Frank Rich:Latter-Day Republicans vs. the Church of Oprah

[cal04]

THIS campaign season has been in desperate need of its own reincarnation of Howard Beale from “Network”: a TV talking head who would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Last weekend that prayer was answered when Lawrence O’Donnell, an excitable Democratic analyst, seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltway’s more repellent Sunday bloviathons, “The McLaughlin Group.”

Pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America,” Mr. O’Donnell branded the speech “the worst” of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romney’s Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was “an officially racist faith.”

That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized co-stars dropped around him, Mr. O’Donnell then raised the rude question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didn’t Mr. Romney publicly renounce his church’s discriminatory practices before they were revoked? As the scion of one of America’s most prominent Mormon families, he might have made a difference. It’s not as if he was a toddler. By 1978 — the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was elected governor in Arkansas — Mr. Romney had entered his 30s

The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didn’t fight his church’s institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that’s his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16rich.html?ref=opinion

[joeybee12]

1. Sounds good! Glad the Times dropped its subscription to

these columns.

[tomreedtoon]

2. Isn't "rampage" the standard mode on McLaughlin?

They always yell at one another. How can one person be "over the top" on a panel of chattering baboons? Unless he went even more simian-like and literally threw crap at McLaughlin, what was the big surprise?

[xchrom]

3. i'm not fan of of oprah or the mclaughlin group -- but this a good read. nt

[Faygo Kid]

4. Brilliant as usual - and no mincing words about Mitt, that's for sure.

Like Frank Rich, the more I think about Larry O'Donnell's blowup, the more I am glad he did it. It had to be said. Mitt Romney is the "fallback" candidate for the neocons, if Rudy blows up.

His VP candidate, and Rudy's, too? Why, Jeb Bush. Of course.