There has been considerable brouhaha over the last several days stemming from one comment Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen made on the April 11 CNN program "AC360." However, rather than being legitimate, the brouhaha was completely artificial and manufactured by Ann Romney.
The thing that tells me that the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney flap was disingenuously manufactured is this: When Hilary said that Ann had "never worked a day in her life," the three words that were implied, clearly implied, but not spoken explicitly by Rosen were "outside the home." This is what I understood her to mean when I saw her speak those words live on CNN last week.
When Hilary said this, she was on a panel with Paul Begala and Eric Erickson, along with host Anderson Cooper, and not one of them, not even Erickson, criticized Rosen for her words when she spoke them. Here is the transcript. The three of them obviously also understood that the implied words after "worked" were "outside the home." Otherwise, they would have said something to her, at the time.
There was no chiding of Rosen (herself a former stay-at-home mother) or, really, any "oh no you didn't" reaction to Rosen's words from any of the people on AC360 . There wasn't any negative reaction until Ann Romney saw an opportunity to feign righteous indignation and send her tweet on Twitter. Romney saw an opportunity to take Rosen's words far too literally, to ignore the implied three words and create a brouhaha; she saw an opportunity to play the victim, in her first-ever tweet, which she then parlayed into an interview opporrtunity on Fox News the next day. It is unfortunate and ridiculous.
And even Republican strategists have weighed in on this: for example, Republican Bay Buchanan.
And it is unfortunate that President Barack Obama and other Democrats have thrown Hilary under the bus for this bit of ridiculousness.