Mitt Romney is a joke and a jerk and the least qualified of the Republican candidates for the job of president.
Never mind his slide from liberal to conservative positions, which always spells "opportunist." Never mind that out of the canon of Western literature he chose as his favorite novel Battlefield Earth, a science-fiction potboiler by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard.
Romney has demonstrated in his public statements a truly astounding ignorance of the world. He also has shown himself to be a liar. He claimed to have been a hunter "pretty much all my life." Turns out, he’s been hunting twice.
His latest stupid statement is to demand that the United Nations not allow the president of Iran to speak and to arrest him for genocide. This, of course, is an attempt to pander to the extreme right of the Israeli lobby.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a former college professor and an Iranian populist. So far as I know, he has never killed anybody, and the notion, which Romney cites, that he has called for the destruction of Israel is false. One of his speeches was mistranslated into "wiping Israel off the map." He never said that. He said the Zionist state of Israel would disappear just as the Soviet Union disappeared.
He has specifically denied any intention of attacking Israel and has several times advocated a referendum in which Israeli Jews and all the Palestinians would vote and determine the kind of government they want to live under.
That’s obviously a bit too subtle for Romney and the foam-at-the-mouths he’s pandering to. Nevertheless, it is not up to American politicians to decide which head of state can address the General Assembly of the United Nations. His cheap threat to cut the funding of the U.N. if it fails to kowtow to his demand is unbecoming to anyone who aspires to lead the United States.
Romney has never seen a bandwagon he wouldn’t jump on, and the current bandwagon is to go to war against Iran. We’ve gone to war once under false pretenses. I hope the American people will not allow cheap, opportunistic panderers to do it a second time.
None of us, I presume, would care to live under the Islamic Republic. Well, we don’t have to. The quickest and most certain way to guarantee the Islamic Republic’s continued existence would be to attack Iran. Iranians would naturally rally to their government, and any hope of democratic change would die.
It’s sort of amusing when Romney says something stupid like believing that France has seven-year marriage contracts or mistakenly quotes one of Fidel Castro’s slogans to an anti-Castro audience and attributes it to those who want a free Cuba.
But I’ve had enough of shallow-minded ignoramuses in the White House. That job involves life-and-death decisions. It is a serious job that requires a serious person with knowledge of the world at large and the intelligence to make difficult decisions.
As for Ahmadinejad, Romney ought to feel a sense of kinship. Both men let their mouths get them in trouble. Both are panderers. And both are certainly tilted more toward authoritarianism than libertarianism. Both men are living proof that elections don’t always produce good leaders.
As for what the Iranian president says to the General Assembly, it’s none of our business. Let him say what he likes. We are, after all, the society that believes in free speech. Romney’s desire to silence a political opponent more resembles fascism than American democracy.
Mitt Romney is a stumblebum who should be sent back to Massachusetts and never allowed near the White House.
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
