Patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel. Battered by revelations of offshore accounts, ducking taxes, and outsourcing US jobs, Romney campaign surrogate John Sununu decides to go all Samuel Johnson and says Obama is not American enough, nod nod wink wink:
MSNBC — The Romney campaign ratcheted up its language on Tuesday in a conference call on which former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff John Sununu said he wished President Obama “would learn how to be an American.”
Sununu led a series of Romney surrogates in questioning the president’s commitment to economic freedom, dredging up the president’s ties to Tony Rezko; another speaker on the conference call said Obama’s policies were akin to “socialism.”
If you replace “American” with “rich” (as Rove, Rommy, et al seem to do) then the statement makes more sense.
Akin to socialism?! *Snort* It cracks me up when Republicans calls Democrats “socialist”. The pathetically narrow band of the American political conversion is positioned so far to the right of centre that it can’t see socialism with a telescope.
“conversation”, that is.
Didn’t Sununu used to be considered a liberal/moderate Republican?
Trebuchet
I don’t recall his reputed position on the spectrum, but I do remember that he had one of those names which Letterman liked to repeat.
You may be thinking of the fact that Sununu pushed for Souter for appointment to scotus. Otherwise, I recall him being pretty conservative, but again, I don’t really remember where he stood on various issues.
“With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.” –Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary, at entry for “patriotism”
can you hear the stampede as they run to the new talking point, that Obama is “foreign” aka “not like us white boys”?
wikipedia’s entry on Sununu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Sununu : Sununu is responsible for recommending David Souter to President George H. W. Bush for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, at the behest of New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman. The Wall Street Journal described the events leading up to the appointment of the “liberal jurist” in a 2000 editorial, saying Rudman in his “Yankee Republican liberalism” took “pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle [after Robert Bork].”[7] Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had “suspected all along” that Souter would not “overturn activist liberal precedents.”[8] Sununu later said that he had “a lot of disappointment” about Souter’s positions on the Court and would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia.[8]
Romney himself is now calling Obama’s policies “foreign to America”, with heavy emphasis on the word “foreign”. Of course, these is all code words for, “Not like us”. His campaign apparently has decided that since they can’t get the conversation away from his tax returns or how many jobs he outsourced while at Bain, the solution is to go full southern strategy.
Of course, using Sununu, a man born in Cuba from two non-American parents, as the surrogate to attack Obama’s standing as a “Real American ™” is pretty ironic.
I’m really convinced that the secret to modern republican rhetoric is to ignore the actual dictionary definitions of words and just cram as many scare terms as they can into every sentence.
@ ^ d cwilson :
Which itself is a code word for black.
As in “B-but-but, but he’s bleck!” spoken Lethal Weapon II (the anti-aprtheid one) style.
Synfandel #2
I really wish the folks throwing the word “socialism” around like it was a curse would learn what socialism actually is. A center-right politician like Obama is not a socialist.
I seem to remember from the days when the Union-Leader was gushing about the new governor of NH that Mr Sununu was born in Cuba of mixed lebanese/arab/central-american parents. You know – a typical “american success story”; just like a poor black kid from Hawaii who grows up to be POTUS is an american failure.
Also they told us that ‘sununu’ is arabic for ‘little bird’. Somebody should flip this ‘little bird’ the bird.