QOTD: Gloria Borger
by digby
“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.”
Yes, she actually said that. That quote comes from a CNN documentary on Romney, which Tommy Christopher at Mediaite rips to shreds in this highly entertaining column. Borger seems to be wholly unaware of the irony of her statement. But then so does Mitt:
The portion of the documentary in question covers Mitt Romney’s stint as a door-to-door Mormon recruiter in 1968 France, a duty which helped him to avoid military service in Vietnam. Earlier in the doc, narrator and interviewer Gloria Borger glossed over the fact that Romney sought, and received, four deferments during the Vietnam War (and later lied about it), instead saying simply that he was “exempt as a student, and with a high draft number.”
The doc also notes, as an example of Romney “becoming his own man,” that he protested in favor of the draft that he so skillfully avoided, before moving on to the time he spent in France, a time that Romney once described as “tough” because the French were “not happy to see Americans, because we were in Vietnam at the time.”
Yes, you heard that right. Not only did Mitt Romney protest in favor of sending other people’s children to die in Vietnam, even as he avoided service himself, he then complained about how those dying Americans made it “tough” for him while he was in France avoiding service.
Is there anything more revealing about the right wing than their double standard over Vietnam? For years and years, they harrangued the Democrats into a pile of quivering jello over their alleged lack of patriotic cojones for failing to serve in Vietnam. And yet once all their fortunate sons started running for office it stopped being relevant.
Mitt Romney did not mention the war in Afghanistan, where 79,000 US troops are fighting, in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday. The last time a Republican presidential nominee did not address war was 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower spoke generally about American power and spreading freedom around the world but did not explicitly mention armed conflict.
I hate the “imagine if the Democrats did that” trope, but seriously … imagine if the Democrats did that.
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