Sounding more like Barack Obama than a member of the Republican party—although it’s getting harder to tell the difference anymore—Mitt Romney went on a rant that would make even the messiah stand up and cheer.
In an appearance on the “Axe Files” podcast with Democrat strategist and Obama’s chief political architect, David Axelrod, Romney took exception with how the growing new media carried undue influence in today’s political world. Sounding almost nostalgic, Romney appeared to pine for the good ol’ days when traditional media ruled the airwaves:
“There was a time when we all got the news with the same facts, if you will. We had three networks we watched for the evening news. Most of us got newspapers. Everybody in the middle class got a newspaper, so we got the same facts whether we agreed or not with them.”
You can almost hear the “Leave it to Beaver” music, can’t you? I wonder what Mitt misses the most about the good ol’ days of The Big Three of TV media.
Maybe it’s Dan Rather, the former CBS reporter who was forced to resign after it was discovered that he made up a story about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. Perhaps he misses Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchor who was suspended after he admitted that he had falsely recounted a story that he was in a helicopter that was hit by ground fire in Iraq in 2003. Or maybe he longs for more of the biased reporting we get from folks like former Clinton team member George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
Romney also said “the extremes within our respective parties are having a louder and louder voice and demanding more attention” and “immediate action” as opposed to “collective action,” Breitbart reported.
Romney further hammered home these comments during a “State of the Union” interview on CNN over the weekend—they weren’t around in the good ol’ days, were they?—and he took the opportunity to express his concern over the rise of conservative insurgents:
“The challenge in our party is not so much that people have differing views on issues, as much as people have differing views about how to get those issues implemented. There are some in our party who think the best approach is throwing bombs. The problem with bomb throwing so far is that most of the bombs have landed on our own team. That doesn’t help. … We have Paul Ryan, for instance, that’s willing to work with Democrats. I think that’s a productive thing.”
Yeah, Paul Ryan’s willingness to work with Democrats has been a big hit, as we see in these examples:
- On illegal immigration, Ryan’s a big believer in open borders and amnesty.
- The Ryan/Murray Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 eliminated sequester protections against excessive spending and exploded the budget.
- He voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Government Motors bailout.
In the end, Romney doesn’t really have a problem with new media. What he really objects to is how new media has exposed him and his RINO buddies for the frauds they truly are, and how they give voice to those pesky conservative groups that he and Mitch McConnell find so troublesome.
And in the end, to quote Romney, I think that’s a productive thing.
David Leach is owner and publisher of The Strident Conservative where he is proudly politically-incorrect and always “right,” and he is also a frequent contributor at RedState.com.
His political commentaries can be heard daily on KLZ560 AM at 3pm MST and on other Crawford Broadcasting stations throughout the day.
