Nothing in the campaign to date has pissed me off more than this. My comments on Romney’s sleaze yesterday and today:
I really can’t believe that Romney, while US diplomatic missions in were under attack in Egypt and Libya, attacked the Obama administration untruthfully for “sympathiz[ing] with those who waged the attacks”. He had released his statement yesterday but initially embargoed it for release after midnight because (apparently) it would be unseemly to mar the memory of national unity on 9-11 by attacking the US president while the US was being attacked overseas on that anniversary. But he couldn’t even wait for that, and went ahead and released the statement yesterday anyway – before all the facts were known and before our president had addressed the nation.
The fact that Romney’s statement was a lie was nothing new – we have come to expect that from him now (he build a whole campaign theme around his racist welfare lie). But so eagerly seeking to politicize an attack on the US – that he couldn’t even wait until after the anniversary of 9-11, at that. This guy REALLY isn’t ready for prime time. (I have always said that had a Democrat been president on 9-11 we would have seen none of the national unity we saw in the aftermath of those attacks. It would have been a partisan bloodbath in this country. My Republicans friends have insisted that isn’t true – that their Republican political leaders would have rallied around a Democratic president just as Democrats rallied around President Bush. I think we now have our answer to that question.)
And check out Romney’s self-satisfied smirking at his press availability this morning:
Is that the look of a president on a day US diplomats were killed?
Or maybe something more like this?
Oh, and did I note that his accusations aren’t true? He was lying about our diplomats in Egypt at the same time they were under attack.
Here are some of the comments on Romney’s attack I’ve seen so far:
From NBC:
Yesterday we noted that Mitt Romney, down in the polls after the convention, was throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama. Little did we know the kitchen sink would include — on the anniversary of 9/11 — one of the most over-the-top and (it turns out) incorrect attacks of the general-election campaign . Last night after 10:00 pm ET, Romney released a statement on the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya. After saying he was “outraged” by these attacks and the death of an American consulate worker, Romney said, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” Yet after learning every piece of new information about those attacks, the Romney statement looks worse and worse — and simply off-key.
Mark Halperin (TIME):
Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign.
Joe Scarborough:
If you think the eye-rolling at Romney is just coming from the MSM, call up some Republican foreign policy hands.
I’ve been inundated with emails and calls from elected GOP leaders who think Romney’s response was a mistake. Not today.
Peggy Noonan:
“Romney Is Not Doing Himself Any Favors. In times of great drama and heightened crisis … I always think discretion is the way to go.”
Andrew Sullivan:
The obvious responsible thing to do when American citizens and public officials are under physical threat abroad and when the details are unknown, and events spiraling, is to stay silent. If the event happens on the day of September 11 and you are a candidate for president and have observed a political truce, all the more reason to wait to allow the facts to emerge. After all, country before party, right? American lives are at stake, yes? An easy call, no?
But that’s not what the Romney camp did. What they did was seize on a tweet issued by someone in the US Embassy before the attacks in order to indict the president for “sympathizing” with those who murdered a US ambassador after the attacks. Unfuckingbelievable.
Michael Tomasky:
Once again, the Romney pattern holds: pander to the right, issue an irresponsible statement, before Romney and his people even know whether this violence is going to spread, and prove that they will try to use even the violent deaths of four diplomats to political advantage. This isn’t an aberration. We’ve seen enough to know that this is his character.
Greg Sargent:
I continue to wonder whether Republicans actually believe this kind of stuff will resonate with perceptions of Obama among persuadable and undecided voters, given Obama’s consistently high marks on national security and terrorism. It’s yet another sign of Republicans attacking the version of the President who is a figment of the GOP base’s imagination, rather than the one swing voters perceive. This latest attack is still more evidence that Romney no longer thinks he can win this election on the economy alone.
According to Josh Rogin, the Romney campaign is going to broaden its case by linking these attacks to Obama’s “failure to assert American leadership throughout the Arab spring.” One wonders whether Romney — who has been widely criticized for failing to spell out his own foreign policies with any meaningful specificity, even as he attacks Obama as a weak appeaser on any number of fronts — will take this occasion to spell out clearly how he would handle the situation.
And the quote of the day:
A Jewish idiot makes a film, a Christian idiot promotes it, Muslim idiots kill over it, and Republican idiots condemn Obama.
More commentary:
Policy Hands Voice Disbelief At Romney Cairo Statement
“Bungle… utter disaster…not ready for prime time… not presidential… Lehman moment.” And that’s just the Republicans.
Ben Smith
BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Sep 12, 2012 11:10am EDT
Mitt Romney’s sharply-worded attack on President Obama over a pair of deadly riots in Muslim countries last night has backfired badly among foreign policy hands of both parties, who cast it as hasty and off-key, released before the facts were clear at what has become a moment of tragedy.
Romney keyed his statement to the American Embassy in Cairo’s condemnation of an anti-Muslim video that served as the trigger for the latest in a series of regional riots over obscure perceived slights to the faith. But his statement — initially embargoed to avoid release on September 11, then released yesterday evening anyway — came just before news that the American Ambassador to Libya had been killed and broke with a tradition of unity around national tragedies, and of avoiding hasty statements on foreign policy. It was the second time Romney has been burned by an early statement on a complex crisis: Romney denounced the Obama Administration’s handling of a Chinese dissident’s escape just as the Administration negotiated behind the scenes for his departure from the country.
“They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up,” said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an “utter disaster” and a “Lehman moment” — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.
He and other members of both parties cited the Romney campaign’s recent dismissals of foreign policy’s relevance. One adviser dismissed the subject to BuzzFeed as a “shiny object,” while another told Politico that the subject was the “president’s turf,” drawing a rebuke from Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.
“I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy,” said the Republican. “This is just unbelievable — when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it.”
Romney has not backed off the response — “It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values,” he said Wednesday — but his campaign faces a near consensus in Republican foreign policy circles that, whatever the sentiment, Romney faltered badly. …
“It’s bad,” said a former aide to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Just on a factual level that the statement was not a response but preceding, or one could make the case precipitating. And just calling it a ‘disgrace’ doesn’t really cut it. Not ready for prime time.”
A third Republican, a former Bush State Department official, told BuzzFeed, “It wasn’t presidential of Romney to go political immediately — a tragedy of this magnitude should be something the nation collectively grieves before politics enters the conversation.” …
The Republicans declined to speak for attribution, for fear of being publicly disloyal to their party’s nominee. Veteran Democratic foreign policy hands, operating under no such restriction, called Romney’s quick move all but disqualifying.
“He did jump the gun. It revealed yet again that his foreign policy team is not ready for prime time,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton State Department official. “It is ugly and amateurish. It also seems strangely out of character with Romney who elsewhere in the campaign seems inclined to be restrained to a fault.”
Heather Hurlburt, who heads the National Security Network, a Democratic group, said the statement “shows not just poor judgment and a willingness to use tragedy for political gains, regardless of the security consequences — but also poor management. He has policy people on his team who know better. Clearly they weren’t consulted.”
“As someone who worked at state and with diplomats for many years, it makes me feel sick,” she said.
“Romney blew it and revealed how seriously maladroit he is when it comes to foreign affairs and national security,” said Steve Clemons, the founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. “An attack on an Embassy, the murder of U.S. officials including an Ambassador, is an attack on all Americans and the idea of America — and Romney gave terrorists what they want — a divided country still torn emotionally and politically by the events of 9-11. Romney talks of leadership but with his reckless commentary when events were fragile and still unfolding, he belly-flopped.”
· Today at 1:13 PM
Romney’s ‘Apology Tour’ Attack Line Crashes on the Shoals of Reality
By Jonathan Chait
Pretty much everybody in politics, Republicans included, is shaking his or her head over Mitt Romney’s ham-handed attack on the Obama administration and equally clumsy follow-up today. But Romney’s strategy here was a perfectly straightforward application of the foreign-policy principles that have guided his campaign from the outset.
In the wake of his defeat in the 2008 GOP primary, Romney almost immediately started running for the 2012 nomination. At that time (well before the depth of the financial crisis was clear), Obama’s main political weakness appeared to be foreign policy. He was inexperienced in the field and associated (through a 2002 speech against the Iraq War) with a vulnerable dovish wing of the party. What’s more, he seemed vaguely foreign, and many Americans incorrectly believed he was Muslim. All this set the stage for Romney’s planned line of attack that Obama did not sufficiently love or appreciate his country and inappropriately coddled Muslim extremists, a line set forth in Romney’s campaign book No Apology, which castigated Obama for undertaking an international apology tour.
Now, the apology tour was a figment of the right-wing imagination. But this was beside the point. The point was that it set the tone Romney wanted: Obama apologizes for America to the bad guys, and Romney would stand firm for America.
And so, when militant Islamists attacked an American embassy, Romney automatically reverted to this line, releasing a statement charging “that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” This was triply false: (1) The statement in question was not made by the Obama administration but by the embassy staff, (2) it was not a response to the attacks but a (justifiably panicked) attempt to preempt them, in keeping with a long-standing bipartisan practice of distancing the U.S. from inflammatory religious provocation, and (3) it was not an expression of sympathy with attackers or other militants.
It’s not clear how well Romney would have understood the falsity of his claim. Perhaps he was confused about the timeline or the authorship, making his statement merely a single lie rather than a double or triple lie. In any case, Romney’s abhorrence of apologies required him to avoid steering his attack even slightly away from its original course. He insisted, “It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values.”
Never too early? Not even before the attacks had occurred, which is when the statement in question was issued?
The miscalculation at work here is that Romney believed his “Apology Tour” method would neatly fit the events at hand — take an event that sort of vaguely resembled an Obama apology to Muslims who don’t like us, twist it around, and call it a day. But Romney had grown accustomed to spinning fantasies cobbled together from months-old Obama speeches and nurtured into legend by extensive repetition and exaggeration in the conservative subculture. What he failed to realize from the outset was that the embassy attack was an immediate, high-profile event that he could not hope to rewrite so brazenly. Forced to confront the yawning chasm between reality and the fantasy he had wallowed in so long, Romney was exposed and, justifiably, discredited.
How about this from The American Conservative:
Romney’s “Lehman Moment”?
By DANIEL LARISON • September 12, 2012, 1:28 PM
Scott Galupo discerns panic in the Romney campaign’s shameless opportunism last night and this morning:
Before yesterday, the idea that the Romney campaign was “desperate” would have struck me as myopic and overexcited. Now it seems unmistakably clear. The Romney campaign knows it’s losing.
The extraordinary thing is that Romney may have been losing yesterday, but he wasn’t being widely ridiculed and attacked for having practically disqualified himself from consideration. When senior Republican foreign policy professionals start referring to this as his “Lehman moment,” likening it to McCain’s mid-September meltdown in response to the financial crisis, we can see that Romney’s latest attempt to seize on an international event has done significant and possibly irreparable damage to his campaign. Most Americans may not sympathize with Romney’s more aggressive foreign policy, but they might have been willing to believe him to be competent and have good judgment. This blunder undermines his claims to both of these.
Romney has made many foreign policy blunders before now, but this is the only one that has provoked such swift, harsh, and near-unanimous criticism. The most incredible part is that all of this has been self-inflicted. Romney and his campaign volunteered for this by inserting themselves into the story. If it were simply the other campaign or Democratic partisans that were hammering Romney on this, it wouldn’t be any different from previous mistakes, but the backlash hasn’t been limited to his partisan foes. The dishonesty of the original Romney statement and the gall of his press conference this morning have combined to create serious doubts about his judgment and to confirm the impression that there are no limits to his opportunism.
As a practical matter, this episode shows how useless Romney’s main foreign policy theme has been. According to Romney, Obama “apologizes for” America, and Romney won’t. He tried to shoehorn the embassy attacks into this frame, and it didn’t work for at least two reasons. First, Obama didn’t respond to the attacks by apologizing for anything or sympathizing with the attackers, as Romney’s original statement charged, so it was blatantly false. Romney’s position that the U.S. should never “apologize for” American values is almost beside the point. Would this have made any difference to the people assaulting the embassy in Cairo or the consulate in Benghazi? Would the attacks not have happened if Romney had been conducting his own brand of thoroughly unapologetic activist foreign policy? It seems unlikely. Romney might have legitimately questioned the security arrangements for the consulate, for example, or he could have made the fair observation that Libya’s new government is very weak and Libya as a whole has serious security problems, but that wouldn’t have translated into the easy and satisfying point-scoring that Romney seems to prefer. It wouldn’t have fit his ready-made scheme of Obama-as-Carter, but it would have spared him of most of the ridicule he’s receiving now. Now instead of portraying Obama as Carter, he has presented himself as the bumbling McCain figure of 2012.
· Today at 12:50 PM
Frank Rich on the National Circus: Romney’s Reckless Rebuke
· By Frank Rich
Every week, New York Magazine assistant editor Eric Benson talks with columnist and writer-at-large Frank Rich about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: attacks on U.S. diplomats in North Africa and the Romney campaign’s response.
Last night, Mitt Romney accused the Obama administration of sympathizing with the attackers who killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya. He was apparently referring to a statement issued by the U.S. embassy in Cairo that condemned the anti-Muslim movie that incited the violence. That statement, however, was issued hours before the Libyan attacks. Is Romney going to regret his sloppy response, or will this, regardless of the facts, mobilize his “no apology” base?
Here’s Romney’s language: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” The statement contains three major errors (or can we say lies?). Not only does it attribute an embassy statement to the Obama administration and falsify its timing, but it also ignores the administration’s actual “first response” to the Libyan violence (a sharp condemnation by Hillary Clinton). As if that weren’t bad enough for a single sentence, Romney also libels the president by accusing him of sympathizing with terrorists. Perhaps stuff like this will mobilize Romney’s base, but its Palin-esque, trigger-happy invective will drive away swing voters he supposedly covets. And keep in mind that Romney rushed to release this statement before the facts were even in — before we learned that the American ambassador and three others were killed in Libya. It’s hard to imagine how Romney’s statement could be more incendiary or tasteless in the tinder-box context of the moment. Even the right-wing blogger Erick Erickson tweeted that Romney should avoid this kind of bluster: “I think the Romney camp has to be very delicate in how it approaches this issue. Hard for partisans to see, but POTUS is POTUS.” If even a hothead like Erickson suggests that Romney is being reckless, you can see he now has blundered into yet another self-inflicted political mess. …
More from me:
Got this observation from a friend of mine:
What part of the embassy statement does Romney actually object to? Has he read it? Here’s what it says:
“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions”
Does Romney think that offending believers is a core American value that needs to be defended. Because if he does, there’s a lot of stuff floating around that’s sure to offend Mormons.
I just need to be clear about this: Is he really giving everyone license to mock his religion?
Good point. Let’s all mock Mitt’s crazy cult religion.
And let’s look at Mitt’s initial statement last night (on 9-11, because he didn’t even have the patience to wait until midnight to thoroughly embarrass himself while attacking the President of the United States):
“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Can anyone make the case this isn’t a complete lie? Bear in mind, the embassy statement was about 12 hours before the attacks on either embassy. So there were no “attackers” with whom to “sympathize.” The embassy was trying to diffuse tensions (in retrospect, a good idea). So on that basis alone, it is a lie (alternatively, Romney shot from the hip without having a clue what he was talking about – admittedly, a possibility, except that he doubled down on the lie today rather than try to write it off as a misunderstanding). Also, given that the embassy statement was made long before the attacks, it wasn’t “the Obama administration’s first response” to the attacks. That would have been Sec. Clinton’s excellent statement this morning. And, finally, by what stretch of the imagination did the embassy statement “sympathize” with the attackers (had there actually BEEN attackers at that point)? “we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions” What is wrong with that? Certainly not an apology, let alone sympathizing with intolerant radical Muslims.
A total lie on at least three levels.
And check out Romney’s smirk in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SVx23KPEk58
Catch what he said while doubling down on his lie from the night before: “The Embassy of the United States issued what appeared to be an apology for American principles. That was a mistake. And I believe that when a mistake is made, of that significance, you speak out. [self-satisfied smirk].” Please identify for me: a/ The apology, and b/ The American principles for which the embassy apologized. I see a condemnation of religious intolerance and hate. That seems like an affirmation of “American principles.” That is neither an apology nor is it inconsistent with “American principles” – unless Mitt considers religious intolerance an “American principle.”
But it doesn’t take a genius to see what he was doing there. It is part of an ongoing campaign theme of his to make President Obama seem alien or “un-American”. President Obama doesn’t believe in “American principles.” Essentially, Birther lite. It doesn’t matter if it is total lie. It is part of his low-road campaign – like his racist welfare lie.
Fortunately, it did WAY more damage to his campaign than it did to President Obama. Unfortunately, it broke with the long American tradition not to interject domestic partisan politics into a national tragedy like this.
Obviously, this pisses me off on SO many levels. The(three-level) lie. The opportunistic timing – on 9-11 as a national tragedy is unfolding. And another low-road appeal to the Birther crowd.
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