Romney dodging draft in Paris.

Let’s start this morning with the idiot chickenhawk. Last night, when the American embassy in Cairo was under attack, the embassy sent out a tweet which expressed understanding of the reason the compound was being attacked. It was intended to defuse a volatile situation and save lives, even though most of the embassy staff had been evacuated long before the protesters arrived. The lives it intended to save were both American and Egyptian as the Egyptian police moved in to protect our embassy. It was not a statement of policy by the administration. It was an immediate response to an immediate danger.

And immediately, without understanding what was going on, Mitt Romney condemned the statement as an “apology” for our values. While our embassy in Cairo was suffering nothing more than a burned flag and graffiti, four Americans were losing their lives in Benghazi. That is what our embassy in Cairo was trying to prevent.

This morning, Romney repeated his condemnation of the embassy staff and the President, saying that our values must always be defended, we must always stand up for our Constitutional rights.

Okay, Mister Romney – you first. This isn’t Paris and your defensive weapon will not be a cute little French bicyclette You will be facing a rampaging horde of religious fanatics who have been whipped up to a frenzy by haters of our country and our Christianity, fueled by an American fanatic who refused to accept responsibility for the lives already lost because of his actions – Terry Jones. Go for it. Put your body where your arrogant mouth is, because I will be damned before you put a single American soldier in harm’s way just because you think you are entitled to be President. You are not worthy of that office.

The Republican party has protected and defended, encouraged even, the blind stupid bigotry against Muslims that has resulted in mosques being burned and vandalized and innocent Sikhs being murdered because they wear turbans and grow beards. They have refused to understand the way the actions of men like Terry Jones and those soldiers who pissed on Taliban corpses jeopardize American lives. You weren’t quick on the draw to condemn them, were you? No, the right wing comes back with moronic justifications about murdered Christians and burned Christian churches to try to claim some high ground in this conflict between faiths. Republicans want to ride this wave of religious hatred to the White House and control of Congress, to their promised “permanent majority” in our government, to the kind of one-party system that the people of the Middle East have been trying to overthrow for the past two years.

Defending our values? Not bloody hardly. Romney was defending his party’s fascism, their use of patriotism and religion to gain control of our nation.

Romney went to Jerusalem and to suck up to the Israelis and their Jewish and fundamentalist Christians supporters, he said that the Palestinians are culturally incapable of a stable economy inside an occupied territory where they are denied any rights. He extended that “cultural inferiority” statement to Mexico and Latin America. He and his party are asserting the policy that America is superior to the rest of the world and should be “guiding” everyone – in plain English, telling everyone in the world what to do and how to do it with no regard for their human rights. Romney has made it clear that he supports the ideas of the Project for the New American Century, that neo-con think tank of Bush intimates who want to establish the “Pax Americana,” an American Empire built on military might. It will be our sons and daughters, our husbands and wives, our grandchildren and friends who will lay down their lives for this empire, not the Bushes or the Romneys or the Cheneys or any of these war-mongering bastards who think they are entitled to rule the world.

Men like Mitt Romney create enemies. Men like Bill Clinton make friends. We have two former Presidents who are respected and admired in the world – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. They made it clear that we respect the rights of others to determine their own futures, even if those futures are not in our best interests, because peace is in everyone’s best interest and always will be. George W. Bush polled internationally as “the most dangerous man in the world,” more dangerous than any Middle Eastern potentate or dictator, more dangerous than Osama bin Laden, because he had no respect for the rights of free men, because he believed in the divine right of America to dominate the world.

If we mishandle the events in Libya and Egypt, if we go in with guns blazing and boots on the ground, we will simply reinforce the belief that America seeks the destruction of Islam and the subjugation of all peoples. Diplomacy is the delicate art of trying to balance conflicting interests, to find a compromise that harms no one. Mitt Romney doesn’t understand that.

Ambassador Chris Stevens understood that, and he gave his life for that principle.