replace their commission with something that actually helps everyone, instead of a tiny, politically active minority, the LGBT community escalated the situation by persuading the legislature to insulate the commission from gubernatorial control. Romney vetoed it, the legislature overrode him, and Massachusetts wound up with two LGBT youth commissions. Romney disbanded the governor’s commission via executive order, while the independent one endures to this day.
Dear God, this Romney character is a monster. I can’t believe Newt Gingrich was brave enough to stand right next to him on stage and criticize him! That’s like poking Bruce Banner in the ribs with a stick!
At any rate, since our liberal friends have decided that it’s OK to scour the high school records of political candidates for evidence of decades-old “bullying,” let us turn to the pages of Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama’s autobiography, which apparently lies unread upon the cocktail tables of every liberal media figure in America. Here we find Obama’s first-hand account of how he ruthlessly bullied a little girl:
“I’m not her boyfriend,” I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. “Leave me alone!” I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight. Appreciative laughs rose around me. Then the bell rang, and the teachers appeared to round us back into class.
Earlier in the book, Obama describes Coretta, the “only black person in our grade” before his arrival, as “plump and dark and didn’t seem to have many friends.” And if I have my Obama timeline right, this occurred when he was a student at an exclusive prep school in Hawaii, which the media does not seem interested in caricaturing as a nursery for rich snobs.
So: one of our 2012 presidential candidates has a thinly sourced, alleged bullying incident 50 years in his past, while the other admits to bullying a little girl in his autobiography. Which grown man’s governing style could be more accurately described as “bullying?”
Obama’s the one grabbing executive power left and right. His EPA made headlines for its thoughts on “crucifying” a few businesses to terrify the others into compliance. Demonization of those who oppose him is a matter of course, with opposition to his spending bills portrayed as nothing but callous greed – or, as Obama’s vice president famously asserted, indifference to rape victims. When Obama’s most recent disastrous unemployment report came out, the President immediately declared it was proof that no one in Congress could possibly dissent from his agenda any more.
The Wall Street Journal published an account on Thursday on how one of Mitt Romney’s donors, Melaleuca Inc. CEO Frank VanderSloot, found himself targeted by a remarkably offensive Obama campaign website dedicated to smearing Romney supporters as somehow unsavory. VanderSloot suddenly became the subject of an “investigation” by former Democrat Senate clerk who now runs a P.I. agency. This fellow expressed a particular interest in the Romney donor’s divorce records – a trademark of top Obama hatchet man David Axelrod.
Oh, and the Obama campaign included VanderSloot on its enemies list of “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” because he’s “litigious, combative, and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”
How’s that for bullying?
By the way, here’s another funny little story from the distant past to chew on: back in 1967, two women were walking down a street in France when an entire team of drunken rugby players began harassing them. The women were missionaries. Badly outnumbered, a few of their male colleagues raced out of a dorm room to defend them, and got the crap kicked out of them. One of these brave young lads was in such a hurry to defend the bullied girls that he ran into the snow without putting his shoes on.
You don’t really need me to tell you his name, do you?
