Mitt Romney Is About To Get an Earful


This week, Mitt Romney is scheduled to get his first official intelligence briefings from President Obama’s national security team. Romney will be getting such an earful that it just may make his head explode, mostly because it’s likely to run totally counter to all the neo-con fantasies he’s been hearing. Sadly, as the Washington Post put it: “when it comes to Republican foreign policy, the neocons are still the only game in town.”

Romney has been listening to many of the same neo-con foreign policies geniuses that brought you the bristling belligerence of the Bush years. And we all saw how successful that was. We got all the slam-dunk “truth” of WMDs in Iraq, the comforting assurances that Iraqis “will welcome us as liberators,” and we were reassured that the Iraq war would pay for itself. The neo-cons were only off by about $3 trillion on that one.

Thanks to the neo-cons, more than 4,000 of America’s finest young men and women have been killed fighting in that war of choice. Nearly 32,000 have been wounded, many of whom will now require and fully deserve life-time care and support. More than 118,000 Iraqi civilian deaths have been documented.

Now, with a decade of war coming to an end and the fragile economy still recovering, the neo-cons want to have even bigger, badder war. This time with Iran. The neo-cons clearly hope that Romney will be just the guy to give it to them.

It was probably the need to reassure and rally the neo-con faithful that led Romney to make his recent idiotic statements about developments in the Middle East. Romney proclaimed that:

“The administration was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our Embassy in Egypt, instead of condemning their actions.”

Romney’s “truthniness” problem here is twofold. First, the Embassy “statement” he referred to was issued hours before anyone breached any Embassy walls anywhere. So because of the constraints of the time-space continuum, it would not be possible to “sympathize” with something that had not yet happened. Second, the statement that the Embassy made about the film sounded almost exactly like what Romney later said about the film.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo released the following statement:

“The United States … condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”

Mitt Romney later said:

“The idea of using something that some people consider sacred and then parading that out in a negative way is simply inappropriate and wrong … under the First Amendment, people are allowed to do what they feel they want to do. They have the right to do that, but it’s not right to do things that are of the nature.”

That sounds a lot like what President Barack Obama said about the film:

“I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi … While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”

So—what exactly is Mitt Romney so mad about?