It’s remarkable, this shitcanning of Richard Grenell as foreign-policy spokescritter for the Romneybot 2.0. Remarkable still for its being handled with such notable dispatch. First, you hire on the former mouthpiece for authoritarian nutbag John Bolton to establish further your neo-conservative foreign-policy gravitas. It turns out the guy is openly gay, so bonus! (Remember, all you wavering and otherwise vacant “independent” voters: Once, I was going to be a gayer senator than Teddy Kennedy. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.) Then, of course, the guy turns out to be just as crackers as his former boss — Bad-mouthing the lovely Callista Gingrich? Calumnizing kindly Doc Maddow? My seconds will call on yours, sir! — and, because he’s gay, the megachurches scramble the flying monkeys into the air and, within two weeks, Grenell is as fired as an Ampad worker. Quoth the Politico:
“This was an unforced error, and one that could have been avoided if the Romney campaign had simply said early on we have 100 percent faith in Ric Grenell to do his job,” said Chris Barron, one of the co-founders of the group GOProud. “Does anyone in the world doubt that if had been an evangelical or a Mormon or a Jewish person that the Romney campaign would not have defended that person? It is hard for me to comprehend why the Romney campaign chose to leave Ric Grenell hanging out there the way that they did.” He added, “Every campaign when you’re at this moment where you’re making the transition from the primary to the general election looks for their Sistah Souljah moment. And this could have been Romney’s Sistah Souljah moment. He could have said, look, this is a guy who was spokesman at the United Nations. This is a guy who served under John Bolton … and by God, I’m not going to let a handful of extremists bring him down.”
Can I just pause here and again thank Bill Clinton for introducing the idea of a “Sister Souljah moment” into our politics? In case you’ve forgotten…
The Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce RSS Feed