Romney's Radical Roots (his "John Birch Society" connection)
. . . . See links at #5.
'Cause we need to know these things.
Posted on 01/09/2010 9:09:37 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
...Romney’s argument with the Iowa talk-radio host starts with the two discussing their shared affinity for W. Cleon Skousen. “You and I share a common affection for the late Cleon Skousen,” the radio host says. The former governor agrees, affirming Skousen was his professor."
Who is Cleon Skousen you might ask? In answering that question, it’s hard to even know where to begin. Skousen was by turns an FBI employee, the police chief of Salt Lake City, a Brigham Young University professor, consigliore to former secretary of agriculture and Mormon president Ezra Taft Benson and, well, all-around nutjob.
Skousen was active with the John Birch Society throughout the 1960s, even going so far as to write another book titled The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, accusing those that criticized Birchers as promoting Communism.
Skousen’s Communist paranoia may have reached it’s apotheosis in 1970 when the Mormon church and BYU in particular began receiving a tremendous amount of external pressure to change the church’s policy on denying the Mormon priesthood to blacks. Skousen, then a professor at BYU, published an article entitled “The Communist Attack on the Mormons” and noted that critics were employing Communist tactics which were “distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.” The Mormon Church reversed course on its discriminatory practices in 1978 and began ordaining black men to the priesthood.
..."I sincerely doubt that Mitt Romney believes anything near as outlandish as many of the things Cleon Skousen espoused, and to be fair Skousen wrote on numerous topics with wildly varying degrees of intellectual sobriety."
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
Palin's father also served in the Army, no Romney man has served the United States of America as a military man, this must be more than a coincidence, since it well predates the Civil War.
In immediate history, Mitt's father (no military service WWII), was the anti war republican candidate for president while his draft avoiding son was living in France during the Vietnam war, while he was campaigning.
Mitt Romney had five military age sons while he was campaigning to be the war time Commander in Chief, but no Romney man will put on the uniform, they don't swing that way.
Mighty white of them.
I certainly hadn’t planned to spend an hour Sunday morning writing this, but you’ve really hacked me off!
They DID NOT ENDORSE CANDIDATES. They TRIED to educate the ELECTORATE so that THEY would recognize, endorse and ELECT decent candidates. Perhaps if you’d pitched in, the effort might have been more successful? The handles to the oars in a rowboat are INSIDE the boat. You and too many others stood in the water and WATCHED others take turns rowing. That certainly explains why your criticism of the JBS is ALL WET.
A major activity of EVERY JBS session I attended was a mass letter-writing to every member’s respective senators and congresscritters — HAND WRITTEN, hand addressed, 3 PARAGRAPHS MAX — on the critical issues of the day. The letters were collected by the chapter leader and mailed over the week between meetings so as to maintain a steady flow into their offices. That was long BEFORE email and faxes. And HOW MANY CONTACTS HAVE YOU MADE WITH Y0UR ALLEGED REPRESENTATIVES?
Groups of members promoted local speeches by folks who had fled communism. I MCd several speeches here by men like former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov who was attached to Novosti Press in Moscow who DEVASTATED Teddy Kennedy. He accompanied Kennedy during his visit to the USSR and said they kept him DRUNK and he simply absorbed all the Soviet PROPAGANDA and brought it back verbatim to the States where he blathered it to any idiot reporter who’d listen. Yuri also told the 300 folks there – gee, wonder where you were those evenings? — that the USSR was the most RACIST NATION on earth, requiring EVERY citizen to carry an ID card listing his RACE.
Men like Avraham Schifrin — a Russian Jew — who tracked the Soviet gulags and the atrocities committed there.
JBS members could always be found at congressional Town Hall Meetings asking the TOUGH QUESTIONS and NOT SITTING DOWN UNTIL THEY GOT SOME KIND OF MEANINGFUL ANSWER. I have HUNDREDS of published letters-to-the editors of our local liberal fishwrappers written by me and other members over the years doing what we could to wake you and your friends the hell up.
Many of us did local radio call-in talk shows for years for little or no compensation.
And stuff like THIS!
Around 6 am on dark morning in the early 80s, 4 of us piled into a car in Atlanta with a few hundred TRIM bulletins and other fact-packed flyers detailing how then Georgia Representative Ed Jenkins and Senator Sam Nunn were voting on issues important to all citizens. Our destination was Hartwell, Georgia and an “Eggs and Issues Breakfast” hosted by a large Hartwell church.
We arrived at the church about an hour early and deployed. As folks arrived for the buffet line, each was handed some of this highly informative literature. As they waited in line, they read and chatted as new information came to their attention. Just before the invited dignitaries were to make their 20 minute speeches (aka, pitches for re-election), we made certain a supply of these flyers made it to the head table. Ed and Sam ate precious little of the fine southern breakfast cuisine before them as they periodically glanced menacingly at the table we occupied. In unison, the 4 of us smiled sweetly and waved.
When Ed and Sam each rose to speak, each devoted 16 or 17 minutes of the allotted 20 minutes TRYING TO DEFEND their DOCUMENTED VOTING RECORDS to an increasingly hostile gathering as we returned Ed and Sam’s constant withering glares with more sweet smiles and waves. It was truly one of the highlights of my early years as a political bomb-thrower. YOU should try it!
After a bit more bomb-throwing in other parts of his district, Ed Jenkins was defeated in the next election. Because he ran state-wide and we lacked the resources and manpower to cover the entire state (and he did begin to clean up his act) Sam hung on for another term or two. (And those 2 year House terms — where the power to tax and spend repose — is where the effort must be concentrated.
Bottom line? The Birchers were — and are — some of the best informed citizens in the country and, if nothing else, they BOUGHT TIME for the rest of you to WAKE THE HELL UP!!!!!
There’s MUCH, MUCH more but I think that by now and with some luck you might get the idea here.
If you’re STILL reading this – those MTV and VHI induced short attention spans can be SUCH a problem – please know that I am positively giddy with anticipation as I look forward to your response. I’m certain it will contain a lengthy list of things YOU and your friends have done and are now doing along these lines to keep this place FREE of the tyranny born of citizen apathy and indolence.
Let me leave you with some wise and timeless words from two thousand years ago:
“We believe a man should be concerned about public as well as private affairs, for we regard the person who takes no part in politics not as merely uninterested but as useless.” –Pericles (Citizen of Athens)
TAXMAN BRAVO ZULU!
Thanks.
Can’t WAIT to see his reply. Might take awhile for him to find someone in his circle to READ it to him.
I meant to also mention that Larry McDonald once remarked that the piece of correspondence that literally scared hell out of the critters up there was the piece of balogna stained brown lunch sack with one sentence — all caps —scrawled across it in Magic Marker. The American worker who sent that one was REALLY PISSED!!!
Might have been a more effective campaign than the current one involving the pink slips.
Be safe, my friend.
That post pretty much reads like the JBS, it doesn’t sound like they amounted to much, as I said, they seemed like an odd, closed, group of conspiracy guys, that pretty much talked and sold books to each other, I never could find much concrete presence in the American political system.
Your insisting on attacking people personally is pretty much JBS as well.
Wow, I did not know as much about Romney’s abortion record. Thank you so much for informing me.
An old friend often warned us to never try to teach a pig to sing. It just wastes your time and really annoys the pig.
You, sir, are a pig and this conversation is over.
Now back over to Democrat Underground with a full report on how you were insulted on FR by some guy who insisted on employing FACTS. Boohoo.
Seriously, your post is exactly typical of a JBS guy, in the meantime, none of us have learned of any effective, or substantive role that they have played in electoral politics. They were like a little club of disgruntled conspiracy guys that sold books to each other.
As I recall, George W. Romney was a staunch critic of the JBS and claimed hat Goldwatrer had cozied up to the Birchers. Romney refused to endorse Goldwater in 1964, and Romney won in MI.
In 1964 (Convention) George and Mitt walked out on Goldwater in protest, in the 1980s Mitt dropped his republican registration in protest of President Reagan, Romney also has quotes like this in his past as he explains the Romney family traditional, political beliefs.
"I'm not a partisan politician. My hope is that, after this election, it will be the moderates of both parties who will control the Senate, not the Jesse Helmses."
Romney's Radical Roots (his "John Birch Society" connection)
. . . . See links at #5.
'Cause we need to know these things.
Your fact-filled posts are totally unworthy of a reply.
My “fact filled” posts are a question, for fifty years, since I first started visiting the JBS free book stands, I have wondered what they do and what they accomplish, it always comes up to zilch to me.
Few were, and are, more vilified than the JBS. Few, if any, have ever been more correct. Not least among their correct observations are the ones regarding the UN and the ones regarding many of our “ leaders “ such as Frank Church and Jimmy Carter.
Perhaps we’d have been well off to listen.
Really? Explain Barry O. then. LOL
Again, they never did anything meaningful, they were like a private club that ranted among themselves, in private.
Thank you for posting the link to the 10 minute history lesson. It refreshed me about our form of government. It has been so many years since I was taught those things. I sent the link to a lot of people on my e-mail list.
I’m only interested in Conservatives. All the Republicans can go suck an egg.
It's not just a color in the Crayola® box anymore.
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