US presidential candidate would not have Muslims in his cabinet
Presidential canidate Mitt Romney has discounted appointing Muslims to his cabinet on more than just the one occasion reported in a CSM op-ed yesterday.
TPM Election Central has learned that at a private fundraising lunchleon in Los Vegas three months ago, Romney said a second time he would probably not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet – and on this occasion, he made other comments that one witness described as "racist."
The witness, Irma Aguirre, a former finance director of the Nevada Republican Party, paraphrased Romney as saying: "They're radical. There's no talking to them. There's no negotiating with them." A second witness, a self-described local registered Republican named George Harris, confirmed her account.
The new accounts provided by the witnesses lend credence to the now-notorious account of a more recent private Romney event that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday that already caused an uproar. In that account, a Muslim businessman, Mansour Ijaz, claimed that Romney had said that based on the "numbers of American Muslims" in the country, "I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified" for a Muslim.
Martin Sullivan