-By Warner Todd Huston
On a July 23 appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Huffington Post Editorial Director and former Newsweek Editor Howard Fineman accused Mitt Romney of pandering to a “xenophobic” Republican Party, a racist party, he said, that is “afraid of the world.”
During a discussion of Michele Bachmann’s questions about Hillary Clinton aid Huma Abedin’s possible familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, host Chris Matthews asked the left-wing HuffPo editor why Mitt Romney doesn’t “have the guts” to stand up to those in his own party. In reply, Fineman slammed Romney and the “nativist” GOP.
“Well, that would require Mitt Romney to run an entirely different campaign from the one he’s run so far. And he’s not going to do it. He is playing to- and has from the beginning of the campaign- played to the kind of nativist base of the Tea Party. And by nativist, I mean people who are, in essence, afraid of the world.”
Fineman went on to attack the GOP as racist saying the party should “quit being xenophobes” and that, “there’s a question about the Republican Party’s identity.”
Naturally, one strains to remember when any Democrat was asked to “have the guts” to stand up to the left-wing of his party. Only Republicans seem to ever face calls to confront his own side.
Amusingly, at one point Fineman mixed up Clinton aide Huma Abedin with well-known movie actress Uma Thurman.
See Newsbusters for the full transcript.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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