That's our Willard!

by Ken

I have more to say about the increasingly unspeakable Willard Inc. in the wake of his adventure in foreign-policy adventuring, but I thought I'd give it a rest today, thanks partly from a subway trip-from-hell getting home this evening, which has left me in poor condition to reflect.

I might note, however, that earlier today AmericaBlog's John Aravosis caught our Willard making essentially the same "apology" to Muslims offended by that dreadful film which Willard so savagelyl excoriated, and continues to excoriate, the U.S. embassy in Cairo for making on Tuesday. "Mitt Romney apologizes to terrorists who killed US ambassador.") He sees no contradiction, of course, because -- as I keep trying to explain to you -- he has essentially no idea what's coming out of his mouth. It's all just stuff, words, designed to produce feelings in some category or other of voters, or donors, or fluffers, or somebody.

After offering detailed versions of both statements, John writes:

So let's compare:

US embassy: "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims... We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others."

Romney: "I think people should have the common courtesy and judgment -– the good judgment– not to be -– not to offend other peoples’ faiths."

Romney just said exactly the same thing that the embassy did, but Romney went one more step. He said that you should abuse the First Amendment. Remember, Republicans were upset that the embassy didn't DEFEND the First Amendment. Romney, went one step further and accused the filmmaker of abusing it. So there are moral limits on the First Amendment, Romney says. So is Romney saying the violence was justified? Well, he's certainly suggesting that the filmmaker doesn't have clean hands here.

This is beyond belief. If anything, Romney's statement is "worse" than the US embassy statement, because Romney made clear that there are moral limits to the First Amendment.

Under Romney's definition, and Fox's and GOP Chair Reince Priebus, Mitt Romney just apologized to the folks who killed our ambassador.

"Just wait a few hours," John suggests, "Romney is going to be backtracking on this entire thing."

Meanwhile, at The American Prospect, Steve Erickson has a terrific piece about "Mitt Romney's Character Problem." Here's a sample:

Romney’s current troubles don’t stem from miscalculation or even a duff convention in Tampa but are manifestations of his own political character as heard and witnessed over the past half-decade. This is a man who has altered his positions—not modified, not tailored, not hedged, but utterly transformed—on every single issue from abortion to climate change to the health-care reform that he signed as governor in Massachusetts. Now he runs a campaign that doesn’t want to talk about his record as governor or as a financier and that refuses to put forth an economic alternative of any detail beyond building the Alaska pipeline and lowering taxes for people like himself, even as at the same time he won’t show us what he pays in taxes now or whether he pays taxes at all. His adamant hostility to revealing anything that resembles an authentic belief or credible strategy for accelerating the recovery is not only losing Romney the choice part of the election but the referendum part as well, as the Democrats succeed in making this a referendum on Romney, not Obama. Romney’s selection of Ryan was meant both to reassure the party’s base and bathe the presidential candidate in the glow of the vice-presidential candidate’s reputation as a man of integrity and candor. As evinced by the ticket’s appearances on this past Sunday morning’s news programs and Ryan’s speech at the Republican Convention, when he blamed Obama for a plant that closed during his predecessor’s term and for a Medicare cut that Ryan himself supports and for not embracing a debt-commission report that Ryan himself opposed and for the country’s credit downgrading that Ryan himself brought about as much as any single individual, it is truth-teller Ryan who bathes in the glow of Romney’s irrefutable standing as the phoniest nominee of our lifetime.

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