Romney on Offensive 9/11 Sign: "Lighten Up" [VIDEO]

Posted by Adam Howard at 12:27 PM on July 23, 2007.

As we reported earlier, a lot of people are really upset about an appearance Mitt Romney recently made in South Carolina where he posed with and held up a sign which implied the Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama were essentially the same. This same poster made reference to Hillary through her daughter Chelsea. The video to your right is from a New Hampshire town hall, where a young man named Jerid confronted Romney about his insensitivity and endorsement of this kind of hate speech. Romney's callous response should haunt him in same way "macaca" does George Allen. Here is Jerid on 9/11 and confronting Romney:

I got up late; it was a Tuesday in Cleveland and I only had early morning swim practice MWF's. Showering, I heard Steve, another guy on the third floor of the "Tyler" dorm yell from his room, "holy shit!" From the pitch in his voice I could tell it was serious. In a blink of eye I threw my clothes on as I stumbled into Steve's room still fumbling with my flip flops. I remember their faces - Chris, Steve, Nate - jaws all agape as the four of us watched the first tower smolder. And right then I had that "sinking" feeling that still I get to this day; at the time it was the strongest it'd ever been, thousands of times worse than a few months previous when I'd broken up with my high school sweetheart - an event that I sheepishly admit still haunts me even in adulthood. The rest of the day I recall drunkenly; the haze that I walked through at the time permeates my memory. The clearest thing I feel now, six years later, are those tears that violently rolled off my face into my pillow the night of September 11th.

I don't understand how someone can compare any American to Osama Bin Laden, but pundits are still willing to prey on the emotions that everyone that lived through 9/11 feel, invoking images of the most hate man in America to describe the political opposition. It's a cheap, divisive, whorish move to make. It represents the worst of the politics of hate. It's a move that I expect presidential candidates of all parties to be above. But Mitt Romney is not.

So I asked him about it on Sunday at a townhall meeting in Exeter, NH. In the video, I'm angry. I still am right now. Please, watch this video.

Tagged as: obama, osama bin laden, election08, romney, 9/11. terrorism

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.