The Repudiation Of Mitt Romney
November 28, 2012 by John Myers
Mitt Romney’s defeat may mark the neoconservatives’ last chance to win the U.S. Presidency. The re-election of Barack Obama, arguably one of the worst Presidents in decades, underscores how bad a candidate the GOP nominee was. The way in which conservatives have disavowed Romney in the past couple of weeks highlights the scorn for him and the neocon policies he wanted to implement in a world rife with war.
Perhaps Romney’s candidacy was doomed all along. What we are left to do in the next four years will be a test of America’s global influence.
Obama needs to avert a war and perhaps even a social uprising within the Nation’s boundaries. And in four years, the Republican Party needs to nominate a leader that will revitalize the United States.
As Conservatives, We Must Find Our Roots
Romney was big on what he was going to do his first day in the Oval Office had he been elected President. It would have turned out to be a very long day, because the Nation has a long list of things that must be done. And as bad as Obama has been, America decided that Romney was not the one to revive the Nation.
On Aug. 28, 2010, during Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Sarah Palin addressed the crowd. She spoke out against Obama’s expressed desire to be a “transformational” President.
“I must assume that you too know that we must not fundamentally transform America as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor,” Palin said.
In New York Times bestseller Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, Conservative Patrick J. Buchanan writes of Palin’s message: “It is a contention of this book that America has been changed in our lifetimes, that a revolution has taken place, that though we appear to the world as the same country, we are a different nation on a course far off the one our fathers set.”
Buchanan’s book was written before Romney won the GOP nomination. Yet he speaks out against the very policies of U.S. imperialism that Romney embraced. Most important, warns Buchanan, is that America is further down the road to bankruptcy because of an ongoing expansionism that persists in Washington despite the cold truth that the Cold War is over. The Federal government has spent $1 trillion over the past dozen years in two wars. Yet instead of winning over enemies, we have created more of them.
Buchanan compares the United States to another superpower that imploded two decades ago: the Soviet Union. In his introduction he lays out his comparison:
“Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” was the title of a 1970 essay by Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik. Forced into exile, Amalrik died in a car crash in Spain in 1980. Few had taken him seriously. Yet, nine years after his death, the Soviet Empire had collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated.
What has this to do with us? More than we might imagine.
As did the Soviet Union, America commands an empire of allies, bases, and troops. America, too, is engaged in a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. America, too, is an ideological nation. America, too, is a land of many races, tribes, cultures, creeds and languages. America, too, has reached imperial overstretch.
These are not the words of an anti-war liberal. They come from a staunch conservative. When words like these are not the rhetoric of the likes of Senator John Kerry, D-Mass, they are difficult to ignore.
Yet that is precisely what Romney was advocating: American involvement in Syria and other nations in the Mideast. It is getting harder and harder for America to be the world’s beat cop, especially with debts of $16 trillion. We are in effect borrowing money (by selling Treasury debts) from China to protect Taiwan from China, borrowing money from Japan to protect South Korea from North Korea and borrowing money from Russia to protect European nations from Russia.
Still, Romney announced that he planned to spend more to extend the global reach of America’s military, which is, by any estimation, huge. Defense spending took up $711 billion of the annual budget in 2011, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. In fact, the United States “spent more on defense in 2011 than did the countries with the next 13 highest defense budgets combined.” Yet Romney wanted to add $2 trillion to the Pentagon budget over the next decade.
Many Republicans were not partial to Romney and his geopolitical ambitions. Romney should have brushed up on history. Fredrick the Great said: “He who defends everything defends nothing.”
This has been proven true for every empire from the Romans to the Soviet Union.
That Obama was able to defeat Romney underscores the problems within the Republican Party. Conservatives must repudiate not only Romney but also the neoconservatives in the GOP. President George W. Bush and the neocons in his inner sanctum cultivated America’s strategy in the Mideast and lead us nowhere but closer to a global war.
We have seen a decade-long abandonment of foreign policies of containment put down by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Those were sound policies. The Republican Party and the United States must return to that strategy. We can only hope that four years from now won’t be too late and that we will have a better candidate than Romney. Otherwise, another Clinton may be President.
Yours in good times and bad,
–John Myers
Editor, Myers’ Energy & Gold Report
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