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Engaging in self-promotion by interrupting Rick Santorum

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Can someone tell me why AOL choose to lead the news with this story:

And not say the story about Obama’s economic team underestimateding the deficits in the president’s budget?

Look, I’m no fan of Rick Santorum, but cannot condone this juvenile tactic often deployed by left-wingers of shouting out “mic check” when someone they don’t like is speaking:

Two men interrupted a Rick Santorum event in Illinois with a same-sex kiss, and were promptly ejected by security when the crowd turned on them.

The fracas began in the middle of Santorum’s remarks (at the 3:38 mark in the above video clip), when two protesters, identified as Timothy Tross and Ben Clifford, began yelling “mic check!,” then embraced before bowing showily to the crowd.

There’s one thing to be able to kiss your beloved when you want to kiss him, quite another to kiss him to make a statement. Kissing is a personal and intimate act, not a political one.

Now, the two men would have been wiser to hold up placards criticizing the candidate’s stand on the issues, but then that manner of expressing their opinion might not have generated the headlines they wanted.

That said, how do those headlines advance their cause? We know Mr. Santorum has made some pretty strange statements about gay people, but he is a presidential candidate and should be allowed to make his case.

And they, in the proper forum, should criticize him.  Interrupting him only generates sympathy.

Why is it again so many on the left insist on interrupting right-of-center speakers?

NB:  Tweaked the post to improve the flow and make my point clearer.

Comments

  6. This isn’t that hard. Tabloid-ish news will trump news with actual number crunching pretty much every time…. Unless those numbers are bogus polar bear counts to show we’re going to die from Global Warming.

  7. These antics simply confirm for many what they already think about gays.

    I would suggest to Santorum supporters that the proper response is “no response at all”. Just a yawn, a ho hum, and get on with the program.

    No need to give these children the attention they crave or the MSM the story they’re hoping for.

    “Romney. He’ll do.” (I can’t work up the enthusiasm needed for a ‘!’.)

  8. So……did AOL expect Santorum to give them a medal for kissing? Or do they not have the brains to just kinda assume that an anti-gay politician would throw gay people out of his rally? That’s not news. That would be like leading with “Donald Trump made money last night”. News would be if he jumped down and joined in.

  10. Who said they were on the left. Could have been some conservative sh!t-disturbers from the Romney camp…

    Yes, because conservatives are well known for pulling childish stunts like this to get attention. /sarc

  11. Hi Dan,
    As for that CBO report you cite as evidence for an increased deficit:

    The differences between the estimates from CBO and the White House budget office are attributable to different baselines and economic assumptions, and a big reason CBO expects the deficit to spike sharply under Obama’s budget is that CBO’s baseline assumes all the Bush-era tax rates will expire at the end of 2012.

    Obama wants to continue the middle-class tax cuts, something reflected in his budget.

    OK, now,

    CBO also compares Obama’s budget to a different baseline in which the budget office assumes Congress and the administration decides to avoid big tax increases and deep spending cuts, something both branches have repeatedly done in the past.

    In this scenario, for example, all of the Bush-era tax rates are extended and the Alternative Minimum Tax is “patched” to prevent it from falling on millions of middle-class taxpayers. In this comparison, Obama’s budget would actually reduce the deficit by $4.3 trillion through 2022.

    So, if you keep the Bush era tax cuts, we end up with a larger deficit. Who knew? Keep the middle class tax cut, and the deficit grows. Again, who could possibly have guessed. 🙂

  16. Cinesnatch, I’m not praising W for his record on deficits and have criticized him on this blog for his spending even when he was president. But, he never ran for president promising a “net spending cut” as did Mr. Obama.

    And with protests from conservatives finally reaching his ears, he did finally start trimming the fat from federal budgets, only to see his efforts undermined by Nancy Pelosi’s Congress.

    He should have stood up to her and vetoed her spendthrift spending bills.

  17. So, who paid for ponied up the money for TARP? Oh, it was a Democratic Congress’ fault.

    Correct. Under the United States Constitution, Congress controls the budget.

    Not that Bush wasn’t wrong to have proposed it, mind you. He was wrong. Obama could have reversed him. Obama didn’t. Instead, Obama added another $800 billion in bailout money on top of it.

  18. (calling it “stimulus”… but of course, more bailouts for politically-connected entities, is all it was… even Obama supporters now admit that it did little or nothing productive, as they call for another “real” stimulus to happen)

  20. They were always tiresome. By “beyond”, I think you mean that only the most demented lefties still pretend to not understand how lame they are.

  22. Hi VK

    repeated explanations of how the deficit is being driven by excess of spending, not lack of taxation, would have sunk in by now.

    And that of course would be wrong. Given that the budgetary position = G -T, it would appear, logically, that differentials in BOTH are to blame.

  23. Huh?

    In the world of the statist, you don’t cut spending and squeeze more out of your income or take a second job. Nope. You apply for more welfare.

    The government can lay off dead wood and stagnant programs. The government can cut waste and duplication and work at increasing production. The government can stretch its tax dollar income in many ways. But when it increases “its income” it is taking money from the economy and burning it to produce the energy it consumes as a leviathan on steroids. Remind me again which essential products the common man gets from government?

    Obambi funded Obamacare in part on the promise of efficiency he was going to squeeze out of Medicare and Medicaid by reducing waste and fraud. At least he hinted at understanding the process. But not really. Obama funded Obamacare on the one trillion he was going to “save” by getting out of Iraq. Get it? Bush supposedly bankrupted us on the wars, but Obama took the money that wasn’t there and doubled the debt effect on a whole new spending spree.

    Only sapping the economy of more of its “excess” vitality through higher taxation can work. And, we all know the economy is just purring along on all 16 gas guzzling cylinders.

  24. And that of course would be wrong right, since the Bush tax cuts already demonstrated a few years ago what part of the Laffer Curve we are on; in other words, that raising tax rates would NOT necessarily increase revenues or fix the budget hole at all, leaving us with a pure spending problem.

    FIFY, Cas.

  27. Further to my point above: History shows that tax increases enable higher spending; that is, politicians *do not actually* cut spending, if some tax increase does give them higher revenue.

    It bears remembering that the future so-called budget “cuts” proposed by Obama are, in fact, huge spending/budget increases. They are simply a tad less huge than what the Democrats really want. Democrats call them “cuts” as a kind of Orwellian gimmick, to obscure the truth.

    It bears remembering that, if we simply held government spending at the HIGH levels where it is RIGHT NOW (just not piling on any further increases), future U.S. deficits become much smaller.. From that alone.

    So no, Cas, we have a pure spending problem, period. No matter how you slice it or dice it, real spending cuts are the only solution to our fiscal problems. And we will get real cuts… sooner or later. The question is, by what path (planned or chaotic, as in a fiscal crisis).

  28. Europe is beginning to get it:

    Panos Tsakloglou, an economist at the Athens University of Economics and Business and a Finance Ministry adviser[, said] “There isn’t any room for increasing taxes right now in Greece. Reduction of public debt will have to come through spending cuts.”

    But watch out for the police (state):

    [In Italy], police have launched spectacular raids on tax-evading businesses. They have taken to patrolling luxury resorts and stopping flashy sports cars to see if the drivers declared revenue high enough to pay for such luxuries. So many were pulled over that Ferrari officials at a recent auto show issued a warning that things were being taken too far.