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Brian Fischer Mocks Mitt Romney over Richard Grenell Resignation

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, open thread, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , |20 Comments

This is hilarious.

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney former Bush administration official Richard Grenell as foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign. By the next day, anti-gay radio host Brian Fischer was attacking the move along with several other right wingers.

The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The Romney campaign was spooked. Campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul released a half-hearted defense:

Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, issued a statement of support for Mr. Grenell on April 24. But it made no mention of the attacks on his sexuality: “We hired Ric Grenell because he was the best qualified person for the job and has extensive experience representing the U.S. Mission to the U.N.”

But at the same time Grenell was repeatedly told not to say anything publicly for the campaign. Grenell finally read the writing on the wall after he organized a major media conference call on foreign policy.

It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President Obama’s record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

That’s when Grenell decided to step down after only two weeks. Brian Fischer celebrated on his radio talk show, calling it a “huge win.”

Yesterday, Romney was running around telling people that he had wanted Grenell to stay with the campaign; yet Romney was stone cold silent for the entire two weeks of the controversy!

Then yesterday, Fischer made fun of Romney for caving to “a yokel like me.”

Fischer: Let me ask you this question, people have raised this question, if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership. I don’t think for one minute that Mitt Romney did not want this guy gone; he wanted this guy gone because there was not one word of defense, not a peep, from the Romney camp to defend him. They just went absolutely stone cold silent, they put a bag over Grenell’s head, they even asked him to organize this phone conference and they didn’t even let him speak at the conference that he organized.

The quoted part begins around 4:00, but the whole thing is pretty entertaining, especially the part where Fischer talks about Romney’s “triple etch-a-sketch” and how Romney “went Saul Alinsky on me.”

20 Comments on “Brian Fischer Mocks Mitt Romney over Richard Grenell Resignation”

  1. dakinikat says:
    May 5, 2012 at 8:29 pm

    lol … Great minds!!!

  2. ecocatwoman says:
    May 5, 2012 at 8:42 pm

    Hey, let the Right do the hatchet job on Romney. I’d love to see them defeat their own candidate. If enough of the wingnuttery stay home, then maybe there’s a chance to win back Congress from weepy Boehner, a$$hats Cantor & Ryan & the rest of the Repugs. Jon Stewart did a piece last week on the lukewarm endorsements of Romney by Repugs. I especially liked his clips of Dickey Morris. Especially when Jon said Morris’ voice was post menopausal & did an imitation sounding like an elderly Jewish woman.

  3. JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
    May 5, 2012 at 10:16 pm

    Hey that cartoon is funny. I was going to post a thread with songs that have a moon theme…but after spending the day in Atlanta, and then waiting for Supermoon to rise…then come home and visit with one of my friends I had not seen for a while. Off to catch up, guess the moon songs will be in tomorrow’s am post.

  4. Wonk the Vote says:
    May 5, 2012 at 10:41 pm

    Mittens the Putz.

  5. RalphB says:
    May 5, 2012 at 11:08 pm

    A great 10 minute interview with Paul Krugman on Reuters TV.

  6. RalphB says:
    May 6, 2012 at 12:04 am

    Found from a link at C&L. This needs to go national! Give the private companies some competition.

    Broadband at the Speed of Light

    The fastest networks in the nation are built by local governments, a new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Benton Foundation reveals

    Chattanooga, Tennessee, is well known for being the first community with citywide access to a “gig,” or the fastest residential connections to the Internet available nationally. Less known are Bristol, Virginia, and Lafayette, Louisiana – both of which now also offer a gigabit throughout the community.
    […]
    “It may surprise people that these cities in Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana have faster and lower cost access to the Internet than anyone in San Francisco, Seattle, or any other major city,” says Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Telecommunications as Commons Initiative. “These publicly owned networks have each created hundreds of jobs and saved millions of dollars.”
    […]
    The new report offers in-depth case studies of BVU Authority’s OptiNet in Bristol, Virginia; EPB Fiber in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and LUS Fiber in Lafayette, Louisiana. Each network was built and is operated by a public power utility.

    • NW Luna says:
      May 6, 2012 at 2:46 pm

      “These publicly owned networks have each created hundreds of jobs and saved millions of dollars.”

      Lower cost, faster access, too. Surprised? No. Irritated? Yes. The MSM doesn’t like publicizing anything about how much better public ownership can be. It might cut into their overlords’ profits.

  7. northwestrain says:
    May 6, 2012 at 3:50 am

    You know the election cycle is going to he%% when we agree with a rightwing nutjob about Romney. How far down the sewer is the GOP intending to go? They must have a plan — or are they merely throwing crap against the wall — waiting to see what sticks?

    Real evangelical Christians I can understand — their theory is that if the world gets bad enough that Jesus will come and take all the faithful away from the evil in the world. However the dominionists and the Family and other dogmatics — these nut jobs are causing the bad stuff.

    There are two distinct groups — one group merely watches and the other actively helps to create the sort of chaos that they think their god wants to see before he “returns” to earth.

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