Red Menace
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s embarrassing European tour is already old news, and while he provided the Obama campaign and people like me with no shortage of gaffes tailored to each of the three regions he visited, I feel his continued, Animal-like pounding on the drums of war ought to be even more worrisome to the American public than his overall ineptitude as a diplomat.
While in Israel, Romney told CNN that a nuclear Iran represents “the number one national security threat to our nation,” as if the Obama Administration has made any indication of disagreement with the spirit of that thought.
This follows his previous assertion, which was itself reinforced by the candidate’s comments in Poland, that Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe.”
Despite the majority of Americans being sick of war after a decade of the Bush Administration’s miserable failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and despite the hundreds of thousands of pointless casualties those two conflicts have incurred, Mitt Romney seems eager to sacrifice even more American troops and foreign civilians to the Blood God.
Forget “pre-9/11” ways of thinking: Romney apparently has a grasp of foreign policy stranded in 1964! He longs for a return to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, when the balance of national security rested on the threat of any armed conflict between superpowers resulting in the extinction of the human race, if not all life on Earth.
The reason for this is simple, of course: The Cold War was a bottomless trough of taxpayer-funded government contracts for the military industry. The collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to that gravy train, and because of the stateless nature of the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wars there proved to be inadequate replacements. After all, you can only get away with proposing new fleets of submarines to fight terrorists for so long before people remember we aren’t at war with Aqua Man or COBRA.
Consequently, you have representatives of the Military-Industrial Complex, such as Mitt Romney, calling for a return to the policies of the Cold War, in an effort to jump-start another endless and expensive* arms race between the United States and some other international boogeyman.
*Expensive to you and me, that is. Anyone occupying the White House would naturally be well-positioned to skim a little something off the top, with relatively little risk to himself.
2 Responses to “Red Menace”
>Blood God
Did I just see me some 40k in here? Sweeeet.
Gotta say though, Mitt strikes me more as the tzeenchian sort, with his bare-faced lust for power and willingness to do and say literally anything for the slightest chance of a lead.
Very well articulated argument in the caption, but I don’t know if your cartoon gets it across as succinctly as you usually do. A very abstract idea to fit into one frame.
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