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.
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