Just how does he do it, one wonders. How does Mitt Romney get way with accepting the most noxious sort of wingnuts, misogynist and racist public figures as his endorsers, only to draw bemused responses from most in corporate media?
You’ll recall we started a bit of a cottage industry here, detailing the hatefulness of Ted Nugent, a walking DEFCON* alert of racism and sexism, whose endorsement the Romney campaign welcomed, and has yet to repudiate. Of course, the woman-hating Kid Rock has played at a number of Romney rallies. Then along comes Donald Trump, who spouts off the right’s most discredited conspiracy theories whenever he can, including the refusal of the paranoid fringe to accept President Obama’s birth certificate as legitimate.
One who is not amused is the right-wing columnist George Will, whose remarks today on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” could pave the way for closer media scrutiny of Romney’s posse of publicity-seeking poison-spewers. Via ThinkProgress:
WILL: Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics. Again, I don’t understand the benefit. What is Romney seeking?
Wow — a Republican smacking down the 1 percent. And this from a guy who accepted an award from David Koch. (I saw it with my own eyes.)
Will’s consternation no doubt stems from the optics of this thing. Here’s the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, reporting his interview with Trump on Friday:
First things first: Donald Trump is delighted that Mitt Romney is using The Donald’s star power to lure lottery contestants and donors to a major fundraiser June 28 for Romney’s presidential juggernaut.
[…]
“I’m honored that they feel that way about me,” Trump told The Daily Beast on Thursday night, as the reality-television star/real-estate mogul was being described in the media as the Republican answer to George Clooney (whose movie-star magnetism helped raise $15 million for President Obama at a similarly touted event two weeks ago)…
No sooner were those dutifully gooey sentiments out of the way than The Donald—who plans to host a lunch or dinner for the presumptive GOP nominee and some of his lucky supporters at one of the Trump properties in Manhattan—launched into a furious disquisition concerning Obama’s place of birth.
“Look, it’s very simple,” said Trump, who has spent the past 13 months questioning Obama’s constitutional eligibility to occupy the White House (and only doubled down with his stubborn skepticism after Obama produced a long-form birth certificate, certifying he was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii, and then hilariously roasted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. “A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book,” Trump went on, “he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”
Actually, Obama’s literary agency at the time, two decades ago, published a recently discovered catalogue of clients and their projects that included erroneous information about Obama and a prospective book about race that he ended up not writing…
I’m still waiting for the uproar. Any day now, hordes of reporters will pummel Romney relentlessly with questions about his use of a hate-monger to bring him some dough, right? Yeah, right.
* Thanks to commenters liam foote and calder for catching my “DEFCOM” typo.
