What do you get when you pair Jennifer Dobner (the LDS Church watcher) and Glen Johnson (the Romney basher) together on an article about Romney's Marmon family roots? A hit piece like no other.

Jennifer is fairly tame in her decidedly left-leaning muckraking, though at times she inserts some fun axiomatic assumptions into her pieces (implying that the Mormon church would "punish" a man who entered into a "legal, same-sex marriage"). Glen has cut his teeth far deeper than Jennifer implying disappointment that Governor Romney doesn't carry over his displeasure with the Mass. Supreme Court into the public arena (see here and here). With their dual agendas the path to literary sniping was almost inevitable.

Actually, I got a call from a friend this morning who indicated that reporters were poking around down in Mexico trying to interview some of the supposed long-lost polygamous cousins of Mitt Romney. It says something about the personal integrity of Governor Romney that his detractors have to scour back 3 generations to literally dig up a skeleton in a closet... since his closet is pretty darn clean.

You see the main problem with AP hit pieces is that they don't state their claims.... they simply insinuate. So the article starts out like this:

While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church, the Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.

This would be funny if it weren't so contorted. They set up the sentence as a dichotomy but can't quite come to the realization of what that dichotomy is. So we need some MORE insinuation:

Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.

So the whispering voices that Dobner and Johnson want you to hear is that Romney Sr. was possibly a closet polygamist himself, that his immediate kin were Mormon defilers for decades and that Mitt obviously must have polyamorous leanings.

What any of this has to do with Romney's presidential aspirations is unclear. Except this: Dobner and Johnson do not want you to vote for him. And nothing pulls on a voters heart strings like the strange estrangement and tears of Mitt's Great Great grandmother:

"I felt that was more than I could endure, to have him divide his time and affections from me. I used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow. If anything will make a woman's heart ache, it is for her husband to take another wife. ... But I put my trust in my heavenly father, and prayed and pleaded with him to give me strength to bear this great trial."

Again, I ask. What does this have to do with Mitt? This is agenda press politics at its best!

Labels: AP, family, Glen Johnson, Jennier Dobner, mitt romney, polygamy, press