What’s important about the NPR excerpt below, which broadcast this morning, is that this is everything NPR’s Cokie Roberts has to say about Romney’s motives for going to Poland. This is the entirety of it. You can listen for yourself here, but when Roberts was asked why Poland, the sole motive Roberts came up with is a racial one.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your tax dollars at work:
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: So today is Poland. Why is he stopping in Poland. What does he hope to accomplish with that?
Cokie Roberts: Well, I think part of it was a desire to portray President Obama as something of a wimp, and say he’s abandoned Eastern Europe. But look, you remember well the Reagan Democrats. Those ethnic white voters who had been Democrats for many years; turned out for Ronald Reagan, and have been fairly predictable Republicans since then. Now it’s a smaller percentage of the population — of the voting population — than it used to be, but white voters are still much more Republican than any other group in the electorate. They went for McCain in 2008 by 55%. And I think that getting those ethnic voters excited is really what Romney has in mind here. It’s more for the folks at home — the descendents of the people that he will be speaking to — in Poland.
As you can see, according to Roberts, Romney didn’t go to Poland to gain some foreign policy experience or to prepare himself to be president or to help differentiate between his values and those of our current president. No, it was all some dark, divisive, cynical, racial plan to suck up to us rural white bitter-clingers.
Yep, Romney went to Poland to blow a big racial dog-whistle.
This is pure McCarthyism on Roberts’s part. Nothing more, nothing less.
When you use the word McCarthyism as a pejorative, as leftists like Roberts love to do, it means ascribing the very worst motives to someone without a shred of evidence. The idea is disqualify, delegitimize, toxify, and attempt to silence this person by hurling a vicious accusation even though you have absolutely no proof to back it up.
As we’ve seen for the last four years, when it comes to protecting Barack Obama, this is all the media does. No matter what it is, if it might in any way hurt Obama, the left-wing media screams racist. For example, today we have the presumptive GOP nominee wrapping up a successful international trip that’s ended with a lot of positive media coverage, but…
…that might hurt Obama. So…
..RACISM!
During the 2008 election, this was the left’s playbook, and now we’re starting to see this desperate McCarthyism return. Last week, it was the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. Now it’s Cokie Roberts.
Roberts has always been very good at spouting the most outlandish stuff and doing so while sounding perfectly reasonable and matter-of-fact. But don’t listen to her tone; read the words. It’s pure McCarthyism — a deliberate attempt to throw a racial cloud over Romney and his campaign without a shred of evidence.
But the only one truly blowing a racial dog-whistle here is Roberts — and she’s doing so while disguised as an objective journalist and with our tax dollars.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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