MSNBC's Jimmy Williams: Romney "Needs to Come out of the Closet on his Religion"

In discussing Romney's commencement speech at Liberty University, and his "courtship" Evangelical voters, Jimmy Williams drops a couple of bombs.

Also, "why would you not embrace your own religion?"

Then, Michael Eric Dyson "defends" Romney as being in a "very difficult position". "He has a particular religious slant on the world that is deeply problematic -- second to being a Muslim."

And the chyron on the screen? A picture of Romney, with the phrase, "It's not a cult?"

I guess today's talking points demanded an attack on Mitt for being a Mormon. Shameful actions by MSNBC.

 

Wow. 25,000 more actions like that, they'll be in FOX News' neighborhood.

 

Shameful actions by MSNBC? Why?

When are people going to realize that its not the questions that are the problem, its being scared of the answers that's the problem.

Romney is a Mormon. Yes. So questions relating to his religion should not be an issue if people respected each other's religious beliefs. Similarly, not an issue if candidates for the Presidency agreed to a separation of state and religion?

Ah but why the outrage for raising the issue? Because many are not comfortable with the US President not being a Christian. Because instead of a separation of church and state, the political dialogue (and the recent Supreme Court rulings) in the US has just about erased the separation.

My suggestion, let's keep raising these issues, these questions, but let's see if the audience still wants the questions asked.

 

Why? Because it's part of a "whisper campaign" designed to portray Romney's religion as "scary" and weird" and a "cult".

And, media members should not be acting as campaign surragates, doing the "dirty work" for the Obama campaign, while allowing the President and his team to keep their hands clean.

And, of course, the media will later lament that the electorate is not "focused on the issues".

 

Your biggest weakness in these discussions is falling into the notion of a monolithic "the media" that thinks and acts in lockstep.

 

OK. "Members of the media."

 

I'd say the bigger weakness is him acting appalled at MSNBC doing this when Fox has been doing the dirty work for Republicans for quite some time. The concern troll moniker for YF is not without merit. If someone started a thread like this every time Fox did something that people here considered shameful, there would be no other threads on the front page.

 

I suppose.

Perhaps it's a compliment to MSNBC, though, that it's still noteworthy if/when they do something objectionable and/or worthy of scrutiny.

 

Or evangelicals, or Liberty University, or all the pastors who opposed Romney during the campaign because they thought he wasn't a Christian, but are being converted because he's not Obama.

 

As has been well established, theology students at Liberty University are taught that Mormonism is a cult.

This is a fact.

It's also a fact that Romney spoke to theology students and professors, about a variety of religious topics, and yet didn't feel the need to openly defend his religion.

To me, that means he either agrees with Liberty's teachings, or is simply not willing to remind voters that he belongs to a controversial religious institution.

 

You think? It seems like members of the media have little problem, and little shame, with covering this stuff as a horse race. When something policy-related comes up, like Obama's gay marriage interview last week, it makes a pretty big splash. Otherwise, it's tough to classify most policy platform stuff as "news." It's all kind of out there, and has been for some length of time. It comes up when it makes actual news - for example, in a debate when two candidates argue over how to characterize another's position. Perhaps newspapers should do more to policy-driven enterprise reporting in the paper, rather than the personality/personal narrative stuff that dominates campaign enterprise reporting. I think that they think that, unlike think tanks and such, it's not what we're best at. And it's not necessarily what people want from us. Just look at the big complaint about Obama, even here. It's not, "We don't know his policies!" It's, "We don't know anything about his time in Indonesia/high school/Occidental/Columbia/Harvard/Chicago!"

 

I'd say this points out that the parties are two sides of the same coin. While their aim is not always the same, the tactics are. Both sides are perfectly willing to use the same kinds of scare tactics and misinformation and fuzzy math and borderline-ethical (at best) tricks and strategies, then to get outraged when they catch the other side using them.

It's why those of us who are independents are independents, and many of us wish like hell there was some reasonable alternative to the dreck offered up by the Democrats and Republicans.