The Real Bully Running for President

(FPM) Last week Washington Post ran a story attempting to portray presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a homophobic bully. Despite every effort to contain it, the story imploded, as factual inaccuracies came to light. Furthermore, the victim’s own sisters (he died of liver cancer in 2004) claimed to have no knowledge of incident, with one of them telling ABC News, “If he were still alive today, he would be furious.” Yet as is often the case with highly publicized news stories, other mainstream media outlets attempted to keep the thematic aspect of the piece alive, irrespective of the facts. Thus, when former Newt Gingrich campaign manager Rick Tyler showed up for an MSNBC interview with Martin Bashir, Bashir attempted to do exactly that. Tyler was having none of it. “I would consider things like Barack Obama bullying the Supreme Court, bullying the EPA, bullying hundreds of property owners and business owners, bullying donors to the Romney campaign. That’s what bullying is when they have an effect on private citizens not people running against them but people who disagree with them politically,” said Tyler. “That’s bullying!”

Tyler’s assessment of the current president is spot on. Moreover, one need not go back almost five decades to underscore that reality. As recently as April 26th, the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel revealed that one of the Obama re-election campaign websites, “The Truth Team,” published “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” It was an ugly attempt to slur and intimidate donors to Mitt Romney’s election campaign. Eight private citizens were described as having “less-than-reputable records,” being “on the wrong side of the law” and making themselves successful at “the expense of so many Americans.”

“These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having ‘outsourced’ jobs,” writes Strassel. “T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a ‘lobbyist’) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a ‘bitter foe of the gay rights movement.’”

One of those men, Frank VanderSloot, did an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, expressing what it was like to be on a presidential “enemies list.” ”Sure enough then the attacks started coming I really thought I’d made a mistake,” he told Susteren. “As I thought about it, I thought, ‘this is America and we can’t let these tactics intimidate us,’ and so I remain undeterred.” Yet VanderSloot also noted that the media “have lodged all kinds of innuendo in my direction, accused me of all kinds of bad things. People have called my children. They’ve been surfing their LinkedIn sites. They’ve been asking interviews of my kids.” VanderSloot also revealed that a “former U.S. Senate investigator” and “member of the sub-committee on Homeland Security” is doing an investigation of him and his family, which “worried him a lot.”

Strassel confirmed that outrage, noting that “a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.” She further revealed that “Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.”

All of the above is having an effect on VanderSloot’s bottom line. In an interview with Fox’s Neil Cavuto, he revealed that a “couple of hundred (customers) we can track” have cancelled their customer membership with Melaleuca, a wellness company run by him. Strassel put the hit piece targeting VanderSloot and the other seven Romney donors in proper perspective. “These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them,” she writes.

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