I’ve been gone for over a week and I have about enough information on the recent motherhood dust-up to be a swing voting centrist independent, but Hilary Fucking Rosen is a Democratic spokesperson now? The same Hilary Rosen behind RIAA’s strategy to sue every kid who shared a song on Limewire? It figures that someone that stupid would end up “speaking for Democrats”. I realized there’s no official registry of Democratic pundits who are actual Democrats, but has there been any effort to get her kicked off of CNN? She’s a walking, talking catastrophe with a reverse Midas touch who shouldn’t be anywhere near the Democratic party or the Obama campaign.
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[…] Since when does she represent Democrats? How so? Because they pay her for that on CNN? MM says: Hilary Fucking Rosen is a Democratic spokesperson now? The same Hilary Rosen behind RIAA’s […]
ant
missed you.
welcome back
Anya
It’s good thing then that the Obama campaign immediately threw her under the bus.
Egg Berry
So she’s Mark Penn in drag?
boss bitch
Yes, and you have some folks on the left who seem to think the campaign should have protected her. A pundit. A CNN punidt. Seriously. She’s a “strategist” – she knows the deal.
MB
Indeed. I spent much of the week appalled at myself for having even the slightest twinge of sympathy for the woman who’s (so far) done more damage to the US than Ann Romney.
Doc Sportello
Also, #10 here.
Anya
@boss bitch: No, they have no obligation to protect one of CNN’s employee, but they should’ve been less profuse with Ms. romney’s praise and talked more about the economic hardships faced by working women who don’t have the choice that Ms. Romney enjoyed.
Litlebritdifrnt
Well at Mitt Romney himself said back in January, obviously Anne has no dignity.
Tone In DC
Hillary Rosen needs the Administration’s protection.
Oh, YEAH.
Pull the other one.
El Cid
The same Hilary Rosen who served as BP’s lobbyist and flack for her US office of a UK PR firm as oil was spilling into the Gulf.
c u n d gulag
mistermix,
“She’s a walking, talking catastrophe with a reverse Midas touch who shouldn’t be anywhere near the Democratic party or the Obama campaign.”
Isn’t that the minimum requirement for all of the “Liberals” on all TV News shows and channels except MSNBC?
FOX probably offers nice pay and a great bonus package for appearing.
Davis X. Machina
@Litlebritdifrnt: If you think rich stay at home moms are awesome, and poor stay at home moms lack dignity, it isn’t motherhood that you respect. Jamison Foser
earl_of_scruggs
If Obama’s responsible for everything any putative Democrat says, can we start holding Mitt responsible for everything that, say, Tom “Nuke Mecca” Tancredo says? Or Michael Savage? Or David Duke? This will be fun.
Cassidy
I know it wasn’t politically viable, but it would have been awesome if they had exposed this bullshit for what it was. Simply suggesting the Ann Romney knows what it’s like to be a SAHM makes me sick.
kay
This is the self-appointed spokesperson for working people:
Jesus. I’m trying to figure out what working people did to deserve these “advocates”.
Must have been something really, really bad.
El Cid
@Cassidy: You know who else praised to a magical degree the value of motherhood and moms staying at home?
jibeaux
I’m just about ready for this particular tempest in a teapot to be over. Good grief, what a bag full of nothing.
Anya
@kay: She’s Lanny Davis in a dress.
Smiling Mortician
@kay: Holy shit. On what planet is she a Democrat? (And yeah, I do know the depressing answer already.)
BudP
Ann Romney, hypocrite.
redshirt
Rules of the game:
1. Once a liberal said something slightly edgy about a Republican on a website once = WORSE THAN HITLER
2. Republicans wage a non stop propaganda war in which there is no low they won’t sink to. A relentless barrage of lies and insult = FREEDOM
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
how does one get assigned a beat in punditry? i mean did they roll dice, play dominoes?
redshirt
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick: A spin on The Wheel of Pain.
rlrr
According to Fox “News”, Rosen is a close Obama adviser…
PeakVT
@kay: I think most working people would want her to stop helping if they knew about her firm’s activities – which they don’t because they’re too busy working to monitor the legalized corruption in Washington.
liberal
@El Cid:
Be fair. If it’s OK for her to represent rent collectors in the music industry, why not extraction industries?
Just to complete her world tour, maybe she can lobby to gut property taxes.
rlrr
@earl_of_scruggs:
No, the rules are different for Republicans…
Kevin
You know…say what you will about her other views, her role with the MPAA, whatever, that doesn’t change the fact that what she said was 100% right, and it is wimpy liberal bs like this that makes us weak.
The way her very true and accurate words are being twisted into an attack on mothers is so stupid, frankly, anyone who piles on from our side of the aisle should be embarrassed.
The fact remains, relying on Ann Romney for insight into the plight of working class women is like Obama relying on Sascha and Malia to discuss child soldiers in Africa. Yes, his girls are children. Yes, they are black. But pretending that that gives them insight into the issue would be silly and he would be laughed at for even suggesting it. Just like we should laugh at and mock the Romney’s.
dmsilev
@earl_of_scruggs:
Or Rush Limbaugh.
“Prominent Romney supporter Rush Limbaugh today referred to the First Lady as Moochelle Obama. Will Romney disavow his supporter?”
Satanicpanic
Alright already, make it stop, I don’t care about that woman or what she said and neither does anyone else outside of our stupid media
Betty Cracker
Well, CNN did hire Dana Loesche (sp) and Eponymous Eponymouson as Republican spokescreeps, so I’m sure every dumb or poorly worded thing they say (i.e., every time they open their pieholes) will create a storm of controversy for Mittens, right? Hey, why are you all laughing?
kay
@Anya:
It’s the Arianna Huffington school of reverse-advocacy.
I think my favorite part was where both Josh Marshall and Greta Van Sustern came to the lobbyist/pundit’s defense. Bi-partisan!
Just kill me now :)
Dr. Squid
Yes, that Hilary Rosen. And then that hemorrhoid Bill Donahue made her look sympathetic by slamming all adopted kids as less than real.
Suffern ACE
@kay: But she is a professional. One must never doubt that professionals can work for one set of clients by day and another set by night. Especially in policital policy PR, where the standards are so clear and the code so strictly enforced.
Just Some Fuckhead
FSM save us from Democratic strategists.
Culture of Truth
She apologized, threw herself under the bus.
Suffern ACE
@Dr. Squid: Actually, this whole episode has just reminded me that when you poke crusty manure with a stick, a whole bunch of bugs run around.
paradox
[sigh] It’s fucking April, man. Long long way to go with this turd train.
kay
@Suffern ACE:
Is she? So what you’re saying is, she intended to give Ann Romney an early birthday present?
Because it’s one or the other. Honestly, we’d be better off with an empty chair where the (alleged) “strategist” sits. First do no harm.
Linda Featheringill
@El Cid:
Praising [Aryan] motherhood while at the same time forcing a majority of the women to work in factories or on farms, with long hours and hard work. And with rationing of food so the army could be fed. With the result that the soldiers were not fed enough and the civilians lost body fat to the point that the incidence of pregnancy went down.
Really, those guys were good at conquering and really bad at governing.
lamh35
A Peek at the Real Romney
by BooMan
“advantage online”
Wow! If there was any doubt that R-Money’s campaign is delusional, it’s that right there.
The Romney campaign seriously believes it has a bigger online advantage than the OFA??? Really?
The OFA which revolutionized the way campaigns use social media, viral video and quick action networking???
REALLY!!!
Anya
@kay: I’ve noticed that too. It’s not called villagers for nothing. But seriously we’re screwed if those are our pundits.
Joey Maloney
@Egg Berry: No, Dick Morris with a boob job.
Cassidy
@Kevin: Everyone here gets what she was saying. That’s never been the issue, except for a few hand-wringers stuck in poutrage mode. The issue is she opened her mouth without thinking of how it would sound and gave the
subhuman bigots and douchebagsRepublicans ammunition to go on the offensive after having been on the ropes the last few months.LABiker
Did anybody else hear David Gregory say she was “close to the White House” on NBC’s Right Center-Right (Meet the Press) yesterday?
General Stuck
Whatever the liars megaphone the wingnut wurlitzer is, it is a powerful political tool, if not overused. It is one of the reasons Obama has driven the nutters crazy, as he has watched his words and not fed that beast with much loose talk. And has learned how to turn the wingnuts words back on them as an antidote to the lockstep messaging wankery these people are good at.
Obama and co. are at an early stage of the race where they are at a dissadvatage, as most of the media spotlight is trained on the GOP primary. But that will soon change, when it becomes a clear two man race.
The war on women, so called, the goopers true believers cannot control, even if they wanted to. It is an ideological orgy of the damned, at the state level, as republicans elected from 2010, go all out to make hay while they are in such control of so many states.
And in the end, the only group of potential voters it will matter for, are single women. Already, largely dem voters, but also not always reliable for showing up to vote. I have a feeling that will not be as true this time, as much as it would have been, pre wingnut wand of freedom.
kay
@Anya:
I thought Anita Dunn was terrible, too.
She was the one that came up with the “attack FOX News strategy” which was a ridiculous months-long waste of time that is completely irrelevant to people outside DC or political junkies, when they should have been selling legislation to the public. It’s typical, though. It’s disgustingly insiderish and lame. No one cares what the White House thinks about Fox News. Pundits talking about other pundits. Good strategy!
Ultimately, though, the Obama White House hired Dunn, so she’s on them.
Nemesis
Its already FACT on rw blogs that President Obama met with Rosen prior to her assault on women everywhere.
The kerfuffle could have been avoided, to an extent. Obviously, anything said by any pundit can be warped by the noise machine and fed back to an eager, lazy press corps, but substituting the word “employed” for the word “work” would have been less objectionable and much more factual when referring to annbot.
Cain
The press is desperately trying to link Rosen with the White House in order to create a *-gate. Fucking press. It smells like the Howard Dean fake scandal all over again.
Also – Rosen I think was on record saying that she was pretty much forced to do the whole sue kids thing from her employers. I think she personally has a more progressive view of downloading. I got nothing on the BP stuff..
Either way, she knows how to deal with hate… I’m quite sure the White House is not pleased.
catclub
@earl_of_scruggs: “If Obama’s responsible for everything any putative Democrat says, can we start holding Mitt responsible for everything that, say, Tom “Nuke Mecca” Tancredo says?”
My magic Village eightball says … no.
I read somewhere that Obama should have said “Have you seen what they say about Michelle?” When faced with the calumny of some one saying Ann Romney having never worked.
Jamey
I must lack the golden touch. I raised precisely the same points about Hilary Rosen in BJ threads last week and got flamed.
/brittle
Sally Rakowski
Dana Loesch never went to the Bush White House once, much less 35 times.
Doubt she’s been to Mitt Romney’s house either.
Chyron HR
@Sally Rakowski:
Given Mitt “Stay-at-home moms need to get real jobs so they can have some dignity” Romney’s track record, I expect footage of Dana Loesch at Mitt’s last birthday party to turn up by the end of the week.
Betsy
@Davis X. Machina: Beautiful.
mattH
@Suffern ACE: Please, don’t denigrate the decomposers. At least they clean it up instead of making it worse.
fasteddie9318
It’s the same truism that exists in other forms in every other facet of American politics: conservatives get to pick their own spokespeople, and liberals get to have the media pick their spokespeople for them.
danimal
My first and hopefully only comment on Rosengate. Ann Romney is a poor political target. Ignore her and keep the focus on the real issues of the campaign. As was mentioned above, Team Obama should (and has) disavow the statements, redirect with a “have you seen the attacks on Moochelle Obama (tks R. Limbaugh-the gaffe machine that keeps on giving)?” and then counter with issues and policies.
Don’t make Ann Romney a sympathetic figure. Just let her be irrelevant.
eemom
@Kevin:
This
@jibeaux:
and That.
eemom
yikes, where did all those spaces come from? : (
Persia
@Kevin:
Thank you, yes. She’s never worked a day in her life. It’s not a fucking value judgement, it’s a statement of fact.
liberal
@Cain:
ROTFLOL. Are you kidding? I don’t give a shit what someone’s “personal” views are. She chose to work for evil, when she didn’t have to.
Shari
Waiting for Pat Robertson to say that the tornados this weekend in OK and KS were God’s way of saying the war on women will wipe your state off the map.
Mike D.
@eemom:
It’s only 100% right if you think she’s actually never worked a day in her life, to include studying to get a degree and raising five kids. I know everyone thinks that’s a right-wing frame because the context is so so obvious, but actually, those were her words. Not “never had to go out and earn a paycheck,” “never worked a day.” Context isn’t everything; the actual words used are something too. And she didn’t make the context nearly explicit enough, either! It’s flat-out ridiculous to say that what she said is 100% right. What she meant was 100% right. But if that always counted, there would be no such thing as gaffes, and somehow malicious twisting of words as a political practice would have had to have never been invented. But they were, and she’s supposedly a professional in navigating exactly that reality. So this was a very real gaffe. She biffed hard on her “choice of words” (aka “what she actually said), and as a professional, she made it clear that that was the case. So the game’s up on the 100% right BS. Her intention may have been, but her words weren’t, and that was the whole problem the whole time – that and the fact that the words were so poorly chosen that they could easily have infected the public’s reception of the ideas they were meant to convey, even when expressed by less incompetent people with the right words. We’reonly lucky that it’s over.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick:
Being a member of the Lucky Sperm Club seems to be about 80% of it.
Joel
Coates puts on his B-J hat….
eemom
@Mike D.:
I don’t agree with any of that. “Never worked a day in life” is an idiom which is generally understood to mean having a job — and especially as applied to Ann Romney, that meaning was clear.
It’s fairly hilarious that you attribute such a level of subtlety to a society that lives on buzzwords and soundbites.
eemom
@Mike D.:
Actually no to that also. There’s a difference between a gaffe and a malicious twisting of words to suggest something that was never meant.
For example, Romtron saying he wasn’t concerned about the poor. That was a gaffe, and it was EXACTLY what he meant.
rikryah
More of Ann Romney’s greatest hits from the 1994 interview she gave to the Boston Globe:
On hers and Mitt’s “struggling” college years:
“Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time…”
“Another son came along 18 months later, although we waited four years to have the third, because Mitt was still in school and we had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining. No, I did not work. Mitt thought it was important for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted.”
http://www.samefacts.com/2012/01/income-distribution/mitt-romney-and-ann-the-students-struggling-so-much-that-they-had-to-sell-stock/
Kevin
No, what she said was 100% right. It’s easy to pick out one sentence and make things look like a horrible attack, but she said this:
Bold is my emphasis. Yes, she said “never worked a day in her life”, but clearly, by reading the PRECEDING SENTENCE AND THE NEXT DAMN SENTENCE , you get the full context that she was saying, and she was 100% correct.
David Koch
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
David Koch
@rikryah:
Now, THAT’S hilarious.
Heliopause
Yes, and it’s nice to see that some of us are trying to talk some sense to the lib blogosphere about this. Look, I realize the deep need some have to satisfy a reflexive craving to defend Rosen, but this one just isn’t a winner and there’s no way to turn it into one. There’s a right way and a wrong way to make your point. Saying it in a way that sounds like a personal attack on Ann Romney is the wrong way. The best thing to do at this point is what the President and other top Dems have done, which is distance themselves from it and hope it goes away.
boss bitch
@Anya: @Anya:
What they did and said was exactly right. They addressed the issue as it was presented to the public – ‘That an Obama adivser said stay at home moms don’t work hard.’ Not one more critical word of Ann Romney should be spoken because it is a losing strategy to address a pol’s spouse in any way but positive. ESPECIALLY a GOP’s wife.
When and if MITT Romney continues this attack THEN the O team can bring up having choices. Absolutely NO NEED to mention Anne’s name or use her as an example.
John Puma
Like Ruth Marcus is a “liberal” journalist?
Another tidbit on Rosen:
http://tinyurl.com/2d333xw
Presumably these were, mostly, jobs outside the home.
What is it more difficult for Ann Romney to do, recite the names of her “professionally” raised children or remember the cell phone number of the nanny who can recite them for her?
Ben Cisco
And a shout out for tire rims and anthrax!
kay
@John Puma:
Does she reveal on Huffington Post or CNN that she works for BP?
I mean seriously. It’s ridiculous. We need a crawl running underneath these people, listing their employers.
Kevin
@Heliopause:
you mean “saying it in a way that can be stripped out of the entire statement and taken out of context is the wrong way”?
Because that’s what’s happening here. I don’t care if she scared you from downloading free music 10 years ago, she spoke the truth here, and piling on with the right wing on her, when she said the truth, just gives them the idea that they were right, that this was the same as defunding title X, planned parenthood, virgin pregnancies, transvaginal probles…yup, all that is the same as what Hilary Rosen said because she hurt your feelings in the past.
God…I’m tired of wimps.
Heliopause
@Kevin:
First, I’ve read it and seen it in context numerous times and it’s still a shitty thing to say.
Second, it’s just very, very rich that I am the one defending the President’s position in this case, you know, the guy who wanted to give Republicans 90% of their agenda on a silver platter for most of last year, and BJers are the ones attacking it. Very rich.
I seem to recall a President who, by his own estimate, was offering the opposition party what they wanted by a nine-to-one ratio. But some some dumbass talking head takes a potshot at a candidate’s wife and that’s the hill you want to die on? Get a grip.
Mike D.
@eemom:
Just because it’s an idiom doesn’t mean it’s not a gaffe, or at least highly defective strategic communication. This is because the context in which it was said – indeed the spirit in which it was said – is that of cutthroat political combat. Hilary Rosen wasn’t trying to be nice or even fair to Ann Romney. She was trying to cut her down as a political figure. Go ahead and use a common turn phrase in that environment, but it better be one that actually redounds to your benefit in any kind of interpretation at all. You better be ready for your words to be taken at their most literal meaning, stripped of any contextual meaning you meant for them to have. That’s why political language always sounds so stilted, and zingy insults like this don’t usually stand up to the scrutiny good strategic communicators give to their words before saying them. You continue to insist on the rules of normal conversation for assessing meaning in the context of political verbal combat, and it’s ridiculous. You wouldn’t give the same consideration the other way. It’s just not the game Rosen was playing, and she was playing it in the kind of setting where it is most clear that that is all that is going on. Her intended meaning, as I say, may have been 100% correct, but the actual meaning of words once their spoken depends entirely on the discursive environment into which they’re spoken. If you say she’s never worked a day in her life in an unsympathetic environment, she better not have by any plausible literal understanding of the words, not just by the idiomatic meaning of the turn of phrase you chose. Or, you better be sure your turn of phrase will be received in the way you want it to by the people you want it to be received by, while also being so unmistakable in its meaning, or obscure or metaphorical enough, that opponents can take it apart and turn it against you using just literal meaning – or you better just be confident that even if they can do that, you’re not concerned about the cost to you of that. Rosen failed at all of this. Her words were too on-point to be immune from literal deconstruction, and their colloquial nature not strong enough or resonant enough with the target audience that there was any value in it. It was essentially a literal charge that she hoped would be aided along by a colloquial meaning that was not in fact strongly enough attached to it in enough peoples’ minds that it carried the day. And it inevitably made many a stay-at-home-parents of varying economic status who heard it wonder if this person, and the people she is affiliated with, thinks that the work they do is actually work.
Further, really, Ann Romney not having a job is not at all material to the point Rosen actually wanted to make, or at least the only one that the words could be meant to have been making that is good both substantively and politically. The meat of her point, what everyone points to to explain the toss-off insult that preceded it, that Romney doesn’t understand what most women have to deal with economically, is completely independent of the “never worked” charge, and not advanced by it at all. Do we say that stay-at-home-moms who are nevertheless at the economic margins don’t understand their economic challenges, don’t worry about paying for school, and so forth, just because they don’t work outside the home? We better not! No, the only *good* point that Rosen had is that Ann Romney doesn’t know what it is to struggle (or work for money), but generally to struggle and worry, like many stay-at-home-parents do, about how to make ends meet.