Though the idea that Romney is unfit for the office he seeks is hardly novel around these parts, I have another log to throw on that fire, or, more accurately, water. Two things in last night's debate shouted out that Romney had no understanding whatever a fundamental physical fact that every American President must fully understand. This planet we share with all those other, sometimes unfriendly nations has a surface covered 71.11% by water. An American President must fully understand the relationship between the United States and those waters and between our adversaries and their waters. If you want to be the President, to exercise the heroic powers our Constitution confers on our President, geography is no longer a part of social studies to be endured and forgotten. It is a matter of life and death to real Americans.
Romney knows nothing more about the United States Navy than what he might have learned from TV or movies. He has no personal experience of military life, much less the special corner of it that is Navy life. Though he has no doubt dined on many a yacht, he has never manned a ship of the line or served in her support.
I am a U.S. Navy veteran who manned ships of the line during the Viet Nam War. But, I don't demand that my Presidential candidates must also be veterans. I proudly and happily supported Bill Clinton, knowing that he had schooled himself about America, her history, and her place in the World and had an intense interest in all of these things. I knew he would be alright.
But no matter how I leaned in my other feelings about a Presidential candidate (and I already detest Romney, anyway), I could never vote for anyone so deplorably ignorant of basic knowledge and understanding of the U.S. Navy and America's place on an ocean planet. I speak, of course, of the debate last night and Romney's idiotic comparison of the incomparable regarding numbers of vessels in the Navy's fleets in different historical eras, as well as Romney's absurd failure to understand Iran's relationship to the oceans of the World when he identified Syria as Iran's path to the sea.
Anybody with an iota of experience with our Navy is likely to know of the United States' commitment of Naval forces to the Persian Gulf. This has been so going all the way back to my years of service, when one of my ships narrowly missed being assigned to deploy to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.
Aside to Mitt Romney:
Hey, Mitt, how could you not remember where Iran is? It's the Persian Gulf, see? You know, that wet patch between Iran and your Saudi Emirate friends. Persian means Iranian, get it? You are one of those Bible people, right? See? It's right there, like in Daniel 10:13:
King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.
See? Persians. Doncha know where Persia is?
Mitt Romney is about my age. He lived through the Iranian Revolution just like I did. Ha Ha. Maybe not just like I did. I cared enough about my country, even as I struggled to start my law practice, to figure out where Iran stood in the World both from my Navy experience, but from watching the American Iranian Hostage tragedy play out on television and in the newspapers. Yeah. We read newspapers. Quaint.
Romney's remark last night about Syria serving as the Iranian path to the sea showed that Romney never learned the lessons from a time of shared (among the 99%, anyway) national emotional and political trauma during the US Embassy hostage crisis. Most folks, those who weren't totally and obsessively consumed with becoming obscenely wealthy, thought about Iran everyday back during that time. That remark by Romney and his stupid comparison of the modern Navy fleet to the fleet nearly a century ago, underscored that Romney understands far too little about Syria, about Iran and about the United States Navy, its composition, its missions, its history or its future. All Mitt Romney knows are a few talking point he gets from skimming the executive summaries of white papers prepared by retained consultants to the campaign.
These are disqualifying flaws in a Presidential candidate. The United States spans a continent and borders two of the World's greatest oceans. How America fits into the oceanic World is one of the principal things that every President must see to. It is the experiences of a lifetime, however obtained, that prepare someone for such responsibility. Romney skipped that part to make money. Romney knows a whole lot about very little and knows very little about everything else. He is dangerously unfit to be President.