I know that the Bill Burton/Joe Soptic “Mitt Romney Killed My Wife!” ad is growing distant in the nation’s rearview mirror, but it brought us a revelatory moment that we should not forget.
In the ad, laid-off union man Joe Soptic accuses Mitt Romney of being indifferent to suffering and destroying Soptic’s employer. That cost Soptic his health insurance, and ultimately his wife, who died of cancer. So the accusations are: Mitt Romney killed Joe Soptic’s job, which resulted in the death of Mrs. Soptic. Fade to black.
The ad manages to get every single relevant fact wrong. Here’s the timeline: In 1993, Mitt Romney was head of Bain Capital, and that company became majority owner of Soptic’s employer, GST Steel. Bain bought into GST to try to save it, as it did with other struggling companies. Romney left Bain in 1999 to save the Salt Lake City Olympics. Two years after Romney left Bain, in February 2001, GST filed for bankruptcy and Soptic was among the 750 who lost their jobs as a result. A full five years after that, Soptic’s wife was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and she passed away.
Soptic’s story is a sad one, but not uncommon. In real life, our problems don’t get solved in a half-hour sitcom format and there aren’t all that many stories that end happily. We live, we work, we raise our families, we experience delights and tragedies, we pass on and are largely forgotten on this earth. Believers point to a brighter day on the other side of our last “amen,” while life on this earth remains a hardscrabble thing for most of us worrying about that next bill or how we’re ever going to be able to afford to retire. Life is often cruel and unfair. But to blame Mitt Romney for any of what happened to Joe Soptic is either delusional or dishonest to the point of sociopathy.
It’s one thing for political operatives to shade the truth to gussy up their party or their policy case. It’s never a good thing, but it happens all the time. But Joe Soptic is no political operative. He is just an ordinary man, or was. For an ordinary man to blame the death of his wife on another man who bears no culpability and who has done Soptic no wrong is bizarre. But grief makes us do weird things sometimes. Festering rage and the unfairness of life can turn the straightest arrow a little crooked.
The political class among the Democrats surely knew that everything about Soptic’s story added up to zero culpability for Mitt Romney. Zero. Goose egg. Zip, zilch, nada.
But Obama’s former deputy chief of staff, Bill Burton, rolled the ad out anyway. Obama spokesmodel Stephanie Cutter claimed that the Obama campaign had no knowledge of Soptic, despite the fact that the campaign was in contact with him and held a conference call with him. Soptic’s charges got repeated by Democrat talking heads everywhere, until the ad became a debunked liability and then they all went the “I know nothing!” route.
The ad lied. The refusal to acknowledge that the ad was part of the Obama campaign’s overall strategy to destroy Mitt Romney was a lie. Everything the Democrats have said in the entire Soptic affair was a total, provable lie. Caught in the lie, they lied about the lie, all under the watchful eye of the 24/7 media and blogosphere. Somehow they retain the ability to sleep at night.
All of that is creepy and Americans should pause and think hard before voting this group any power. They cannot be trusted.
Creepier still is that the brain rot has infested even the allegedly reasonable Democrats and isn’t limited to the Soptic ad. Look at this exchange with Democrat operative Kirsten Powers on Fox last night. The panel was discussing Ryan’s entitlement reform plan.
POWERS: It will affect old people, just they’re not old right now. So they will eventually be old.
KRAUTHAMMER: They’re called young people.
BAIER: Currently they’re young people.
POWERS: Yes, but I will eventually be an old person who will need Medicare.
BAIER: You understand how silly that sounds?
POWERS: No it’s not silly, actually.
BAIER: But it’s only for people under 55.
POWERS: But the point is it’s a political point because it’s the old people who are voting right now that they’re concerned about.
BAIER: Of course!
POWERS: Right, but I’m saying like to pretend it’s never going to affect old people, it will affect old people.
Apparently no political point, regardless of how far from the facts it may be, is too silly to try to advance.
Gone are the days when it was possible to have a rational argument with a Democrat. If reality has lost people like Kirsten Powers, who in the above exchange tries conflating young people and old people, then reality has really lost them all.
From the hand-picked by the president head of the DNC who refuses to acknowledge the difference between “under 55″ and “over 55″ (which is a factual question, not an opinion), to the regular guy Joe Soptic who blames Mitt Romney for the cancer death of his wife seven years past Romney’s stewardship of Bain, to the forces of tolerance and love now getting physical at Paul Ryan’s campaign appearances, to the media which dubs these disruptors “spirited,” the Democrats have gone full postmodern when it comes to facts. In their arguments against Paul Ryan’s entitlement reform ideas, they are campaigning against math and reality, which are not subjective. The greatest threats to Medicare as we know it and Social Security as we know it are, respectively, Medicare as we know it and Social Security as we know it. If they are not reformed, soon and drastically, they will blow up. Those of us who have long paid into the system yet remain decades away from retirement will end up with nothing, other than an unsustainable debt to pay. The Democrats’ refusal to acknowledge this fact, purely so they can try to mount a short-term attack on Ryan and Romney, is more than a bit creepy.
We can argue whether it was decades of describing Margaret Sanger’s legacy as “pro-choice” or defending Bill Clinton’s copious and obvious lies that killed that party’s moral grounding, or whether it was the stealth statism that has infused that party for decades, or whether it was supporting the crypto-socialist Barack Obama in his dishonest “hope and change” campaign, or whether it was something else or whether the rot starts at the top or at the grassroots, but the facts are plain to see: The Democratic Party is a lost moral cause. It is a party that loves and revels in lies and is running for office on the power of lies. What will that party do if it then wins? The reasonable expectation is that it will continue to lie.
In the case of Joe Soptic, the Democratic Party from its grassroots supporters to the president himself is memorializing a woman’s life by constructing a monstrous lie regarding how she died.
To me, that is skin-crawlingly, dash awake in the middle of the night, cold sweat and hairs standing on end, creepy. It’s the single creepiest thing I have ever seen in American politics.
Said Obama partisan Bill Burton,
“Romney’s not someone we can find dirt on—
“So, let’s just go with lies.
“If the media tries
“To debunk, just tell them, ‘Keep your shirt on’!”
Welcome back, Bryan. You’ve been missed. “Creepy” almost isn’t strong enough.
What is to me the most creepy aspect of this are the actions and lack of actions by the media around this ad. These people (the media) are propagandists for Democrats. They are over-the-top, in-the-tank, hands-on, deliberate and intentional propagandists. They are not basically good-hearted people who are distracted by their liberal bias into momentarily abandoning all the principles of their profession. They are propagandists. We need to call them by their name. Out loud.
“They are not basically good-hearted people who are distracted by their liberal bias into momentarily abandoning all the principles of their profession.”
Hammer. Nail. Head.
– back and so your discussion of it remains topical and timeless. It is a campaign tactic used a lot in Californecrosis.
“your discussion of it remains topical and timeless…” Yes, and what needs to be added to the meme is that Conservatives confuse the idea of “defense” with the idea of “offense.”
You can’t win on defense is a truism. But we are missing the offensive thrust, which is exactly what Bryan Preston articulates here. The liberals “win” with this stuff because our side thinks that to rebut them is playing defense.
Nonsense. Play up the creepy side of all these lies … that’s not defense, that’s powerful, powerful offense.
An overreach of this magnitude is a gigantic mistake on the order of the behavior of the Democrats at Paul Wellstone’s funeral a few years ago and should be pounced on, exposed for the lie that it is, and the exposure replayed over and over again as an example of the character of the people who are running today’s Democratic Party.
All good points. My biggest questions are; why Mr. Soptic wasn’t able to get gainful employment in those 7 years? Is the man worthless? Seriously? 7 years without a meaningful job?
Does that point to the possibility that GST was filled with useless and union protected deadbeats, which is the underlying reason the company went bust?
Regardless of where he stood – his wife was employed and had medical coverage. They conveniently leave that out of the ad.
It is lying by omission! First of all the man was and probably still is a Union member and all he knows is the union and owes all he has to the democrats, which is not much at all as we can see, yep the union and Democrats really took care of him didn’t they, he is barking up the wrong tree.
I live in a right to work state and I do so for a reason, I negotiate my own wage and working conditions and will continue to do so. There is no need for a union in my state they are just communistic organizations anyway and most everybody knows that after the past four years!
It’s my understanding, from stuff I’ve read on the web, that when he lost his job, his wife *had* insurance thru her employer. At some later point he went to work as a custodian at a school (union?).
I think an important question to ask is why, when he got that public sector job (school custodian), did he not apply for insurance, hmm?s
If he had, his wife would have been covered when she lost her job. Romney’s fault, eh? That sounds like projection in this case.
During my college days, I spent my summers working in a factory. It didn’t take long to identify all the the union shop stewards. They were the lazy useless guys that didn’t even try to look busy. The reason they were so pro-union was because without the union they would never get employed. Im guessing that is the case with Soptic.
I saw the same thing happen to the Mack truck “workers” in Allentown, Pa. The UAW honcho flies into town, riles up the rank & file, bangs his shoe on the table and Management moves to a right to work state. In this case, sopdick should be PO’d at the steel workers’ chief, who hopped on his Gulfstream and is NOT worried about healthcare at ALL today!
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/08/10/buzz-ballad-the-ballad-of-joe-soptic/
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
“Creepy” does not even begin to describe the current political situation. A more apt description is that conservatives are under assault from people who are trying to enslave us.
Those of us who have researched thoroughly realize that actually we are in the midst of a full-blown marxist takeover attempt. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it.
That’s nothing compared to that Jack Conway ad accusing Rand Paul of the “Aqua Buddha” thing.
Bryan – It gets creepier. There’s a woman running for Senator in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren by name. She claims to be 1/32 Cherokee, she wrote a book that was poorly researched and was called out on it (and an a university investigation found nothing wrong because they didn’t want to find anything wrong), she wants Sen. Brown to release his tax returns but won’t release hers, she was the originator of ‘you didn’t build that,’ and yet, yet she’s neck and neck with Brown in the polls. The problem lies not in the Democrats but in the voters who would vote for them. They’re the really creepy part of this whole equation. The Democrats are lying their way to office and the public is not sickened. That’s what’s really creepy.
Elizabeth Warren is another Obama sycophant. Made out of the same cloth. Marxist. Lied about being a Cherokee. These people have no morals and particulary do not care about the poor except they need their votes. Right now Brown may be a point or two ahead but Warren just had the state of Massachussetts send out a half of a million, 500,000 voter registration forms to people on welfare. Wonder why Obama wants people on welfare they are required now to register people to vote that go to welfare offices, if not they have to send out voter registration forms. It is costing the state $285,000. The depth of the democrats and the lack of character and love of country is pathetic. I find it hard to believe anyone anyone would vote for or support these kind of slimes.
I personally think some states should be forced to secede. Nevada, for foisting Harry Reid on us for six more years, and then Massachusetts if they are stupid enough to vote Elizabeth Warren into office.
I could not agree more. It is We Voters who are to blame for the mess in America. But, in defense of libtards, it is almost impossible to overcome inculcated liberalism that flows through our media and educational system. Core concepts around our constitution, character, knowledge, science and so on are simply not taught, and TV is such a powerful medium that hordes of ignoramuses flock to the polls and vote based on sound bites.
What we are seeing is who “liberals” really are. We are seeing what they do. If the great divider is reelected, you can count on more of the same lies, distortions, half to no truths. Guaranteed.
The man has no qualms lying about the circumstances surrounding his late mother’s death from cancer. Why should he care if his PAC’s ads are false? Obama and his supporters are quite easily the nastiest, most amoral people to hold power in this country in over a century. No smear is too foul for them to spread.
I’ld like to be among the first to welome Bryan Preston to real life as it has been since about a year before Nov 4, 2008.
but you know, Joe Soptic got his 15 minutes, didn’t he? Either that’s what it’s all about for him, or the man is mentally ill for harboring a grudge against Mitt Romney for 20 years.
As I’ve been saying for some time now, it does no good to credit these people with sanity, morals, or decency. People who desperately want what you have and will do ANYTHING to get it are criminals. Period. And if they will exploit the death of a woman to falsely accuse a man of murder, what won’t they do? And the answer to that is they are willing to do a lot more than nice people want to admit.
Excuse me, but I’ve been fighting this fight under my real name for years. Welcoming me to reality is a joke.
I watched her last night with Bret and she was kind of curt telling Bret to just listen to her, or something to that effect. She was totally touting a liberal argument about well people will eventually get old. The whole point that was seemingly lost is we need to do something now for those of us in that age bracket now before it is too late. As far as the Soptic argument, the really creepy thing is why did’nt this man accept the buy-out to protect his family? and, why did he not go out and get another insurance policy or do something more to provide for his wife? The whole ad is about what Romney did or did not do and less about his poor dead wife?
Kirsten Powers has beclowned herself many times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsErSzAoHA8
Fictive Reality is an overall world view based on a collection of fake facts. Although they’re not true, they are so broadly accepted they may as well be.
Fictive Reality is allowed to expand because beating down fake facts as they emerge every day with rebuttals is a tiresome and makes for bad television and boring, confusing copy for newspapers and magzines.
The proposers of fake facts (and the media) get away with lying not so much by spinning fake facts but by actually lying and then suffering no consequence. For example, Dan Rather, who was caught red handed peddling a fraud about a forgery, is back in good standing, and back on the network as a correspondent emeritus.
We need for liars when caught to be derided, shunned and banished. But nowadays they just keep coming back on air, smiling as if nothing had happened. This is how we lose, and the question is why we’re made to do lose.
…we lose because there are not enough articulate people like Bryan pointing out how CREEPY all these lies are. We lose because silly republican consultants still think that rebutting these lies (and pointing out the creepy factor) – is “playing defense.”
People hate being fooled. Personally I think that by now our team could actually win by just hanging them with their own rope. Address these lies directly, clearly and very, very often.
If Joe was a “Union man” I must ask, where was the union? Didn’t this guy have a Business agent? In construction when a project wraps up the union hands call the hall and get back on the list. Having a forever job is almost unheard of. Joe’s union has more culpability in his wife’s death than does Mitt Romney or Bain Capital.
What Kirsten Powers does not understand is that those who are under 55 will be facing the consequences of the debt being accumulated from Medicare and Social Security. Both programs are based on a “free lunch” – those collecting are taking far more out than what they ever put in even with reasonable interest considered. I think we need to be more bluntly honest about the “free lunch” built into these programs and many more federal programs as well.
No doubt old Joe sold his soul for a few pieces of silver.
Never wonder: ‘what’s in it for them’ when they lie. They’re getting paid to lie. So that’s what they do. Not complicated at all really.
As far as I can tell, without Mitt Romney and Bain, Soptic would’ve lost his job in ’93 instead of 2001. Isn’t that a good thing?
It didn’t even phase the like of DWS or Powers or any of the Progressives that Soptic held a conference call with Progressive operatives in order to discuss the strategy of blaming Romney for the death of his wife. Sickening.
Brian, they’ve been nasty, lying a**holes for a long time, since the late-’70s, early ’80s anyway, but the Country is so divided that Republicans never much see hard-core Democrats and vice versa. In a capital city in a Red or Purple state, the Democrats have to be nice most of the time. In DC they have to act human most of the time. In their Blue, union states they can let their a**hole flag fly free.
Alaska is unique in its having wall-to-wall unionization in the public and private sectors and in usually having a Republican government. The reason is that the contending forces for control of Alaska are organized labor on the Left and the oil industry on the Right. When I was Alaska’s head of labor relations it was like having Leon Trotsky or Saul Alinsky pulling me one way and the Governor General of the British East India Company on the other.
When our home-grown independent employee associations were supplanted by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in the late ’80s, I got to deal with my first real communists since the SDSers I knew in college in the ’60s. If you’re wondering what happened to the SDS, look no further than the apparatchik level of public employee and industrial unions.
Most of the places where they live are so Blue that they can be a**holes fulltime and nobody ever challenges them. They had to learn the hard way here that they had opposition and they didn’t handle it very well. When they stand outside your door and threaten to huff and puff and blow your house down, they expect you to run screaming out of the house. If you say come and take it, they really don’t know what to do.
Romney and Ryan really need to understand this and to take the WI lesson to heart; the left are paper tigers. Like celebrities are famous for being famous, the left is powerful for being thought to be powerful. If they woof at you and you pound your chest and woof back, they run.
Romney was the head of Bain when Bain acquired GST, and for four years thereafter.
I’ve heard plausible claims about how Bain mismanaged GST – that they sent in a lot of know-it-all MBAs in suits who imposed grotesquely wrongheaded policies on the basis of spreadsheets and canned management theories. This would not be “vulture capitalism” or “corporate raiding”, just incompetence. And AIUI, Bain lost money on GST.
AIUI, GST was already in trouble when Bain took over, so I don’t blame Bain for its ultimate failure. But from the point of view of the factory floor, Bain looks primarily responsible – that they made a bad situation much worse.
Romney was gone two years before the final decision, but he would still be responsible for the previous four years.
So it’s possible that despite having left Bain in 1999, Romney bears some responsibility for GST closing in 2001, instead of staying in business through 2005, and thus for Mr. Soptic not having work-based health insurance in 2005.
At the other end of the story: Mrs. Soptic’s cancer was detected only three weeks before she died. It’s possible that she went without regular checkups because the Soptics had no work-based health insurance, and it’s possible that such checkups would have detected the cancer in time for treatment.
However, all these suggestions are only possibilities. All of them together make a very remote possibility.
It is also possible that GST was nearing collapse when Bain came in, that Bain provided extra capital which kept GST going longer than it would have on its own, that GST would have been out of business anyway long before 2005, and that Mrs. Soptic’s cancer was a rapid-onset form which would not have been detected in time.
And there is another question overlooked: Mrs. Soptic had a job with health insurance benefits after 2001, but lost it between then and 2005. What happened to that job?
I suppose in your strange way of thinking about this situation that a doctor who loses a patient is guilty of malpractice. This allegation is a game. They say jump. You say how high?
They always create monstrous lies about their “icons”. Soptic’s wife is just another fabrication to support a “narrative” (lie). Every “hero” of the left has been sanitized in death to the point of being unrecognizable. The left are liars, murderers, thieves, venal, corrupt, a gargantuan festering pustule of stink and poison. That 50% of the country still supports them speaks volumes about the “quality” of our fellow citizens and doesn’t bode well for the nation. After four years of marinating in their political bodily fluids, I’ve had it up here with the democrap party. From top to bottom, they are turds.
One wonders if the “designated hitter” for the left on Fox panels is expected to defend that point of view no matter how ridiculous it makes them appear, or if they really believe in their positions when that happens to them. It would seem a little tactical retreat now and then would preserve some semblance of analysis rather that a simple parroting the party line.
And what if Mitt Romney had still been involved with Bain Capital when Soptic lost his job? What difference would that make? Would it make the ad any more connected to reality?
I guess Mitt Romney should be thankful Soptic’s wife didn’t need a kidney transplant or something because he’d be expected to have offered up a body part to her.
Let’s recap shall we? The democrat party is the party of slavery, segregation, jim-crow, abortion and fiscal insolvency. It is an evil pernicious institution that must be vigorously fought until it no longer exists.
“The political class among the Democrats surely knew that everything about Soptic’s story added up to zero culpability for Mitt Romney. Zero. Goose egg. Zip, zilch, nada.” Remember, it is not a lie if you really believe it; and these people really believe it.
Let’s look at things from a larger, more insightful perspective.
The Democrats and their allies run lying Joe Soptic ads because they can.
Congress wrote into law many years ago that political ads do not have to be truthful. Once you realize that, you also see that Democratic and Republican lawmakers give their tacit approval to lying; made up fabrications that are fed to the public like mental hogwash; most political ads have no intent other than to deceive.
Outside of the political world, of course, there is no fantasy land of advertising. If you tell lies, you can be fined heavily, made to run corrective advertising at the same rates and time length as the original untrue advertising was exposed to the public. Which has the potential to put a company out of business.
In politics, though, Joe Septic type advertising is perfectly legal because the people we elect wrote laws to make it so. Just like they wrote laws to make information learned from insider knowledge could be used by people in government to buy stock with that insider knowledge and make millions.
This ability to trade on insider information, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons why people run for congress.
Character-challenged, classless people like Obama will use these truth-be-damned laws of Congress to lie like the wind. The Obama advantage is that the mainstream media is really an Obama media arm that won’t call him on his lying nature. So he gets away with trying to win an election on the back of public disinformation and patent untruths.
Congress can fix this, but, the Hannities of the world aren’t even aware of this to bring it into public view.
Someday, a politician with use this information to get elected and make an issue of it. Like the rules for insider trading, that’s the only way these sweetheart rules for congress will be changed.
My experience is that liberals can not mount an argument without the benefit of lying about the details of the issue!
Look, when Zero can lie, with a straight face, about the death of his mother due to a lack of health insurance, knowing full well she had insurance and the media doesn’t bat an eye, do you really think liberals care about how “creepy” their ads are?
They know the media won’t call them on it and only Republicans will complain.
Big whoop as far as they are concerned.
The lie is out there. The damage is done (or, mission accomplished if you’re a liberal)
I know confirmed conservatives who still think the census worker hung from a tree was murdered solely due to media coverage. He wasn’t. He committed suicide.
Nope, this time we have to fight fire with fire ’cause our lives depend on it.
Get Brian Terry’s parents in an ad. Get some relatives of those who committed suicide because of the closure of Delphi or any of the dealerships on the air today! There must be many of this latter group that lost health insurance and loved ones shortly after they were shut down. Zero caused this! With the added attraction these people died so that his union buddies would not lose their benefits!
Talk about picking winners and losers!!
Saturate the country with these ads!
How is it that I’ve been “let go” from two jobs and had two companies fold out from under me, lost my insurance, lost my retirement, had my career set back by several years – and yet I’m not angry at anyone about it? My rationale? “Them’s the breaks.” Yeah, it sucks. A lot of things suck. But that’s what life is like, at least for people who live in the real world. Nobody owes me security. I have to try to find it wherever I can, every day. Consequently, the “Romney Killed My Wife” thing has no effect on me. It’s not logical.
A couple of points I would like for someone to clear up about this Joe Soptic character: Was he let go because he was among the more incompetent employees? Why did he not get another job in that intervening 7 years that would have provided him with health insurance after hers ran out. Most of the people I have known would have had that as a high priority.
If, as he said, he did not know when she got sick, maybe it was because he spent all seven years down at the union hall “looking for a job.”
Why isn’t he the one responsible for her death if having insurance was the answer to saving her?
This one is so dumb that I believe Obama himself came up with it.
What is missing is that if the person had lung cancer she smoked. If she spent money on cigs ,that was money not availible for insurance. If her husband brought her cigs he helped kill her.
The worst part is the very premise of the ad! Are businesses now liable for the illnesses of laid off employees spouses? This is how far off we’ve become. Mitt Romney fires the man, without cause, no two weeks notice, shut the plant down, walks away and makes a fortune selling the plant to China . . . he’s still not responsible for his wife’s health!