Where Daniel the Cuckold and Zig Zag Clown Vie for Office

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Where Daniel the Cuckold and Zig Zag Clown Vie for Office

by Simon Romero

Sept. 16, 2012

Geraldo Wolverine campaigning in Piracicaba, Brazil.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Batman is running for office in the Brazilian city of Uberlândia. Not one but two James Bonds are seeking city council seats, in Ponta Grossa and Birigui. Elsewhere in Brazil, voters are being urged to cast ballots for candidates with names like Daniel the Cuckold and Elvis Didn’t Die.

Brazil has nurtured one of the world’s most vibrant democracies since its military dictatorship ended in 1985. As campaigning for municipal elections in October intensifies, this vitality is evident on the ballots, which reflect Brazil’s remarkably loose restrictions on what candidates can call themselves.

Ballots are filled with superhero names (five Batmans are running this year), mangled versions of American television characters (like the Macgaiver running in Espírito Santo State, inspired by the “MacGyver“ secret-agent series), and an array of raunchy nicknames.

“It’s a marketing strategy, a political program, because if I said Geraldo Custódio, no one was going to recognize me,” said Geraldo Custódio, 38, a teacher of driver’s education who is running for city council with the name Geraldo Wolverine in Piracicaba, an industrial city in São Paulo State.

Mr. Custódio said he had gotten the nickname of Wolverine, after the Marvel comics character, when he tried out for the reality television show “Big Brother Brazil.” He did not make it on the show, but the sideburns he adopted, along with his big build, made the nickname stick. He now campaigns with long metal talons. One of his ads says, “Vote for the guy who has claws!”

Creatively named candidates with talons might raise eyebrows elsewhere, but this is Brazil, a proudly relaxed country when it comes to the names of its politicians.

Consider the president, Dilma Rousseff, almost universally referred to by her first name. Her immediate predecessor incorporated his childhood nickname, Lula (“squid”), into his full name, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Calling him Mr. da Silva here raises hackles. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the president from 1995 through 2002, is commonly referred to as Fernando Henrique or by his initials, F.H.C., but rarely by his last name.

Some candidates in local elections jump on the bandwagon of a well-known politician, explaining, perhaps, why dozens of candidates across Brazil named Luiz or Luis have incorporated “Lula” into their own campaign names. Then there are the hat tips to overseas personages, reflected in the 16 Obamas running in Brazil this year. Popular culture and religion also inspire: Ladi Gaga (sic) is running in Santo André, in the São Paulo area, while Christ of Jerusalem (a k a Omedino Pantoja da Silva) lost a municipal election in Porto Velho, an Amazonian city, in 2008.

“I think Barack Obama is more than a politician; he is an icon,” said Gerson Januário de Almeida, 44, an administrative assistant in the public health system who is running for city council with the name “Obama BH” in Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest cities.

Mr. de Almeida said he had come by his nickname when American tourists riding the cable car to Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro remarked that he bore a striking resemblance to the American president. Since then, Mr. de Almeida said, he has earned additional income doing freelance gigs posing as Mr. Obama’s doppelgänger at promotional events.

There are some limits to the names Brazilians can choose when running for office. The law stipulates that the names chosen should correspond to the candidates’ nicknames or how they are commonly referred to.

Judges in some cities have had enough of some especially bizarre or vulgar-sounding election names, issuing injunctions to keep them off ballots. And electoral courts have tried to prevent candidates from using the names of state-controlled companies and other bureaucratic entities.

This has not stopped some candidates from trying. Israel Soares, a candidate in São Paulo State, is running as National Institute of Social Security’s Defender of the People.

Such names may attract attention in a complex political system with more than 20 parties of various ideological stripes, but seasoned electoral strategists say they seem to offer little more than a sideshow in many races.

“I don’t know if I would advise my clients to do it,” said Justino Pereira, a political consultant in São Paulo who has advised numerous candidates in municipal elections, including one named Palhaço Zig Zag (Zig Zag Clown), who lost.

Mr. Pereira said candidates were particularly inspired after another clown popular on television under the stage name Tiririca, which roughly translates as “Grumpy,” won a seat in Congress. (Relatively few people know his real name, Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva.) “Using nicknames is an easy way to draw attention,” Mr. Pereira said, “but doesn’t necessarily make a lasting effect.”

Of course, some candidates in a country with such a whimsical approach to names have no need to resort to wild nicknames. These aspirants for office already have colorful names bestowed by their parents, reflecting the attention paid in the past in Brazil to some foreign political figures.

Jimmi Carter Santarém Barroso is running in Amazonas State; John Kennedy Abreu Sousa is running in Maranhão, in Brazil’s northeast; and Chiang Kai Xeque Braga Barroso — whose first name evokes Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese rival in the mid-20th century to Mao Zedong — is seeking to be elected in Tocantins State.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/world/americas/in-brazil-eccentricity-at-the-ballot-box-is-the-norm.html?_r=1

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The Nastiest Elections Ever – Historically Corrected

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CAMPAIGN STOPS September 27, 2012, 10:09 PM

Is This the Nastiest Election Ever?

By Peter Manseau

A month after pundits declared the current presidential contest the “meanest,” “nastiest,” “most poisonous,” and “dirtiest campaign in history,” those summer laments already seem like poignant reminders of a kinder, gentler time. Thanks to recent efforts to score political points on violence in Egypt and Libya, and charges of class warfare rising on both sides, this mean and nasty season has only gotten worse.

Yet as bad as this election may seem, it is hardly original in its biliousness. Its protagonists often appear to be reading from a borrowed script, delivering lackluster renditions of the truly inspired negative campaign tactics that have made American politics a blood sport from the start.

Concerned that the supposedly hands-off topic of a candidate’s faith has become too much a factor in 2012? Compared to the elections of 1796 and 1800, this contest has all the inter-religious animosity of a Lutheran versus Methodist slow pitch softball game. In the earliest of the nation’s two-party elections, the match-up of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson gave voters a choice, according to Adams supporters, between “God and a religious president, or Jefferson and no God!” The pious allegedly buried Bibles in their gardens, in fear that President Jefferson would gather holy books for the pyre upon inauguration.

Jefferson versus Adams may also have the dubious distinction of the being the first time the so-called race card was played. Even then, Jefferson’s rivals circulated rumors of his relationship with an enslaved woman — perhaps beginning during his years as the United States minister to France, when Sally Hemings was just 14 years old. It was thanks to the racist undercurrents of this campaign that Jefferson, the target of more conspiracy theories than even Donald Trump could shill, was later said to be a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father, as was well known in the neighborhood where he was raised, wholly on hoe-cake (made of course-ground Southern corn), bacon, and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog, for which abominable reptiles he had acquired a taste during his residence among the French.

“Race has always been an inflammatory subject in campaigns,” Richard Brookhiser, the author of several presidential biographies, told me. “In 1844, the Whigs ran slave owner Henry Clay. But he and his running mate, Theodore Frelinghuysen, supported settling freed slaves in Liberia. This was not racist enough for Democrats, who attacked them in verse: ‘De ni**er vote am quite surprising, We’s all for Clay and Frelinghuysing.’ ”

Entwined suspicions of ethnic difference and foreign connections run like an ugly thread through the fabric of our civic history. The original birthers of American politics, members of the 19th-century Know Nothing Party, were driven by nativist fears exploding in response to the influx of Irish, Chinese and other immigrant groups. In 1856, a popular Know Nothing candidate for president, George Law, was hoist on his own xenophobic petard whensupposed evidence of his foreign birth emerged. Mr. Law swore he had been born on a farm in New York, a year after his alleged immigration, but that did not stop his opponents from pursuing this attack with obvious delight.

Library of Congress Anti-Whig poster depicting Zachary Taylor as “An Available Candidate,” 1848

Nor is this election unique in its willingness to play politics with the loss of American lives. The Obama camp went there first with a “super PAC”-financed ad that blamed Mitt Romney for the death of a woman who lost her health insurance when Bain Capital closed a Kansas City steel plant. More recently, Romney adviser Richard Williamson suggested that the deaths of American diplomats in Benghazi might have been avoided if his man had been on watch.

Distasteful as either of these claims may be, they have nothing on the 1848 image of the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor sitting on a pile of human skulls (a sharp critique of the kind of experience he had gained during the Mexican-American War) or on the attempt to tar Andrew Jackson as an actual murderer of American militiamen during the War of 1812. While commanding American forces fighting the British in New Orleans, Jackson had approved an execution order for six men convicted of desertion though they had believed their tour of duty had ended. A dozen years later, a broadside describing “The Bloody Deeds of General Jackson” offered the iconic visual of six black coffins arranged below the presidential candidate’s name. An accompanying hymn made these attack ads a multimedia experience:

The regulars then he did command
These citizens to kill
And far from home, their wives and land
Their blood he there did spill…
And God forbid, our President
This Jackson e’er should be;
Lest we should to his camp be sent,
And shot for mutiny.

 

Library of Congress The anti-Andrew Jackson “Coffin Broadside,” 1828.

Of course, Jackson’s campaign could give as well as it got, and its efforts likewise have a contemporary analogue. While some have drawn a parallel between the hidden camera tactics behind Romney’s 47 percent video and James O’Keefe’s stealth attack portraying Acorn as an enabler of prostitution, Jackson supporters charged that Old Hickory’s rival for the White House, the incumbent John Quincy Adams, was an actual pimp.

“Sex was used with special gusto in prudish times,” Mr. Brookhiser said. “Adams was charged with supplying an American woman to the czar when he was minister to Russia years earlier. Adams’s supporters in turn accused Jackson of bigamy.”

The moral character — and intimate entanglements — of the candidates has been a common front in the battle of for the presidency. In 1884 Grover Cleveland famously dealt with taunts of “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” when news spread that he had fathered a child with a woman to whom he was not married.

Library of Congress Grover Cleveland with his mistress and child, 1884.

Less well known is a counter-rumor that circulated about Cleveland’s opponent, James G. Blaine. Hitting the supposedly morally superior Blaine where he lived, Cleveland supporters claimed that Blaine’s first-born son, who had died as a toddler 30 years before, had been conceived before Blaine and his wife were married. In an apparent attempt to make it seem as if Blaine was hiding something, vandals chiseled the date of the child’s birth from his grave.

Before we count our blessings that we are now far removed from a time when the dead children of politicians were considered fair game, or when an election would be framed unabashedly as a choice between God and no God, it’s worth remembering that similar moments have been a part of 2012 all along — from January, when Rick Santorum endured questions about his family’s method of grieving for his son Gabriel, to September, when Democrats faced a literal “God or no God” question in their party platform.

If there is anything uniquely negative about this year, it could only be the sheer tonnage of baldly hostile messages bombarding the electorate in the dozen or so states still considered to be in play.

“What may set apart the 2012 campaign from previous elections is the volume of negative ads,” said Melissa Deckman, a professor of political science at Washington College. While the use of deceptive ads by campaign organizations goes back at least as far as Jefferson and Adams, Ms. Deckman noted, recent research shows that while negative ads accounted for 9 percent of all political advertising in 2008, in this election attack ads account for 70 percent of the total. “Given that Election Day is still weeks away,” Ms. Deckman said, “from an advertising perspective, this election could well be the most negative in history.”

Is it possible that anything good could come of this? Negative campaign tactics — even the meanest and nastiest — have their place in the theater of American politics, but they do not always have their desired effect. Four years ago, Mr. Obama most likely would not have given his pivotal speech on race were it not for the attempts to link him to the divisive rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Twenty years earlier, George Bush similarly turned negative associations to his advantage when he countered concerns over his toughness with tales of his time as a decorated fighter pilot and undeniable war hero. After enduring questioning of his manhood at the hands of media ranging from Newsweek to “Doonesbury,” the vice president showed that his ability to throw a punch had not diminished by going on the offensive during a live interview with Dan Rather – who is, it must be noted, among those currently lamenting this election as “the worst.”

Smear campaigns, whether they contain a kernel of truth or are based on outright lies, allow candidates to demonstrate how they respond under the strain of conditions most other Americans would find intolerable. As the historian Gil Troy has written, brutal campaigns endure not only because they let off the collective steam of 300 million opinionated Americans, but because – unlikely as it seems – they work.

If there is to be no end to the negativity, perhaps the question we should be asking is not “Is this campaign the dirtiest ever?” but rather “Why have our elections been so negative in the same ways for so long?” The enduring themes of the supposedly worst campaigns – race, religion, sex and death – remind us of their centrality not just to politics, but to every aspect of American life. No matter how much the economy matters to the outcome, this election is as dirty as many others because voters know they are choosing something other than a manager.

Given the stakes, the most surprising part of our perpetually dirty political system is that all the slings and arrows that once cut so deeply may later seem merely funny, or only instructive. Today’s fighting words will be reduced to tomorrow’s interesting anecdotes, but the true questions at the heart of every presidential election will remain.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/category/historically-corrected/

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Matt Harding Dancing Around the World

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Where the Hell is Matt? 2012

For about a decade, video-game developer and world traveler Matt Harding has danced enthusiastically in many exotic locations. In this latest of his viral videos, he dances with new friends in 71 places around the world.

More about Matt Harding:

http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/about

http://youtu.be/Pwe-pA6TaZk?hd=1

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Why Romney is Slipping (NY Times Editorial)

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 Why Romney Is Slipping

SEPT. 24, 2012

Mitt Romney said in an interview aired on Sunday that his campaign “doesn’t need a turnaround.” He told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that he is tied with President Obama; he has a “very effective campaign; it’s doing a very good job;” and all he needs to do to win is keep repeating his plan to restore economic freedom.

That’s an outright denial of political reality, but Mr. Romney’s willingness to stray from the truth is at the root of what’s really going on. His campaign has been losing ground since the two political conventions. All the reliable national polls now show Mr. Obama ahead, and in two cases substantially so — beyond the margin of error. A variety of polls also shows Mr. Obama with growing leads in most of the important swing states.

To some extent, Mr. Romney’s diminishing stature is because of two recent statements that revealed his deficiencies to a newly interested audience. He falsely suggested that the Obama administration was sympathetic to the violent Muslim protests in Libya and Egypt, illustrating his ignorant and opportunistic critique of foreign policy. And he was caught on video belittling nearly half the country for an overreliance on government handouts.

These moments, though, were not fumbles or gaffes. They were entirely consistent with the dismissive attitude Mr. Romney has routinely shown toward non-Americans or the nonrich. Now even long-undecided voters are starting to catch on and dismiss him.

In Wisconsin, for example, a hotly contested state that has veered Republican in recent elections, Mr. Obama leads Mr. Romney by 17 points when voters are asked who cares about their needs and problems, according to a Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll published last week of likely voters. The poll found that only 10 percent of voters said his policies would favor the middle class. (This poll was taken before the video showing his disdain for 47 percent of the country.)

Voters don’t react positively when a candidate speaks incomprehensibly about taxes, as Mr. Romney did on “60 Minutes.” He said he would lower everyone’s tax rate by 20 percent but that everyone would wind up paying essentially the same taxes because he would limit unspecified deductions and exemptions. Even on its face, that makes little sense. If everyone will pay the same taxes, how does that stimulate growth or reduce unfairness? In fact, tax experts say the rate cut is such a huge benefit for the rich that it can’t be balanced by curbing their deductions. But listeners don’t have to do the math to calculate how fundamentally hollow the proposal is.

Asked about the government’s responsibility to the 50 million Americans without health insurance, Mr. Romney said they already have access to health care: in emergency rooms. That, of course, is the most expensive and least effective way of providing care, as someone who once advocated universal care has reason to know. But it also reeks of contempt for those left behind by the current insurance system, suggesting that they must suffer with illness until the point where they need an ambulance.

Mr. Romney is free to pursue this shallow, cavalier campaign for six more weeks, but he shouldn’t be surprised if voters increasingly choose not to pay attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/opinion/why-mitt-romney-is-slipping.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120925

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what people talk about before they die: Family & Friends

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What people talk about before they die

Jan. 28, 2012

Editor's Note: Kerry Egan is a hospice chaplain in Massachusetts and the author of "Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago."

by Kerry Egan, Special to CNN

As a divinity school student, I had just started working as a student chaplain at a cancer hospital when my professor asked me about my work. I was 26 years old and still learning what a chaplain did.

"I talk to the patients," I told him.

"You talk to patients? And tell me, what do people who are sick and dying talk to the student chaplain about?" he asked.

I had never considered the question before. “Well,” I responded slowly, “Mostly we talk about their families.”

“Do you talk about God?

“Umm, not usually.”

“Or their religion?”

“Not so much.”

“The meaning of their lives?”

“Sometimes.”

“And prayer? Do you lead them in prayer? Or ritual?”

“Well,” I hesitated. “Sometimes. But not usually, not really.”

I felt derision creeping into the professor's voice. “So you just visit people and talk about their families?”

“Well, they talk. I mostly listen.”

“Huh.” He leaned back in his chair.

A week later, in the middle of a lecture in this professor's packed class, he started to tell a story about a student he once met who was a chaplain intern at a hospital.

“And I asked her, 'What exactly do you do as a chaplain?' And she replied, 'Well, I talk to people about their families.'” He paused for effect. “And that was this student's understanding of faith! That was as deep as this person's spiritual life went! Talking about other people's families!”

The students laughed at the shallowness of the silly student. The professor was on a roll.

“And I thought to myself,” he continued, “that if I was ever sick in the hospital, if I was ever dying, that the last person I would ever want to see is some Harvard Divinity School student chaplain wanting to talk to me about my family.”

My body went numb with shame. At the time I thought that maybe, if I was a better chaplain, I would know how to talk to people about big spiritual questions. Maybe if dying people met with a good, experienced chaplain they would talk about God, I thought.

Today, 13 years later, I am a hospice chaplain. I visit people who are dying – in their homes, in hospitals, in nursing homes. And if you were to ask me the same question - What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain? – I, without hesitation or uncertainty, would give you the same answer. Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters.

They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally.

They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it is not. And sometimes, when they are actively dying, fluid gurgling in their throats, they reach their hands out to things I cannot see and they call out to their parents: Mama, Daddy, Mother.

What I did not understand when I was a student then, and what I would explain to that professor now, is that people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. That is how we talk about the big spiritual questions of human existence.

We don't live our lives in our heads, in theology and theories. We live our lives in our families: the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends.

This is where we create our lives, this is where we find meaning, this is where our purpose becomes clear.

Family is where we first experience love and where we first give it. It's probably the first place we've been hurt by someone we love, and hopefully the place we learn that love can overcome even the most painful rejection.

This crucible of love is where we start to ask those big spiritual questions, and ultimately where they end.

I have seen such expressions of love: A husband gently washing his wife's face with a cool washcloth, cupping the back of her bald head in his hand to get to the nape of her neck, because she is too weak to lift it from the pillow. A daughter spooning pudding into the mouth of her mother, a woman who has not recognized her for years.

A wife arranging the pillow under the head of her husband's no-longer-breathing body as she helps the undertaker lift him onto the waiting stretcher.

We don't learn the meaning of our lives by discussing it. It's not to be found in books or lecture halls or even churches or synagogues or mosques. It's discovered through these actions of love.

If God is love, and we believe that to be true, then we learn about God when we learn about love. The first, and usually the last, classroom of love is the family.

Sometimes that love is not only imperfect, it seems to be missing entirely. Monstrous things can happen in families. Too often, more often than I want to believe possible, patients tell me what it feels like when the person you love beats you or rapes you. They tell me what it feels like to know that you are utterly unwanted by your parents. They tell me what it feels like to be the target of someone's rage. They tell me what it feels like to know that you abandoned your children, or that your drinking destroyed your family, or that you failed to care for those who needed you.

Even in these cases, I am amazed at the strength of the human soul. People who did not know love in their families know that they should have been loved. They somehow know what was missing, and what they deserved as children and adults.

When the love is imperfect, or a family is destructive, something else can be learned: forgiveness. The spiritual work of being human is learning how to love and how to forgive.

We don’t have to use words of theology to talk about God; people who are close to death almost never do. We should learn from those who are dying that the best way to teach our children about God is by loving each other wholly and forgiving each other fully - just as each of us longs to be loved and forgiven by our mothers and fathers, sons and daughters.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kerry Egan.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/28/my-faith-what-people-talk-about-before-they-die/

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WOW – Super-Talented Kids

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Jotta A – Brazilians Got Talent 2011

http://youtu.be/O_tb2KKjUpM

^^^

Carly Rose Sonenclar – The X Factor (USA)

http://youtu.be/nU_dBDccruI?hd=1

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The Romney Tapes

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 Let Them Eat Crab Cake

by Maureen Dowd

SEPT. 18, 2012

Oh, for the days when we thought Mitt Romney didn’t stand for anything.

As a secret video from a Boca Raton fund-raiser with high rollers in May shows, Romney in private stands for so many bizarre things that it’s hard to tell what’s crazier — his domestic policy or his foreign policy.

Less than 50 days before the election, we learn that Romney may have given up on half of America and on Mideast peace.

In a reply to a fat cat at the $50,000-a-plate dinner, he wrote off 47 percent of the country as deadbeats, freeloaders and “victims” who feel they’re entitled to stuff — stuff like basic sustenance.

“Well, there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. “All right? There are 47 percent who are with him. Who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

The candidate, who pays so little in taxes relative to his income that he has to hide tax returns and money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, then added, condescendingly: “These are people who pay no income tax.”

“So my job is not to worry about those people,” he blithely concluded. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” What kind of presidential candidate shrugs off wooing whole groups — we’re talking many seniors and white-working-class voters in battleground states who are, if he actually knew what he was talking about, his own natural constituencies?

A “stupid and arrogant” one, as Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, put it.

Conservatives knew that Romney was no Reagan, but the tape left many Republicans and Obama strategists gobsmacked. One top Democrat called it “a treasure trove of stupid answers.”

On Fox News Tuesday, Neil Cavuto gently asked Romney if he had “prematurely” presumed that he couldn’t get all of those voters. Mitt’s rambles to the donors, released by Mother Jones magazine and, in a bit of poetic justice, unearthed by Jimmy Carter’s grandson, were a stunning combination of wrong facts, callous sentiments and dumb politics.

He seemed to have bought into the warped canard that some conservatives inside and outside of Congress have pushed: that the president and Nancy Pelosi were nefariously hooking people on unemployment benefits so they’d get addicted and vote Democratic to keep the unemployment bucks flowing like crack.

It’s literally rich: Willard, born on third base and acting self-made, whining to the rich about what a great deal in life the poor have.

We thought Romney was secretly moderate, but it turns out that he’s secretly cruel, a social Darwinist just like his running mate. [emphasis added]

You’d assume that it would be hard now for Romney to resume bashing President Obama for demonizing and pandering on class warfare, with lines like he’s been using on the trail: “he and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into groups.”

But, even as Mitt was spitefully demonizing and dividing in Boca, he remained cardboard-cutout un-self-aware, musing: “The thing which I find most disappointing about this president is his attack of one America against another America.” This is the absolute height of cluelessness.

At another point in the video, Romney once more showed his foreign policy jejuneness, questioning the workability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which is U.S. policy endorsed by W.

Mr. Sunshine said he sometimes felt “that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace — and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

He continued: “You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem,” adding, “And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately somehow, something will happen to resolve it.”

Wow. That’s leadership. He said a former secretary of state had called him to suggest that after the Palestinian elections there might be a prospect for a settlement, but that “I didn’t delve into it.”

After months of doggedly trying to seem more likable, sharing his guilty pleasures like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snooki, Romney came across as a mean geek, a Cranbrook kid at the country club smugly swaddled in class disdain. He thinks being president is his manifest destiny. His father didn’t make it, so he will — no matter what far-out conservative positions he must graft on to in order to do it.

We’re in search of the real Romney. But, disturbingly, so is he.

One thing we have to give Mitt, though: He is, as advertised, a brilliant manager. He’s managed to ensure that President Obama has a much better chance of re-election.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/opinion/dowd-let-them-eat-crab-cake.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120919

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The Question: Are You Better Off Today Than 4 Years Ago?

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http://youtu.be/YiVe_7kTTdQ

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Martin Bashir Rips Romney’s Politicization of US Diplomats Murdered in Libya

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Martin Bashir | Aired on September 13, 2012

Bashir: Mr. Romney, you owe diplomats who risk their lives an apology

Martin Bashir lashes into Mitt Romney’s twin campaign themes – misrepresentation and refusal to apologize – and challenges Romney to apologize for using the American embassy tragedy to score cheap political points against President Obama.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/martin-bashir/49024623

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Romney on Israel – Is This Presidential Material?

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Israeli Fallout

by Eric L. Lewis

SEPT. 13, 2012

It should go without saying, but apparently does not, that the tragic crisis unfolding in the Middle East calls for sober statesmanship rather than political posturing. The jihadist murder of the American ambassador to a newly liberated Libya; the carnage unleashed by the Assad regime on the Syrian people; the emergence of a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt; the conundrum of Iranian nuclear ambitions — the region presents decades worth of complex challenges telescoped into real time.

Responding to these challenges, Mitt Romney mixes crude political theater with neocon bromides. Attacking President Obama for supposedly apologizing to Islamic radicals, he appears unable or unwilling to understand the responsibilities of a president trying to deal with a volatile situation while Americans are in harm’s way.

Romney shows no respect for diplomacy in general. He declares that “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers” and maintains that “in an American century, America leads the free world.” His surrogates repeatedly mock President Obama’s “apology tour” and his unfortunate “leading from behind” formulation on Libya. His principal advisers, John Bolton and Dan Senor, are part of a neocon hard core that opposes any policy that would diminish American sovereignty or freedom of action. Yet faced with the vexing issue of whether the Middle East should be further roiled by an Israeli attack on Iran in an attempt to stop its nuclear program, Romney is willing to outsource that decision to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking earlier this week, Netanyahu said that if the Obama administration was unwilling to set fixed red lines that Iran could not cross, it “has no ‘moral right’ to restrain Israel from taking military action of its own.” The fundamental moral and political issue here, however, is whether it is the sovereign prerogative of the United States to make the decision of whether to start a regional war, a war that will certainly require American resources and may well require American troops to finish.

The threat to international security posed by the Iranian nuclear program should not be underestimated and the Obama administration takes the threat seriously. It continues to keep all options on the table, but believes that there is additional time for sanctions to work. Romney is apparently prepared to delegate to Netanyahu the decision to start a conflict that the United States military believes is, at best, premature, that is unlikely to be fully effective, that will send oil prices skyrocketing, that will further destabilize Lebanon and Syria (and possibly the shaky governments in Libya and Egypt), and that will be likely to consolidate domestic support for a deeply unpopular Iranian regime. But the question in the presidential campaign is not whether attacking Iran now or later is a good idea, but whether a decision with enormous geo-strategic consequences should be made by the American president or by the leader of an ally dependent upon American power.

Strong, even passionate, supporters of Israel should be troubled by the prospect of an Israeli government not only ignoring the policy choices of its powerful ally but also willing to intrude into American domestic politics in an attempt to influence or override the president’s foreign policy. Imagine, for example, that South Korea decided it was going to invade North Korea to destroy its nuclear facilities, potentially triggering a war on the Korean Peninsula that could bring in China and possibly other countries in the region. Indeed, South Korea could take its policy argument directly from Mitt Romney’s Web site:

A nuclear weapons capability in the hands of an unpredictable dictatorship with unknown leadership and an unclear chain of command poses a direct threat to U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere in East Asia, threatens our close allies South Korea and Japan, destabilizes the entire Pacific region, and could lead to the illicit transfer of a nuclear device to another rogue nation or a terrorist group.

But Mitt Romney is not suggesting an attack on Pyongyang and he certainly is not offering carte blanche to Seoul.

Analogous situations would be equally untenable. If India decided that, once and for all, it refused to live under the threat of an unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan and intended to invade, we would never tell them it was up to them. If Taiwan had feared an attack from China across the Formosa Strait during the early 1970s, would Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger have told them it was their call rather than ours whether to launch a surprise attack? Even to put the question shows the absurdity of a superpower’s acquiescing to allies on critical questions of war and peace in a nuclear age.

To be sure, Israel is a special ally, but that does not entitle it to make the decision on matters where United States interest and power are inextricably and centrally engaged. It is inconceivable that the United States would permit another ally dependent on American funds and American defense systems to take such a decision unilaterally. It is also inconceivable that we would permit another foreign government to intervene directly and forcefully in our political process to garner popular support for its policies over the objections of the administration.

Yet senior Israeli officials take the view that the Israeli government believes it can defy American wishes and bypass the president. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “Ehud Barak says that if Israel were to act now against U.S. wishes, the U.S. Congress would still favor Israel over Iran.”Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, who was appointed by Netanyahu, says “the American people and Congress would support Israel right now if it were engaged in a war with Iran.” Netanyahu and Obama appear to recognize that airing their toxic relationship publicly is to neither one’s advantage and both have been walking back stories that Obama refused to meet before the approaching United Nations meetings in New York. They have both called attention to the hourlong telephone conversation they had this week. Attitudes in Israel are fluid, and Defense Minister Barak appears to have moved against an imminent attack (or maybe he hasn’t — as I said, the situation is fluid), but it is remarkable that senior officials of a foreign government would suggest that the president’s judgments could be bypassed and foreign policy should be subject to Congressional or popular choice.

The Romney campaign seems to think that all of this is just fine. “If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision,” says Dan Senor, Romney’s senior national security adviser and someone widely tapped as a future national security adviser in a Romney administration. Romney expresses a similar view, stating blandly, “Prime Minister Netanyahu always has to do what he feels is in the best interests of his own nation.” In his convention address, he accused President Obama of threatening to throw Israel “under the bus.” Apparently, Romney thinks Israel should drive the regional bus, leaving the United States to deal with any crashes.

It is American policy to support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders, and the United States has supported its ally with billions of dollars and sophisticated weaponry. That support should earn reciprocal cooperation and respect for American policy from its ally, not to mention non-interference in its domestic politics. 

Despite all his talk about American power and sovereignty, Mitt Romney seems willing to let someone else decide whether to start what may be the first potential regional war of the new “American century.” That is not real leadership; it is dangerous pandering and a strong indication of a prospective president without a genuine foreign policy compass. Once again, we are left with the question of whether Romney means what he is saying and whether he would govern sensibly. But as we have learned to our great detriment over the last decade, the Middle East is no place for loose talk or lazy thinking.

Eric Lewis is a partner at Lewis Baach PLLC in Washington.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/israeli-fallout/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120914

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