BDBoop
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Stanley Weiss: An Open Letter to Mitt Romney
It's a good read. I hope somebody gets it into Romney's hands.
All of them are gone from Congress now. If polls are to be believed, the only remaining senator from either party who readily fits into their company -- who earned the title of "statesman" more than two decades ago, and who has played THE central role for the U.S. on arms control the past 30 years -- is about to lose his seat today to a candidate that has charitably been described as a "tea party hothead."
The shame of it is not that six-term Indiana Senator Dick Lugar is on the ropes because his lifetime 77 percent rating from the American Conservative Union is now judged as "too liberal" for the increasingly right-leaning politics of Indiana. That is a judgment for the voters to make. The shame of it is that the challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, has been allowed to turn "statesman" into a dirty word.
He mocks Lugar for his work to build a bipartisan coalition to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, stating flatly that "The time for being collegial is past -- it's time for confrontation." Never mind that Lugar's "collegiality" is what helped protect Americans from weapons of mass destruction for 36 years, or that Lugar actually served in the U.S. military while Mourdock avoided service and now believes that "some branches of the U.S. military might not be necessary in the 21st Century." In the new Republican party, America's real enemy isn't Tehran or Beijing -- it's the Democratic National Committee. We've finally reached a point where the Tea Party believes its own bumper stickers.
As a World War II veteran who wore a Wendell Wilkie button to school and remembers when Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower embodied American foreign policy competence, I was willing to look past it when Sarah Palin called Africa a "country" four years ago. I was willing to look past Minnesota congresswoman (and Tea Party favorite) Michele Bachmann's assertion that her first act as president would be to close the U.S. embassy in Iran (which isn't hard, since it's been closed since 1980). I was willing to give former Senator Rick Santorum a pass for implying that he wanted to go to war with China and bomb Iran; Herman Cain for appearing like he'd never heard of Libya; and Newt Gingrich for envisioning a foreign policy that extended to a colony on the moon.
But slapping Dick Lugar for being a statesman is a step too far.
It's a good read. I hope somebody gets it into Romney's hands.