Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch: The Gaffetastic Fall of Mitt Romney

Desperate campaigns often to stupid things and Willard Mitt Romney has been in the throes of desperation more common to crackwhores jonesing out since the end of the Democratic National Convention. It would be almost sad to watch were it not so hilarious.

In all honesty, I have no idea why Obama got a convention bounce and Romney didn't. Both conventions were among the most boring unwatchable messes I had ever seen. Sure, there were exceptions, such as Bill Clinton reminding us that he's the Muhammad Ali of lying and the insane spectacle of sending Clint Eastwood on TV without a script, but the only candidate who deserved increased support from the Republican and Democratic conventions was Libertarian Gary Johnson.

But after Obama's fantastically dull speech, it became clear to Team Romney that he wasn't just losing, he was losing badly. The Obama campaign had successfully defined Mitt and if his convention couldn't change that, chances are that nothing would. And that's never good.

On the other hand, it's entirely Romney's fault. He had every chance to define himself and his principles (to the extent that either actually exists) during the GOP primaries when he was under withering assault from the Seven Dwarves that sought to take the nomination that was rightly his, but he didn't. That would be risky, so Romney decided to carpet-bomb them with money instead.

The governor figured that he could fix everything at his Lifetime movie of a convention, but it was too late. The narrative, largely about his activities at Bain Capital, had already been set in stone. The most devastating fact of all was that the harshest attacks on Bain came not from the Democrats, but from Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. To my knowledge, Barack Obama has yet to utter the words "vulture capitalism." On the other hand, he doesn't have to, since other Republicans did it for him. At the end of the day, Gingrich and his bagman, Sheldon Adelson, turned out to be the best surrogates the Obama for America could have had.

For the last week and half Mitt Romney has smelled his dreams dying in the street and knew that something had to be done about it, post-haste. We're getting late in the calender now and having Obama expand his national lead just won't do, especially when Romney's electoral college map was always so narrow. The GOP has essentially abandoned Michigan and Pennsylvania, which suggests that they're basically fighting on George Bush's 2004 map. The problem with that is that it doesn't provide the Romney campaign with any margin of error.

Then North Africa exploded on, of all days, Tuesday September 11. The Romney folks obviously thought that this was an opportunity that he couldn't help but exploit. They did, and it turned out to be an exceptionally bad idea.

First, nobody actually knows what the Republican policy on the Arab Spring actually is. I know more than my share about this history of U.S foreign policy, and I can't figure out what the GOP actually wants.

I had more than a little to say about Bush's second inaugural address with its "freedom agenda" and not much of it was particularly flattering. But it is an inescapable conclusion that the Arab Spring is exactly the logical conclusion of it. This is what the Bush foreign policy was designed to accomplish, as the former president said repeatedly at the time. But, as with everything involving Bush, Republicans now pretend that it never happened.

This is what I said on January 20, 2005;

Secondly, there are countries in the region where "democracy" is not in the interest of the United States. Two of these countries are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The neoconservative community, as exemplified by Richard Perle and David Frum in their book, An End to Evil , argue that the choice is between the Mubarak government and the House of Saud and something better and freer. In fact, the reverse is true. Successive Egyptian governments and the Saudi monarchy have devoted decades to liquidating moderate and democratic opposition. It would take several decades to rebuild these moderates to a degree that they could reasonably be expected to govern. To expect an overnight transformation is incredibly dangerous and criminally irresponsible.

(...)

In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, were an election held tomorrow, the jihadists would win it. They are the only ones organized enough to be politically effective, and they enjoy broad popular support. In these nations, the choice is not between Hosni Mubarak and Thomas Jefferson, it is between Hosni Mubarak and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Despite the rhetoric, democracy in the Middle East - at least in the near term - is directly counter to the national security interests of the United States. As unpleasant as that reality is, to not recognize it as a reality is dangerously naive.

The second problem is the public attitudes of the Middle East. During the Cold War, the people of Poland, for example, knew that the United States had their interests at heart. That is why they are such a stalwart ally today. Nowhere in the world is the US more popular than it is in the former nations of the Warsaw Pact.

In the Middle East, the United States is not seen this way. America is seen as a power that has maintained their oppressive governments in the interest of stability and cheap oil. While the people of Eastern Europe trusted America, the people of the Middle East do not. To ignore this is to prolong that perception.

Anyone who's surprised about the popular anti-American sentiment in the region just doesn't know their history. That things would come to this was one of the most predictable developments in recent world history. But don't try to remind a Republican of that. At the time, such criticism was met with accusations that those making it were "racist" for suggesting that "Arabs can't have a democracy."
Far be it from most Republicans to accept responsibility for policies that they voted for and spent years supporting rhetorically, especially when it's much easier to deny that they ever did it and blame Obama instead.

And that's precisely what Romney proceeded to do. Of course, he wouldn't wait for any actual facts to come out. He just charged ahead, mostly because he's desperate.

Mitt Romney is out with a statement condemning President Obama over the attacks on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya, the latter involving the death of an American, officials have said.

“I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi," said Romney in the statement, which the campaign initially embargoed for midnight, which was when the 9/11 anniversary would have ended, and was sent out a short time ago (this was one of the sharper statements of the day, although as I noted earlier, the anniversary was hardly devoid of politics by both Democrats and the Obama campaign, and Republicans, before this).

"It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” Romney added.

Actually, the part about sympathizing with the attacks refers to a tweet from someone inside the Cairo embassy that was designed to placate the mob before the embassy was stormed, not an official communication of the administration afterward.

In the wake of this disastrous gaffe, Republicans everywhere doubled down and tried comparing it to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the subsequent rescue attempt that failed at Desert One. Sadly, this too is a false narrative from people who either don't know their history or are determined to lie about it.

Former President Carter's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis helped torpedo his reelection hopes. But when news broke in April 1980 that an attempt to rescue Americans held hostage at the Tehran embassy had failed, the immediate response from the campaign trail was more supportive than critical.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan told reporters it wouldn't be appropriate for him to express an opinion at that time. "This is the time for us as a nation and a people to stand united" and to pray, Reagan said, according to United Press International.

George H.W. Bush, also campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, went further. "I unequivocally support the president of the United States -- no ifs, ands or buts -- and it certainly is not a time to try to go one-up politically. He made a difficult, courageous decision," Bush said in Michigan, UPI reported.

(...)

"Your question is difficult to answer," Reagan said, when the debate moderator asked how he would deal with a similar hostage crisis. "Because, in the situation right now, no one wants to say anything that would inadvertently delay, in any way, the return of those hostages if there is a chance of their coming home soon, or that might cause them harm."

During an important foreign policy crisis in the spring of 1980, both leading Republican candidates (and future presidents themselves) allowed no daylight between themselves and Carter. And that is something that Governor Romney pointedly refused to do this week, instead blaming Obama (and implicitly, the United States) first.

Predictably, it blew up in his face. It was Romney's "Lehman Brothers moment" almost exactly four years to the day after John McCain invented it and guaranteed Obama's election as president.

Then comes that old, pathetic GOP standby, blaming the media for everything. I'm not aware of it ever having worked, but Republicans just can't seem to break themselves of it. It's especially precious watching Fox News - who are the self-described number one voice in news - engage in it, while having demented partisans like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin offer what's supposed to pass for analysis.

More than anything else, it exposes the schizophrenic narrative modern conservatives have come to embrace. On one hand they want you to know that no one pays attention to the "Lamestream Media" anymore and that it's effectively meaningless in modern life. On the other, they can't stop complaining about being constantly foiled by it. It's as if they've taken the 60's era liberal persecution complex and made it all their own, while both decrying and mocking its effectiveness.

It's too soon for any significant polling to be done in the wake of this nightmare, but I can't imagine that's going to look the way Willard and his minions want it to. Americans tend to rally around the president in times of crisis, and I'd be shocked of this time was any different. If what is widely accepted as a five-point Obama lead didn't balloon to ten by Monday, I wouldn't be all that surprised.

Once that happens, this campaign is finished. It would be almost unprecedented for a challenger to overcome a lead that large this late in the day. More importantly, everything that Romney says about foreign policy after this week is going to be highly suspect and scrutinized beyond belief.

I was going to start this week by posting an obituary for the Romney campaign on Monday. I was going to call it "It's Over" and embed the Roy Orbison song of the same name at the end of it. But I didn't feel like it. I'm glad I didn't because it would have been premature.

Also, Tampa never struck me as an appropriate cemetery for hopes and dreams as grandiose as Willard Mitt Romney's. Benghazi, on the other hand, is more than exotic enough a place to throw the dirt down after the funeral rites are read.