Religious Right radio host Sandy Rios told a caller today that conservatives perpetuating the lie that President Obama was born in Kenya was “not the same” as the real sexual assault allegations that women made against former Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore because it’s “not so far-fetched” to think Obama was not born in the U.S.
Today’s episode of “Sandy Rios in the Morning” was dedicated to evaluating what went wrong in the push to elect Moore. Ken Cuccinelli, who heads the Senate Conservatives Fund, joined Rios and they agreed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was to blame because groups affiliated with McConnell spent millions trying to defeat Moore in the Republican primary.
“I’m sure that people can’t even comprehend why Mitch McConnell would spend $30 million defeating Roy Moore and end up with a Democrat called Doug Jones,” Rios said.
Cuccinelli elaborated, saying that he thought the election was “an unmitigated disaster for both conservatives and Republicans” and that “Mitch McConnell really, really screwed this one into the ground pretty good and he drove this plane into the dirt and we’re all, unfortunately, going to pay for that over the course of the next year. Mitch McConnell needs to go. He’s a terrible leader. He makes terrible decisions.”
Rios was explaining to a caller later in the program that Christian conservatives do not campaign aggressively enough because “most of us get our values from Judeo-Christian ethics, so we don’t cheat and lie and try to make up stuff on people to destroy them, and that’s a weakness on our part. It makes us weak.”
The caller responded by pointing to “the whole birther thing with Obama,” noting that “a lot of people who would call themselves Christian conservatives would insist that he was born in Kenya … and that’s just a lie.”
“Look, so much of what we believe are lies and truth is because of what we hear,” Rios said before pausing for a few seconds to think. She went on to explain that she didn’t believe telling people that Obama was born in Kenya was comparable to the sexual assault allegations against Moore.
“I would say that an allegation like that is not the same as getting women to come out and say that a man did things to them, or tried, sexually when they were 14 and he was in his early 30s. That’s really damning. I would say if you are entertaining the notion that a president may not have been born here when he has the kind of history that he has—you know, Hawaii and Indonesia and all of that—that’s not so far-fetched and that doesn’t strike a person’s character,” Rios said.
She added, “I still think that maybe the truth about a lot of things regarding President Obama hasn’t come out yet.”
