Mitt Romney Slamming Away In All Directions

Mitt's in a slammin' mood lately. He feels he's the only Republican after his party's presidential nomination who isn't certifiably insane, and the only one who won't hand the increasingly unpopular Barack Obama a second term. Obama and his team of Wall Street lackeys may be destroying any semblance of enthusiasm from the Democratic base, but the hope in the West Wing is that a crazed teabagger candidate like Palin will re-energize Democrats and even independents and moderate Republicans to turn out for the president.

Romney-- the one Republican candidate who didn't jump on the anti-Scozzafava bandwagon-- may not have endeared himself to the teabaggers but staked out the ground as the "serious" and "adult" challenger to Obama. Lately he has been trying to raise his profile and repaint it as a fighter. This weekend he was fighting Tim Pawlenty, who he as much as called a liar on national TV, and his old antagonist, the anti-Mormon fanatic Mike Huckabee. Romney meted out revenge on Huck during an appearance on Larry King Live, driving home for viewers that Huckabee's judgment is impaired and untrustworthy by pointing out the unwarranted clemency he granted to Maurice Clemmons, who went on to murder 4 police officers last week.

His attacks on Obama have been on much shakier grounds, lashing out against TARP, the Stimulus Plan, the jobs bill and Obama's lack of experience as a business leader. (Romney was a vulture capitalist with Bain, something that would disqualify him from ever being considered for public office anywhere but in Idiot America. Romney was more nuanced, however, when it came to Afghanistan. He's all for the surge, of course. If there's one thing he learned from his father's failure to ever win the GOP nomination, it's that Republicans demand saber-rattling assholes as their candidates. His father, a popular Michigan governor, and once the front-runner for the GOP nomination won by Richard Nixon, was widely quoted as saying:

"When you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you don't kill them and destroy their property. You don't use bombers and tanks and napalm to save them."

Neither Mitt-- nor Barack, for that matter, seems to give that idea much consideration. Romney has adopted the standard GOP attack line regarding Afghanistan: "escalation, good; dithering and time-line, bad."

“And, by the way, you’re noting that Republicans are not making this a political football,” the former White House hopeful added. “Republicans are saying ‘Yeah, he’s done the right thing here.’”

But, Romney’s praise of Obama quickly turned to criticism.

“It took him a long time,” Romney said of Obama’s 3-month deliberation process. “That was a mistake, of course.

“I think he is mistaken also in sending these conflicting and confusing signals about the timeline because you don’t want in any way to have [Pakistan or Afghanistan] thinking that somehow we’re only in there for 18 months and then we’re getting out no matter what. That’s not the message you want to have heard.”

Romney also questioned Obama’s judgment in providing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan with 30, 000 additional troops when McChrystal had reportedly requested 40,000 more.

“My first question is not, ok, how do I get it down to 30,000?” Romney told CNN Chief National correspondent John King. “My first question is what’s the right number?”

“I think [Obama] may have been a little unwise to cut back on that number,” Romney said Sunday. “But we sure hope [Obama’s surge] works,” the Republican added.

On the other hand, to many conservatives, particularly Evangelicals, Romney's religion makes him an instrument of Satan. And they're just not going to vote for a Mormon bishop running for the presidency.

[T]here is a legitimate case to be made for judging any candidate for office by his religious convictions.

In late 2007, Mitt Romney made his somewhat-famous speech on religion, where he spoke the following words:

“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

Similarly, Romney has stated: “I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it…my faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs.”

If freedom requires religion, if his Mormon faith sustains his life and he will be true to those practices, then I’m at an utter loss as to why we should ignore Romney’s religious beliefs when evaluating his fitness for the White House.

We ask plenty of questions of any Evangelical Christian candidate: what do his beliefs about the nature of God, the nature of the cosmos, and the meaning of man’s life mean for his potential tenure in office? But for whatever reason, these questions are looked at as unnecessarily piercing and prejudiced when asked of a member of a minority faith.

When Sarah Palin gave her fumbling answer about Israel’s settlements, several commentators jumped on her faith, wondering whether she subscribed to the bizarre but potent sect of modern Christianity that believes in the imminence of the End Times. Will anyone ask Mitt Romney about the oddities of the dogma of the Mormon Church? There are plenty of Mormon doctrines that may strike people as a bit odd — and rightly so. It is established in the church that the devout can reach the upper echelons of heaven and eventually become gods themselves, able to create their own universes and govern them as they see fit (all while supervised by the One True God). Why is it that when I bring this up to Romney fans, I am dismissed as a bigot?

I guess because they didn't watch this video about Mormonism yet!