Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?

Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up? During the third and final presidential debate, the flip-flopper flipped again on foreign policy. The bellicose cowboy in a pin-striped suit suddenly became a peace seeker.

I think that in last night's debate, Romney was mostly seeking to reassure voters that he wouldn't drag us into yet another war in the Middle East. He agreed with Pres. Obama on nearly every one of Obama's foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East. I think Romney's major mission was to avoid sounding like Barry Goldwater, who tilted so far to the right that he frightened people when he said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!"

Those who have heard Goldwater say that know it wasn't just what he said but how he said it. He was just plain scary. He was little girl picking petals off a daisy while a nuclear bomb goes off behind her scary.

Someone on the 10/23/12 public radio show "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook said that during last night's debate Mitt Romney "ripped his mask off" and showed himself to be the rational "moderate" he really is, or was when he was governor of Massachusetts.

I don't know how, after all of Romney's flip-flopping on the issues, anyone could assert that he knows when Romney is wearing a mask and when he's not. It seems to me that Romney's agenda now is to court voters any way he can. If he has an actual agenda in domestic or foreign policy, he's keeping it under wraps.

Why? Does he want to be president so badly that he'll say and do anything to get there? And if so, what does that say about his character?

What Romney would do in office if he won is still a mystery to me and I'm not willing to vote for a question mark who is also a tax evader and corporate predator.

Pres. Obama was ready for the Shape-Shifter this time. You could see when he shook hands with Gov. Romney that Obama had brought his A-game this time. He had an easy, knowing smile on his face. He looked almost playful, ready to thrust and parry.

Where Obama succeeded markedly in the final debate was in noting that Romney's positions have changed dramatically on every issue over a relatively short period of time. Even more so, Obama succeeded in making Romney look like the out-of-touch Cold War warrior he apparently really is. 

Russia is our number one enemy? Not al Qaida? Not terrorists in general?

When Romney talked about beefing up the Department of Defense with $2 trillion in additional spending, I thought of what caused the Soviet Union to crumble. The Soviet Union kept spending money on weapons as their soldiers and other Soviets were hungry, begging, even starving. The Soviet empire built an edifice that they didn't have the economic wherewithall to sustain over time.

Are we going to do the same thing? Again?

George W. Bush already put two wars, one the longest war in American history and one which we show few signs of winning, on a credit card. We haven't won a war since World War II. We haven't even necessarily created anything better than the government that was there before in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

Hamid Karzai, a good fighter but morally bankrupt as a leader in Afghanistan, is widely distrusted. Karzai's drug-dealing brother was assassinated. Karzai himself has escaped numerous assassination attempts. Are we winning? Are we even staying even? Al Qaida will have a foothold in Afghanistan as long as Pakistan continues to give al Qaida and affiliated groups safe cover. Pakistan is our real problem there.

We're building schools for girls in Afghanistan. Our efforts are admirable. The Taliban doesn't want girls to be able to go to school. The Taliban kill and throw acid in the faces of girls who want to go to school. I want to kill each and every member of the Taliban. I cheer when a drone takes one or more of them out.

Quite rightly, Gov. Romney says, "We can't kill our way out of this mess." If only it were that simple. If only Gov. Romney had said this before. It's just another flip-flop, but this time, he's right. He's right for the next five minutes till he changes his mind again.

Meanwhile, American roads and bridges are crumbling. Our schools are crumbling, closing, and our education is expensive, increasingly inaccessible and/or inequitable, and inferior to that of other nations. How much can we donate to our military-industrial complex without collapsing the way the Soviet empire collapsed?

We need to stop nation-building in other countries, as Pres. Obama said last night, and bring our resources home to nation-build our own country before it's too late. 

Pres. Obama is a long way from perfect. I realize that. My biggest problem with Obama is his failure to rein in Wall Street and impose meaningful reforms on corporate predators like Mitt Romney, Bain, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley Chase.

I dispute Obama's assumption that the investigation he needs to do regarding the Benghazi fiasco is in Libya instead of in the State Department, which is much closer to the White House. The Obama administration knows who screwed up at State, who told Lt. Col. Woods to stop requesting that Marines be allowed to stay in Benghazi and to "stop [putting his] requests in writing." The Obama administration just don't have the guts to come out and say so and fire somebody.

As long as no one is held accountable for mistakes made, either in the Bush administration or in the subsequent Obama administration, the government will not improve. It can only pretend that it is improving and is less dysfunctional than it really is.

That being said, I will vote for Pres. Obama and hope he grows a pair. I will not vote for the Shape-Shifter. I trust him even less.