Mitt Romney is again trying to crassly exploit the tragic deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in the attack on the Libyan Consulate by accusing President Obama of trying to minimize their deaths as "bumbs on the road." In Romney Returns To Risky Territory With Mideast Criticism, TPM reports:
“[Obama’s] indication that developments in the Middle East represent ‘bumps in the road’ is a very different view than I have,” Romney told ABC News. “The president — I can’t imagine saying something like the assassination of ambassadors is a bump in the road, when you look at the entire context: the assassination, the Muslim Brotherhood president being elected in Egypt, 20,000 people killed in Syria, Iran close to becoming a nuclear nation. These are far from being bumps in the road.”
Romney repeated the same argument in an interview with NBC this morning, and the usual suspects are spreading this meme on CNN, and others news shows, today.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responded, “[T]here is a certain rather desperate attempt to grasp at words and phrases here to find political advantage, and in this case that’s profoundly offensive.”
Speaking for the Obama campaign, Lis Smith said:
“Today, we saw what Mitt Romney meant when he told a closed door group of high-dollar donors that he would ‘take advantage of the opportunity’ to politicize an international crisis to help his campaign,” ... “He’s purposely misinterpreting the President’s words and making reckless statements about the death of four Americans in Libya, apparently for the sole purpose of his own political gain. Using this incident to launch political attacks should be beneath someone seeking to be our nation’s Commander-in-Chief.”
You can see the extent to which Mitt Romney took the President's remarks out of context from the transcript of the President's interview with 60 minutes when he was responding to a question about the supportive stance the United States government took towards new Arab governments formed as a result of the Arab Spring protests.
“I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights, a notion that people have — have to be able to participate in their own governance,” Obama said in the interview. “But I — I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty — pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because, you know, in a lot of these places, the one organizing principle has been Islam.”
As you can see, our President was talking about the inevitable bumps in the road that occur when a nation tries to establish a new democratic government in a region previously governed only by religious theocracy.
But, Mitt Romney is so desperate he is willing to grasp at any isolated words, or phrase, take them out of contexts, and opportunistically recast them to mean anything he can think of. Romney is willing say or do anything to win this election, no matter how low he has to go - Romney Limbo.
Yes, the White House said it best, Mitt Romney's craven opportunism is "proudly offensive," and should be "beneath the dignity" of someone seeking to be Commander-in-Chief of our country.
Fasten your seatbelt as the next 6 weeks are likely to become even more ugly than we've already seen, as Mitt Romney slips further in the polls and becomes more desperate.