When seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney promised to keep the Bush tax cuts and tack on a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. Now, he struggles to explain how that would work, but even the status quo has helped the rich and damaged the middle class, says former Republican William Frey.
The American Left is engaged in its quadrennial debate, whether to vote for “the lesser evil” Democrat or maintain political purity and either boycott the election or cast a ballot for a minor-party candidate. A similar argument in 1968 helped change the course of U.S. history, Ted Lieverman recalls.
Many Americans don’t know where the Great Middle Class came from. They see it as a natural outgrowth of “free-market capitalism” when it was really the product of conscious government policies, starting with the New Deal. That confusion must be addressed in this political season, says Beverly Bandler.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney put some space between himself and President Obama on Middle East policies by suggesting a return of U.S. troops to Iraq and drawing the “red line” for Iran around the fuzzy concept of nuclear “capability,” notes Adil E. Shamoo for Foreign Policy in Focus.
Americans may see themselves as worldly cynics when it comes to political lying, observing that all politicians do it. But Mitt Romney is testing the limits with his ever-shifting positions and outright lies, notes Lawrence Davidson.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made what was billed as a major foreign policy address, but the speech combined a shortage of specifics with specifics that were misleading or factually wrong, writes William Boardman.
Exclusive: Mitt Romney gave a rousing speech about how his foreign policy would be much more muscular than President Obama’s. But Romney displayed again his proclivity to lie on specifics and distort the broader reality, too, writes Robert Parry.
Rep. Paul Ryan wraps his Ayn Randian philosophy of unrestrained selfishness in phrasing selectively lifted from the Founders, but the Republican vice presidential nominee misses the role of democracy and self-government in establishing human rights, says historian Jada Thacker.
Despite doubts from many quarters, President Obama appears to have backed down Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu from his demands for an explicit American “red line” to attack Iran’s nuclear program and from Netanyahu’s own suggestions of a unilateral Israeli bombing strike, writes Gareth Porter.
Exclusive: The conventional wisdom has spoken: Mitt Romney trounced Barack Obama in the first debate. But there was a squirrely sneakiness to Romney’s behavior as if Eddie Haskell from “Leave It to Beaver” had grown up and somehow won the Republican presidential nomination, writes Robert Parry.
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