Showing posts with label flip-flop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flip-flop. Show all posts

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Vote For Romney The Choice of Conservative 17th Century French Aristocracy


















Vote For Romney The Choice of Conservative 17th Century French Aristocracy

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

    TODD: Do you think Citizens United was a bad decision? [...]

    ROMNEY:Well,I think the Supreme Court decision was following their interpretation of the campaign finance laws that were written by Congress. My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately and the creation of these independent expenditure committees that have to be separate from the candidate, that’s just a bad idea.


It’s not entirely clear from this interview that Romney understands what happened in Citizens United. That decision emphatically did not follow any “interpretation of campaign finance laws that were written by Congress.” Rather, Citizens United threw out a 63 year-old federal ban on corporate money in politics. Citizens United was a case of five conservative justices deciding they knew better than America’s democratically elected representatives, and it was not a case of judges following the law.

More importantly, however, Romney’s proposal to allow wealthy donors to give candidates whatever they’d “like to a campaign” is simply an invitation to corruption. Under Romney’s proposed rule, there is nothing preventing a single billionaire from bankrolling a candidate’s entire campaign — and then expecting that candidate to do whatever the wealthy donor wants once the candidate is elected to office. Romney’s unlimited donations proposal would be a bonanza for Romney himself and the army of Wall Street bankers and billionaire donors who support him, but it is very difficult to distinguish it from legalized bribery.

As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that [those candidates are] going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.
 Romney thus believes that corporations are people. If corporations are people that means Prince Romney believes money and free speech are one in the same. Those with the most money get the most free speech. Romney would have been a great French monarch.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Should Military Families Trust Mitt Romney. His Foreign Policy has Flip-flopped and he Is Not Sure What a Wise Decision Is




















Should Military Families Trust Mitt Romney. His Foreign Policy has Flip-flopped and he Is Not Sure What a Wise Decision Is

Appearing on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dodged a question about whether or not the U.S. should have invaded Iraq in 2003. Instead of answering the question about knowing what we know now, Romney, who’s flip-flopped between calling the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq “appropriate” and an “astonishing failure,” stood by his support for the war when he knew only what he knew then:

    WALLACE: [L]ooking back, and hindsight is always 20/20, should we have invaded? [...]

    ROMNEY: At that time, we didn’t have the knowledge that we have now. At that time, Saddam Hussein was hiding. He was not letting the inspectors from the United Nations into the various places that they wanted to go. The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] was blocked from going into the palaces and so forth. And the intelligence in our nation and other nations was that this tyrant had weapons of mass destruction.

    And in the light of that — that belief, we took action which was appropriate at the time.


While running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 at the height of the run-up to the Iraq war, Romney campaigned alongside President George W. Bush. Then-Romney aide and now-adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters: “Al Gore has been a critic to the president’s policies in regard to the war on terrorism, specifically on the plans with regard to Iraq. Mitt’s position is that he supports the president.”

In his 2007 presidential campaign, Romney answered the same question Wallace posed the same way. “I supported the president’s decision based on what we knew at that time,” he said, noting that Hussein had not allowed inspectors in. But, as Media Matters pointed out at the time, by the fall of 2002, U.N. inspectors had entered Iraq and were making progress taking stock of weapons of mass destruction programs.

Today, Romney repeated the false claim that Hussein never allowed inspectors in, adding that “the IAEA was blocked from going into the palaces.” However, in a March 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog wrote: “In the past three months they have conducted over 200 inspections at more than 140 locations, entering without prior notice into Iraqi… presidential palaces.”

Ignoring altogether what the Iraqi government wanted, Romney said the U.S. “should have left 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 personnel there.”

Many Romney advisers pushed for invading Iraq in the early 2000s, and now they’re doing the same with Iran.

Asked by Wallace if, as president, Romney would send troops back to Iraq, the candidate replied, “I think the decision to send U.S. troops into a combat setting is a — is a very high threshold decision. This is not something you do easily.” Perhaps he should apply that principle to his reflections about the initial invasion.

How hard can it be to remember and have a straight up opinion on something his buddy George W. Bush one of the three worse presidents in U.S. history did? Bush kicked out inspectors. Why? Because they were not finding the WMD Bush and the conservative media said were in Iraq. Should U.S. military families put their lives in the hands of someone who wants it both ways - to pretend he doesn't remember important historical facts and also says he is an expert on foriegn policy. Maybe he can see Russia from the balcony at his mansion. 


Saturday, December 10, 2011

Where Does Romney Stand On Iraq - Depends on Which Way The Wind is Blowing


















Where Does Romney Stand On Iraq - Depends on Which Way The Wind is Blowing

When President Obama announced in October that he was ordering all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, Mitt Romney’s campaign issued a statement assailing the president, calling his decision an “astonishing failure”:

    “President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women. The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government. The American people deserve to hear the recommendations that were made by our military commanders in Iraq.”

Yet today during an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board, Romney backtracked. Immediately after criticizing Obama for not keeping up to 30,000 troops in Iraq, the former Massachusetts governor said the withdrawal is the right move:

    ROMNEY: With regards to Iraq, of course we’re following the Bush timeline with one exception and that is the [blank space] President Bush and I believe others anticipated that we would have an ongoing force, somewhere between 10 and 20 and 30,000 there to help with the transition. President Obama’s own Secretary of Defense suggested that would be the case and they were unable to negotiate a status of forces agreement to allow the 10 to 20 to 30,000 troops to remain which I think was a failure on the part of the administration. But is the wind down in Iraq appropriate? Yes.


It seems like Romney and Newt Gingrich are in stiff competition for this year’s top GOP flip-flopper. Gingrich’s recent Iraq reversal clocked in at an impressive 13 seconds. Perhaps Romney is trying to reclaim the mantle.

It is either sad or ironic that Romney is the smartest of the Republican presidential candidates and probably the most compassionate. Those could be the two things that sink his campaign with a right-wing conservative base that has more in common politically with the Italian fascists of the 1940s than Abe Lincoln.

Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum: ‘Science Should Get Out Of Politics’