SECRET VIDEO excerpt #2: On Israel, Romney Trashes Two-State Solution

[seafan]

David Corn just released another excerpt from Mitt Romney's candid remarks at a $50,000 per plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, FL in May. (Videos are at the link.)


RE: Foreign policy


September 18, 2012

At the private fundraiser held May 17 where Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney candidly spoke about political strategy—noting that he saw half of the American electorate as freeloaders and "victims" who do not believe in personal responsibility—he discussed various foreign policy positions, sharing views that he does not express in public, including his belief that peace in the Middle East is not possible and a Palestinian state is not feasible.

Mother Jones has obtained video of Romney at this intimate dinner and has confirmed its authenticity. ..... During the freewheeling conversation, a donor asked Romney how the "Palestinian problem" can be solved. Romney immediately launched into a detailed reply, asserting that the Palestinians have "no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish."

Romney spoke of "the Palestinians" as a united bloc of one mindset, and he said: "I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way."

Romney was indicating he did not believe in the peace process and, as president, would aim to postpone significant action: "(So)what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it." ...... Romney emphasized that he was against applying any pressure on Israel: "The idea of pushing on the Israelis to give something up to get the Palestinians to act is the worst idea in the world."

.....

Talking to these funders, Romney also demonstrated that his campaign-long efforts to criticize Obama's handling of foreign policy in simplistic and exaggerated terms—he's an appeaser, he's an apologist—are not reserved for public consumption. Romney told these well-to-do backers that the president is a naïf with an oversized ego: ..... The president's foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception he has that his magnetism, and his charm, and his persuasiveness is so compelling that he can sit down with people like Putin and Chávez and Ahmadinejad, and that they'll find that we're such wonderful people that they'll go on with us, and they'll stop doing bad things. And it's an extraordinarily naive perception.

.....

This is the face of today's Republican party.


Mitt Romney represents its corrosive philosophy of greed, hatred and ignorance, in a time of immense suffering and need in our country.


Perhaps Jonathan Chait says it best, in NY Magazine this morning:

.....

Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney.

Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)

It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class — “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

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(via NY Magazine)


The Sneering Plutocrat.

[No Elephants]

1. A lot of Arab Americans vote Republican, despite all the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim garbage from the

right.

Here's hoping loyalty to Palestinians finally tips the scales.

Then again, my understanding is that many Arabs dslike Palestinians, even though they think that the Palestinians were wrongly ousted from their homes. So, I don't know.

In their shoes, the odious remarks about Arabs I heard on radio on 911 alone would have had me running to switch political parties. So, I don't get why they stayed Republican this long. Therefore, I don't know what, if anything might make them switch.

[seafan]

2. WATCH: Full Secret Video of Private Romney Fundraiser

Hats off to David Corn of The Nation.


Today is a day for the history books.