NAUSEATING

No question but that Newark Mayor Cory Booker mis-spoke on that Sunday morning news show, when he used strong, passionate language to assail the use of personal attack ads, which he described as "nauseating."  Fair enough.  But he misspoke in suggesting a comparison between the Obama campaign ads about Bain capital and the Republican reversion to the old Rev. Wright assault on Obama.  As many commentators have already pointed out, Romney is running hard on his record as a successful "job-creator" as a businessman, which makes that record a legitimate subject for investigation and criticism.  Only by the wildest stretch of the imagination could Obama be accused of sharing the rabid anti-American views expressed on one occasion long ago by the Rev. Wright.

Still, the Republicans leap in with both feet when they see an opening, and they found one here.  Romney now openly accuses Obama of scurrilous personal attacks and self-righteously proclaims his own intention to run a spotlessly clean campaign.  It's amazing to watch the truth being turned so smoothly on its head--and being echoed by the multitude of right-wing zealots.  Booker himself has forcefully rejected his co-option into the Romney campaign, but that does not prevent the machinery of politics from turning his remarks into sausage for their breakfast.  I have no doubt we'll be seeing Booker's face in many a television commercial.

Obama's response to the press was, as always, measured.  I have not heard him stoop to a single personal attack on Romney.  Not so his opponent, who glibly "stands by" his comments, "whatever they were," in which he unambiguously accused Obama of wanting to turn this country into a "less Christian nation."  I personally would applaud such an effort, but the president has given no indication of attempting such a laudable goal.  But the remark allowed Romney to signal insidious support to those who persist in believing Obama to be a Muslim, bent on converting the entire country to Islam and introducing sharia law; and he stands by it, whatever it was.

Mayor Booker erred, in my view, in seeming to equate the strategies of the two campaigns.  I myself work hard to dissociate my personal opinions of Romney-which are not too high--from my critical understanding of the policies with which he proposes to lead the country.  I am not always successful.  But I can still be appalled by the cognitive dissonance purposefully exploited by the other side, where simple, self-evident truths get twisted into lies, and self-evident lies are presented insistently as truths.