The next question for Mitt Romney

The Romney campaign's echoing hollowness on foreign policy may--or rather should--soon replace all the talk of the Romney campaign's astonishing political amateurism. The NY Times, in a minor state of shock, quotes a senior staffer:

Mr. Romney’s camp was surprised by the blowback. "While there may be differences of opinion regarding issues of timing ... I think everyone stands behind the critique of the administration, which we believe has conducted its foreign policy in a feckless manner."

Yesterday, after posting a hard-copy litany of those possible "differences" from downright despondent Republicans--the Romney camp's ploy was an "utter disaster," "[un]presidential," "incompetent" and "just unbelievable"--BuzzFeed's Ben Smith mentioned in a television interview that Romney has been, and almost certainly will remain, strikingly silent on actual alternatives to President Obama's "feckless" foreign policy.

Because there aren't any, really. And even the feckless Mitt Romney knows it.

Which is to ask what else, by way of non-Obamian options, could Romney explicitly suggest? That while wrapping up one unpopular, unaffordable land war the United States commit incalculable troops to Egypt? Libya? Syria? That we occupy the entire Middle East? For a decade? A century? Anyone care to do the fiscal math on that, as well as tally the human toll?

OK, how about an air war? But against whom? Pro-American Libyans? Egyptian students? Syrian loyalists fighting just yards away from Syrian rebels?

And what of Israel's jingoistic "red line" against Iran?--which, as Fareed Zakaria observes this morning, even Israel discreetly refuses to draw.

As is true with virtually everything else, press Mitt Romney on foreign policy and you'll meet no intelligent resistance. There's nothing there. He's as hollow on world affairs and America's proper place in them as he is about Obama's shotgunning of welfare checks to shiftless post-Acorn agitators who drag illegal, Medicaid-defrauding, food-stamp-reaping Latinos to the polls.

Comments

[japa21]

As Eliot put it, although not speaking of Romney:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Applies to most of the GOP today.

[Janicket]

Holy guacamole, japa21, that was perfect.

[Beauzeaux]

If the President's foreign policy is feckless, Romney wants to make sure it's fecked.

[Turgidson]

I thought the GOP's campaign brains were smarter than this. I mean, the party has gradually but inexorably gone braindead in terms of policy and vision since Nixon invited the neo-confederates into the fold. But their braintrust for winning campaigns seemed to still be going pretty strong until not too long ago.

They were smarter to shut the hell up about foreign policy. While the Neocons may still hold astonishing sway in the party, their "War Forever! Every time a brown person thousands of miles away dies at the hands of US ordnance, a little girl gets a pony!" worldview is only slightly more popular than cyanide cocktails.

I don't get it. Romney, who is wisely, if cynically and cravenly, refusing to actually put forth a coherent economic agenda because he knows the one he and Granny Starver will actually pursue would be unpopular. In foreign policy, why say anything at all other than benign platitudes about America Fuck Yeah? People LIKE Obama's foreign policy record, and for good reason. We're out of Iraq, we got Osama, we stopped what looked to be an epic bloodbath in Libya without committing any ground troops, the world is more or less on the same page regarding Iran...

I know the left has gripes about Obama's drone war and his refusal to roll back some Bush era security state measures - I share them. But, despite Glenn Greenwald's dogged efforts, most voters don't really care about that. What they see is a sane but muscular foreign policy that has advanced our interests and refurbished our reputation. Romney's apology tour bullshit is belied by...the facts. As usual. I'm surprised he wasn't smart enough to just shut up and put on a foam USA #1 finger. Wait, no I'm not. He's an idiot. But GOP strategists didn't used to be.

[majii]

"I think everyone stands behind the critique of the administration, which we believe has conducted its foreign policy in a feckless manner."

This is one of the main problems in today's GOP-its members think that what they think, America thinks. Nope. They lack the ability to notice, or care, that most Americans want an end to endless wars, an end to subsidies to Big Oil and Big Business, an end to the GOP war on women, an end to their attempts to transform America into a Christian theocracy, and an end to tax cuts for the richest Americans. The GOP is tone deaf. Just as the party ignores the truth and facts,it ignores the polls showing what the majority of us want the government to do. The GOP refuses to give us government that is responsive to the things we consider important, and it is hellbent on imposing its conservative wishes on not only the U.S., but the world.