What makes Willard's thuggish imbecility on Libya different from his usual thuggish imbecility?

Willard's probably wondering why everyone's making such a big deal when he's just spewing his usual thuggish imbecility.

"The foolishness of Romney’s reaction is glaring. Pretending that the statement from the U.S. embassy in Cairo was anything other than a completely understandable and reasonable attempt by its occupants to save their own lives borders on disgraceful. Romney’s implication that the statement was issued at the height of the attacks is also false; it was actually released earlier in the day, a preventive measure aimed at keeping the protests from turning violent."

-- Steve Kornacki, in "Mitt's shameful Libya
statement," on salon.com

"'They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it's just completely blown up,' said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an 'utter disaster' and a 'Lehman moment' — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.'"

-- Ben Smith, in "Foreign Policy Hands Voice Disbelief
At Romney Cairo Statement," on BuzzFeed

by Ken

Poor Willard Inc. probably has no idea why people are saying such terrible things about him. After all, ever since he began his current campaign for the presidency, every time he opens his mouth out comes utter lying gibberish that could only be uttered by a submoronic predatory thug. So why should his monstrous blithering about the dreadful events in Egypt and Libya be any different? First let's have Steve Kornacki walk us through the episode:

"It's disgraceful," Romney's statement, which was released late Tuesday night, read, "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."

That's not at all what happened, of course. The actual chronology goes something like this: As anti-American protests inspired by a crude Terry Jones video began gathering steam, the U.S. embassy in Cairo -- and not the Obama White House -- put out a statement condemning "the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."

The obvious intent was to cool the passions of the protesters. As Marc Ambinder explained, it was "exactly what Americans inside the embassy who are scared for their lives now and worry about revenge later need to have released in their name."

Protests were also building in Libya, and sometime later the U.S. consulate in Benghazi came under siege, with news breaking late Tuesday night that a State Department official had been killed. It was around this time that two major American political figures released statements. One came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and read: "I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission. We are heartbroken by this terrible loss. There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind." The other was Romney's.

And today, as a number of people have put it, Willard "doubled down" on his saber-rattling imbecility. BuzzFeed's Ben Smith, who as we know only too well has extensive sympathetic contacts on the Right, quotes an unnamed Republican saying we know now why the Romney campaign has so aggressively shunned foreign-policy talk: "I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy. This is just unbelievable -- when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it."

Smith reports much concern on the Right.

Romney has not backed off the response — "It's never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values," he said Wednesday — but his campaign faces a near consensus in Republican foreign policy circles that, whatever the sentiment, Romney faltered badly.

"It’s deeply unfortunate when the circumstance of the statement becomes the story," said Rick Perry's former foreign policy adviser, Victoria Coates, who is now an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and who suggested that Romney should simply have "gone earlier rather than save it for midnight" to avoid appearing to play politics on September 11. "It’s unfortunate that it’s playing out this way, and hopefully they can get back on message, because their point is sound," she said.

Other conservatives were less sympathetic.

"It's bad," said a former aide to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. "Just on a factual level that the statement was not a response but preceding, or one could make the case precipitating. And just calling it a 'disgrace' doesn't really cut it. Not ready for prime time."

A third Republican, a former Bush State Department official, told BuzzFeed, "It wasn't presidential of Romney to go political immediately -- a tragedy of this magnitude should be something the nation collectively grieves before politics enters the conversation."

That third Republican, however, agrees with Victoria Coates ("Rick Perry's former foreign policy adviser," remember -- so you know she must be good) that "their point is sound." Says this former Bush regime State Department official:

Romney's attack is spot-on — disgusting that the first Obama administration impulse was to apologize instead of condemning violent religious intolerance. Obama's gotten a real pass on his intervention in Libya, his failed strategy in Afghanistan, and his lack of leadership in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. By trying to cut it down the middle in his foreign policy, no one knows where or for what Obama or America stands in the world these days.

Of course he's an asshole. Not that the administration's Middle East policies have been above reproach. Far from it. But people like this make the Obama team sound like geniuses, prattling on about some mysterious "leadership" the U.S. could have exerted without a ghost of a clue what that might have consisted of, or how it might have produced anything but far more catastrophic results.

And of course this business about a supposed U.S. policy of "apologizing" is simply lying cretinous nonsense. As always with the Right, you don't know whether it's the result of gross stupidity or gross dishonesty. Steve Kornacki summons the September 2011 PolitiFact.com assessment of this tired Romney claim ("Pants on Fire") as he notes: "That it’s fundamentally dishonest hasn’t stopped Mitt Romney from repeating his central critique of Barack Obama's foreign policy over and over -- the idea that the president 'went around the world and apologized for America.'"

But to return to my original point, that Willard himself probably doesn't understand why suddenly people are so stressed about him spewing another swamp of lies and delusions, when it's what he does every moment of his waking-candidate life. I can tell you why I take note of this. Here we have this man who would be president having to respond to a crisis in real time, and having neither any requisite knowledge for it, nor any knowledgeable advisers, nor the slightest inclination to acquire either of the above.

As I put it in a note to Howie this morning: "I suppose it could be argued that this does sort of prefigure a kind of situation that a President Willard might actually have to deal with, and suggests that on this evidence he, um, may not be exactly up to the job."

He replied: "Yeah, he might not be."


POSTSCRIPT: DOES IT MATTER THAT WILLARD EITHER
(1) DOESN'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN EMBASSY &
A CONSULATE OR (2) DOESN'T KNOW THE CAPITAL OF LIBYA?

Over at AmericaBlog, John Aravosis notes that not once, not twice, but three times in his idiotic statement Willard Inc. referred to attacks on U.S. "embassies," one of those times referring specifically to "our embassy at Benhazi, Libya."

Of course the embassy is in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and what we have in Benghazi is a consulate. That's certainly how I heard the story reported on the radio this morning, as an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Says John:

It's a rookie mistake to confuse embassies and consulates, and it's the kind of thing that anyone with any training in diplomacy and international relations would immediately look out for, and notice. Romney should have seen this speech and immediately said "Libya's capital [is] Tripoli, and our embassy isn't in Benghazi." But he didn't. Because Mitt Romney simply has no background in foreign policy. But that didn't stop him from weighing in immediately on a major national security crisis, with the presidential backdrop and all.

Considering that Willard knows essentially nothing about the U.S. of A., at least the one that 99 or more percent of us live in, why should it be surprising that he knows absolutely nothing about anyplace else? And apparently can't be bothered to hire flacks who do?

I very much doubt that Willard knows it, but there actually was a time, the period of the Libyan kingdom, from 1951 to 1969, when Benghazi, the capital of Libya's eastern Cyrenaica province, was a co-capital of the country, but it strikes me as overwhelmingly likely that even then the U.S. embassy was in Tripoli, which reverted to the country's sole capital at the time of the coup that brought a young officer named Gadaffi to power.


A FINAL WORD FROM PAUL KRUGMAN: HAS WILLARD
DOOMED HIMSELF BY MAKING THE PRESS NOT LIKE HIM?

September 12, 2012, 7:11 PM
Why The Vileness Matters

I haven't weighed in on Romney's awesomely awful intervention on events in Egypt and Libya; with even Republicans joining in the chorus of shocked disapproval, not much I can add.

But maybe I can say something about why this matters for the campaign.

There will probably be some voters moved directly against Romney by this spectacle, and none moved toward him. Yes, there are quite a few Americans who are willing to believe that the man who has been president for three and a half years -- and who killed Bin Laden -- actually sympathizes with terrorists. But everyone in those fever swamps is already an Obama-hater, and Romney has just made himself look small and hysterical to everyone else.

But the real impact probably comes via the press.

I've seen some comparisons between Mitt Romney's position right now and that of George W. Bush after the Democratic convention in 2000, and by the numbers there is some resemblance. But what really happened in the final months of that election? The answer -- not a popular one with journalists, but very obviously true to anyone who lived through it -- was that the press took sides. Reporters liked Bush and didn't like Gore, and as a result they treated Bush with kid gloves while gleefully passing on every smear against his opponent ("Gore says he invented the internet!" No, he never did).

That probably wasn't going to happen this time in any case. But now Romney has really ensured that everyone in the news media, the GOP propaganda organs aside, is going to view him with distaste and alarm -- as well they should.

Romney could still win, but he has just made it even harder for anyone to consider him suitable for the job.

#