Is it possible that Mitt Romney is even dumber than George Bush? At yesterday’s GOP debate in Iowa, he tossed out the old Saddam equals al Qaeda canard that even Bush has been forced to repudiate:
“Just come home,” dissented Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the lone advocate of a quick troop withdrawal on a presidential campaign debate stage. He said there had never been a good reason to go to war in the first place.
“Has he forgotten about 9/11?” interjected former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Last year, during his address to the nation on the fifth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, Bush grudgingly admitted that the connection he and his administration’s top official made between Saddam and the attacks was a lie:
George Bush last night admitted that Saddam Hussein had no hand in the 9/11 terror attacks, but he asked Americans to support a war in Iraq that he said was the defining struggle of our age…
“I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” Mr Bush said
Romney’s assertion otherwise in the debate was of course, a lie. And yet the moderator, George Stephanapolous, the famous liberal, did not stop to ask him if he had new evidence of Saddam’s culpability in the 2001 attacks.
Romney is playing to the ever-shrinking GOP base — particularly to the last vestige of true-believers in the false Saddam-al Qaeda connection rolled out by Bush and his rightwing talk-radio propagandists in 2002 and 2003 during the run-up and aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
What is unsmart about this is the fact that the number of people who remain under the delusion that invading Iraq was retribution for the 2001 attacks is dwindling, even among Republicans. By the time votes are counted 64 weeks from now, the number who cling to the illusion that the attacks justified the war could be minuscule.
Ron Paul, the smartest GOP candidate, and thus the one no chance, also injected this rare moment of common sense into yesterday’s debate:
“If you make a mistake and you’re marching toward a cliff, the best thing you can do is march back,” Texas Congressman Ron Paul said.
The bad news is, history has taught us that intelligence is not even on the list of attributes Republicans look for in their presidents, so if history is to be our guide, they could well foist Romney on the nation, if the November 2008 election is close.
- Topic: Politics
- Topics: Campaign 2008
[...] Ya gotta love a blog post that starts “Is it possible that Mitt Romney is even dumber than George Bush?” [...]
Is there more context to Romney’s statement? If not, then the headline “Romney Repeats Descredited Claim That Saddam Was Behind 9/11″ is misleading and disingenuous. Romney’s statement “Has he forgotten about 9/11″ in no way says that Saddam executed/planned/funded or in any other way was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, only that invasion of Iraq resulted from those attacks.
Do you believe Iraq would still have happened if there were no 9/11? Whether you subscribe to the belief that the neo-cons hijacked public sympathy and eagerness for retribution to mislead us into Iraq, or believe that the invasion was a warranted and ambitious attempt to reshape the troubled middle east by laying seeds of western-friendly democracy, either way it’s not factually inaccurate to say that we’re in Iraq because of 9/11.
It is, however, factually inaccurate to state that Romney said something that he clearly did not: which is that saddam was somehow behind those attacks.
If you believe facts are on your side, then there’s no need to play them up. Doing so weakens your point of view and make people dismissive of your larger point.
Ease of “brain washability” must be a genetic trait. Mitt the Twit’s father,another Dumb George, in 1967 confessed to having been “brain washed” by the Johnson Administration concerning Vietnam. Mitt is obviously attempting to avoid the s**t his dad stepped in so he’s trying to brain wash the rest of us. Sorry, Mitt! too little, too late. Millions of Americans have come to realize they have not only been “brain washed” but have been “hung out to dry”. Following this brain fart,if your polls don’t drop like “flop” from a tall bovine’s a$$,the cumulative I.Q. of the nation’s Rethugicans has to be a negative number.
Comment by Stozzel | Aug. 7, 2007, 10:33 am
I just saw this article, and I agree the headline is misleading, but not as misleading as the conflating of 9/11 and Iraq.
Here’s where I disagree with your premise that the Iraq war would not have happened without 9/11. That is just factually inaccurate and assumes facts not in evidence. The Clinton and Bush administrations had been bombing the so-called no-fly zone for years before 9/11.
After Bush was appointed in 2000, he increased the bombings, even attacking radar installations outside the no fly zone.
Also, the man whom Bush had chosen to author his biography, prior to his ascension to the Presidency, has stated that Bush was planning then on the Iraq war as an asset to his presidency.
And lastly, the PNAC had been plotting and planning the Iraq invasion for years. In this sense you may be part right about 9/11. As the PNAC document stated; the plan was unlikely to be accepted unless some ‘catalyzing event, like Pearl Harbor’ were to occur.
It did, and we call that event 9/11.
In fact the war on/in Iraq has little bearing on the war on terror, except as a recruiting tool for Osama.
Hey,at least he has perfect hair and his complexion with all that makeup is flawless.This is all the rethugs need to vote Mitt into office.Forget about the issues,he’s got a pretty mouth.
Stozzel: It is Romney and you who are being disingenuous.
The only reason it is not “factually inaccurate to say we’re in Iraq because of 9/11″ is because Bush and company deliberately created the false connection between Saddam and the attacks as a part of their pretexts for war. To leave that out of the equation, as you did, truly is misleading and, yes, disingenuous.
While we’re hurling insults around, you are also being lazy. “Is there more context?” I assume your fingers aren’t broken since you typed the above. If you took the trouble to come here to cover for Romney and Bush, you ought to have come armed with the facts. It took about 40 seconds on the Google to find the transcript and, guess what, the context of the quote supports the description in the headline. Ron Paul says the Bush administration lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, and Romney interrupts to say 9/11 was the reason:
(The transcript ascribed the comments to “MCCAIN ?” But as you can see in the video, it is clearly Romney.)
Who’s hurling insults (besides you)?
I said, and still say, the headline is disingenuous. This is not an insult. Nothing in the expanded transcript you post has Romney saying Saddam was behind 9/11, which the headline states.
Stating that we are in Iraq because of 9/11 is simply not the same thing as saying Saddam was behind the attacks.
If Romney responded to someone questioning the motivation behind the invasion of Afghanistan with the same statement: “Have you forgotten about 9/11?”
and then pensito review posted a headline that said “Romney falsely claims Mullah Omar behind 9/11 attacks”, this would also be a misrepresentation of his statement.
Stozzel –
You say the headline of the article is misleading because Romney did not literally say the exact words, “Saddam caused 9/11″ — that there is another completely honest and benign interpretation of what he blurted out in this exchange:
Paul: We went to Iraq for no reason.
Romney: “Has he forgotten 9/11?”
The article interpreted this to mean “Has Paul forgotten we went to Iraq to take out Saddam because he was in cahoots with al Qaeda in planning 9/11?”
The benign alternative seems to be “Has Paul forgotten that we chose to invade Iraq because Saddam had WMDs and to bring democracy to the Middle East — and by an amazing confluence of events, the invasion occurred a few months after 9/11?”
The Bushies deployed similar rhetorical tactics to promote the Saddam-9/11 connection during their “marketing campaign” for the war. You won’t find a tape of them saying the exact words “Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks.” Therefore they didn’t say it.
But they and their media lapdogs did say it. Americans were told that an Iraqi agent met with an al Qaeda rep in Prague, that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, and that a terrorist was given shelter in Baghdad. What Americans weren’t told was that Saddam was a secularist, and like other secular dictators in the region — Musharaff and Mubarek, and the Saudi royals — he was on al Qaeda’s kill list.
Eventually, without the phrase “Saddam was behind 9/11″ ever being spoken, millions of people came to believe there was a connection. In fact, over half the country bought into this lie at one point. Tellingly, among Fox News watchers, the percentage was much higher. It was probably in the 90 percent range among Freepers and Dittoheads.
The percentage has dropped to rock bottom now. Only a handful of Republican dead-enders still believe Saddam knocked down the World Trade Center. This drop happened after Bush — who carefully never literally made the connection — was forced to say, literally, that Saddam was not behind the attacks.
Millions of people now believe they were lied to about this and the other bogus reasons we were given for going to war. And even though the connection has been denied by Dear Leader, the neocons and others are still out there fighting the good fight, arguing that the connection did exist, an argument that may have reached the nadir of speciousness in this thread. But normal Americans are not buying it.
Romney’s motive in interjecting the Saddam-9/11 connection into the debate is clear. He was not equivocating, nor was he making a casual observation about the fact that the invasion happened after 2001. He was tossing a bit of red meat to GOP dead-enders, trying to convince them to vote for him.