It’s hard keeping up with all the flip flops of Mitt Romney (as well as Newt Gingrich), but Mediaite has caught him in a doozie of one:
At Christmastime, it’s comforting to know that a Mitt Romney interview is the gift that keeps on giving. On Wednesday’s The Daily Rundown, host Chuck Todd drew a lot out of the candidate with his deceptively easygoing style. Todd asked Romney about the notion that “any president” would have carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and Romney said “I think other presidents and other candidates like myself would do exactly the same thing.”
But we have that internet and can find all kinds of good things from way back in 2007. Take for example what then candidate Barack Obama said:
“There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans,” he said. “They are plotting to strike again. . . . If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
As the writer of the Mediaite article puts it, “then-Sen. Obama couldn’t have described this setting better, in 2007, than if he were Miss Cleo”. And once President Obama’s premonition came to life, Republicans who attacked him in 2007 started thumping their chests, saying they would have done the same thing, like Mitt is doing, and even wanting to give George Bush the credit.
One of those attacking Republicans was Mitt Romney. Here’s what he said about Obama’s comments in 2007:
“I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours… I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort,” Romney told reporters on the campaign trail.
…Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is one of the Republican front-runners, said U.S. troops “shouldn’t be sent all over the world.” He called Obama’s comments “ill-timed” and “ill-considered.”
“There is a war being waged by terrorists of different types and nature across the world,” Romney said. “We want, as a civilized world, to participate with other nations in this civilized effort to help those nations reject the extreme with them.”
Sounds like if we had a President Mitt Romney, or even John McCain, who said similar things to Romney, Osama would be alive today plotting his next attack.
I really can’t wait for one of these Republicans to debate President Obama, especially on national security. For years the right tried to make the left look like the weaker side on this issue, but reality has shown something totally different. The polls even reflect this now and the right, which used to love getting to the issue of national security, now cowers away from the topic. That’s even more evident by how little attention the issue has received in the 13 debates we have had so far.
Welcome to the new Republican Party – one that ignores things like national security. Actually this is how it was in the early 90’s too and that gave time for a once U.S. ally to develop a terrorist network against the U.S. It wasn’t until then President Clinton learned of what was left over from another Bush Presidency and Clinton tried to take out this man. Of course that was met with criticism from Republicans, who thought Clinton was making something up to distract from Monica Lewinsky. Even one of then speaker Newt Ginrich’s top advisers sent out a letter to right wing radio talking about “wag the dog“.
That faux terrorist these Republicans were talking about? Osama bin Laden.