Dishonest Reporting
Reuters has a story up that became reasonably popular in the blogosphere. Andy Sullivan – the journalist who wrote the article – claims that Mitt Romney distanced himself “from his party’s unpopular president” by saying that the Bush administration mismanaged the Iraq war.
Sullivan quotes Romney as saying: “I think we did a less than effective job in managing the conflict following the collapse of Saddam Hussein. I think we were under prepared for what occurred, understaffed, under planned, and, in some respects, under managed.” That’s criticism, yes, but one has to look at it in its context. Obviously Sullivan didn’t consider the context to be important. Instead of reporting what Romney actually said and tried to say, the Reuters journalist (and I use this word loosely) took his remarks out of context in an attempt to, once again, portray Romney as a flip-flopper.
As happens all too often in the blogosphere, bloggers jumped on the article and started bashing Romney. Sadly for them, however, one commenter at Macsmind links to this piece at TownHall… Here’s what Romney actually said:
According to Romney, Bush did a “very effective job in responding aggressively to the attacks of jihadists on 9/11. I supported his decision to go into Afghanistan and I supported his decision to go into Iraq. I think he did a superb job in overseeing the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s military and government. I think he did a less effective job in managing the conflicts following the collapse of Saddam Hussein. That’s been said by many people, a number of mistakes were made. I think we were under prepared, understaffed and under managed, but I do believe that the new course that’s been set by the President and General Petraeus is working. It is working.”
In other words: no flip-flopping here. He criticizes Bush about certain things, but he stands by the American president. What’s more, Romney’s comments are clearly true. There can be no debate about that.
To bash Romney over these comments is silly.
And to compare them to what Huckabee said (bunker mentality, etc.) is even more ludicrous. Only those who strongly oppose Romney’s candidacy and don’t want him to win the nomination (or presidency) – by whatever means necessary – are willing to misinterpret what he said in such a radical way.
Watch this video, which was posted on YouTube on February 18, 2007.
This video leaves no doubt that Romney didn’t flip-flop on this issue at all, and that those who attacked him over his words recently should retract their stories.
No doubt it was taken out of context, but Romney had a different tune on the subject as far back as May of last year. The point being that he is only attempting to gain support from McCain supporters in NH, and that’s still a problem for Romney who has worn the badge of "say whatever to get elected".
Either way, he could have done without the comment.
Romney didn’t flip flop here. What makes me skeptical of him is the fact that he criticized Huckabee for saying basically the same thing in his Foreign Affairs article.
I’m no fan of Huckabee, but I did some extensive writing on the problems with Huckabee’s article, and what Romney said was the same thing Huckabee said.
There’s a double standard there.