Repeated As Farce: Obama Echoes Carter In His Critique Of Romney's Foreign Policy Skills

A great history lesson from the Examiner which reminds us of the last Democrat president embroiled in a Middle East crisis who dared to chortle over his GOP rival's approach to diplomacy:

Carter criticized Reagan’s views on foreign policy during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, slamming Reagan for living in a “fantasy world” and noting his inability to understand the “complex global changes” in foreign policy. 

“It’s a make believe world. A world of good guys and bad guys, where some politicians shoot first and ask questions later,” Carter said, “No hard choices. No sacrifice. No tough decisions. It sounds too good to be true – and it is. The path of fantasy leads to irresponsibility. The path of reality leads to hope and peace.” 

After Reagan’s nomination in July 1980, Carter criticized Republicans calling it “a party with a narrow vision, a party that is afraid of the future, a party whose leaders are inclined to shoot from the hip, a party that has never been willing to put its investment in human beings who are below them in economic and social status.” 

As Philip Klein noted on Twitter, the Carter campaign ran fearful “man on the street” ads during the campaign, fretting that Reagan would be a president who would “shoot from the hip.”

You really can't make this stuff up. The only people in US politics who seem to remember the lessons of the Carter years are conservatives!

The idea that Mitt Romney committed some kind of gaffe by talking tough against the Middle East mob is a striped-pantsed fantasy that can only work inside the Beltway. Americans have been watching Muslim a**holes attacking our embassies for decades. We "get" the idea that we can't treat every burned American flag as a casus belli. But that doesn't mean we have to like the peoples of the non-Israeli Middle East, and frankly there is little reason to. And, that also doesn't mean we have to lie back and enjoy the trashing of our emabssies and the murder of our ambassadors. Do we still need to be sending $1.5 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood's Egypt? Do we need to be hosting their diplomats? Best of all (and something we could implement in short order), do we need to be issuing so many visas to these folks?

A war-weary America will not react well to Republican sabre rattling, but will react well to a show of resolve. That's the real lesson of the Carter years.