After declaring in 2011 the U.S. is operating under a "peacetime economy," Willard Romney crafted an overseas trip that seemed intent on erasing our nation's wartime efforts by ignoring the people still fighting and dying in his Forgotten War.
Romney might have mitigated his stunning display of foreign policy ignorance by spending some time on the ground meeting troops serving overseas. He simply flew over our military stationed at any number of foreign outposts; stopping to meet none of them.
Imagine the difference in media outcomes had this wannabe Commander-in-Chief set aside time with service members rather than scandal-ridden bankers.
It's downright impossible to stick your foot in your over-privileged mouth when, rather than trying to impress the elites and your crazies back home, you're listening to down-to-earth troops. And you wouldn't have had to shake up your panderthon fundraising much to have made it happen.
Not very far from where Romney's dressage horse would prance about an Olympic arena, sits RAF Mildenhall, home of the 100th Air Refueling Wing, the USAF's lone air refueling wing serving the European theater. One need not use imagination to know what
that photo op looks like.
Sure, sure, we all know how poorly the London leg went and the campaign needed to beat a hasty retreat to escape a barrage of negative press. So Israel was to be as much about face-saving as more fundraising Mid-East policy statement.
Again, hard to insult yet another nation when one veers from Adelson's shadow and opts instead to meet some US troops. Perhaps some sailors making a port call at Haifa. Or if that's not an option, given your campaign staff's meticulous scheduling, a quick jet trip to meet the 100 or so American techs and guards with the US European Command, who serve at the Dimona Radar Facility, would be closer even to your beloved money guys. Imagine the GOP candidate shutting his gaffeliciousness long enough to meet the only American service members serving in Israel's isolated Negev Desert.
You see, attempting to burnish one's bona fides for the position of Commander-in-Chief without so much as meeting a single man or woman serving this country in the most isolated or dangerous or foreign outposts, far from extended family and friends, is the biggest "gaffe" of all. It is the sort of behavior that fails to bring great credit upon oneself, the U.S. Armed Forces or the United States of America.
Epic #FAIL.
Crossposted to a quiet corner of the Interwebz