Mitt Romney sought to establish his “foreign policy credentials” with an attempt at a showy, splashy string of foreign visitations and he established them alright, established that they are not very good and not very appealing. The good news is that after forging a path of rhetorical and diplomatic destruction across foreign lands we aren”t at war with anyone as a result, at least as of today we aren’t, and Romney has so far not screwed up relations with the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, the fictional nation from The Mouse that Roared.
If you retain the average Republican’s disdain for everyone beyond our borders, despising foreigners almost as much as they despise most of their fellow Americans a pat on the back is in order for Willard Romney. If he can do for our relationships with other traditional allies what he did for British-American relations the Pentagon is going to be ecstatic. What with so many new potential foes and the expected budget bump the military-industrial complex surely experienced with Romney’s trip a perpendicular non-Viagra assisted hard-on.
The cornerstone of Romney’s primary campaign and presidential campaign to date has been an observation of the lowest, craziest, most divisive, demonizing tropes from the rest of the field of hardcore ideologues and then adopting them as his own with a little exacerbating and gratuitous nastiness thrown in. A hateful zealot by vocational necessity rather than by principle or conviction he first apes the outlandish positions of his manifestly radical, irrational and irresponsible compatriots and then clumsily attempts to up the ante.
Transporting this modus operandi to distant regions he undertook to pander for American Jewish votes in a manner so whorish as to cause strumpets to blush, needlessly and viciously insulting Palestinians and by extension the Arab world with the same foolish regard for short term benefit at the expense of long term disaster that has become the Republican operating philosophy in all things. Childishly bloviating about bombing Iran Romney cemented the perception there is no place in his approach to governing and certainly to foreign policy for thoughtfulness, deliberation, statesmanship or cool calculation, just the same penchant for hotheaded movie dialogue used so ineffectively and embarrassingly by George Bush, proving again that pretend bravado creates the opposite of the intended impression, of a wiener playing at being tough rather than toughness.
Perhaps the most witlessly clueless thing Romney uttered during his caravan of gaffes and rhetorical blunders was to tell the Poles, “In the 1980s, when other nations doubted that political tyranny could ever be faced down or overcome, the answer was, ‘Look to Poland.” This stupidly overlooks that Romney’s own political party and political predecessors were those loudly proclaiming in garishly absolute terms that indeed political tyranny could not be faced down or overcome, championing as they did the Kirkpatrick Doctrine (Credited to Reagan UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick) which declaimed that totalitarian nations could only be conquered, vanquished through mutually destructive full-scale war, but could not change, could not reform or peacefully transition to democracy as of course Poland and other European satellites of the Soviet Union (and the Soviet Union itself) eventually did, as American anti-communist liberals always asserted correctly they could. On the bright side Romney’s gift for unintentionally trumpeting his own ignorance once again was proven undiminished.
Apparently Romney’s campaign remains convinced there was genius in Karl Rove”s rally the base to a fever pitch approach in 2004, an election which in fact saw George Bush reelected with the slimmest margin of any sitting incumbent in 80 years. Whether home or abroad the presidential campaign of Willard Romney clearly presumes winning friends and influencing people is a knave’s game, much inferior to rousing the faithful to a hot, foamy lather. Keep up the good work, Mittens.
