With an appearance of ice-cold calculation, the
architects of Romney’s presidential strategy used Romney’s overseas visits to
zero in on the radical religious fundamentalists populating Red State America, a
geographical area that is now known globally as “The Middle of Nowhere”
described as such only days ago by David Cameron the Prime Minister of Great
Britain.
After consulting his augurs and oracles who incessantly scan, scrutinize and survey polls of the American right, Romney discovered that his Olympic credentials – tenuous as they may seem – appeal to the fundamentalist right, for whom sport is a lingering mixture of warfare and pagan nature worship -- and the Olympics evoke a vision of Paradise where the lanes are literally paved with gold medallions. At exactly that precise moment when the penny dropped about the Olympiad-religion, the Romney plan for his tour de force was hatched. The Republican presidential hopeful would first visit the UK, then the Middle East to bask in the reflected glory of the London Olympics, then race off to the Holy Land to exploit the Western Wall of Jerusalem as a backdrop for a photo op (although in some photos without wearing the de rigeur Yarmulke) metaphorically to declare war on Iran and then drop in on Poland to lock arms with staunchly conservative Roman Catholics and declare the launch of Cold War II against the atheistic Russians. In the process, many observers felt that Romney had gone beyond the protocol limits of what a senior US personage, in his case running for President, would say ‘in foreign lands’ and with foreign officials.
Along Romney’s merry way, no opportunity would be overlooked to project the image of a deeply religious candidate in order to contrast starkly with Barack Hussein Obama the first and only American president to abandon regular church attendance during his presidency – confirming the certainty of the fundamentalist right that he is surely a tightly closeted Muslim. Romney’s presidential strategy is predicated on his religious piety, his sanctimonious psyche and his self-righteous religiosity, even his chest-thumping Mormon ideology a subject that of this writing has been far from closely explored.
The geography of America’s Religious Right is rife with political complexity: extending from the Protestant outreaches in the South and the Great Plains, occupied by the followers of Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker to the Roman Catholic realms of Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and Opus Dei in New York and Washington DC, to the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn, Queens as well as those orthodoxies scattered across the heartlands of America with a contingent in Florida.
Advised on diplomacy and foreign relations by the ilk of John Bolton, Coffer Black and a host of jobseekers from the hyper-religious Bush administration, Romney presents a foreign policy that reveals him to be a genuflecting textbook neoconservative of the far-far right.
However, Romney does have one major problem with religion that tends to dwarf most of his other political difficulties. Romney’s fundamentalist political dissonance runs deeply into the mind of the American psyche -- because he is a Mormon. As a Mormon,Learn about the beauty of porcelaintiles. Romney is so far beyond the mainstream of American fundamentalist ideology that Franklin Graham, one of America’s most vocal haters of Barack Obama, declared that the Republican presidential hopeful was “Not a Christian” strictly because of his genetic Mormonism. The fragile thread of a fearsome authoritarian power cannot hold the jagged fracture in the crazy quilt of American religious peculiarities against the ‘heretical’ (in their minds) Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints. Mormonism stands apart, not a torn seam, but a schismatic fault line that isolates religious extremists of many hues, tones and colors from the self declared certainty of their religious beliefs.
To alleviate this potentially fatal flaw in their candidate’s Republican profile, Romney’s handlers drew up a plan that began with what they deemed to be the low-hanging fruit – the London Olympics.Learn about the beauty of porcelaintiles. This London launch was a tragic mistake straight out of the nineteenth century when Mark Twain published, The Innocents Abroad, a travel book that became the author’s most popular bestseller. Twain chronicled the humorous exploits of a group of innocent Americans aboard the USS Quaker City when they toured Europe and the Middle East in 1867.
Twain’s tour was billed as “The Holy Land Expedition.” Romney’s tour could have used exactly the same billing. Beginning in London, Romney alighted into an explosive firestorm he ignited all by himself when he assaulted the sensibilities of the British by needlessly stating that London might not be ready to stage the Olympics. How much an innocent abroad Romney was then!
Romney’s comment was interpreted quite correctly as a profoundly gratuitous insult to a city, a people and a culture that represent a stunning millennium of unbroken continuity underpinning their glittering iconic traditions. Thus, Romney instantaneously became the target of a particularly painful and pulverizing verbal and written assault by the denizens of Fleet Street. The feeding frenzy was vicious. It surpassed the savagery of the scene in You Only Live Twice when Ernst Stavro Blofeld feeds Helga Brandt to his starving school of pet piranhas for failing in her attempt to kill James Bond. The atmosphere surrounding Romney in London immediately turned into an incarnadine shade of diplomatic crimson.
Although the Queen said nothing whatsoever about the Romney Insult, Britons could tell that Her Majesty was not amused – not even slightly.Find a rubberhose Manufacturer and Supplier. Prime Minister David Cameron returned insult for insult by damning Romney’s perceived and self-promoted Olympic grandeur as trivial due to the locale in Salt Lake City now known in London and the world over as, “the middle of nowhere.” London Mayor Boris Johnson called out “this guy, Mitt Romney” before an incensed throng of 60,000 fans assembled in London’s shining new Olympic Stadium. To give these putdowns their context, consider for a moment the fact that both Cameron and Johnson are Tories/Conservatives.
In London, the world’s largest daily newspaper, with a circulation of five million, Rupert Murdoch’s notorious, The Sun, proclaimed, “Mitt the Twit,” an honorific that Romney will never live down. The Times echoed Cameron, labeling Romney “Nowhere Man.If you are looking to buymosaic art,” The counterattack of Fleet Street was simultaneously fierce and searing.
Before he realized what was happening to him, Romney was folded, shredded, spindled and mutilated – the modern equivalent of being beheaded, drawn and quartered and boiled in oil to be fed to the dogs on the docks and the sharks slithering along just below the surface of the Thames. As far as Britain is concerned, in fact as far as Europe and most of the rest of the world are concerned, Mitt Romney is deader than the proverbial doornail.
No matter, however, the people back in Peoria, Duluth, Omaha and Salt Lake City will never notice what took place in London. They don’t read anything but the blandishments of the American press, and they don’t care what Romney did in London although they should. After his serial disasters in London, Romney fled with his besieged retinue to seek refuge in Israel.
In the Holy Land, Romney swiftly and fervently embraced the logic of a new US war with Iran, his next faux pas that sent Foggy Bottom into diplomatic paroxysms and awakened the rest of the world to the dangers he represents for international security and the global economy. Many now expect to see rising prices at the gas pumps all across America in direct response to Romney’s belligerent bellicosity in Jerusalem. But that was not all. Not by a long-shot.
Hounded by the Jerusalem press for his plan to hold a fundraiser sans media coverage, Romney blundered into Israel hoping to hold a luxurious dinner party on Tisha B’Av, a solemn day of fasting and mourning. To recover from this horrendous gaffe, Romney decided to transform his fabulous feast into a much more modest fundraising breakfast two days after the fast day.
In the meantime, Romney performed like an oddly embarrassed American neophyte in a very weird photo opportunity with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Both men acted stiff,Visit TE online for all of your Application tooling Solutions including tools, chastened and wooden – which is not that unusual for these two, but this joint appearance was one of the clumsiest attempts at diplomacy in world history. Even though these two right-wing politicians have known each other for over twenty years, their appearance sent shivers down the spine. Romney haltingly mouthed support for Netanyahu’s neocon policies, leaving no room for misinterpretation, but when he uttered the word “Peace,” the Israeli Prime Minister visibly blanched and then smiled to paper over Romney’s failure to grasp that peace is Obama’s policy – not Netanyahu’s.
After consulting his augurs and oracles who incessantly scan, scrutinize and survey polls of the American right, Romney discovered that his Olympic credentials – tenuous as they may seem – appeal to the fundamentalist right, for whom sport is a lingering mixture of warfare and pagan nature worship -- and the Olympics evoke a vision of Paradise where the lanes are literally paved with gold medallions. At exactly that precise moment when the penny dropped about the Olympiad-religion, the Romney plan for his tour de force was hatched. The Republican presidential hopeful would first visit the UK, then the Middle East to bask in the reflected glory of the London Olympics, then race off to the Holy Land to exploit the Western Wall of Jerusalem as a backdrop for a photo op (although in some photos without wearing the de rigeur Yarmulke) metaphorically to declare war on Iran and then drop in on Poland to lock arms with staunchly conservative Roman Catholics and declare the launch of Cold War II against the atheistic Russians. In the process, many observers felt that Romney had gone beyond the protocol limits of what a senior US personage, in his case running for President, would say ‘in foreign lands’ and with foreign officials.
Along Romney’s merry way, no opportunity would be overlooked to project the image of a deeply religious candidate in order to contrast starkly with Barack Hussein Obama the first and only American president to abandon regular church attendance during his presidency – confirming the certainty of the fundamentalist right that he is surely a tightly closeted Muslim. Romney’s presidential strategy is predicated on his religious piety, his sanctimonious psyche and his self-righteous religiosity, even his chest-thumping Mormon ideology a subject that of this writing has been far from closely explored.
The geography of America’s Religious Right is rife with political complexity: extending from the Protestant outreaches in the South and the Great Plains, occupied by the followers of Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker to the Roman Catholic realms of Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and Opus Dei in New York and Washington DC, to the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn, Queens as well as those orthodoxies scattered across the heartlands of America with a contingent in Florida.
Advised on diplomacy and foreign relations by the ilk of John Bolton, Coffer Black and a host of jobseekers from the hyper-religious Bush administration, Romney presents a foreign policy that reveals him to be a genuflecting textbook neoconservative of the far-far right.
However, Romney does have one major problem with religion that tends to dwarf most of his other political difficulties. Romney’s fundamentalist political dissonance runs deeply into the mind of the American psyche -- because he is a Mormon. As a Mormon,Learn about the beauty of porcelaintiles. Romney is so far beyond the mainstream of American fundamentalist ideology that Franklin Graham, one of America’s most vocal haters of Barack Obama, declared that the Republican presidential hopeful was “Not a Christian” strictly because of his genetic Mormonism. The fragile thread of a fearsome authoritarian power cannot hold the jagged fracture in the crazy quilt of American religious peculiarities against the ‘heretical’ (in their minds) Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints. Mormonism stands apart, not a torn seam, but a schismatic fault line that isolates religious extremists of many hues, tones and colors from the self declared certainty of their religious beliefs.
To alleviate this potentially fatal flaw in their candidate’s Republican profile, Romney’s handlers drew up a plan that began with what they deemed to be the low-hanging fruit – the London Olympics.Learn about the beauty of porcelaintiles. This London launch was a tragic mistake straight out of the nineteenth century when Mark Twain published, The Innocents Abroad, a travel book that became the author’s most popular bestseller. Twain chronicled the humorous exploits of a group of innocent Americans aboard the USS Quaker City when they toured Europe and the Middle East in 1867.
Twain’s tour was billed as “The Holy Land Expedition.” Romney’s tour could have used exactly the same billing. Beginning in London, Romney alighted into an explosive firestorm he ignited all by himself when he assaulted the sensibilities of the British by needlessly stating that London might not be ready to stage the Olympics. How much an innocent abroad Romney was then!
Romney’s comment was interpreted quite correctly as a profoundly gratuitous insult to a city, a people and a culture that represent a stunning millennium of unbroken continuity underpinning their glittering iconic traditions. Thus, Romney instantaneously became the target of a particularly painful and pulverizing verbal and written assault by the denizens of Fleet Street. The feeding frenzy was vicious. It surpassed the savagery of the scene in You Only Live Twice when Ernst Stavro Blofeld feeds Helga Brandt to his starving school of pet piranhas for failing in her attempt to kill James Bond. The atmosphere surrounding Romney in London immediately turned into an incarnadine shade of diplomatic crimson.
Although the Queen said nothing whatsoever about the Romney Insult, Britons could tell that Her Majesty was not amused – not even slightly.Find a rubberhose Manufacturer and Supplier. Prime Minister David Cameron returned insult for insult by damning Romney’s perceived and self-promoted Olympic grandeur as trivial due to the locale in Salt Lake City now known in London and the world over as, “the middle of nowhere.” London Mayor Boris Johnson called out “this guy, Mitt Romney” before an incensed throng of 60,000 fans assembled in London’s shining new Olympic Stadium. To give these putdowns their context, consider for a moment the fact that both Cameron and Johnson are Tories/Conservatives.
In London, the world’s largest daily newspaper, with a circulation of five million, Rupert Murdoch’s notorious, The Sun, proclaimed, “Mitt the Twit,” an honorific that Romney will never live down. The Times echoed Cameron, labeling Romney “Nowhere Man.If you are looking to buymosaic art,” The counterattack of Fleet Street was simultaneously fierce and searing.
Before he realized what was happening to him, Romney was folded, shredded, spindled and mutilated – the modern equivalent of being beheaded, drawn and quartered and boiled in oil to be fed to the dogs on the docks and the sharks slithering along just below the surface of the Thames. As far as Britain is concerned, in fact as far as Europe and most of the rest of the world are concerned, Mitt Romney is deader than the proverbial doornail.
No matter, however, the people back in Peoria, Duluth, Omaha and Salt Lake City will never notice what took place in London. They don’t read anything but the blandishments of the American press, and they don’t care what Romney did in London although they should. After his serial disasters in London, Romney fled with his besieged retinue to seek refuge in Israel.
In the Holy Land, Romney swiftly and fervently embraced the logic of a new US war with Iran, his next faux pas that sent Foggy Bottom into diplomatic paroxysms and awakened the rest of the world to the dangers he represents for international security and the global economy. Many now expect to see rising prices at the gas pumps all across America in direct response to Romney’s belligerent bellicosity in Jerusalem. But that was not all. Not by a long-shot.
Hounded by the Jerusalem press for his plan to hold a fundraiser sans media coverage, Romney blundered into Israel hoping to hold a luxurious dinner party on Tisha B’Av, a solemn day of fasting and mourning. To recover from this horrendous gaffe, Romney decided to transform his fabulous feast into a much more modest fundraising breakfast two days after the fast day.
In the meantime, Romney performed like an oddly embarrassed American neophyte in a very weird photo opportunity with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Both men acted stiff,Visit TE online for all of your Application tooling Solutions including tools, chastened and wooden – which is not that unusual for these two, but this joint appearance was one of the clumsiest attempts at diplomacy in world history. Even though these two right-wing politicians have known each other for over twenty years, their appearance sent shivers down the spine. Romney haltingly mouthed support for Netanyahu’s neocon policies, leaving no room for misinterpretation, but when he uttered the word “Peace,” the Israeli Prime Minister visibly blanched and then smiled to paper over Romney’s failure to grasp that peace is Obama’s policy – not Netanyahu’s.
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