Hetrick spins, too

Bruce Hetrick’s Oct. 22 column " Spouting off about the all-too-common art of spin” begins by offering the reader his view on how characters in the Broadway play “The Book of Mormon” are adept at spinning falsehoods in the guise of “helping people.” Hetrick provides spinning of his own, personally reviewing the highly irreverent play as hilarious, pant-wetting entertainment.

Hetrick finds vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s allegedly “cleaning already-clean cookware” recently in a soup kitchen in Youngstown, Ohio, as an example of fake empathy spun as a selfless act. Hetrick’s spin is wrong. Even NBC reported that the charity’s president reported that the Republican vice presidential candidate did, indeed, scrub dirty pots.

In another spin sortie, Hetrick attacks Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s comments mentioning “binders full of women” Romney used as governor when considering cabinet members and department heads for Massachusetts state government. Hetrick characterized Romney’s comment as “boasting” as evidenced by a story in the Boston Phoenix that women’s organizations had put together the binders before the election to give to whoever was elected. Hetrick says, “Taking credit for others’ effort and ideas is spin of the lowest order.”

Romney never said that he assembled these binders, only that he asked for and used them. A Washington Post article confirms that Romney worked with the women’s caucus and the binders of resumes they put together to make sure that women were considered equally for appointed positions. (Half of Romney’s top 20 appointees were women.)

No one died scrubbing pots and the binders of women, no matter who assembled them, assisted in providing real jobs for women. Meanwhile, Hetrick is free to laugh long and hard about a play that rudely and crudely skewers a Christian religion, but according to the Obama administration (and despite the First Amendment) it is absolutely reprehensible to make light of a certain other religion. I wonder how Hetrick would spin that.
____________
Gregory D. Finch
Carmel