Mitt Romney was asked to weigh in on Chick-fil-A and on the McCarthyite campaign against Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and he refused, telling reporters, "Those are not things that are part of my campaign." However, I see he's hanging out with some folks who aren't quite as shy about expressing opinions on these issues:
Mitt Romney took time on Thursday during a trip to Denver to meet with a group of well-known social conservatives, including Gary Bauer, James Dobson and others, POLITICO's Jonathan Martin reports.Boykin? I expect a Republican presidential candidate to meet with Bauer and Dobson, who are bad enough, but Jerry Boykin? Seriously?
The group assured Romney they are firmly behind him, according to a source familiar with the conservation.
... Thursday's meeting ... also included former Sen. William Armstrong and Lt. General William Boykin....
You probably know this about Boykin:
A Pentagon investigation in 2004 concluded that Boykin had violated "internal regulations" by giving speeches marked by fiery religious rhetoric while in his U.S. Army uniform....But he was recently one of the signers of a letter to House Speaker John Boehner endorsing Michele Bachmann's call for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood influence in the U.S. government.
In one instance, Boykin mocked a Muslim adversary in Mogadishu for believing he would be protected by Allah. "I knew that my God was bigger than his," Boykin said. "I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
... Despite the controversy, Boykin remained deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence under Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and retired in 2007.
... If our country and its people are to be spared potentially grave harm, it is essential that we establish the nature, extent and impact of ... influence operations aimed -- to borrow the Brotherhood's own words -- at destroying us from within, by our own hands.And no, these aren't just a couple of blemishes on an otherwise exemplary record.
We urge you to acquaint yourself with the background and status of the Muslim Brotherhood's civilization jihad in America. Should you do so, we are confident you will agree with us that the requests for formal inspector general investigations into this matter by Reps. Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Trent Franks, Lynn Westmoreland and Tom Rooney are both warranted and needed....
Boykin has maintained that "Islam is evil" and a "totalitarian way of life," and therefore its adherents should not receive First Amendment protections. Boykin even wants the U.S. to ban mosques, telling fellow mosque-banner Bryan Fischer, "no mosques in America." But his conspiracies don't end there. He believes that a "cabal" led by George Soros and the Council of Foreign Relations is trying to "create a global government," and that Obama, who may or may not be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood himself, is using the health care reform law to build his own version of the Brownshirts to impose Marxism on America. He also seems to think that the only difference between Islam and Marxism is that Muslims believe in a God.Boykin went to agree with the host that Joe McCarthy "was a great American."
... Boykin in an interview just this week on TruNews with Rick Wiles praised McCarthy and said he wishes "we could find a McCarthy-like individual today that was willing to stand up and proclaim very boldly that we do have a problem with a Marxist cabal in America, which are now in powerful positions, influencing our policies and the direction of our country," including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Wiles: Little Leon Panetta, he's got some Marxist relationships in his closet too, if you go back far enough, Mr. Panetta, he's palled around with no communists.
Boykin: That's right. He certainly has, as have a number of the people who are in the administration right now....
Why is it acceptable for a major-party presidential candidate to meet with a guy like this, and to accept his endorsement? Why isn't this a scandal? It would be scandalous if Romney met with Orly Taitz or Alex Jones or some other conspiratorialist. Romney gets grief when he hangs out with Donald Trump. Why isn't this on par with that?
(X-posted at Balloon Juice.)
3 comments:
"Why isn't this a scandal? "
IOKIYAR.
This has been today's edition of "SATSQ's.
Stay tuned for Luke Russert's show, 'His Father's Son' - where Luke will talk about Elizabeth Warren with Cokie Roberts', David Brooks', and Tom Brokaw's, young children as guests - where Luke will dole out career advice, like, "Looks like you already have a good start...".
And a special segment with Jamie Dimon's and Mitt Romney's kids, to discuss how the elimination of the "Estate Tax" will be a boon to everyone - where Luke will dole out financial investment advice he learned from watching CNBC and FOX Business News.
Boykin is such a crackpot he is terrifying.
In fact, when I first heard of him years ago it frightened and depressed me that a man like that could rise so high in the military and keep his place even after his views had been revealed.
(Remember the movie, “The Ruling Class”?)
Romney is generally taken to be a vanity-driven man of broadly unprincipled ambition, but not personally a nut.
But maybe people need to look a little more closely at a man capable of as much personal commitment to Mormonism as he wants us to think he has.
Yes, I know.
Most of the people doing the looking will be themselves committed in varying degrees to organized superstitions every bit as loony.
But not all of them.
And this does seem to matter in a perhaps unexpected way.
Some of the people most alarmed by Islam are atheists and other secularists in whose eyes it is historically the most bloody and today the most untamed of the Abrahamic religions.
But it seems that the people suggesting the most extravagant measures against Islam and against Muslims are themselves devotees of Christianity allied with Christian and Jewish Zionists.
As for me, I would imagine we living in America would have a lot less to fear from Muslims were we not Israel’s bodyguard, a position there was never any good reason for us to fill.
And at the same time domestically the danger of religious “totalitarianism” in this overwhelming Christian country emanates almost exclusively, so far, from the Christian right and generally from the same sorts of Christian crackpots who have the most sympathy with Boykin’s views regarding Islam.
All the same, there is a possibility that as Muslim immigration into America continues it will add to the American mix a significant number of voters and others who are highly politically active, all of whom are even crazier in typically right-wing ways than the crazy Christians we already have to deal with.
Whatever else we may think of the politics of people like Pym Fortyn and Bruce Bawer – and I personally deplore their neoliberalism and everything connected to it – we have to admit their alarm about a Muslim threat in some parts of Europe to social liberalism, the sexual revolution, and homosexuals in particular is genuine and justified.
And in this connection it pays to recall that just before 9/11 some leading representatives of the Christian right, Catholics in the van, were talking about an “ecumenical Jihad” allying Islam and Christianity worldwide in a global movement to put down the sexual revolution that was born in the Occident and has been driven by Western secularism and liberalism.
Perhaps the only good result of 9/11 was that it prevented such an alliance from emerging.
Or at any rate delayed it.
And in this connection it pays to recall that just before 9/11 some leading representatives of the Christian right, Catholics in the van, were talking about an “ecumenical Jihad” allying Islam and Christianity worldwide in a global movement to put down the sexual revolution that was born in the Occident and has been driven by Western secularism and liberalism.
Dinesh D'Souza was making more or less that case years after 9/11, though the right-wing Islamophobes hated him for it, so he turned his attention to calling Obama a Kenyan colonialist, which brought him back into the right-wing fold.
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