Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Monday, September 03, 2012 4:58:20 PM
Sometimes a blogger has to rewrite his posting before he starts writing it. I was reading a blog posting by Burt Prelutsky (http://www.burtprelutsky.com/2012/08/making-use-of-lemons.html), when I read this:
"Let me say that I can understand how someone can be a Democrat. After
all, a lot of people simply accept the party affiliation they were born
into, just as most of us accept our parents’ religion as our own. What I
don’t understand is how liberals can stomach the recent TV commercial
in which Joe Soptic,, a retired steelworker, lays the death of his wife
at the feet of Mitt Romney. Are liberals so totally devoid of morality
that they don’t object to being allied with a political party, long
known for registering dead people to vote, stooping to desecrating a
woman’s grave to help win an election?
In case you missed the back story, Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in
1999. Mr. Soptic was actually offered a buy-out by Bain before they were
finally forced to close down the steel plant where he was employed.
That was in 2001. What’s more, even after he was out of work, Mrs.
Soptic still had a job and still had health insurance. In fact, it
wasn’t until 2006, seven long years after Romney was entirely out of the
picture, that she was diagnosed with cancer, dying shortly thereafter."
Now obviously for Soptic to blame his wife's death on Mitt Romney or Bain Capital makes as much sense as it would for me to blame my father's death last year on Obamacare's death panel, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. So when I sat down at the keyboard a few minutes ago, I had planned to write about Joe Soptic and the fact that while the sponsors of the ad have been pounded publicly (and rightly so), didn't Soptic have a responsibility to keep his own personal tragedy from being abused? The evidence shows that Mitt Romney had not even a tangential connection to his wife's tragic death, so shouldn't he have told the Democrat SuperPAC that his story, honestly told, couldn't help them, and then hung up the phone?
As I said, that's what I planned to write.
However, I ran a net search on his name and found an article on the Washington Examiner (http://washingtonexaminer.com/joe-soptic-the-man-blaming-romney-for-wifes-death-is-a-familiar-face-on-the-anti-romney-beat/article/2504211#.UEUP8ZbF-uI) that made clear that Soptic perhaps isn't such an innocent victim as he makes out. It turns out that he's been on TV attacking Bain Capital before, and the reason for his lying anti-Bain bitterness is that most classic of union-worker jihad-starters, his pension got cut by somewhere between $283 and $400/month (depending on which Joe Soptic TV appearance you choose to believe).
So Mr. Union Retiree has his pension cut by Bain Capital management trying to save his failing former employers, and so he lies in a political ad attacking a former Bain executive who had nothing to do with the cutting of the pension because he had left the company two years before the plant was closed and seven years before the doubly unfortunate Mrs. Soptic (I say doubly because she was married to Joe Soptic) was diagnosed with the cancer that was to kill her. He's a male Cindy Sheehan.
Yeah, just call him Joe Septic.