Romney’s terrific counterattack on Obama

Here is the section of Romney’s August 14 speech in Ohio for which “Touré” of MSNBC absurdly accused him of engaging in the “niggerization” of Obama:

Over the last four years, this President has pushed Republicans and Democrats as far apart as they can go. And now he and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into groups. He demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.

If an American president wins that way, we all lose.

But he won’t win that way. America is one Nation under God. American history has been a story of the many becoming one—uniting to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness. Everywhere I go in America there are monuments that list those who have given their lives. There is no mention of their race, their party affiliation or what they did for a living. They lived and died under a single flag fighting for a single purpose. They pledged allegiance to the United States of America. So, Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.

I have to say, for Romney that is very good. That is showing a passion, a feeling for America, that has been invisible up to now.

I’ve often said that responding to racism charges by saying that they “divide us” is inadequate, because the real purpose of such charges is not to “divide us,” i.e., to harm us all equally and to harm the abstract unity to which we all equally belong; it is specifically to smear and intimidate and delegitimize white non-liberals and read them out of the body politic and out of decent humanity. To illustrate the weakness of the “You are dividing us” criticism, when whites are criticized for attacking blacks, do their accusers merely say that such whites are “dividing us”? No. Their accusers say that such whites are denigrating blacks and denying their equal humanity and trying to exclude them from America. But whites will never say those true things about false racism charges that are made against whites, because that would mean defending whites as whites, which whites are incapable of doing. The strongest criticism they are capable of is to say that racism charges are “divisive,” “desperate,” and a “distraction.”

But in this speech, though he started with the usual “you are dividing us” trope and remained roughly within its ambit, Romney went beyond it when he said: “[Obama] demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.” He’s accusing Obama, not just of “dividing us,” of trying to destroy America! Which is the truth. Incredible! As Ben Shapiro writes at Breitbart, this is a Romney who can win. And that is probably why “Touré” felt compelled to call him a racist over it.

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Terry Morris writes:

This sounds like an uncharacteristically passionate Romney. I like his statement declaring that “they pledged allegiance to the United States of America.” Unfortunately Romney’s understanding of our national purpose is to protect the world against what he terms “unspeakable darkness.” That would be a lot easier to swallow if we could protect ourselves against the unspeakable evil of liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2012 07:47 AM | Send