Risky Business (Part One)

 

President Obama accused Mitt Romney of “being all over the map.”  While that is metaphorically true, underscoring as it does Romney’s attempts to impose his notions of American exceptionalism on the rest of the world, it also has a literal component— geography.

ROMNEY:
“Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea.”

Er, Willard, any 7th grade geography student knows better than that.  Ever heard of The Persian Gulf? The 97,000 sq miles of ocean that is the most strategically important waterway in the world?

At some 650 miles in length, Iran’s coastal exposure is about half as large as the entire West Coast of the United States (1293 miles).  Additionally— we hate to break it to you— but Syria and Iran don’t currently share a border.  There’s a little country called Iraq separating the two.

Maybe it’s the word “Persian” that’s throwing you.  Long before Iran was known as Iran it was called— wait for it— Persia.  As in The Persian Empire, which was one of the world’s largest empires, thanks in large part to— wait for it— its navy. 

Xerxes, Immortals, and Persian Naval Forces at Salamis observing the Naval Battle.

Maybe you were thinking about what the map of the Middle East looked like 2500 years ago, when the Persian Empire extended to the Eastern Mediterranean and included modern day Syria.  You really should trade in your old Risk game board for an updated map of the world.  If you do find yourself in a position to bomb Iran, you might want to locate it on modern map first.  Just sayin’.

On a related note, you decry the number of US naval vessels as being less than what we had during World War I, using that little factoid to criticize Obama as somehow being weak on defense.  As President Obama was quick to point out, you seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of capability, quipping that we have less “horses and bayonets” in our arsenal as well.  Would you really trade one modern warship for two or three WWI vessels?

A poster of numerous U.S. Navy vessels sailing in New York Harbor during World War I entitled
“Uncle Sam’s Big Fighting Ships.”

 

I’d be willing to bet that a single modern day missile cruiser, armed with over the horizon radar and enough Harpoon missiles, could destroy the entire fleet pictured above in less time than it would take your car elevator to fill up your garage.

The last thing we need is a geographically challenged, militarily ignorant Commander in Chief who thinks that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.”  (I hear that Sarah Palin‘s contract with Fox News is up at the end of the year. Maybe you can hire her to keep an eye on the Ruskies for us.)

You know, Mitt, if for some ineffable reason, the real Powers-That-Be determine we haven’t suffered enough on this Veil of Tears, and you end up being installed as the leader of the free world, I fear that you won’t be able to distinguish the game of Risk from the real thing.

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To be continued. Part II will spotlight Romney’s bogus tough talk on China, featuring his personal investment in a Chinese sweat shop.

Metamorphosis Mitt

President Obama schools Metamorphosis Mitt on the nature of modern warfare

During last night’s final presidential debate, it soon became apparent that, in the arena of foreign policy, Willard Mitt Romney is playing fantasy football while President Obama is grinding out the real thing.

Obama is studying the opposition, meeting with his coaches, drawing up and revising game plans as circumstances require. He chooses the starters, putting his faith in his players whether they are in the State Department, the CIA, or the military, then sends them out to the field. He trusts in their professionalism and experience to move the ball forward, to stop the opposition, and ultimately, win the game.

Meanwhile, Romney is just making shit up as he goes along, shifting positions faster than a fantasy football fan/atic trades his virtual players. He even threw most of his foreign policy advisers under the bus, some 70% of whom are Bushie neocons, including chicken hawks like Dan Senor and Robert Kagan who’ve never seen a war they wouldn’t start or send somebody else’s kids to fight. Heck, Romney tacked so far to the left that he sounded like he was channeling John Lennon:

“…[O]ur purpose is to make sure the world is more — is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet.”

Even with plenty of advanced warning to his advisers that he was going to shake his mighty, all-forgiving etch a sketch once again, John Bolton’s head must have exploded, if even out of just one side.

On record for criticizing Obama’s decision to set a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan? No problemo. Just inhale a heady dose of Romnesia , and voila– Romney is suddenly on the same page as Obama, despite his earlier characterization that setting a withdrawal deadline was a grievous strategic flaw that only empowered the enemy.

But it wasn’t just Obama’s Afghanistan policy that Romney suddenly found himself embracing. (A growing majority of Americans are sick to death of the longest war in US history, so that has to be counted as a no-brainer.) Add Willard’s support for the Administration’s role in the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi; the killing of Usama bin Laden, despite the violation of Pakistani sovereignty that previously had Willard’s magic underwear in such an excruciating twist; the cautious approach to the civil war in Syria; the imposition of increasingly ruinous sanctions against Iran; the handling of the Benghazi incident; and other gimmees like unconditional support for Israel and the increasing use of killer drones around the world—Obama and Romney might just as well have been kissing cousins.

The political calculation of Romney’s debate strategy is painfully obvious. While maybe a million people at any one time are exposed to a given campaign speech or a targeted media buy, alight as they are with inflammatory, hyperbolic rhetoric, the number of people tuning into any one of the four televised debates is [at least] an order of magnitude greater. A perfect venue to re-invent a candidate from a “severe conservative” into a controlled, reasonable moderate that would appeal to undecided voters, including a large swathe of the coveted female voter demographic, with whom Obama continues to enjoy a substantial lead.

Gag me with a bayonet.

[image found here.]

Blaming The Victims

  Thanks to a five hour delay in my flight yesterday (first plane was two hours late, and after finally boarding it and sitting in it for a half hour, we had to deplane for mechanical reasons, forced to wait again until the airline could find us another bird); and having run out of battery charge for my laptop, I …

Exorcising Mitt (UPDATE)

Would you want to get inside of this guy’s head?

While Willard’s dodge of a question about whether he supported equal pay for women, his  “whole binders full of women” comment that has lit up the twitterverse and is providing endless fodder for bloggers and pundits everywhere, my favorite takeaway from the debate is not something that was said during the debate but about the preparation for the debate itself.

Politico reports:

Sen. John Kerry joked Wednesday that he’ll need an “exorcism” after the final debate next week to purge Mitt Romney after playing the GOP presidential nominee for weeks in debate prep with President Barack Obama.

“It’s been an interesting exercise,” Kerry said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’ve decided next Tuesday I’ve got to have an exorcism of Romney out of my being.”

Good luck with that.

Kerry might want to consult with Sissy Spacek, nominated for Best Actress for her lead in the movie “Carrie,” who reportedly got so into her character that it took her weeks to completely shed it.

UPDATE 10/17 12:35 pm : Ooops. Looks like Romney got caught in another lie.

HuffPo reports the following:

[Romney] “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they brought us whole binders full of women,” he said.

Romney’s account of that story is false, according to two women who led an effort in 2002 to recruit female candidates to high-level appointed positions in Massachusetts. MassGAP, a bipartisan coalition of women’s groups dedicated to increasing the number of women appointed to top government jobs, approached Romney and his Democratic challenger Shannon O’Brien before the 2002 gubernatorial election and pressured them to sign a pledge to appoint more women if elected.

“It was an initiative of women’s organizations, not to force [Romney’s] hand, but to make it be something he had to follow through on,” Carol Hardy-Fanta, former co-chair of MassGAP’s higher education subcommittee, told The Huffington Post the morning following the debate. “He didn’t go out looking for these binders.”

Liz Levin, who was the chairwoman of MassGAP at the time, told HuffPost that during the 2002 governor’s race, the group spent months identifying, vetting and collecting resumes of qualified women for the high-level appointments.

“They told us … that they were going to send [the binders] to us,” O’Brien recalled in a Wednesday interview with The Huffington Post. “Whoever won was going to get this.”

 

Magical Rethug Thinking

The zombie eyed granny starver demonstrates his compassionate conservatism

Having done my share of restaurant dish washing as a teenager living on Maui in the early Seventies, I found myself laughing out loud at this clip of Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan scouring pots and pans that had already been cleaned. (Notice how deftly Ryan, who Charlie Pierce calls “the zombie eyed granny starver”, prevents the camera from seeing the inside of the pans.) The venue for this overly staged PR puff piece was a volunteer soup kitchen, which just might go out of business should Ryan and Mitt Romney win the election.

As shown by a recent analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation, a bi-partisan Congressional committee equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, the proposed Ryan-Romney tax plan is mathematically impossible to achieve.  The central feature of that plan is an across the board 20% tax cut (which overwhelmingly favors Romney and his fellow uber rich). In order to pay for it, even if the vast majority of the largest tax loopholes and deductions are eliminated, including charitable contributions that makes soup kitchens and other vital community services possible, the revenue raised by eliminating the write-offs  would  total something like 4%.

 Making up the deficit between 4% and 20% is pure faith based, trickle down, voodoo economics, predicated on all kinds of assumptions about “broadening the tax base.”  Which is precisely why the Romney-Ryan campaign refuses to provide specifics of their secret plan to balance the budget. (Shades of Nixon’s campaign promise of a secret plan to end the Vietnam war, which only worsened when he expanded the conflict into Laos and Cambodia.).
Promising to balance the budge by starving the government of desperately needed revenues, while simultaneously increasing the budget of the military industrial complex, is an exercise in magical thinking. Maybe Mitten’s magic underwear has shrunk to the point where it’s cutting off the blood to his brain.

Stay Thirsty My Friends

The most interesting man in the world on one of the least interesting men in the world.

Yeah, that sloshing the water around your teeth every time is so attractive.
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Did that leave a bad taste in your mouth?  K then, here’s your palette cleanser.

Mitt Channels Yogi

Jon Stewart asks Willard about his doublethink proposals: Are you a wizard…or a liar?

“I really didn’t say everything I said. […] Then again, I might have said ’em, but you never know.” – Yogi Berra

“I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.” –Mitt Romney, to Shawn of the Dead Hannity

 

It became obvious long ago that a fundamental component of the Romney campaign strategy is to spend a billion dollars fusing three of the most effective propaganda techniques ever devised by man: repetition, the Big Lie, and doublethink.

George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four provides some background:

“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

[…]

Definition of doublethink: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed….”

Not only has Merry-Go-Round-Now-Moderate-Mitt flip flopped on a plethora of issues, the latest being his position on abortion as he explained it to the Des Moines Register yesterday, but he lies unreMITTingly, not only about the Obama Administration’s record, but his own as well.

As has been said here and elsewhere many times, Willard will say anything to anyone at any time if he thinks it will move him one step closer to the White House. Last week’s debate is a prime example, with Romney telling a series of lies and propagating over two dozen “myths”  some of which  we documented here.

While the establishment media hasn’t been completely absent in noting some of his more egregious lies and flip flops, their record so far has been anemic, reflected in those polls that ask the public about their knowledge of, or more accurately, their level of confusion about specific issues. (The more common “horse race” polls also reflects this ignorance but to a lesser extant, given that they include subjective issues like a candidate’s “likability.”)

The big post-election question for the media is whether the Fourth Estate will live up to its structural responsibility for separating truth from fiction from downright lies. If it doesn’t, we will have completed the transition from the Walter Cronkite era, characterized by a non-profit, non-partisan approach to news and information; to the Rupert Murdoch era, where “news”– more accurately, “infotainment”– is merely the vehicle for propagating a larger corporatist agenda.

We begun and now end with a Yogi-ism that Willard has internalized to perfection, becoming its very embodiment:

When you come to a  fork in the road, take it.