Mitt Insults Marines, Outlines Foreign Policy for Fantasy World

Update: See the Chickenhawk Hall of Shame:  “Let you and him go fight; I’ll hold your coat.” – Motto of the Chickenhawk

From Joe Lieberman to Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney, chickenhawks love to talk tough about using military force because it makes them look tough, a political asset. The problems are obvious.

From Ed Kilgore:

Semper Fi, Mitt!

I was reading Spencer Ackerman’s scathing summary of the foreign policy/national security sections of Mitt Romney’s new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and had to laugh out loud at this brief aside:

Romney himself never served, and his unfamiliarity with military issues is evident in ‘No Apology.’ He proposes adding ‘at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines’ (Marines are not soldiers)….

You don’t have to have served, but need simply to have known a Marine (and they never, by the way, become ‘ex-Marines’), to be aware that Marines strongly object to being lumped in with Army folk as ‘soldiers.’ How that reference made it past the ghostwriter and various editors, in a book heavily focused on boosting Romney’s national security street cred in anticipation of another presidential run, is beyond me.

Ackerman’s broader indictment of the book is well worth a careful read. He covers Mitt’s weird tyopology of America’s enemies and “rivals;” his indifference to diplomacy, alliances and international institutions; and his shirking of any real analysis of what we should do in Afghanistan. His summation:

[A] glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in ‘No Apology’ makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

If, of course, you can’t talk about, say, health care policy without getting into deep trouble, maybe even bad prose on national security is preferable. But Mitt does need to avoid insulting Marines.

Posted by Ed Kilgore