The Mitt Romney Deception

NO MORE RINO’S OR MODERATES!!!

Man,

For MittWits That has really got to hurt when everything they are trying to convince others about their candidate is refuted by their candidates’ own words.

Well, what do you know? Mitt’s a RINO.

I don’t understand why some people are so crazy about him

"calculated effort by the Romney campaign to revise his history and portray the Governor as far more conservative than the record indicates."

May it work as well it has for Ghouliani! Not!

He’s purty... /s

Ping a ling

Meaning it didn’t work, of course. Seemed kinda unclear after I posted

Would you vote for Mitt vs. Hitlery?

Hey,

Now how do you explain all this if your guy Mitt is such a great candidate as you all have been posting?

I don’t understand why some people are so crazy about him

I think it's the hair. How many candidates (other than John Edwards) has such a nice hair-doo?

Romney 2008: Because he’s pretty

Now how do you explain all this if your guy Mitt is such a great candidate as you all have been posting?

This Camenker crap has been posted repeatedly here. Heck, I used to post it back when I was initially fooled by it and believed it. It is a huge pack of lies, misquotes, out of context quotes, mischaracterizations, falsehoods, distortions, and wild conclusions. It was the primary thing which had me originally opposing Romney. I read through it and started testing its accuracy and drawing my own conclusions based upon the truth and I ended up supporting Mitt Romney. Your mileage may vary.

How measurable is the difference between the two? It doesn’t appear to be statistically significant. They’ll both say anything. It appears that they’ll both DO anything.

Me and Brian Camenker

Posted by: Dean Barnett at 5:59 PM

For this news cycle anyway, Brian Camenker has emerged as a thorn in Mitt Romney’s side. A long time fixture on the fringe of Massachusetts politics, Camenker and his organization, MassResistance, have steadily expressed their disappointment with Mitt Romney as well as virtually every other Massachusetts Republican. One important note – Camenker’s MassResistance verges on being a hate group. Its disappointment with Romney and his Republican predecessors in the Massachusetts’ gubernatorial office is that they haven’t been sufficiently hostile to homosexuals.

None of this is easy for me to write. As strange as it may seem, Brian Camenker and I once were friends. When I ran for State Representative in Massachusetts’s 12^th Middlesex district in 1992, Brian was an active Republican ward committee member in the area I sought to represent. We got to know each other reasonably well. I thought he was a nice guy, and I think he felt the same about me. On Election Day in 1992, it poured. In a driving rainstorm, Brain stood next to me that cold morning holding one of my campaign signs for almost two hours.

Any candidate for office knows that a service like that creates a debt that the candidate can’t ever repay. It wasn’t all about me, and I was never so vain as to conclude that the people who volunteered that morning did so because they were my minions or followers. They believed in a cause, and I was the standard bearer for that cause. Nevertheless, the signs they held had my name on them. Almost a decade and a half later, I still feel indebted.

I GOT CREAMED THAT ELECTION DAY, as did virtually every other Republican office seeker in the Commonwealth. I stayed involved with the 12^thMiddlesex political scene, though, focusing especially on Newton, MA which was my hometown.

The 1993 political year for Newton was dominated by a contentious city-wide argument over the School Committee races. The Newton High Schools were giving out condoms and beginning a more “progressive” form of sex-ed. Both of these things scandalized the town’s conservatives, and they mounted a slate of candidates to run on a “traditional value” platform. The unquestioned leader of the movement, and the angriest Newton conservative, was Brian Camenker.

When it came to School Committee issues, I have always sided with conservatives who believe our schools should focus on educating our children. Other potential agendas, like having the schools serve as a job program for teachers or “socialization” programs, have to take a back seat. I felt that way then, I feel that way now.

I managed the campaign of one of the conservative candidates for School Committee. While I agreed with the policy prescriptions proposed by Brian and his ilk, we got to the same place via very different routes. For Brian Camenker and a handful of others, opposing Newton’s sex-ed program became a moral crusade. Having graduated one of Newton’s high schools a mere eight years earlier, I knew that there was nothing that a sex-ed program would teach students that they hadn’t already learned from magazines, their friends or experience. (In this day of the internet…)

There was also the issue of Brian’s feelings regarding homosexuality. Brian opposed anything that the schools might do that taught tolerance for homosexuals, not on the practical ground that scarce resources for education should be used solely for, you know, education, but rather on a "moral" ground that teaching tolerance for homosexuality was somehow immoral. I found this repugnant, and was not shy about saying so at Ward and City Committee Meetings. Additionally, it was bad politics. One other note - I also thought that Brian’s concerns regarding homosexuality were deepening into an obsession.

In the end, all of the conservative candidates lost. It was no big surprise to anyone, or at least it shouldn’t have been. Newton is one of the most liberal cities in the country. Barney Frank has been the city’s congressman for a generation. A slate of candidates who defined themselves by their anti-homosexual “morality” never had a chance.

At the end of 1993, I moved to Boston and lost touch with the Newton political scene. I have not spoken to Brain Camenker in over 13 years.

BUT I HAVE OCCASSIONALLY SEEN HIM on the news or read about him in the newspaper. My suspicion that Brian had become obsessed with gay issues was subsequently borne out. He has spent his leisure time the past 13 years turning himself into Massachusetts’ most notorious anti-gay scold.

I’m sure Brian would describe his role differently, but I’ll let you be the judge. Seven months ago, Brian and his organization protested a Macy’s window display in Downtown Boston that celebrated Pride Week. Here’s how the Boston Herald summarized Brian’s complaints:

“They were male mannequins with enlarged breasts, and one was wearing a skirt,” said MassResistance president Brian Camenker, referring to the gay pride flag wrapped around one figure, cinched with a white belt. “It was really disgusting.”

My point isn’t that the display was appropriate or inappropriate, although those who found it inappropriate could surely shop elsewhere to register their disapproval. (Readers who for whatever reason are desperate to make up their own minds regarding the display can follow the link and see a picture of it.) My point is that Brian Camenker has spent the last thirteen years of his life doing things like getting outraged over store mannequins that he found “disgusting.” The man I knew 14 years ago was a good man, a dedicated father and a nice guy. He was normal. His current incarnation is, more than anything else, sad.

But Brian is what he is, and the media has discovered him. Previously, Brian had danced around the margins of fame, doing things like making a fool of himself by appearing on the Daily Show blasting the "gay agenda." Mitt Romney’s campaign, however, has catapulted Brian to new heights. A national media desperate to find the dirt under Romney’s fingernails has found Brian, a longtime antagonist of the Governor’s.

Responding to popular demand, Brian and his group today issued a 28 page report belittling Romney’s bona fides as a social conservative. Not everything in it is wrong. Indeed, most of it is factually correct. But the fact that Camenker is so infuriated by the charges he lists should disqualify him from a seat at the Grownups’ Table of civilized political discourse.

Here are some of the headings in Camenker’s report that purport to show Romney’s past outrages:

Gov. Romney has a long history of promoting and furthering the homosexual agenda, and working closely with leading gay activists.

Romney twice sought and received the endorsement of the homosexual Log Cabin Republican Club.

Romney's campaign distributed pro-gay rights campaign literature during Boston's "Gay Pride" events

Romney supports homosexual "anti-discrimination" laws.

Romney appointed prominent homosexuals to key positions in his administration.

Is this homophobia? I link you decide.

As for liberals in the media and the blogosphere who think legitimizing Brian Camenker will be a swell way to take Mitt Romney down a peg, they might want to rethink that. People like Andrew Sullivan (who in the past has approvingly cited Camenker as an anti-Romney authority) should strongly consider the wisdom of offering Brian that kind of legitimacy.

Regarding media outlets like AP who have printed a news story on Mitt Romney’s critic and the 28 page report he just released excoriating the former Governor, one can only wonder whether they’ve read the report and are aware of the raw, undiluted hatred that it contains.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com

Hey,
It out weighs all that serious political stuff

Now how do you explain all this if your guy Mitt is such a great candidate as you all have been posting?

The usual procedure for Mittbots is to demonize the poster and discredit the source....or vice versa. It will be interesting to see if that ploy is used here.

Over the last several weeks, Mitt Romney has been attacked from the right by at least one rather vitriolic conservative group and one conservative presidential candidate. Unfortunately--and despite the Governor's considerable record defending conservative values in Massachusetts and the nation--these attacks have caused some individuals to question the Governor's conservative credentials. In part, these questions have persisted because the Governor's supporters have not issued a comprehensive response to the challenge mounted by MassResistance (the conservative group) and Sam Brownback (the conservative candidate). That response starts today.

This morning, EFM releases two important documents. The first is an "open letter" from the absolute top tier of pro-life and pro-family leaders in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, including Mary Ann Glendon from Harvard Law School, Kris Mineau from the Massachusetts Family Institute, Joseph Reilly from Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Thomas A. Shields from the Coalition for Family and Marriage, and many others. These signatories decisively answer those who mistakenly believe that leading Massachusetts social conservatives do not admire and respect the Governor's defense of life, marriage, and religious liberty in Massachusetts. The letter begins:

Dear conservative friends,
We hail from a broad spectrum of organizations dedicated to fighting for the pro-family agenda in Massachusetts. As you know, Mitt Romney became the governor of our state in 2003. Since that time, we have worked closely with him and his excellent staff on that agenda.
Some press accounts and bloggers have described Governor Romney in terms we neither have observed nor can we accept. To the contrary, we, who have been fighting here for the values you also hold, are indebted to him and his responsive staff in demonstrating solid social conservative credentials by undertaking the following actions here in Massachusetts:

Read the whole thing. Better yet, download the PDF file, and e-mail it to interested friends, family, bloggers, and members of the media. This letter deserves a wide distribution.

Our second document is EFM's direct response to MassResistance's efforts to paint Governor Romney as a liberal falsely posing as a conservative. Longer than the letter from Massachusetts leaders, this document, entitled "Mitt Romney: The Real Truth," not only details the Governor's considerable conservative track record but rebuts the substance and philosophy of MassResistance's arguments. It begins:

No American governor has faced more critical cultural issues than Mitt Romney, Massachusetts’ chief executive from 2003 to 2007. In the midst of Governor Romney’s efforts to rescue his state from a fiscal crisis and create lasting and innovative health care solutions, activist judges and a far-left legislature forced issues of same-sex “marriage,” abortion, religious liberty, stem cell research, and gay rights into the forefront. Each time he was challenged, the Governor not only made the conservative choice, but also did so with an optimistic, unifying message. In doing so, he became a national leader on these vital cultural issues without squandering his ability to govern the Commonwealth.
In four years, Governor Romney turned a deficit into a surplus without raising taxes, created a health coverage plan that is applauded by experts on both sides of the aisle and is designed to reduce costs while preserving personal choices, and effectively responded to the deadly collapse of one of the most expensive construction projects in American history. He did all these things in one of America’s most liberal states at the same time that he vetoed expansive stem cell legislation, vetoed the expansion of abortion rights in Massachusetts, defended the religious liberties of Catholic Charities from an assault by homosexual activists, and launched a multi-year (and multi-state) campaign to preserve traditional marriage after Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage.
In spite of this impressive conservative record, a group called “MassResistance” has been circulating a lengthy document called “The Mitt Romney Deception.” Combining old statements, half-truths, and some completely misreported stories, the document has gained some traction in the conservative community, with anti-Romney activists forwarding the document dozens of times (apparently without any independent verification of its facts). In much the way as urban legends gain traction through repeated e-mail “forwards,” the seriously-flawed MassResistance piece has led a few individuals to question the Governor’s commitment to conservative principles. MassResistance’s document, however, suffers from at least five fundamental errors.

Like the Massachusetts leaders' letter highlighted first, "Mitt Romney: The Real Truth" is downloadable as a PDF and should be forwarded to anyone who has questions about the Governor's record in Massachusetts.

Now is the time to push back against unfair and unfortunately misguided attacks against a man who stood--with real integrity--against some of the worst excesses of the cultural left. Not one of us at EFM would be supporting the Governor if we doubted for a moment his commitment to advancing our core cultural values. With these documents, we hope that our readers will come to know the man as we know him--a conservative leader with an optimistic, unifying, and compelling vision.

CHARLES adds: "MassResistance," meet the Mass. leaders. For purposes of easier identification, the open letter has been updated to include the signers' titles.

Posted by David French on January 11, 2007 08:48 AM | Permalink

Please cite from the item posted the parts that are inaccurate and then link us to evidence to support your contention of fallacy.