(Caricature of Mitt, courtesy of DonkeyHotey, via Flikr)
This morning started out with a steaming tightly coiled pile of Op-Ed from GOP Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney in the Washington Post. It is titled “How I would check Iran’s nuclear ambition”. If there were any actual details in it, there might have been some value in reading it. Instead it is 10 minutes of my life I will never get back.
Mitt is as bad on foreign policy as he is on economic policy (which makes one wonder why this Vulture Capital Ken doll thinks he is qualified to be president). He starts out by bashing President Carter for not getting the diplomatic hostages back but praising President Reagan for doing so.
Romney shows off his ignorance of history in this comparison, since insists that it was Reagan’s “seriousness in turning words into action” that made Iranians cough up our hostages and not the illegal arms sales to that regime.
But that doesn’t matter to the struggling GOP front-runner, he wants to make a comparison between Presidents Carter and Obama and nothing, not even historical facts is going to deter him. He probably thinks the audience he is targeting is not going to know the history either.
He makes all the usually conflations, including 9/11 about the dangers of a nuclear armed Iran. He frets about the rhetoric of annihilation that Iranian leaders, including the current one have used about Israel, but, like nearly everyone else fails to understand the basic concept of nuclear deterrence.
For those who’ve also forgotten, it is simply that the use of a nuclear weapon by any country preemptively is grounds for everyone to (in the words of a Simpsons episode) make that nation NWB, Nuclear Whipping Boy. To really feel that we have to attack Iran for the threat of developing a nuclear weapon is to say that we feel they are not afraid of using it, even though it would mean that the US and its allies would turn the nation into a glass floored self-lighting parking lot.
Again, Romney doesn’t care about any of that; he wants to show off his testosterone while AIPAC is going on. His big idea is that we should crank up our naval ship building by 6 more ships a year and go back to stationing carriers in both the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean at the same time.
Beyond that it is vague platitudes about peace through strength and dire warnings about how we can’t afford four more years of President Obama’s foreign policy. Your basic fact free pile of political horse-shit.
Still there are some smiles to be had in this chuck of offal. The first is the way that Mittens resorts to the blogger trick of putting hyperlinks to his own work in the post. It is so cute that he feels like he can’t say what he wants in this short piece so he has to reference other (equally bad) Op-Ed’s he’s written in the Washington Post.
But really the best part of the whole thing is the comments! The Wa-Po Op-Ed section is the home of some serious conservative and confused writers. They have a big, big following and so you might think that there would be a soft landing space for Mitt there.
You’d be really wrong about that. While there are some supporters of his Democratic President bashing, here are the top three comments, so far, on this post:
Candidate Romney is plainly either abysmally ignorant or deliberately lying when he says that Iran is rushing to get a nuclear bomb. Both our Government's 2007 NIE on Iran (under President Bush) and our Government's 2011 NIE on Iran (under President Obama) contained consensus findings by all 16 US intelligence agencies that: (1) Iran ceased attempting to build a nuclear bomb in the Fall of 2003; and (2) Iran has not since then made a decision whether or when (if ever) to resume efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Both of these intelligence findings have been reaffirmed within the past month by our Government's top defense and intelligence officials. Either Mr. Romney is an ignoramus or he is a liar. Neither is a qualification for President of the United States of America.
Nothing like a few facts to blow wholes in your reasoning, eh?
Then there is this one:
Bombast, non-specific, ignorant, uninformed about current intelligence assessments, nothing the White House isn't already pursuing, no plan for paying for paying for the doubling aircraft carriers, no evidence that more aircraft carriers would make Iran back down....and pablum about "improved coordination with all of our allies."
It is really bad news when someone can boil your post down to a paragraph and then dismiss it in a sentence.
Finally:
Stuff like this is why I dislike Romney. So many falsehoods and half truths and just plain silliness. Next please.
The fact that the likely Republican Nominee is getting his ass handed to him on policy grounds by the denizens of a major newspapers comments section really highlights what is wrong for the GOP this cycle.
They have gone so far in terms of diminishing the role of expertise that they are on the verge of nominating someone who basically has none in any area that would really be benefit to the nation. I’ll even give Romney some credit as a person with decent business executive skills, the way he turned around the Salt Lake Olympics was really very good.
However we know that so-called “MBA Presidents” are not really very good for our nation. The amount of “do it because I say so” that is allowable chief of a business is in no way close to the way things should work in our government. The skills don’t transfer well and even if a president is able to do it, there is significant harm to the nation and our notions of governance when it is done.
Mitt has shown that his instincts on domestic policy are horrible and he keeps showing that his ideas on foreign policy are the uninformed mouthing’s of someone desperate to be the nominee of a party that wants to pick the dumbest candidate they can.
If Romney wants to be president, he would probably do best to stop penning this kind half-witted, half-informed, half-truth. But luckily for us, he probably won’t.
The floor is yours.