Britain is an easy date. So how did Mitt Romney mess up so badly?

[maddezmom]

The Romneyshambles tells us plenty about one man's lack of conviction and the dire state of today's Republican party

¬snip¬
For an American politician, Britain is an easy date: just praise the country as a steadfast ally, mention Churchill a couple of times and we'll roll over. Yet somehow Romney managed to provoke both the prime minister and the capital's mayor – both fellow conservatives who should regard a Republican nominee as a kindred spirit – into public rebukes. That takes some doing. So what explains how an accomplished politician, with the resilience to have prevailed in a bruising primary campaign, could mess up so badly? The answer says a lot about Romney – and a fair bit about the dire state of today's Republican party.

In the first category comes the observation that, despite having sought the presidency twice and served as a state governor, Romney is not really a politician at all – not in the Bill Clinton sense of someone who thinks, talks and breathes politically, constantly calculating the likely impact of both words and deeds. Instead Romney speaks and acts like the chief executive he was for so long, whether of private equity firm Bain Capital or the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics of 2002.

¬snip¬


In this, Romney is fully in step with the party he now leads. For today's Republican party is characterised by a kind of bellicose ignorance towards the rest of the world, contemptuous of Obama's attempts to show respect to foreigners, crudely aggressive towards those deemed the US's enemies, uninterested in its friends. Take the response of Romney's allies to the London debacle, his surrogates professing that "we're not worried about overseas headlines", while one media cheerleader dismissed Cameron as "limp-wristed" and Britain as "a second-rate, semi-degenerate nation".

This, remember, is the party that slammed John Kerry for the crime of speaking French. Its antics, like those of the man it has chosen for the presidency, would be funny were the Republican party not aspiring to hold an office that is still mighty and, for the rest of the world, deadly serious.

more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/27/britain-easy-date-mitt-romney-mess?newsfeed=true

Please read it in it's entirety....it's a good wrap up of Mitt and the Repub's/

[Jeff Murdoch]

1. Mitt Romney goes to London,

wins gold medal for stepping on his dick.

[Fumesucker]

4. Welcome to DU!

You're off to a good start..

[MIDNITERIDER1438]

2. The Blunderbuss Businessman's Dark Agenda

One might be led to believe Romney's ramblings are incoherent enough to conform with his own mysterious undefined & uneducated foreign policy planks, but I smell a rat, in fact a whole ratpack:
Barbarians At The Tea Party

Or How the Romniacs Misread the British Tea Leaves

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
- Hamlet (1.4.90), Marcellus to Horatio

The reticence of Willard "Mittens" Romney to cooperate with his hosts' Olympian endeavors is surprising at first since better etiquette might be expected from the crusty upperclassman, although one suspects that megalomania might be the primary cause for such incivility. But upon closer examination, it becomes more apparent why this participant of "dressage" clashes with even his Tory bosom buddies.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#48360256

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#48360508

http://samuel-warde.com/2012/07/stephen-colbert-on-romneys-london-olympics-blunder/

Mittens had previously stacked his deck of foreign policy advisers with the very same neoconservatives of the last Bush administration, with such infamous names as John Bolton, Eliot Cohen, Cofer Black, Walid Phares, Dan Senor, Max Boot, and Michael Hayden (who I'm still not sure why he's even involved in this). And oh, let's not forget their prime bankroller, Sheldon Adelson, who has the most narrow foreign policy agenda of his own.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/25/576331/romney-foreign-policy-advisers/

http://www.politicususa.com/people-dont-mitt-romneys-war-agenda.html

http://www.thenation.com/article/167683/mitt-romneys-neocon-war-cabinet#

This set up of his so-called "War Cabinet" is so highly suspect that one might be led to believe that the far right wing of the Teapublican party might ride in on Mitten's coattails and claim to be protectors of "U.S. interests" (actually their own) to drum up support for another war. And you might not be far off the mark.

It appears even Dick Cheney is clawing his way back into favor, performing a supporting role as a major fund raiser. Now that's really appalling to anyone who's appreciated the rise of America's recent standing in the world up until now as promulgated by the Obama administration, and deftly dealt with by Secretary Clinton in the true role that the U.S. State Department is responsible for. American influence has been repaired to a great degree by more than adequate stewardship, and competent handling of crises.

We simply can not, nay must not, permit these ex-Bushie bumblers to plunge us further into economic disrepair and military weakness as the unrepresentative shadow government in league with inept Teapublican freshmen would have us march again. We are still struggling to recover from those highly damaging 8 years of incompetent leadership under Bush with ineffective and misguided legislation, and the subsequent obstructive and recalcitrant 112th Congress, the most polarized since the Reconstruction. The most that the sequestration cuts to defense will total is approximately 10%, to the worst possible scenario of 14%, but further expeditionary follies need to hold anyway, before the armed forces of the U.S. become broken.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/07/20/Will-Defense-Cuts-Kill-the-Anti-Tax-Pledge.aspx#page1

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-romney-cant-have-it-both-ways-on-defense-spending-tax-cuts/2012/07/25/gJQAZh0x9W_story.html

Only 1 in 5 congressmen have had any military service, and that includes the current members of the military reserves who you may count on less than two hands. Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was the only member of Congress whose spouse was an active duty servicemember until his retirement. So I ask you, who are the true patriots now, and where are the politicians gutsy enough to stand up for their own country over party affiliation and reelection contributions ?


http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/hes-no-averell-harriman/?smid=fb-share

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/why-colin-powell-bashed-mitt-romneys-foreign-policy-advisers/

http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/R41647.pdf

[tjwmason]

3. Fascinating article

Romneyshambles has pretty much failed at one of the easiest venues on the planet.

[Fumesucker]

5. Eh, Brits are pretty damn good at mockery once you get them rolling..

I think these two blokes represent a wide spectrum of opinion about Mitt over in Blighty.

[Cal33]

6. I wouldn't be surprised if Romney would be the type to pay his speech-writers the

way a Scrooge does. So, they're getting back at him by writing incredibly
stupid remarks, knowing that he wouldn't notice anything anyway. They,
better than anybody else, ought to know how stupid the man really is!