Virtually with every passing day my opinion of Mitt Romney goes lower. The man is shameless, uncaring and willing to stoop to any lengths to try to get himself elected - something that ought to scare the hell out of rational, thinking Americans (yes, I know - that excludes the GOP base). But seriously, even before he knew the facts and details of yesterday's sad events in Egypt and Libya, Romney was trying to score political points with no regard for the families of those at risk. Fortunately, the reaction from all but the Kool-Aid drinker crowd seems to be uniform in its condemnation of Romney. Here are excerpts from a piece on Politico:
The folks at First Read
capture the snap consensus among the political class
that Mitt Romney's statement on Egypt and Libya was a big tactical
mistake:
*** Over the top Yesterday we noted that Mitt Romney, down in the polls after the convention, was throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama. Little did we know the kitchen sink would include — on the anniversary of Sept. 11 — one of the most over-the-top and (it turns out) incorrect attacks of the general election campaign. Last night after 10 .pm. ET, Romney released a statement on the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya. After saying he was “outraged” by these attacks and the death of an American consulate worker, Romney said, “It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Yet after learning every piece of new information about those the attacks, the Romney statement looks worse and worse — and simply off-key. First, Romney was referring to a statement that the U.S. Embassy in Egypt issued condemning the “efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” But that embassy statement, which the White House has distanced itself from, was in reference to an anti-Islam movie and anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones, and it came out BEFORE the embassy attacks began. Then this morning, we learned that the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and others died in one of the attacks.
*** When news-cycle campaigning goes awry: Bottom line: This was news-cycle campaigning by the Romney campaign gone awry. Why didn’t the Romney campaign wait until it had all the facts? . . . . But how much time do you give an administration to work through a diplomatic and international crisis before trying to score immediate political points? You’d expect the Sarah Palins of the world to quickly pounce on something like this, and she predictably did. But a presidential nominee running for the highest office in the land? After the facts have come out, last night’s Romney statement only feeds the narrative that his campaign is desperate.
There are a lot of problems with Romney's reaction to the U.S. consulate attacks, but the most straightforward one may be that it burns away time his campaign didn't have. We're now going to spend at least one news cycle — and probably more — analyzing and responding to Romney's incendiary statement, and the issue will surely carry through to the Sunday shows this weekend. When you're trailing in a presidential election with eight weeks to go, you can't afford to spend one of those weeks defending a provocative statement that you didn't have to make in the first place, especially when you were already on the defensive on national security.
Andrew Sullivan summed up Romney/Ryan's unfitness for office well:
These people are simply unfit for the responsibility of running the United States. The knee-jerk judgments, based on ideology not reality; the inability to back down when you have said something obviously wrong; and the attempt to argue that the president of the US actually sympathized with those who murdered his own ambassador in Benghazi: these are disqualifying instincts for someone hoping to be the president of the US. Disqualifying.
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