Paul Ryan Is an Ayn-Rand Loving "Satanist" and Romney Is in a "Cult?" The GOP's Religion Woes

AlterNet / By Bruce Wilson

Paul Ryan Is an Ayn-Rand Loving "Satanist" and Romney Is in a "Cult?" The GOP's Religion Woes

There are major conflicts roiling the depths of American religious conservatism, and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are caught in the middle.

October 18, 2012  |  

 

Congressman Paul Ryan attends a rally October 8, in Rochester, Michigan. As Ryan got pumped up Thursday about the vice presidential debate, observers were distracted by his pumped-up biceps in photographs of the Republican running mate published hours bef

 

Back in 2011 a series of attacks from leading conservative evangelicals darkly warned that Ayn Rand devotees, Paul Ryan included, might be worshiping at the altar of crypto-satanism. Now, within the last 24 hours, a flurry of mainstream media articles cover a controversy erupting after evangelism superstar Billy Graham prayed with (and in effect endorsed) candidate Mitt Romney and observers noticed that an article on the website of Graham's flagship Billy Graham Evangelistic Association identified Mormonism as a "cult".

Yes, really: This year, the Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower is championed by one candidate conservative evangelical Christians suspect of worshiping odd, fecund Gods who live, love, and multiply on strangely-named foreign planets, and by another candidate enthralled by an economic philosophy that helped birth Anton LaVey's Church of Satan.

This train wreck wasn't supposed to happen.

A few months ago, despite ongoing, savage swipes from prominent fundamentalist pastors who called Mormonism a "cult", the Republican Party sloughed off evangelical right challengers in the 2012 presidential primaries, along with its "anyone but Mitt" syndrome, to pick a Mormon as the GOP standard bearer in the 2012 presidential election.

Then, Mitt Romney doubled down on the "cult" issue by picking, as his vice presidential running mate, a Congressman who as recently as 2010 (in official campaign ads no less) had praised a libertarian philosopher accused, in mid 2011 by a leading hard-right Catholic journal, of promoting a thinly-veiled form of satanism.

For a party that not too long ago under George W. Bush had managed to artfully wrap its bloodier instincts in the evangelical cloak of many colors that was "compassionate conservatism", Paul Ryan's radical budget - that provoked ire from across the Catholic political spectrum - and Mitt Romney's apparentdisgust at the mooching "47% percent" of America - threatened to open up a rift between religious conservatives who see some sort of proper role for government in mitigating the worst effects of laissez faire capitalism, and secular conservatives who envision anarcho-capitalism as the road to a glorious, Ayn Rand-inspired utopia in which the "producers" would finally relegate the mooching masses to their proper, subordinate status in great chain of being.

It didn't help that Paul Ryan's plan for privatizing Social Security was, at base, a rehash of the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian Piñera Plan cooked up under the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet - whose military regime helped refine torture methods later employed in Iraq at Abu Ghraib and has become known for "disappearing" thousands of its citizens, often by pushing them out of helicopters into the sea.

This is the dilemma - will modern American conservatism continue to pay at least lip service to traditional Christian social justice teaching, or will it breakwith that moral touchstone and remake itself as a party which cleaves to a Hobbesian social contract that reduces American society to an atomized struggle of all against all, nasty, brutish, and short?

Leading up to the 2012 electoral cycle, the eminence grises of the evangelical right tried to ward off the looming amoral libertarian menace of Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ron Paul Ron Johnson, and the growing Randian horde in Congress and the Senate:

In early 2011, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who was well-placed to known which way the wind was blowing, launched, from his perch as an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, a withering preemptive attack against rising Ayn Rand worship within the GOP:

Rand's novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible.

More firepower was, it seems, needed and soon the late Chuck Colson, beloved by evangelicals since his noisy Born Again conversion (and book) weighed in, in a scathing review of the 2011 movie adaption of Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged".

Colson lambasted followers of Ayn Rand as "cranks and crypto-cultists" and noted, too, that some "powerful committee members on Capital Hill indoctrinate their staffers with her tracts" - in a not-too-subtle reference to Congressman Paul Ryan's repeated declarations that Atlas Shrugged was required reading in his office.

But even that wasn't enough, apparently, so a searing June 2011 article, The Fountainhead of Satanism , published in the hard-right neoconservative Catholic journal First Things, posed the question - what if prominent U.S. congress members had been requiring their staffers to read Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey's book The Satanic Bible and were giving out the book as a Christmas gift? Wrote author Joe Carter,

"to be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn't seem to understand what she was saying.

Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism.

[...]

Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand's diabolic sway. But we are sustaining a climate in which not a few gullible souls believe she is worth taking seriously. Are we willing to be held responsible for pushing them to adopt an anti-Christian worldview? If so, perhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible. If they're going to align with a satanic cult, they might as well join the one that has the better holidays."

In the comment section attached to his article, Carter openly acknowledged that his article referred directly to Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan.

A little later, in July 2011, compassionate conservatism's uber-guru Marvin Olasky tried to pin the ruckus on liberals, claiming in an article at his World magazine that,

"For nearly a decade Democrats have sought a religious wedge issue that could separate big chunks of white evangelical voters from their Republican home. Now they've found it, and are thrusting at the Social Darwinist/Ayn Rand underbelly of American conservatism."

But Olasky couldn't conceal his revulsion at Rand's inversion of the traditional Christian moral ethos, and called conservatives, including Paul Ryan by name, to account:  

"I read Atlas Shrugged recently and respected its support for innovators who pour themselves into their businesses and its disdain for bureaucrats who think entrepreneurialism is easy and automatic. I also was amazed at the viciousness of Rand's view of Christianity, leading up to its conclusion, where the book's hero traces in the air the Sign of the Dollar, a replacement for the Sign of the Cross.

[...]

...this, sadly, is the book that a budget expert I admire, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., recommends-apparently without caveat-and tells his staffers to read. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is also a Rand fan...

...Ryan and others, if they want support from Christians, cannot merely react to the left's criticism with a shrug: They should show what in Rand they agree with and what they spurn. The GOP's big tent should include both libertarians and Christians, but not anti-Christians."

But that's precisely what Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan did; like Rand's Atlas, he shrugged.

When controversy surfaced over his past praise for Ayn Rand's ideas (which in 2005 Ryan credited as inspiring his decision to go into politics) Paul Ryan spoke out, denouncing Rand's atheism but little else.

Now charges of cultism are swirling around Mitt Romney and, unlike the attacks against Paul Ryan and the Randians back in 2011, they may be less than fair:

In classic sociological and anthropological definitions, cults tend to revolve around one or several charismatic figures, and are organized in concentric rings, with an inner circle of acolytes around those charismatic figures and outer rings of followers with successively less devotion, access, and perceived authority.

In that view, most religions (Christianity included) begin as cults, and the ones that successfully evolve into religions (such as Christianity and Mormonism) eventually develop fixed doctrine, established ecclesiastical hierarchy, and so on.

If anything, the conservative evangelical Christian animus against the Mormon Church has much to do with the fact that Mormonism has long been one of thefastest growing religions in the U.S. and the world.

So it's less than surprising that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association would try to tar Mormonism, a business competitor, as a "cult" - a term that since the 1970s has in American culture, especially in evangelical culture, picked up dark connotations; for many evangelicals, even cults which do not feature overt Satan worship are halfway there nonetheless.

When casual visitors to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website punch the word "Mormon" into the website's search engine, what search results will they get? - The first hit is a BGEA page on which Billy Graham himself explains that,

"A cult is a group that claims that it, and it alone, has the truth about God and offers the only way to salvation. Members reject what Christians have believed for almost 2,000 years, and substitute instead their own beliefs for the clear teachings of the Bible.

Often, they add to the Bible by claiming that the books their founder wrote or "discovered" are from God, and have equal authority to the Bible. In reality, however, those books deny what the Bible says about God or Jesus, or about the way of salvation."

It's no secret that Momonism's founder Joseph Smith did indeed discover new scripture.

The less than obvious but fully absurd aspect of this is that, while Graham's definition could be seen as applying to Mormonism, it also pegs a fast-rising tendency within conservative evangelical Christianity itself, the New Apostolic Reformation - a tendency whose apostles and prophets dominated The Response, the August 2011 religious rally that kick-started Texas Governor Rick Perry's failed bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

in August 2011, NPR's Fresh Air dedicated an entire hour long segment to the New Apostolic Reformation - who were the religious leaders up onstage at Perry's event? Few seemed to know.

Then, in early October, Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed NAR guru C. Peter Wagner himself - the low-key, elderly academic who has played a key role in shaping and organizing the emerging NAR.

If the New Apostolic Reformation had been competing* with Mormonism for sheer doctrinal color, Wagner hardly could have done better - during the interview Wagner told Gross that the early 2011 tsunami which ravaged Northern Japane, and the Japanese economic downturn of the 1990s, both may have been caused by what Wagner described as a sexual tryst between the Japanese emperor and a "sky goddess" who, according to Wagner, may have been a succubus.  

Of course, Republican politicians vying for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination who had noteworthy ties to the New Apostolic Reformation didn't prevail - and so the Japanese emperor and the succubus did not become a presidential campaign issue.  

Rather, Republican success or failure in the 2012 presidential election may hinge on internecine doctrinal disputes within conservative evangelicalism, disputes that will help determine evangelical voter turnout -- Is Mitt Romney a cultist? Is Paul Ryan a crypto-satanist? And more importantly, for evangelicals who agree with one or both propositions, does politics trump theology or does theology trump politics?

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Reports from my sources suggest that, efforts from party fixers and evangelical kingmakers notwithstanding, the latter may prevail.

As usual, mainstream media won't likely acknowledge the intensity of these conflicts roiling the depths of American religious conservatism. But if I'm wrong, you heard it here first.

*There are many similarities between the Mormon Church and the New Apostolic Reformation - for example both have apostles and prophets, who talk to God on an ongoing basis and thus can, in effect, write new scripture (Wagner is quite direct about this).

5 Disturbing Stories About Mitt Romney That Expose His Private Worldview

Election 2012  

AlterNet / By Lauren Kelley

5 Disturbing Stories About Mitt Romney That Expose His Private Worldview

A close look at Romney's past reveals many warning signs -- some even worse than driving with his dog on the roof.

October 15, 2012  |  

 

US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney waits to speak during a town hall meeting at Ariel Corporation in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Romney on Wednesday warned that China was "gaining fast" on the United States and could become the world's top economy,

 

Mitt Romney’s infamous dog-on-the-roof-of-the-car story is atrocious, and has been mocked within an inch of its life. But there are many other stories from the Republican presidential candidate’s personal life that illuminate what kind of a human being he really is. Here’s a look at a few of them.

1. Mormon women have reported "horror stories" about Romney from when he served as a Mormon bishop. 

According to investigative reporter Geoffrey Dunn, several Mormon women have reported disturbing stories about how Romney treated them while he was an LDS bishop and “stake president.” (One Mormon woman who’s known Romney since the '70s called them “horror stories.”) In one story, a woman who was facing a life-threatening medical condition was advised by her doctor to terminate her eight-week pregnancy. Despite receiving the blessing of her local stake president, Romney, then a bishop, reportedly came to her hospital room uninvited to pressure her not to go through with the abortion. "At a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends," Sheldon has written, "I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection."

In another incident, Romney reportedly pressured a woman to put her son up for adoption because, according to the woman, her son “didn't have a Mormon father in the home and because of the circumstances of his birth--being born to a single mother.” She said she felt attacked and intimidated by Romney.
Other details from the report reveal that Romney “never seemed to be particularly comfortable in the company of unmarried Mormon mothers.”

These stories, and others from Dunn’s reporting (not to mention Romney’s wavering, but always troublesome, abortion stance), illustrate a man who is ill-suited to govern the female half of the U.S. population.

2. He reportedly pushed Bain employees to lie to get information.

In a recent story in Vanity Fair, Nicholas Shaxson interviewed one of Romney’s former Bain employees, who said he remembers his old boss being “nice,” “fair” and encouraging,” but also someone who had no problem bending the truth.

Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a proj­ect at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such proj­ects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.

“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.

This probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given the whoppers Romney has been telling on the campaign trail, including in the first debate.

3. He paid for his son and daughter-in-law’s surrogacy agreement, which included an abortion clause.

Speaking of Romney’s hard-to-pin-down stance on abortion, a recent story about his son Tagg, who had twins through a surrogate earlier this year, reveals that Romney seems to fall into the “abortion for me, but not for thee” viewpoint so common among conservatives. As AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer recently noted:

TMZ released a blog post this weekend explaining that in the surrogacy agreement signed by Mitt Romney's son, Tagg, there were clauses that allowed both the parents and the surrogate to opt for an abortion in non-life-threatening (but serious) situations.

There’s evidence that the clause may have been included by mistake, but:

Still, the fact they did allow the clause in -- and indeed, that it's a standard part of surrogacy agreements -- is telling, because it's totally reasonable to have those kinds of clauses in a surrogacy agreement. Surrogates shouldn't be compelled to complete pregnancies that threaten their health. That's common sense, right? Not in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's dream world.

As Kathleen Geier so perfectly put it, “I don’t doubt that, like the vast majority of elites, Romney would support abortion rights for his own family members for any reason, because rich white Christians by definition are not those slutty, trashy people running around having the ‘wrong’ kind of abortions, just for the hell of it.”
Americans, this is your Republican nominee for president of the United States.

4. He’s annoying his neighbors by quadrupling the size of his beach house.

So, about that $12 million beach house: the Romneys plan to make it four times its original size. Unsurprisingly, the neighbors are not thrilled – not only because of the “impact on the neighborhood,” but because of their political leanings.

The New York Times' Michael Barbaro talked to several of Romney’s neighbors in June and found that many of them are Obama supporters and at least a few are gay couples, like Randy Clark and Tom Maddox.

The men, who married in San Francisco four years ago, were asked by Mr. Romney’s architect to sign a document that stated they have no objections to his planned renovations, which would obscure a portion of their ocean view. They refused.

Mr. Clark, an accountant, is trying to organize a campaign fund-raiser at his home for President Obama and hopes to bump into Mr. Romney on the street, so he can explain, “in a neighborly way,” why he thinks his relationship with Mr. Maddox deserves the same rights and status as the marriage between Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann.

Good luck getting neighborly with the Clark-Maddox household, Mitt.

5. He publicly berated a man for drinking and smoking weed.

As Barbaro reported in June, the Romneys “have tried to weave themselves into the fabric of local life” in La Jolla, Calif. But the way they’re going about that social weaving is a little odd. For instance:

Mr. Romney and his wife take regular walks around La Jolla, exchanging pleasantries with fellow strollers and occasionally enforcing the law. A young man in town recalled that Mr. Romney confronted him as he smoked marijuana and drank on the beach last summer, demanding that he stop.

I can think of a lot of ways to ingratiate yourself with the neighbors; ordering them to stop drinking and smoking is not one of them.

Lauren Kelley is the activism and gender editor at AlterNet and a freelance journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Salon, Time Out New York, the L Magazine, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter.

Election 2012  

Salon / By Jonathan Bernstein

Romney and Ryan Have Resorted to Lying as a Form of Debating

Romney's criticisms of Obama -- on full display during the debates -- don't even make sense.

October 12, 2012  |  

 

The hallmark of Republican thinking these days, especially as expressed in Romney/Ryan rhetoric, is just the sheer laziness of it. That’s presumably a consequence of having developed an amazingly efficient partisan press. There’s just very little incentive remaining to develop actual policies or even a real critique of Barack Obama’s administration. After all, if the president is a Kenyan socialist intent on destroying the United States, it’s hardly necessary to explain exactly where his policies are going wrong or why.

That often shows up in the way that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan dissemble. Every presidential campaign lies, but what distinguishes this crowd is a lazy mendacity in which there’s not even an attempt to make their falsehoods plausible (here’s another recent, excellent example).

But it also shows up in their basic rhetoric. Why put together a critique of Barack Obama’s foreign policy when they can just refer to unspecified disasters and know that anyone watching Fox News will nod in agreement? And thus we get Paul Ryan’s astonishingly substance-free line that “What we are witnessing, as we turn on our television screens these days, is the absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy.”

Ryan trotted out “unraveling” three times in the vice-presidential debate.
The first one was at the end of a scattershot answer that was mostly about Libya:

And with respect to Afghanistan and the 2014 deadline, we agree with a 2014 transition. But what we also want to do is make sure that we’re not projecting weakness abroad, and that’s what’s happening here. This Benghazi issue would be a tragedy in and of itself. But unfortunately it’s indicative of a broader problem, and that is what we are watching on our TV screens is the unraveling of the Obama foreign policy, which is making the world more — more chaotic and us less safe.

Apparently something is happening “on our TV screens” that’s self-evident to Ryan. Now, I have no doubt that on certain TV screens – the ones permanently set to Fox News – all sorts of terrible things are happening as a direct result of Obama’s incompetence. Or, perhaps, Obama’s deliberate preference for those horrible outcomes. But it would be nice for Ryan to give us some sort of clue about it. His critique is that the U.S. is “projecting weakness abroad” (how?), and that’s resulting in … something. What? No idea.
So that’s one try. Next:

Look, this was the anniversary of 9/11. It was Libya, a country we knew we had al-Qaeda cells there. As we know, al-Qaeda and its affiliates are on the rise in northern Africa. And we did not give our ambassador in Benghazi a Marine detachment? Of course there is an investigation so we can make sure that this never happens again. But when it comes to speaking up for our values, we should not apologize for those.

Here is the problem. Look at all the various issues out there and that’s unraveling before our eyes. The vice president talks about sanctions on Iran.

At which point he was asked a question about Iran and answered it.

“Unraveling”? There’s surely plenty of room for criticizing Barack Obama’s Iran policy, either that it’s too hawkish or not hawkish enough, but it’s really hard to understand an argument that Iran policy is “unraveling before our eyes.”
Unwise? Perhaps. Short-sighted? Maybe. Unraveling before our eyes? How? The only obvious news out of Iran is the collapse of their currency, which, for better or worse, is awfully hard to cast as an unraveling of a tough sanctions policy. Indeed, it seems suspiciously like the consequences of a successful tough sanctions policy! Again, one can criticize the policy, but how is it unraveling before our eyes?

Otherwise, all we get here is a vague reference to “the various issues out there,” as if we all knew what they were. Presumably because they’re on our TV screens. And therefore not worth mentioning.

That’s two strikes. The third? It’s in response to a question about staying in Afghanistan beyond 2014:

We want to make sure that 2014 is successful. That’s why we want to make sure that we give our commanders what they say they need to make it successful. We don’t want to extend beyond 2014. That’s the point we’re making.

You know, if it was just this, I feel like we would — we would be able to call this a success, but it’s not. What we are witnessing as we turn on our television screens these days, is the absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy. Problems are growing at home, but jobs — problems are growing abroad, but jobs aren’t growing here at home.

So Afghanistan would be a success, but it’s not for some unspecified reason, which goes back to that “absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy” that we can see “on our television screens.” The best example of which appears to be something about jobs.
Strike three.

It’s easy to spin this as an example of Paul Ryan’s inexperience with foreign policy and national security issues, but I think that’s wrong. The truth is that he’s merely reciting a standard Republican talking point here. And why not? On the Rush Limbaugh program or any of the other Republican-aligned talk shows, it’s obviously true that Obama’s foreign policy is a total failure. That’s good enough for the hosts, and it appears to be good enough for the audiences. So why bother developing anything more?

A minor problem with all of this is that it leaves Republicans ill-equipped to convince anyone of anything unless they’re already within the conservative closed-information feedback loop. Minor, because most voting decisions are more about retrospective evaluations of incumbents than about careful examination of the logic in campaign statements, to the sheer laziness of the critique probably doesn’t matter very much at that point. The major problem, however, is that all of this lazy thinking leaves Republicans ill-equipped to govern – as seen in the problems encountered by the Gingrich Congress, the George W. Bush administration and now the Boehner/Ryan House. And that matters a lot.

Myth Romney, Liar to the World

Mitt Romney Lies to the World

October 9, 2012

 

Exclusive: Mitt Romney gave a rousing speech about how his foreign policy would be much more muscular than President Obama’s. But Romney displayed again his proclivity to lie on specifics and distort the broader reality, too, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

While it’s true that all politicians play games with the facts, it is actually rare for a politician to be an inveterate liar. But Mitt Romney is one of that rare breed on matters both big and small. And with some polls showing his surge toward victory on Nov. 6, his dishonesty may soon become an issue for the entire world.
Romney’s foreign policy speech on Monday was another example of his tendency to lie on minor stuff as well as weighty issues. For instance, he claimed that President Barack Obama “has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years” though Obama secured passage of agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama and signed them in October 2011.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. (Photo credit: mittromney.com)

Romney apologists suggest that the Republican presidential nominee was hanging his truthiness on the word “new” since negotiations on the agreements began late in George W. Bush’s presidency. But the work was completed by Obama and he pushed the deals through Congress despite resistance from some of his own supporters in labor unions.

So, by any normal use of the English language, Obama had signed new trade agreements, but Romney simply stated the opposite.

Romney also accused Obama of staying “silent” in the face of street protests in Iran over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. But Obama wasn’t “silent.” He did speak out, with his comments becoming increasingly harsh as more images of violence emerged.

“The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the last few days,” the President said on June 23, 2009. He added that he strongly condemned “these unjust actions.”

If Romney wished to criticize Obama for not condemning Iran in even stronger terms or for not using his harshest language immediately that might be one thing, but to say, the President was “silent” is just a lie.

More broadly, Romney’s depiction of U.S. foreign policy as weak and feckless under Obama is almost the inverse from the truth. For instance, Obama helped organize an international military force to wage war in Libya, enabling rebels to overthrow longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi, but Romney acts as if that never happened.

Instead, Romney lays every foreign policy problem at Obama’s door and credits others with every accomplishment, including the killings of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

On that topic, Romney said: “America can take pride in the blows that our military and intelligence professionals have inflicted on Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, including the killing of Osama bin Laden.” But Romney gives no credit to Obama for ordering these strikes and taking criticism from many on the Left for his aggressive use of drone attacks.

The Palestine Flip-Flop

Another jaw-dropping example of Romney’s dishonesty was his sudden embrace of negotiations leading to a Palestinian state after he was recorded in his infamous “47 percent speech” last May as deeming such talks hopeless.
“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way,” Romney told a group of wealthy donors. “The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”
As for what the U.S. policy would be in a Romney administration, he said, “we kick the ball down the field.”

However, on Monday, Romney declared: “I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel.”
And again, all the blame for the impasse is placed on Obama: “On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew.”

And then, there’s the traditional hypocrisy that you get from both parties but most notably from the Republicans, preaching the value of liberty and democracy but advocating ever closer ties with the oppressive monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Romney declared about Obama’s approach to the Arab Spring that “the greater tragedy of it all is that we are missing an historic opportunity to win new friends who share our values in the Middle East — friends who are fighting for their own futures against the very same violent extremists, and evil tyrants, and angry mobs who seek to harm us.”

However, Romney then added, “I will deepen our critical cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.”

Neocon Revival

Besides the lies and misrepresentations in the speech, there were some genuine policy differences expressed by the Republican presidential nominee. For instance, he vowed to expand the U.S. military and to deploy it more aggressively around the globe.

Romney also repeated his pledge to yoke U.S. foreign policy to Israel’s desires. “The world must never see any daylight between our two nations,” he said.
And Romney renewed his belligerence against Russia, which he had previously deemed “without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” In his speech on Monday, Romney said, “I will implement effective missile defenses to protect against threats. And on this, there will be no flexibility with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

Despite the Depression-level economic crisis gripping Europe, Romney also announced that he “will call on our NATO allies to keep the greatest military alliance in history strong by honoring their commitment to each devote 2 percent of their GDP to security spending. Today, only 3 of the 28 NATO nations meet this benchmark.”

One might regard Romney’s neoconservative revival as delusional in a variety of ways – further driving the United States toward bankruptcy even as U.S. interventionism in the Muslim world would surely make matters worse – but it is Romney’s reliance on systematic lying that perhaps should be more troubling to American voters.

Romney has long been known as a serial flip-flopper who changes positions to fit the political season, but his pervasive mendacity has been a concern since the Republican primaries when his GOP rivals complained about him misrepresenting their positions and reinventing his own. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Mitt Romney: Professional Liar.”]

That pattern has continued into the general election campaign, with Romney telling extraordinary whoppers on the campaign trail and even during last Wednesday’s presidential debate, such as when he claimed his health-care plan covered people with pre-existing conditions when it doesn’t. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Mitt Romney as Eddie Haskell.”]

Strategic Lying

One reason that I criticized Romney’s debate performance – though many other Americans, including many Democrats, disagreed with my assessment – was that I felt his lying and his squirrely behavior were more important than Obama’s sluggishness. Telling lies while waving your arms shouldn’t trump telling the truth in a moderate tone.
Indeed, as a journalist, I simply cannot abide politicians who lie systematically, who don’t just trim the truth once in a while but make falsehoods a strategic part of their politics and policies.

When I arrived in Washington in 1977 as a reporter for the Associated Press, the nation had just emerged from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. To reassure the country that the government could be honest, President Jimmy Carter promised never to lie to the American people.

But then came the Reagan administration with its concept of “perception management,” i.e., the manipulation of the public’s fears and prejudices for the purpose of lining up the people behind new foreign adventures. A chief “public diplomacy” goal of the administration was to cure the American people of “the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Thus, minor threats, like peasant uprisings in Central America, were portrayed as part of a grand Soviet strategy to invade the United States through Texas. The strength of the Soviet Union was itself exaggerated to justify a massive U.S. military build-up. Today’s neocons cut their teeth of such distortions and lies.
Post 9/11, with George W. Bush in the White House, this neocon strategy of fear-mongering led the United States into the debacle of the Iraq War (in pursuit of imaginary weapons of mass destruction).

Now, less than a year after U.S. military forces left Iraq — and with a withdrawal from Afghanistan finally underway — the latest polls suggest that the American voters are shifting toward the election of another neocon President who promises more soaring rhetoric about U.S. “exceptionalism” and more interventionism abroad.

It’s almost as if many Americans like being lied to.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra storie
s in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.