mitt romney has the nerve to criticize Pres Obama on foreign policy and proceeds to show just what an idiot he is, playing his role as the rich ugly American to the hilt. He insults London and the entire U.K. with negative comments on the prospects for successful Olympic games, gets a quick retort from the mayor of London and the P.M. and then has dinner with his rich British bank-financial cabal buddies who just happen to be mired in the LIBOR scandal rocking their banks in the U.K. and on the Continent and even reaching to the U.S. Oh yeah, mitt really knows foreign policy. From the Washington Post....
LONDON — Thursday was supposed to be the easy day, when Mitt Romney
would audition as a world leader here by talking about his shared values
with the heads of the United States’ friendliest ally.
Instead, the Republican presidential candidate insulted Britain as
it welcomed the world for the Olympics by casting doubt on London’s
readiness for the Games, which open Friday, saying that the preparations
he had seen were “disconcerting” and that it is “hard to know just how
well it will turn out.”
The comments drew a swift rebuke from
Prime Minister David Cameron and, by day’s end, a public tongue-lashing
by the city’s mayor as the Olympic torch arrived in Hyde Park.
“I
hear there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re
ready,” Mayor Boris Johnson cried out to a crowd of at least 60,000. “He
wants to know whether we’re ready. Are we ready? Are we ready? Yes, we
are.”
Cameron, responding to the candidate with a note of
irritation, said that “of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic
Games in the middle of nowhere,” an apparent reference to Salt Lake
City. That city held the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, which Romney
organized. The prime minister and the mayor are conservatives, making
their scolding all the more embarrassing for the candidate, an otherwise
sympathetic ideological ally.
It was a difficult start to
Romney’s first foray on the international stage as the presumptive
Republican nominee, one that was supposed to present him to U.S. voters
as a potential commander in chief. Beyond his Olympics remarks, Romney
had a series of uncomfortable moments — some of them seemingly minor,
but distractions nonetheless.
At one point, he told reporters
about his previously undisclosed meeting with the head of the MI-6,
Britain’s secret intelligence agency.
On the first official day of his six-day
overseas tour,
Romney declined to answer reporters’ questions about his foreign policy
positions , saying he will avoid talking about any policy specifics
while he is on foreign soil.
He ended the day in a scene that
could prove damaging for a candidate sometimes labeled as out of touch. A
dinner fundraiser, which raised $2 million, was co-hosted by executives
at banks under investigation in London’s rate-fixing scandal.
For
any candidate on a foreign trip, the margin for error is small, with
every misstep magnified, fairly or not — especially so for Romney, whose
visit is drawing inevitable comparisons to Barack Obama’s largely
successful foreign tour as a candidate in 2008.
The notoriously
harsh British media spewed out brutal headlines about what they almost
uniformly deemed a bomb of a debut for Romney. The criticism
reverberated across the Atlantic and into the United States,
overshadowing a day in which Romney wanted to polish his diplomatic
credentials, although his surrogates insisted that they were not worried
about overseas coverage.
Olympics organizers have had to cope
with a series of security blunders, including a disclosure that the
private contractor hired to provide guards for the Games was 3,500 staff
members short. The military scrambled to fill in the gap.
Still,
the hosts did not seem to appreciate a foreign visitor reminding them
about the problems. Romney voiced his doubts about the final
preparations for the Olympics during an interview with
NBC News’s Brian Williams, taped Wednesday as he began his trip.
Cameron responded by telling reporters on Thursday: “You’re going to see beyond doubt that Britain can deliver.”
He added: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world.”
A
headline Thursday on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper said, “Mitt
Romney’s Olympics blunder stuns No. 10 and hands gift to Obama,” while
the Telegraph published an opinion column
with a sub-headline that read: “Mitt Romney is perhaps the only
politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm
offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive.”
By
Thursday, in back-to-back meetings with British officials, Romney was
lavishing praise on London’s Olympics efforts. He said that “it is
impossible for absolutely no mistakes to occur” at any Olympic Games.
And in an appearance with Cameron in the formal White Room at 10 Downing
St., he pronounced the Games “fabulous.”
“I was watching last
night the torch relay coming across Great Britain and the stories about
that, and the enthusiasm and passion,” he said. “And I love the theme,
‘Inspire a Generation.’ ”
Later, Romney told reporters, “My
experience as an Olympic organizer is that there are always a few very
small things that end up going not quite right in the first day or so.
Those get ironed out and then when the Games themselves begin and the
athletes take over, all the mistakes that the organizing committee — and
I made a few — all of those are overwhelmed by the many things that the
athletes carry out that capture the spirit of the Games.”
Romney
passed on several opportunities to discuss his foreign policy proposals.
He told reporters that he had spoken to British leaders about the
global economy and the world’s hot spots — including Syria, Iran, Egypt
and Afghanistan — but insisted that he would not describe his positions
while traveling abroad.
Several hours later, Romney campaign aides
hastily arranged a briefing for reporters with a campaign adviser who
attended the meetings to provide a more substantive window into the
talks.
The adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said
that concern about the U.S. and British economies, coupled with fear of
global fallout from the European debt crisis, consumed many of the
meetings.
The leaders discussed recent developments in Syria and
Iran, although Romney did not say how he would handle the crises because
he did not want to “make his own foreign policy” while overseas, the
adviser said.
Romney’s visit to Britain, where the country’s
leaders boast of its long-standing “special relationship” with the
United States, was expected to be a relatively easy stop, diplomatically
speaking, on his foreign tour. From here, he will navigate more
difficult terrain in Israel and Poland.
But in London, Romney hit a
few other rough patches as well. During a morning press appearance with
Ed Miliband, head of the opposition Labor Party, the candidate broke
with typical protocol. While Miliband called on two British journalists
to ask questions, which Romney answered, Romney did not call on any U.S.
journalists.
While visiting with Foreign Secretary William Hague
at the stately Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Romney also met with the
leader of the MI-6, the intelligence agency. The meeting was not on
Romney’s public schedule, but the candidate referred to it in his
remarks to reporters, saying they “discussed Syria and the hope for a
more peaceful future for that country.”
At the evening
fundraiser, held at the five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel, Romney showed
no signs that anything had gone awry. He mused about his heartstrings
being tugged as he drove past a statue of former prime minister Winston
Churchill — “with him larger than life, enormous heft of that sculpture
suggesting the scale, and the grandeur and the greatness of the man” —
and his interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, who he noted “did a fine
job.”
“It has been a marvelous day for us,” Romney said.
Debbi Wilgoren in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-meets-british-officials-in-london/2012/07/26/gJQAfqixAX_print.html
