It’s nearly impossible to hear or read about the prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidates without the nasty F word being mentioned. No — not that word. Flawed. All the 2012 GOP challengers are continuously dismissed in the media. It’s like little laser beams are focused on each ostensibly fatal flaw, blinding voters to the totality of the candidate’s career and achievements:
- In 2006, then-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney signed mandatory health care legislation — which, as the story goes, is the basis for Obamacare. POLICY: FLAWED!
- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is on his third wife — and his two prior divorces were not family friendly. ETHICS: FLAWED!
- Two-term Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is a former lobbyist — and, as a teenager, was more interested in watching girls than in remembering Martin Luther King’s speech in his home town. CHARACTER: FLAWED!
- Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels suggested to the party base that the next president would need to call a “truce” on social issues to focus on economic ones and he is several inches under 6 feet tall. SOCIALLY and PHYSICALLY FLAWED!
- Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is charisma challenged — allegedly way too boring and way too nice. PERSONALITY: FLAWED!
- Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s record raises red flags — he raised some taxes and commuted the sentence of a prisoner who years later murdered four policemen in Washington state. RECORD: FLAWED! And now with Huckabee’s latest “Obama was raised in Kenya controversy,” he is flawed by the prevailing media…. forever.
- Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is — well, let’s say too polarizing for a general election. ELECTABILITY: FLAWED!
The mainstream media wants you all to believe all the potential Republican candidates are too flawed to defeat President Obama. As if President Obama is not too flawed to win!
Whether flaws are overlooked or accentuated greatly depends on the party from which the candidate hails. What the 2008 election proved — through the elevation of a man to the highest office in the land with the thinnest resume and least executive experience ever — is that anyone can get elected president, if the press chooses to overlook that candidate’s flaws.
Republican candidates will be judged in the media by vastly different standards than Barack Obama. Once one of them has at last secured the nomination, he or she will be pummeled while Obama will get a pass for his policies and how he comports himself as president. And the preparation for that howler of a pass is all happening now:
- On Thursday, February 24th, Libya, along with the rest of the Arab world, was in turmoil. Hundreds of American diplomats, whose lives were in danger as potential hostages, had not yet been evacuated from Libya. The State Department was working 24/7, but the ferry they sent had not been able to leave shore for two long days with passengers aboard. What does our president do? He throws a party! Yes — a rockin’ Motown celebration at the White House featuring Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and other celebs, with Obama looking and sounding more like a modern day Emperor Nero fiddling while Libya burned, gas prices spiked, and the lives of American Embassy workers hung in the balance.
Was the White House concerned that images of Obama dancing and grooving on that tenuous evening would perhaps send the wrong signal to the nation and the world? Of course not! After all, Obama was honoring Black History Month for a televised show on PBS.
Aside from numerous headlines on conservative blogs like “Obama dances while the Middle East burns,” there was no criticism from the mainstream media — only glowing reports and footage on the festivities themselves.
Now, in contrast, here is how a “flawed” Republican president reacted to a crisis when American lives were in danger:
- In August 2003 President Bush said he decided to stop playing golf to show his respect for the troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” Bush said in an interview with Politico and Yahoo News on May 13, 2008. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Here’s the signal Obama was sending the loved ones of those Americans waiting to leave Libya: We party — you enjoy the ferry.
Imagine the media outrage if George W. Bush had thrown a similar party during a crisis of this type.
Example two:
- What could be more flawed than the $821 billion stimulus package, increased from the originally enacted $787 billion stimulus? Well, yes — ObamaCare may turn out to be even more economically disastrous. But one hopes the courts will intervene or Congress will defund it. The stimulus bill is so flawed, failed, and costly that our great grandchildren’s children will be still be paying for it. Filled to the brim with waste, fraud, and lies, it never pushed unemployment rates below Obama’s stated goal of 8%.
While traveling recently on the Florida’s Turnpike, I stopped at one of those huge tourist-friendly service areas with food courts and gift shops. There was a very small work-in-progress road project of about 200 square feet between two curbs. It looked like the gravel was being readied for a garden. Although the purpose of the project was not exactly clear, the sign sure was. It boldly proclaimed The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. I swelled up with national pride knowing our economy is being stimulated by a gas station shrub garden. Who knows — maybe it was a future plot for an electric car charger for Government Motors’ Chevy Volt.
And since the stimulus sign was stimulating itself, I had all the more reason to feel proud of my government’s ability to create jobs at turnpike rest stops.
Flawed? Super flawed? So unbelievably flawed that recently Obama was reduced to telling our nation’s governors at a White House meeting that, even though many of our states are flat broke, the Recovery Act helped manage every state’s budget “whether you admit it or not”? Yes. But not if you ask a fawning press or a doting media.
Republicans must unite behind one of their “flawed” candidates and help that person triumph before we all collapse under the weight of our debt.
The alternative? A second-term president who throws more glamorous parties during more international crises while ordering up more stimulus project signs.
We must defeat this modern day Emperor Nero — or else we will follow the Roman Empire down the path to collapse and ruin.