No, Folks, Romney DOESN'T Know What He's Talking About in Foreign Affairs

It's just that compared to the rest of the ludicrous Republican circus (Jon Hunstman excepted) he doesn't sound like a complete blithering idiot. But man, he most assuredly is. Steve Benen has the takedown here:

[Last Saturday] The former Massachusetts governor effectively called for a trade war with China, which is hopelessly insane, and is based on Romney’s confused understanding of what’s procedurally possible at the WTO. He also called for U.S. support for “the insurgents” in Iran, apparently unaware of the fact that there are no such insurgents.


Romney went on to say he would never negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is naive and at odds with the assessments of all U.S. military leaders, and added that he’s both for and against withdrawal timetables.


Remember the time Romney told ABC News he would “set a deadline for bringing the troops home” from Iraq — but only if it’s a secret deadline? How about the time Romney, more than four years into the war in Iraq, said it’s “entirely possible” that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction in Syria prior to the 2003 invasion? Or the time Romney pretended “Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood” were all the same thing? How about my personal favorite: the time Romney made the bizarre assertion that IAEA weapons inspectors were not allowed entry into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?


More recently, Romney tried to trash the New START nuclear treaty in an op-ed, prompting Fred Kaplan to respond, “In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and — let’s not mince words — thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty.”

Yes, friends, Romney is as much of a hopeless buffoon as almost all of the rest of the Republican field. It's just that he can speak in complete sentences and doesn't start shooting sparks from his temples like Bachmann or Perry. But he would be incredibly dangerous and incompetent in foreign affairs. It would be back to the dark days of W.

But with better grammar--and really swell hair.