Potshots from Left and Right Target Romney's Foreign Policy Team
When Mitt Romney's campaign unveiled his team of foreign policy advisers, the political left unloaded.
The Nation magazine dubbed it "Romney's Neocon War Cabinet," noting firebreathing former UN ambassador John Bolton, columnist Robert Kagan and former Bush-Cheney official and neoconservative tutor Eliot Cohen. The take from left-leaning blog Daily Kos: "Knuckle-Dragging Ultrahawks Dominate Mitt Romney's Foreign Policy Team." And a web video by New Orleans music publisher Louie Ludwig -- "These Guys" -- ran through a rogue's gallery of former Bush-Cheney team members who, the video implies, brought us the Iraq War. "So what happened to these guys?" intones the Tony Soprano sound-alike narrator. "They work for this guy," a.k.a. Romney.
Even some Republicans voiced alarm about the roster. "...[S]ome of them are quite far to the right," former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Morning Joe. "And sometimes they might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought." Powell cited Romney's assertion in March that Russia was "our number one geopolitical foe." Retorted Powell, "Come on, Mitt, think. That's simply not the case."
So imagine the surprise two weeks ago when news broke that Robert Zoellick, the just-departed World Bank president, had been named to head Romney's national security transition team.
"Romney's Foreign Policy Mistake: A Big One," proclaimed Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, whose Right Turn column channels neocon thinking. "For foreign policy hawks, Zoellick is an anathema," she said, describing him as one-time "right hand man in the State Department and Treasury Department of James A. Baker, who was infamous for his anti-Israel stance."
more: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/08/romneys-foreign-policy-team.html