More trouble with those deadly metaphors

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney stumbled over an explosive turn of phrase Friday night, telling an audience here that Republicans would figuratively "hang" President Barack Obama with bad economic news.
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Speaking at an Americans for Prosperity dinner, Romney's comment came as he recalled Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign.

"Reagan came up with this great thing about the ‘misery index' and he hung that around Jimmy Carter's neck," Romney said. "Well, we're going to have to hang the ‘Obama Misery Index' around his neck."

"I'll tell you, the fact that you've got people in this country really squeezed, with gasoline getting so expensive, with commodities getting so expensive, families are having a hard making ends meet. So we're going to have to talk about that," Romney said.

Romney continued, "We're going to hang him - " before stopping mid-sentence.

"So to speak - metaphorically," he clarified. "You have to be careful."

Any reference to hanging - however unintentional - would be especially loaded in a campaign against the country's first black president, as Romney apparently recognized.

So, to sum up. Romney uses an everyday, ordinary figure of speech to describe how he is going to run against Obama, and then - misspeaks. His tongue was moving faster than his brain and out pops an unintentional utterance.

And this is news? It is as if the politically correct nincompoops in the press and the eager beaver hypocritical Democrats actually believed that Romney - or anyone in the Republican party - was capable of actually hanging the president of the United States. Like rhetoric vultures, they hang on every word, every phrase, examining them for anything they can use to criticize, to imply racism or worse, even to accuse their opponents of advocating violence.

That is the only context for which this might be a news story. Anything else is political correctness run amok. 

It is they who are doing violence - violence to the very basis of free speech in America. And because we allow them to get away with it, we are as guilty as they are.

This is the way this campaign is going to be run; Republican candidates walking on pins and needles lest they cross an ever changing, ever evolving line of decorous speech determined solely by their opponents and based on nothing more than their own subjective political needs of the day. And with the press making crystal clear whose side they are on, we will get a lot more of these non-news stories in the future.