Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The key word here is "disgraceful"


In the wake of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Libya and Egypt and the Obama administration response, Mitt Romney released this statement:
"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. 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."
Leave aside the merits of the measured administration statement or the in-the-heat  responses from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which were not "administration" response. You do not have to be expert in anything to assess the merit of Romney's reaction -- or his fitness for the presidency. You need only be a social mammal of the human species.

In response to everything Obama does or says -- or, for that matter, anything his primary opponents did or said -- Romney's reaction is so knee-jerk condemnatory, so extravagantly worded, so predictably self-serving that the instinctive response for most listeners or readers not themselves besotted with hatred for the target has got to be, "this guy is faking it."  His condemnations have the rote extravagance of a Soviet communique.

I don't think that I'm simply generalizing from my own response here. A majority even of Republicans think that Romney typically "says what he thinks people want to hear" rather than that he "says what he believes." Much of that belief obviously stems from his own shifting policy positions.  But some stems, I suspect, from his Gingrichian denunciations.

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