Last month, a Colorado Republican Official Linda Sorenson, the chairwoman of the Delta County Republican Committee, posted a racist meme on her Facebook wall. The post a screenshot from the 1951 Ronald Reagan movie Bedtime For Bonzo which showed Reagan bottle-feeding a chimp. The text accompanying it said:
“I’ll be damned … Reagan used to babysit Obama!”
The vice-chairman Vic Ullrey said:
“This whole thing is a hoax. Someone got into the Facebook somehow. It was hacked and somebody got into it, definitely.”
Sorenson told a different story when asked by a reporter. She told Jason Salzman of BigMedia.org that is was a joke:
“I really don’t care if people are offended by it.”
A candidate for the Delta County Commission, Don Suppes, said:
“There’s no room for racism, intended or unintended, in society. It’s best for the party, best for the county, that she step down.”
A few days later, Sorenson said she will “take responsibility” for the meme. Now, she has resigned.
Colorado GOP Chairman, Steve House, said:
“If an individual who is not technically savvy uses the work [sic] ‘hack’ and they don’t know what that means, you create an impression that someone’s trying to disclaim responsibility. That’s not what happened. There was no hack. The issue was if you have public versus private settings on your Facebook page and you are not as young as my children, you can make mistakes. That’s part of what happened.”
Sorenson has now resigned. Here is the letter she sent:
BREAKING: #LindaSorenson: "Please forgive me for being insensitive & not thinking of others" @copolitics @cologop pic.twitter.com/Ry2r6hSQW6
— Ernest Lee Luning (@eluning) June 7, 2016
Here is the original, disgusting meme:
Suppes further said:
“That is one of the hardest parts of that job. You have to stay neutral no matter how strong your feelings are one way or another. You have to stay neutral.”
Or perhaps just don’t be racist. There’s a thought.
Here is a clip from the movie Bedtime for Bonzo:
