The "Milk Before Meat" Candidate: Why Romney Doesn’t Deserve Your Vote

by Nomad

The Truth about LyingMost us as children were taught that lying was wrong. There was never any need to inquire too deeply. It just was. Why? Because I said so. End of discussion.

Later, things started getting complicated. Some lies were more acceptable than others- white lies, for example, though, in fact, all of them were still wrong. Technically.

Around the time of high school, that great petri dish for social behavior- most of us simply stopped asking this basic question and accepted lying a part of the human condition. Get over it.
Throughout the long history of philosophy the subject of deception has been a hot topic. Immanuel Kant was pretty categorical. Lying, he said, was always unethical. To be human means having the ability to be rational and to make own choices. It gave a sense of dignity to humanity. A life with any rational choice was no life for a self-respecting human being.
Bear with me.

Romney on Iran: The Dangerous Non-Policy of the Hollow Man

by Nomad

L

ast night’s third and final debate proved once again that the Republican presidential candidate Romney really has nothing new to offer in terms of foreign policy leadership. And when it comes to Iran, Romney demonstrated last night that he is really a hollow man.

His statements on Iran and how he would deal with this sticky problem are really fascinating, though not in a good way. If you listen to the things he said, they might sound impressive but actually upon a closer inspection, they are filled with peculiarities, political posturing and sparkling fluff.

Sanctions

It is also essential for us to understand what our mission is in Iran, and that is to dissuade Iran from having a nuclear weapon through peaceful and diplomatic means. And crippling sanctions are something I called for five years ago, when I was in Israel, speaking at the Herzliya Conference. I laid out seven steps, crippling sanctions were number one. And they do work. You're seeing it right now in the economy. It's absolutely the right thing to do, to have crippling sanctions. I would have put them in place earlier. But it's good that we have them.

So basically then he would do what the president is already doing. No change of policy but he would be happy to take credit for the results. Begun in the last two years of the Bush administration, the sanctions were expanded and strengthened under the Obama administration, according to the Christian Science Monitor "at a speed that has made current US sanctions policy on Iran the harshest in contemporary history. This leaves a potential new Romney administration with few policy alternatives."

Mitt Romney and the Eye of the Needle

Check out this excerpt from one of the (hundred) debates during the Republican primaries. 

That was an interesting reaction, wasn't it? Romney stammers his answer and has to think fast before he commits his soul to the fiery furnace. As Anderson Cooper gives him a second chance to clarify, Romney hesitates and finally- to smattering of applause- takes the plunge. 

(In an earlier post, we pointed out how Romney has violated repeatedly his own Mormon code forbidding lying in every form. He was quite willing in that case to break the tenets of that faith to the cost of his salvation.)