palestinians Archives - Where Is The Outrage?

How big a liar is Mitt Romney?

Well, I would admit that it is hard to quantitate lying. I have talked about Mitt Romney lying several times. Steve over at MaddowBlog has a long list of Mitt lies.

Let’s look that these two statements Mitt Romney said in the recent past. Are they the same or different?

So Mitt gave his foreign policy speech today and said – Finally, I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel. On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew.

Mitt told private donors – I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way … the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish … [S]o what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

I think that Mitt believes that he is on a roll. He is trying to capitalize. He thinks that he can talk foreign policy. He can’t. The Middle East is complex. He is trying to fool Americans into believing that all the Middle East needs is a strong leader and will fall in line. Horse feathers. Wasn’t Bush a strong leader? Why didn’t he get it done? Wasn’t Reagan a strong leader? Why didn’t he get it done? The problem is that the problems in the Middle East run very deep. They run to the core of Israel and Palestine. During arguments folks will whip out the Bible, the old testament, to support their arguments. You can’t fix that with some knucklehead flexing his muscles talking about strong leadership. It simply will not work.

Romney’s Gaffe Tour

I agree with David Kurtz at TPM:

First and most important, talking up the innate superiority of the Israelis over the Palestinians isn’t, by any definition, a gaffe. That’s real, with real geopolitical consequences. He didn’t misspeak (and I’m not sure one can “misspeak” about such things anyway), and his initial claim to have been misinterpreted has been trumped by his decision to reiterate all the same points to the conservative audience at National Review.

Second, it’s hard to imagine Romney’s gaffes, missteps, and flat-out egregious mistakes happening if he had a different, i.e., solid, foreign policy team advising him. (Ignore the silly, DC-centric focus on whether his press team mismanaged the ensuing uproar.) Romney has no core foreign policy team. It’s also a team without a core. No surprise since it serves mostly to check the box of various conservative foreign policy constituencies. David Rothkopf can and does explain this part of it a lot better than I. Go read him.

The easy flourish to conclude with here would be drawing a heavy black line from Mitt’s team not having a core to Mitt himself not having a core. Maybe that’s true. But Romney is not the first presidential nominee to wind up saddled with an advisory team that is designed for political reasons to reflect the various constituent parts of his party instead of designed to get the real, difficult work done in service of the nominee. So you don’t have to reach the ultimate conclusion about Mitt’s own core — unless and until he fails to fix his team.