December 29, 2007
by Robert Fantina

As the countless multitudes currently seeking the presidency continue to prattle on endlessly about a wide variety of topics, casual observers soon lose the capacity to distinguish the occasional, factual statement from the inane blather. However, former Massachusetts governor and current GOP presidential candidate wannabe Mitt Romney utters statements so outrageous that they make one sit up and take notice. In a single speech in Humblot, Iowa he showed his ignorance, his inexplicable clasping at President Bush's tattered coattails and, most importantly, his dangerousness.

In responding to a comment made by one of his rivals, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who has dethroned him as the frontrunner in Iowa, Mr. Romney showed either his own stupidity, or his belief in the stupidity of the American voter.

Mr. Huckabee violated the Republican playbook rule of ignoring facts when he referred to President George Bush's foreign policy as 'arrogant bunker mentality." He further stated that a Huckabee administration would "recognize that the United States' main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists."

Mr. Romney, a Bush clone in many regards, found the 'bunker mentality' statement extremely offensive. Said he: "I can't believe he'd say that. I'm afraid he's running from the wrong party." He then made what is the most startling statement he has made in some time: "The truth of the matter is this president has kept us safe these past six years and that has not been easy to do."

One must suppose that he is referring to the time period from September 12, 2001, to the present. That assumption is necessary because, by all accounts, Mr. Bush missed the clues he should have seen that might have prevented the disasters of September 11, 2001 which, Mr. Romney might wish to learn, happened while Mr. Bush was president. That he was busy reading My Pet Goat at the time is unimportant.

As reported by 'TruthOut,' "The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration ignored hard evidence from its top intelligence officials between April and September of 2001 about an impending attack by al-Qaeda on US soil." The report further states the following: "Meanwhile, as the administration continued to focus on re-making the Middle East, the CIA sent President Bush a daily intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001, saying the agency had 'detected patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings;' no one in the administration acted on the report.

"Yet even top officials in the Clinton administration, whom President Bush and his senior aides have blamed over the years for not being tough in fighting al-Qaeda during their tenure in office, warned the new administration that al-Qaeda was determined to strike inside the US. President Bush, it seems, heeded the warning, appointing Cheney to head a task force to 'combat terrorist attacks on the United States.' But the task force never met, according to the 9/11 Commission report."

So it appears that Mr. Romney is relying on the short attention span of the U.S. voters, in the hope that they will remember the attacks, but will somehow be confused as to when they occurred.

Mr. Bush, Mr. Romney tells us, has kept us safe. One must therefore assume that the former governor from Massachusetts also praises former Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton and recognizes that they 'kept us safe' and doing so was not 'easy.' After all, the last attack on American soil prior to those of 9/11 was Pearl Harbor. It was during Mr. Bush's administration that the unbroken record of 10 presidents was finally destroyed by four hijacked airliners. Five of those presidents were Democrats, described by Mr. Romney in his response to Mr. Huckabee as 'the wrong party.'

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So by praising Mr. Bush, Mr. Romney apparently hopes that the 33% of Americans who approve of the president's job performance will rush to the polls on Election Day and vote for Mr. Romney in the hope of continuing for at least four more years Mr. Bush's disastrous policies. While one might be excused for wanting to remind Mr. Romney that 33% does not represent a majority, one should not be hasty; the Supreme Court could weigh in and appoint the former Massachusetts governor as it appointed Mr. Bush in 2000.

The idea that Mr. Bush has been so busy keeping us safe, as expressed by Mr. Romney, is greatly puzzling. While 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, the current president has killed more U.S. soldiers in Iraq alone (not including the U.S. body count from Afghanistan) than the number of citizens who died that day. And one must look at his record of keeping others safe: over 1,000,000 Iraqis have died due to Mr. Bush's illegal, immoral and totally unjustified invasion of that nation.

Unlike Mr. Huckabee, who chose to look at facts prior to making his assessment of Mr. Bush's foreign policy, Mr. Romney continues to see historical realities as inconvenient, and certainly not worth boring the U.S. electorate with. It must be remembered that, during the second Republican debate, Mr. Romney made the following remarkable statement when asked if the war in Iraq was justified: if ".Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction -- had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions -- we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in."

Mr. Romney was apparently too busy preparing for his run for the presidency to follow the then-current news about how Mr. Hussein had in fact (there is that irksome word again) opened his country to the IAEA weapons inspectors giving them unprecedented access to suspected sites in Iraq. He is seemingly unaware that, after several months of searching, the inspectors found nothing. He then missed the news about President Bush advising the U.N. that it had better remove the inspectors: his bombs were coming.

This is the man that would be president: one who is unaware of recent historical realities; who is willing to twist facts in the apparent hope that the U.S. voter will accept his convoluted view of events; who has previously stated his desire to double the population of the U.S. torture center known as Guantanamo. While many people were aghast when conditions there were made public, Mr. Romney said this: "I am glad [detainees] are at Guantanamo. I don't want them on our soil. I want them on Guantanamo, where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil. I don't want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo." So much for due process, another trifling principle Mr. Romney dismisses.

A Romney presidency would bring continued, endless war; further erosion of basic civil rights; greater intolerance and increased polarization of U.S. society. The U.S. government will continue to be a pariah on the world stage, feared by it's own citizens and hated abroad. While few of the political actors currently strutting across that stage have the potential to demonstrate real leadership (Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul being notable, possible exceptions), in a lesser-of-several-evils evaluation, Mr. Romney does not come out even close to the top. His continued warlike rhetoric, his disdain for human rights and his striking inability to see facts make him a danger to the nation and the world.

Mr. Romney, it appears, would continue Mr. Bush's 'arrogant bunker mentality.' That is exactly what the world does not need.

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Robert Fantina [send him email] is a long-time activist for peace and social justice. He has worked with the Coalition for Peace Action in New Jersey. Following the 2004 presidential election, he moved to Canada, where he now resides. Robert is the author of Desertion and the American Solder: 1776-2006.

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