Quote of the Day, Mitt Romney Twists The Foreign Policy Knife edition.

The use of the Shakespeare quote was particularly vicious. I approve, mind you:

In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, “a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

Slightly ironic, of course, given that in Julius Caesar you could argue that Cassius was right in that particular case to delay offering battle, and Brutus wrong in wanting to strike while their army was still at its peak. But the truth is that Brutus’s principle was sound; he merely had the misfortune of being a character in a play where the other side was going to win, no matter what. And while that victory may have been preordained by Shakespeare, the real-world situations described by Mitt Romney were something that we could have influenced: for both our benefit, and the world’s.

Besides, the odds that anybody in Obama’s Executive Branch has enough of a proper education to recognize the reference on sight were, shall we say, long. Even I had to look up a couple of the details.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

7 thoughts on “Quote of the Day, Mitt Romney Twists The Foreign Policy Knife edition.”

  1. Shakespeare. Old dead white guy.

    No way he could be relevant to anything.

    This is the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, after all. Don’t you know that January 2009 was the beginning of history?

      1. To be blunt, Romney demonstrated he was out of touch when did everything he could to completely crush fellow Republicans in the primary, and then played “Mr. Nice guy” in the general election.

        Romney’s prediction of Obama’s foreign policy being a disaster wasn’t much of a prediction, all he said was something that was blatently obvious to anyone that was actually paying attention and wasn’t blinded by Obama’s charisma.

        If anyone deserves credit for predicting what a disaster Obama’s foreign policy would be, it would be Sarah Palin among others all the way back in 2008.

          1. That the person the media mocked back in 2008 actually knew what she was talking about, and the person that the media worshipped and acted as though he could do no wrong, is either completely clueless or a far-left ideologue (or both).

            Yeah, you could call it ironic, but I consider it to be scary.

            I actually predicted that Romney wouldn’t be able to beat Obama in the general election back during the primaries when we were down to Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich. I got called an Obama supporter for it, but seriously my analysis indicated Romney was about the weakest possible candidate we could run against Obama (Romney was in my bottom four candidates as far as likelihood of beating Obama, that list also included Ron Paul, Obama’s former ambassador to China, and some governor that wanted to legalize drugs). Romney could be targetted with Obama’s favorite attack: “class warfare.” Romney also couldn’t go after Obamacare. He lost a key attacking issue, and had a huge vulnerability that the other candidates didn’t have. Obama made his living off of class warfare as a community aggitator.

            The ironic thing is I wish my prediction had been wrong. I am glad to be wrong about the prediction of the Florida special election (which I thought would be lost based on the poll numbers, even if they were skewed particularly if the vote was close because of the Democrats and their voting shannigans.

          2. Yes, but …
             
            I don’t think Romney could have hit Obama any harder than he did, simply because the Mushroom Media were poised to label any criticism of the First Black President as racist. And don’t you dare point out the Constitutional Scholar’s ignorance, inexperience, or incompetence, you hater! Even with Romney’s relatively mild campaign, the media condemned him as a heartless, racist, dog-torturing, soulless creep who oppressed minorities, hated women, forced people to die of cancer, enjoyed firing people, didn’t pay taxes for a decade, and wanted to take people’s free stuff away from them.
             
            Frankly, I think a lot of the blame for Romney’s defeat goes to those conservatives and Republicans who stayed home on election day because “there’s no real difference between the two parties’ candidates” and “Romney isn’t conservative enough” and “Romney is a Mormon heretic” and “let’s teach the Republicans the lesson that they can’t ignore us.” Plenty of other things contributed to his defeat, of course, but if the conservative/Republican turnout had been what it should have been, he’d have won.
             
            To be blunt, Romney demonstrated he was out of touch when did everything he could to completely crush fellow Republicans in the primary, and then played “Mr. Nice guy” in the general election.
             
            To be blunt, Romney had to do that to win the nomination, because of the stupid winner-take-all primary system. What the Republicans need to do to win elections is change over to an approval voting system for their primaries, to determine which candidate is most acceptable and least unacceptable to the Republican base.

          3. Seriously, the instant the race card was used all Romney would have had to do was say: “Okay so you’re telling me that, it’s racist to hold everyone to the same standard regardless of their skin color?”

            You don’t go cowering when someone throws the race card around, throw it right back in their face. Say you feel sorry for those whom are actually victims of racism, that people won’t believe them because people on the left spam the race card to accuse everyone that disagrees with them of being a racist.

            If Romney was really so afraid to stand up to Obama, if he was so afraid of being called names if he dared to actually fight in the general election, then honestly he should have gotten out of it in the primary and let someone whom would have actually been willing to fight be the nominee instead.

            I for one am sick of the “we can’t win, so we shouldn’t even try,” attitude that Republicans continually demonstrate, I’m sick of them constantly worrying what Democrats think of them (the Democrats want the Republicans reduced to irrelevancy and Republicans need to wise up).

            Establishment Republicans wonder why the Tea Party is trying to primary them. Well, it’s blatently obvious as to why they are primarying establishment Republicans. They’re saying: “If you won’t represent your constituents and stand up to Democrats and their big Government power grab, they should get the hell out of the way so that we can get someone in there that will.”

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