Rmoney's Foreign Policy

We already have a pretty good idea of Rmoney's foreign policy capabilities from the gaffes he committed on his July world tour. (YouTube, Al Jazeera) Now the Rmoney campaign has announced a foreign policy speech today at VMI (time? awwww, c'mon, we're talking about TPM here; you don't expect them to give you details, do you?) in which Rmoney... well, here it is in one graf:

The Romney campaign cast Obama as an outlier president who failed to continue a bipartisan tradition of a strong military and leadership in the world. Several times on the call, his advisers described Romney as following a tradition that included Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton while President Obama’s approach, they said, was similar to Jimmy Carter’s. Romney’s approach is “a restoration of a strategy that served us well for over 70 years” and will renew a “bipartisan vision” of foreign policy, Wong said. “[Obama’s] foreign policy is marked by passivity, by delay and by indecision.”

 

First of all, Rmoney's faulty memory has lost all but one recent Republican president; presumably he doesn't want to think about the Bushes and he doesn't want you to think about them either. One can hardly blame him, but if his heroes include Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton... WTF is he doing running as a Republican? The fact is that Truman, Kennedy and Clinton, for all their flaws, were inarguably competent presidents when it came to international matters, while the two Bushes ranged from throwing up on a foreign host to being unable to navigate off the stage after a foreign presentation. Rmoney's first trip abroad as presidential candidate suggests that he would follow in the tradition of the Bushes: nauseated and lost, just what America needs.

There's one other thing... the matter of nu‑cu‑lar weapons. Truman ordered the only use in history of an atomic weapon against a human population... two human populations, in fact. I'm not here at the moment to argue right or wrong on that decision, but admiring Truman (which I do) involves embracing or otherwise recognizing the fact that he dropped The Bomb on a lot of people (I do not embrace that decision). Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan and the President with No Name in Rmoney's Campaign (GeeDubya) spent their entire two terms each as president exhibiting some real enthusiasm for the use of nuclear weapons... indeed, I don't know if Bush 43 convinced Iraq that he would use The Bomb, but he certainly convinced me. Does Rmoney share that enthusiasm? I ask the question because whichever nation initiates nuclear conflict today probably triggers the end of the civilized world for at least decades to come.

Tell us, Mr. Rmoney... would you drop The Big One? on whom? with what degree (to use a singularly Republican phrase) of "acceptable losses"?

I know it is traditional not to make an issue of a presidential candidate's religion, but I can't help doing so: Mormon folklore (not specifically Joseph Smith's prophecies) contains references to future events some of which sound downright apocalyptic. Is it possible that Mr. Rmoney sees himself as helping to bring about the fulfillment of these events? I'm crazy, you say? really? who is crazy?