Do We Want a Real Bully in the Bully Pulpit?

Mitt R-money was promoting anti-equality in marriage over the weekend, as more occasion of his anti-gay courting of right wing religious fundamentalist voters.  Romney seems to have in his conduct and his proposed policies, to utterly miss the point of his own religion specifically, and the message of Christianity generally.  This may be the one area in which Romney has managed to be consistent, his willingness to say whatever he believes will appeal to an audience, but it doesn't indicate good character.
Humor often makes the point very well.  We have a lot of bullying, we have a lot of pulpit-style religious speech, and we have an utter failure from the right to do anything but hate with bigotry, fear, anger, and intolerance, and  rather than unite.

The term bully pulpit originated with President Teddy Roosevelt; he used it to describe his position as president, the influence and prestige of the office, as a platform to address issues, but it doesn't ONLY refer to the Presidency.  It refers to any position of authority or broad recognition from which one speaks, which in this case would clearly apply to Romney as a prominent political candidate for the office.
Mitt R-money is not so old that he has no memory of his high school years, given that he has five friends who remember the incident in question so vividly are approximately the same age.  His "I don't recall" statement doesn't fly, it is not credible.  Rather it appears to be a deliberate, calculted LIE. 

His non-apology apology doesn't fly either.  A central part to any genuine apology is to take the responsiblity for an action, and the results whether intentional and/or unintentional - Mitts Grabbing R-money doesn't do that.
I do believe that people change, they can change a lot in the years after high school and college.  People should grow and develop.  Mitt R-money doesn't seem to have made those kinds of changes to his character.  He will still say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear.  His Christian fundie audiences on the religious extremist right want to hear that it is ok to bully someone who is gay.  In point of fact they HATE the idea that any legislation might prevent or penalize them from exercising their freedom of religion to harass and terrorize another human being....except that is NOT in fact a core teaching or precept of Christianity.  Love thy neighbor as thyself is the central teaching, not stone people who have a same-sex orientation, not drive people to suicide, not be hateful and hurtful.
But that doesn't play well to the righties, so Mitt won't actually admit he did what he appears to have done, and he stops short of denying it too, which suggests to me he is worried about getting caught in too adamant a denial as a lie.  No Mitt just tries to use having abused another person, or being accused of doing so, to appeal to other people who like to do the same thing.
Here we have Mitt R-money, speaking from what amounts to a pulpit addressing Bible Thumpers who are apparently illiterate regarding the actual writings in the Bible.  The Bible, Judaism, of which Christianity in the first few centuries or so was a sect, preaches polygamy; that's also why it is the custom in Islam, because it comes from the same polygamist Abrahamic origins.  Not 'one man one woman'; NOWHERE is that in the Bible. 

In   1979, in Loring Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota,  we had a gay bashing incident that killed a man named Terry Knudsen; in 2010, 2011 and continuing into 2012 we have had bullying incidents leading to an epidemic of suicides.  The religious right doesn't want to take responsibility for the damage, the hurt, the harm, the death that they cause - shame on them for failing to take that responsibility.  The blame is at their feet no matter how they try to tap dance around it.
Whether they do the killing or just cause the killing, the bullies love their pulpit that excuses their hatred, that pats them on the back and praises their hatred.

We should not now or ever put them in charge, or give them any authority to act on their hate or to legitimize their hate.  They will keep on trying, they will throw words like love and God and Freedom into their efforts, but there will be none of those things in their politics or their governance. NONE.  Nor will their be honor, or integrity, or service to the majority of people in this nation, only service to themselves, to conformity rather than critical thinking, and to putting corporations and a few very wealthy people in control.

If you have any doubts about the folly of doing that, about the failures, the desperate failures of those very people, look to the J.P. Morgan billions of losses that were perfectly repeating the disasters, the UNREGULATED disasterous financial decisions that brought us the financial collapse of the country, and following our fall, the rest of the world under the Bush administration.

Make no mistake, it was not ONLY the Bush administration that was at fault, but it was primarily the Republicans and other conservatives who systematically dismantled the safety provisions to regulate our economy so as to prevent this occurrence after the collapse that brought on the Great Depression.

It is like a giant game of Jenga, dismantling regulation instead of little bits of wood, and the collapse when too many regulations removed reach a tipping point is what has happened to our economy --- a lesson obviously lost on the high priced not-as-smart-as-they-thought talent on Wall Street.

The reality is that the religion that is practiced is greed, the theology they follow is outward social conformity, which has no more genuine spirituality than skipping down a sidewalk, avoiding the divisions between segments of concreate, because of the childhood verse that stepping on a crack will break your mother's back.  It amounts to superstition, the superstition that if you conform to the way that their false history depicts society, where blacks and hispanics and women are subordinate and white males are dominant, and there was prayer in schools, and we hunted godless commies and hounded people like the soulless McCarthyism did, that God will mysteriously wave a magic wand like something out of the fictional Harry Potter series, and make us richer than the rest of the world, and give blessing to ignoring science, raping and pillaging the environment, and that we can look the other way at Jim Crow laws.  They are already embracing similar efforts to prevent people from voting to what was done in the worst days of southern oppression.

There is nothing worthwhile in the Bible rantings of Romney or other righties; the only miracle is that lightning doesn't regularly strike them.  The photo on the right is of Roy Sullivan, who according to rarelyknown.org, was struck by lightning seven times, more than any other individual.  This is what should be happening figuratively, if not literally, to people who make the utterly false statements that we see promoted as Biblical or as representing religion when it is not in fact an accurate reflection of the known texts.  I would never sincerely wish anyone harm, but in the case of Mr. Sullivan, the consequences of being struck by lightning involved losing his eyebrows, losing the nail of one toe, and in one case having his hair catch on fire.  While I wouldn't REALLY wish any harm to any other human being........the thought of R-money's hair on fire -- say CGI, not really injuring him, or of Rick Un-Saintly-whorum, or the chronically untruthful Michele Bachmann------ IS a funny image, one that satisfies  a little some of the frustration they engender.  "Liar, liar, pants on fire" or "Liar liar ZAP! hair on fire", both work for me as a momentary mental image to vent.