Why a Romney Presidency May Be Worse Than You Think

Election 2012  

Salon.com / By Alex Pareene

Why a Romney Presidency May Be Worse Than You Think

War with Iran. An ultra-conservative Supreme Court. Death to Social Security. Romney could be an epic disaster.

November 4, 2012  |  

A few moderates and liberals have lately taken to arguing that, you know, maybe a Romney presidency wouldn’t be too bad. He might turn out to be more moderate, or at least pragmatic, than he’s acted in the campaign so far. He might make a point of reaching out to Democrats in Congress. Republicans might regain their trust of Keynesian economics and actually do things to boost the economy out of naked political self-interest, instead of sabotaging the economy out of same.

I am not really convinced! Mitt Romney will be working with a Congress full of Republicans and his Cabinet and administration will be full of Republican political appointees, and that adds up to disaster, especially with the current, insane Republican Party.

As it’s the spooookiest time of the year, it seems appropriate to ask: What’s the Romney presidency worst-case scenario? If Mitt Romney turns out to be exactly the severe conservative he says he is, what can we expect?

War

Obviously we’re bombing Iran. They might be spinning some uranium around in a mountain, and we can’t let that continue. As Wired recently reported, bombing Iran isn’t actually as easy as it sounds. If we want to do it right, it’ll take a massive strike against Iran’s ability to launch a counterattack on Israel or Kuwait, followed by the much more massive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

And of course war with Iran leads to a worldwide oil shock, probably.

But why stop with a preemptive airstrike? The actual worst-case scenario, in terms of loss of life and possibly world-destroying consequences, would be a nuclear strike on Iran. I’d hope that would be off the table even in the event of “Defense Secretary John Bolton.” But you never know, regime change might become popular again. A ground force in Iran might suddenly become urgently necessary! The idiot Bush-era foreign policy experts might suddenly decide that it wouldn’t be that hard to invade and occupy. The Iranian people would probably greet us as liberators! That same weird bloodthirsty hysteria that gripped the political elite in 2002-2003 might return, especially if Iran successfully sinks an American ship or blows up a plane or a helicopter during our totally righteous strike on their nuclear facilities — or, god forbid, if there’s a terrorist attack in the U.S. that can be credibly blamed on Hezbollah. Under the standard proposed for an invasion by Gen. Shinseki prior to the Iraq war, we’d need a good 1.4 million troops to properly invade Iran. Of course, Romney’s Pentagon and White House will be stocked with exactly the sort of people who ignored Gen. Shinseki prior to Iraq, so it’d probably only be a couple hundred thousand. But basically mass, widespread death and terror would result, just like Iraq only much, much more so.

Remember: John Bolton isn’t just being kept around for show. Romney actually listens to the guy. Romney’s selection of moderate Robert Zoellick for his transition team led to so much howling from the hawks that his mouthpiece is basically promising Zoellick won’t have an important role in a Romney administration. But we can expect a big job for Dan Senor, the man who instantly went from unqualified idiot political hack appointee to Respected Foreign Policy Expert the day Bush sent him to lie on behalf of the disastrously incompetent provisional government in post-invasion Iraq.

Let’s also not forget that former longtime CIA spook Cofer Black — who was vice chairman of Blackwater for three years — is Romney’s “envoy to the dark side.” Black was at the CIA while plans for extraordinary rendition were drawn up and the fact that he was at Blackwater at all should tell you what sort of principles the guy has.

The National Journal also says Michael “Warrantless Surveillance” Hayden could be the director of national intelligence or homeland security secretary in a Romney administration, so we have that to look forward to, too. (Also, Mitt will bring back torture. He will bring it back so hard.)

Also, from Jennifer Rubin: “Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who caucuses with the Democrats, is frequently mentioned for the secretary of state job.” Ah yes, a wonderful option if you want some “bipartisan credibility” for your plan to wage endless global war forever.

The Courts

Jonathan Bernstein sums it up:

If Romney wins the presidency and holds it for eight years, he very likely would replace not only moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy (born in 1936) with someone closer to Alito, but he also would probably have the chance to replace either Ginsburg (born in 1933) or Stephen Breyer (1938). On the other hand, if Obama wins, it’s possible that he could wind up replacing at least one conservative justice, perhaps Kennedy or Antonin Scalia (also 1936).

Scalia is obviously not going to purposefully allow a Democrat to replace him, but he’s quite old, and he may not have a choice. (Not that I’m wishing Antonin Scalia anything but the best!) Ginsburg is even older, and it’s extremely unlikely that she’d remain in place through two terms of Mitt Romney.

Basically one more conservative vote means the effective end of Roe v. Wade and the Commerce Clause. Replacing Breyer and Ginsburg with conservatives would possibly mean the end of the entire New Deal regulatory state. Three Romney appointees would mean conservative control of the Court for decades.

And there is every reason to suspect that Romney will pick judges who’ll vote like Scalia. That is the sort of person Republicans appoint now, while Democrats appoint squishy mainstream moderate liberals that they imagine everyone will be fine with. (And if Republicans control the Senate during a Romney presidency, haha, sorry, we’re going back to 1896.)

That’s just the Supreme Court. Reagan’s lower court judges profoundly changed American politics, and they continue to do so today. George W. Bush appointed more circuit and appeals court judges than Clinton, and so far Obama is on track to have appointed the fewest since Ford. These judges have a tremendous amount of power, and they will use it to strengthen the power of corporations at the expense of individuals, the environment, and communities every step of the way. (Plus, obviously, on criminal justice they will be universally pro-prosecutor and basically ensure that our horribly broken system keeps systematically locking up as many young black men as possible.)

The Environment

It’s not like President Obama will actually manage to avert catastrophic climate change in his second term, considering the many barriers to the sort of action required to actually help the problem, but it is safe to say that Romney will do less.

The EPA’s new fuel efficiency standards probably wouldn’t end up surviving. And the EPA certainly won’t be regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act in a Romney administration. And no more investment in clean, renewable energy sources. And Keystone’s getting built (probably either way, actually). Basically instead of half-measures that won’t come close to addressing the problem, we will get actively harmful policies, most likely.

The Federal Budget

If you hate the deficit, you will … probably ignore those professed beliefs as you defend a president who spends ever more on defense and also slashes taxes, primarily on rich people. Just like the last Republican president! And their Messiah, Ronald Reagan.

If you hate government spending on social programs, you’ll find stuff to like: Unlike Bush, with his squishy “compassionate conservative” aisle-crossing education and healthcare initiatives, Romney will cheerfully eliminate “Obamacare” and destroy Medicaid by handing it to states that plan to spend as little money on it as possible.

And of course there will be this fiscal cliff issue. The can will be kicked, in the event of a Romney victory, to the next Congress, so that the Romney administration can implement its grand deficit reduction plan. It’s plausible that a Romney victory would lead to Senate Democrats showing more spine on “entitlements” than they are willing to while a Democrat is in the White House, but it’s also possible that they’ll be desperate to appear bipartisan. So: Social Security retirement age raised, most definitely, and lord only knows what happens to Medicare.

Eventually the new equivalent of the Ryan plan will pass. It will just be a matter of time.

The Economy

It will continue to suck! Horribly! For everyone!

In conclusion: We’ll be at war and pretty soon there won’t be any more Medicare or Social Security plus the rich will keep getting richer and abortion will be illegal in most of the country. Happy Halloween!

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

5 Disturbing Signs Romney Would Steer Us to Towards a Capitalist Dictatorship

Election 2012  

Informed Comment / By Juan Cole

5 Disturbing Signs Romney Would Steer Us to Towards a Capitalist Dictatorship

The lies and activities of Mitt's campaign show a contempt for democracy itself.

November 3, 2012  |  

 

 

The mainstream media and even Democrats have been slow to call Mitt Romney's deliberate falsehoods "lies." But after just calling them what they are, it is also important to analyze their meaning. Lies on Romney's scale do not simply show contempt for the intelligence of American voters. They show contempt for democracy, and display some of the features of capitalist dictatorship of a sort that was common in the late twentieth century. Mohammad Reza Pahlevi in Iran, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Park Hung Chee in South Korea and P.W. Boetha in South Africa are examples of this form of government. Capitalist dictatorship has declined around the world in favor of capitalist parliamentarism, in part because of the rising power of middle and working classes in the global South.

Capitalist dictatorship has many similarities to fascism, but differs from it in lionizing not the workers of the nation but the entrepreneurs of the nation. Fascism seeks a mixed economy, whereas capitalist dictatorship privileges the corporate sector and attacks the non-military public sector. But both try to subsume class conflict under a hyper-nationalism. Both glorify military strength and pick fights with other countries to whip up nationalist fervor. Both disallow unions, collective bargaining and workers' strikes. Both typically privilege one ethnic group within the nation, marking it as superior and setting up a racial hierarchy.

One big difference between capitalist democracy (as in contemporary Germany and France) and capitalist dictatorship is the willingness of the business classes to play by the rules of democratic elections, to allow a free, fair and transparent contest, to acknowledge the rights of unions, and to respect the universal franchise. Businessmen in such a society share a civic ethic that sees these goods as necessary for a well ordered society, and therefore as ultimately good for business. They may also be afraid of the social disruptions (as in France) that would attend any attempt to whittle away workers' rights. Attempts to limit the franchise, to ban unions, and to manipulate the electorate with bald-faced lies are all signs of a barracuda business class that secretly seeks its class interests above all others in society, and which is not afraid of workers and middle classes because the latter are apolitical, apathetic and disorganized.

Sound familiar?

1. Romney's contempt for the democratic process is demonstrated in his preference for the Big Lie. In order to scare workers in Toledo, Ohio, into voting for him, he alleged that President Obama was arranging for Chrysler's Jeep production to be shifted to China. Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne sent an email to all employees refuting Romney: "I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China..." He pointed out that Jeep production in the US has tripled since 2009. Romney's political ad containing this sheer falsehood, is blanketing Ohio.

2. Romney backs Koch-brother-funded attempts to bust public unions, as in Wisconsin, even though that effort has run into trouble with Wisconsin courts.

3. Romney supports Koch-brother-funded attempts to suppress voting, typically through state legislatures requiring voter identification documents at polling booths. Such identification often costs money, so that it is a stealth poll tax. It also requires, for non-drivers, a trip to a state office and bureaucratic runarounds. Voter i.d. requirements hit the poor, Latinos, African-Americans and urban people who use public transit hardest, i.e., mostly voters for the Democratic Party. In some states, the courts are questioning the laws. But in many states they are now entrenched. Limiting the franchise was a key tactic for Apartheid South Africa's government under Boetha, which was run as a capitalist dictatorship on behalf of the white Cape Town business classes.

4. Romney's devotion to increasing military spending and his rattling of sabers at Russia, China, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (aren't we up to about half the world now?) are typical of the militarism of capitalist dictatorship. His repeated pledges to defer to the wishes of the officer corps with regard to whether to end the Afghanistan war suggests a certain amount of Bonapartism, where the business classes bring in the generals to make key decisions. The problem for small authoritarian business classes is that they are in competition for resources with the much larger middle and working classes and in a parliamentary system they risk being outvoted. In order to suppress the latter's claims on resources and deflect any tendency to vote along class interests, the business classes in this system pose as defenders of the nation, thus hiding class conflict and legitimating the diversion of resources to arms manufacturers and other corporations. Nationalism, militarism and war, along with voter suppression, can even the playing field for the rich.

5. The Romney campaign's remarks about "Anglo-Saxons" better understanding allies like Britain, and its support for the racist Arizona immigration and profiling law show a preference for racial hierarchy, with "Anglo-Saxons" at the top. Again, many capitalist dictatorships privilege a dominant ethnicity, as with Apartheid South Africa or discrimination against native Chileans by the Pinochet regime in Chile. Fostering racism is a way of dividing and ruling the middle and working classes, of binding a segment of them to the dominant business classes.

Obviously, the Romney version is capitalist dictatorship lite. But its strong resemblance to the full form of that sort of polity is highly disturbing. While these tendencies have existed on the Republican Right for some time, the sheer level of contempt for democracy as demonstrated in the Big Lies, the exaltation of war, the racial profiling, and the new extent of attempts at voter suppression and union-busting all indicate a sharp veering toward authoritarianism.

Juan Ricardo Cole, a blogger and essayist, is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

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.

Mother Jones

Does Monsanto Man Mitt Romney Secretly Eat Organic?

—By Tom Philpott

| Wed Sep. 26, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

 

 

 

Organic food? Not for you 47 percenters. Kristin Callahan/Ace Pictures/Zuma

Mitt Romney hasn't divulged many details about what kind of agriculture policy he'd pursue as president. (Sound familiar?) But all signs suggest that he'd follow the agribiz party line. As Wayne Barrett showed in a recent Nation piece (my comment here), Romney has ties to agribusiness giant Monsanto that date to the '70s, when GMO seeds were an R&D project, not a business model. According to Barrett, Romney, then a young Bain consultant, helped nudge Monsanto on its path away from disgraced industrial chemical concern toward its current status as world-beating agribiz player. Then there's the agribiz execs and shills the GOP nominee tapped for his campaign's Agriculture Advisory Committee.

But guess what? In the privacy of his campaign jet, the beleaguered presidential contender apparently eats organic, reports the Today show's Peter Alexander:

And, while I've never been invited up front, sources close to the campaign tell me the shelves are stocked with a wide variety of healthy fare. Kashi cereals, hummus, pita as well as organic applesauce. Everything's organic, I'm told, including the ingredients to Romney's favorite, peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

Nor is this the first time the Romney family has been linked to organic food. Get a load of this 2002 profile of Ann Romney from the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette:

Mrs. Romney was introduced to several practitioners of holistic medicine, who persuaded her to adopt alternative therapies. She now eats organic foods and very little meat. She practices reflexology and undergoes acupuncture treatments. She credits the lifestyle with turning her health around.

I have calls and emails into the Romney campaign to confirm these reports. I have yet to hear back. But if they're true—and it's hard to imagine either the Romneys or the journalists would make them up—Romney would hardly be the only prominent politician to publicly promote genetically modified foods while privately avoiding them by sticking to organics. (USDA organic code forbids GMOs from any food labeled organic, along with the application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides).

Indeed, he's following a tradition that dates to Bill Clinton, includes George W. Bush and his family, and is alive and well in the White House of Romney's opponent, Barack Obama. What's my evidence that the Clintons and Bushes ate organic? Get this, from someone who knows—Walter Scheib, who served as White House executive chef during the Clinton and Bush years:

From 1994 to 2005 I was the executive chef at the White House. This offered me not only the personal honor of serving two unique and interesting first families, but the professional challenge of fulfilling Hillary Clinton's mandate of bringing contemporary American cuisine and nutritionally responsible food to the White House.
This meant that nearly all the product used was obtained from local growers and suppliers. There was a small garden on the roof of the White House where produce was grown.

The ethic of the purchasing and the cooking at the White House under my direction and under the continuing direction of [current Obama White House executive chef] Cris Comerford is one of respect for the pedigree of the product and manner it is grown, gathered, raised or caught.

The Clinton and Bush families dined regularly on organic foods. Both wagyu and grass-fed beef were frequently used.

And here's Scheib again, in an interview with the blog Obama Foodorama, on Hillary Clinton's unheralded rooftop veggie garden:

"Not certified organic," Mr. Scheib said. "But everything was absolutely grown without pesticides and fertilizers. I guess it's what these days we call 'natural.'"

And "the emphasis on organics became even more important when the Bushes arrived in the White House," Obama Foodorama reported. "Laura Bush was 'adamant' about organics, according to Mr. Scheib." Scheib also told the New York Times that Laura Bush "insisted that fresh, organic foods be served in the White House," but she just didn't talk "much about it outside the house."

While the Clintons and Bushes quietly dined on organic and grass-fed, their administrations pushed policies that propped up industrial agriculture and the companies that dominate it. Clinton promoted GMOs to the very end of his term—a cause his wife Hillary has kept up as secretary of state. At least Clinton was fairly progressive on maintaining strict USDA standards for organic farming; Bush matched Clinton's zeal for propping up industrial farming but also tried to weaken organic standards. 

As for the Obamas, Michelle Obama, unlike her predecessors, was pretty open about her preference for organics—at least at first. For a pre-election 2008 profile, Ms. Obama told the The New Yorker that "in my household, over the last year we have just shifted to organic." She added a little critique of a famous industrial-food sweetener:

And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think—we think—that's juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there's high-fructose corn syrup in everything we're eating. Every jelly, every juice. Everything that's in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don't even know…

And, of course, soon after she moved into the White House, Ms. Obama famously broke ground on an organic garden on the lawn—and launched a campaign to inspire children to make healthier food choices.

But the agrichemical industry quickly chided the Obamas for not using "crop protection products" (i.e., pesticides) in their garden; the administration began making pro-agribiz appointments and policy moves (a trend that continues to this day); and Michelle Obama shifted her kids' health campaign to emphasize exercise over diet change.

Now the Obamas appear to have settled into the pattern established by their predecessors: privately eat organic while publicly maintaining the food system status quo—a pattern that Romney, if he wins, seems ready to maintain. So, organic for the elite, GMOs for everyone else? That's precisely the kind of exclusive mindset that gives organic food a bad name.

Romney Supervised Medical Testing Company Guilty Of Massive Medicare Fraud

Image via Wikipedia

In 1989, Bain Capital purchased controlling interest in Damon Corp., a medical testing company located in Needham, Massachusetts.

During the time that Bain held its ownership of the company, Mitt Romney personally sat on the Board of Directors. And during that same period, Damon Corp. was busy submitting fraudulent reimbursement claims to Medicare to the tune of millions of dollars charged for unnecessary blood tests.

According to federal government prosecutors, Damon was misleading physicians into ordering unnecessary blood tests, assuring the doctors that the testing would be covered by Medicare.

By the time Damon Corp. pleaded guilty to defrauding the United States Government of $25 million—and paid a total of $119 million in what was, at that time, the largest penalty of its kind in Massachusetts history—Bain was long gone having sold the company in 1993 to Corning, Inc.

Inasmuch as neither Romney nor Bain was ever implicated in the fraud, it would be reasonable to conclude that while the illegal activity was going on under Mr. Romney’s nose, Romney would, himself, bear only some responsibility for perhaps not being as on top of things as one might hope for a company’s director to be.

But, according to Romney, such a conclusion would be wrong.
When Mitt Romney was confronted with the matter during his campaign to become the Governor of Massachusetts, Romney acknowledged that he did have some awareness of the funky things going on at Damon.
According to The Deseret News-

More than a decade later, when Romney was in pursuit of the Massachusetts governorship, his Democratic opponent Shannon O’Brien accused him of lax oversight at Damon and failing to report the fraud.
Romney replied that he had helped uncover the illegal activity at Damon, asking the board’s lawyers to investigate. As a result, he said, the board took “corrective action” before selling the company in 1993 to Corning Inc.

So, then, the future Governor and candidate for his party’s nomination to run for the presidency, did fulfill his obligation as a great American and did report the fraud to the proper authorities, right?

Apparently not.

According to the court records, “…the Damon executives’ scheme continued throughout Bain’s ownership, and prosecutors credited Corning, not Romney, with cleaning up the situation.”

But there is an explanation – it turns out that the Damon experience was a foreshadowing of the Mitt Romney to come as he engaged in one of his now infamous episodes of flip-flopping.

You see, before Romney indicated that he was involved in conducting an investigation while he was on the board of directors, he said that he was completely unaware of any investigation.

Here’s another shocker. While the company eventually went bankrupt, with thousands losing their jobs, Bain Capital walked away with a $12 million profit—a little over $400,000 of that money ending up in Mitt’s pocket.

Expect to hear a lot more about this in the coming days as AFSCME has spent close to  one million dollars in advertising buys throughout the state of Florida to highlight this misadventure.

contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com
Twitter @rickungar

Mitt Romney Foreign Policy Team: 17 of 24 Advisors Are Bush Neocons

policymic

Mitt Romney Foreign Policy Team: 17 of 24 Advisors Are Bush Neocons

 Laura Hughes

I can’t figure out Mitt Romney, though I think I’m hardly alone in that sentiment. When he’s not trashing the president (his only clear-cut campaign initiative) he spends the rest of the time dallying around issues that deserve serious consideration. He’s inscrutable and you don't need to look any further than the list of names on his sizeable foreign policy team as evidence.

In a must-read article this week in Foreign Policy, Rep. Adam Smith is smart to point out that of “Romney’s 24 special advisors on foreign policy, 17 served in the Bush-Cheney administration.” And yet, mixed in with that decidedly neoconservative crowd are a number of very thoughtful and moderate voices.
Any foreign policy advisory board that seeks the counsel of Cofer Black, Michael Hayden, Dan Senor or John Lehman, to name just a select few, is a real cause for concern. Of that crowd, Black is the most worrying. Cofer “the gloves come off” Black was one of the most brutal figures in CIA history, heading the agency’s Counterterrorism Center at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Think Obama’s counterterrorism program is perverse? Black is about as “dark side” as you get, an American exceptionalist in the worst sense of the word, and perhaps the most vocal advocate for extraordinary renditions and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The public may have trouble with Obama’s use of armed drones, but with Black whispering in his ear, Romney’s counterterrorism policy would be a frightening true return to those heady, Bush-era days of CIA black sites and waterboarding sessions.

Michael Hayden you will remember was at the helm of the National Security Agency during the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping and Dan Senor, one of the most right-wing pundits on Romney’s list, is a regular contributor to Fox News. From 2003 to 2004 he was the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority and managed to paint one of the rosiest pictures of a post-Saddam Iraq that in reality was rapidly descending into chaos (thanks, in large part, to the incompetence of the CPA itself).

Former Secretary of the Navy, under Reagan, John Lehman fits in well with the above crowd, though he may be the principal neoconservative behind Mitt Romney’s belief that the greatest strategic threat to the United States at the present time is… Russia.

But the list has some respected moderates, too. Paula Dobriansky is one of the most thoughtful foreign policy experts in the business and has had an impressive career at the State Department. As the Undersecretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, she was a staunch defender of human rights and has been a vocal advocate in the campaign to combat climate change.

Her colleague, Mitchell Reiss, is no less distinguished; serving as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Colin Powell and playing an integral role in the Northern Ireland peace process as a special envoy during the Bush Administration. Robert Kagan, while a leading neoconservative, and among the most vocal of the American exceptionalist crowd, is a thoughtful writer and respected by both Democrats and Republicans alike. His must-read piece in The New Republic on the myth of American decline is said to have influenced Obama’s State of the Union speech earlier this year.

One wonders then who on this list has Romney’s ear? Between his hawkish stance toward Russia or his belligerence toward Iran it would seem that there’s little room for moderates at the Romney foreign policy table. Even the list of countries Romney’s slated to visit in the next few weeks- Great Britain, Israel, Germany and Poland- looks like an itinerary “25 years out of date,” to quote the ever-clever Laura Rozen. It is further evidence that the inner circle is populated by old, right wing, Cold War warriors, which is as frightening as having no particular foreign policy experience or stance at all.

I would be far more comforted if that itinerary included a stop in India or South Korea, even China. Don’t we want a presidential candidate who at least appears vaguely aware of the geopolitical realities America is facing? Why isn’t Afghanistan on the list? In the words of Colin Powell, “C’mon Mitt, think!”

With just five months left before the election, Romney’s foreign policy “agenda” remains nebulous and thoroughly perplexing. There is just enough evidence, however, that when this agenda does in fact take shape, it will be alarmingly outdated.