If the uber-rich Romneys hanging out with the uber-rich Donald Trump wasn’t tone-deaf enough:
“A lot of people are questioning his [Obama’s] birth certificate,” Trump said on CNBC on Tuesday. “They’re questioning the authenticity of his birth certificate.
“I’ve been known as being a very smart guy for a long time. I don’t consider myself birther or not birther but there are some major questions here and the press doesn’t want to cover it,” he said.
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“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me,” Romney said. “My guess is they don’t agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1 percent or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”
It’s not like Romney and Trump happen to disagree about, oh, I don’t know, what to do about the deficit. Romney’s saying Trump’s a good person, and they just happen to disagree about a few things, like whether the president of the United States is an American citizen.
Of course Trump’s birtherism is a proxy for Islamophobia. Has Romney met this Trump?
The Koran is very interesting. A lot of people say it teaches love and there is a very big group of people who really understand the Koran far better than I do. I’m certainly not an expert, to put it mildly. But there’s something there that teaches some very negative vibe.
I mean things are happening, when you look at people blowing up all over the streets that are in some of the countries over in the Middle East, just blowing up a super market with not even soldiers, just people, when 250 people die in a super market that are shopping, where people die in a store or in a street. There’s a lot of hatred there that’s some place.
Now I don’t know if that’s from the Koran. I don’t know if that’s from some place else. But there’s tremendous hatred out there that I’ve never seen anything like it.
So, you have two views. You have the view that the Koran is all about love and then you have the view that the Koran is, that there’s a lot of hate in the Koran.
Because Romney’s religion relies on a sacred text that other people who might get Romney over 50% think is satanic, you’d think Romney might have some discomfort with this blatant disparaging of other peoples’ religion. This Romney, though, has been Etch-a-Sketched away:
Poisonous language does not advance our cause. It has never softened a single heart nor changed a single mind. The blessings of faith carry the responsibility of civil and respectful debate. The task before us is to focus on the conservative beliefs and the values that unite us – let no agenda narrow our vision or drive us apart.
That was October. In February, that Romney was replaced by this one:
[W]ithout question, the legal code in this country is based upon Judeo-Christian values and teachings, Biblical teachings, and for the president not to understand that a wide array of religions and a conviction that Judeo-Christian philosophy is an integral part of our foundation is really an extraordinary thing. I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like to see America (more secular. And I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we … must be a less Christian nation.
