Disgusting Person of the Year
So recently, Time magazine announced their 2007 Person of the Year as Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, while I might not agree with Time about their choice (there just seemed like a lot of other people that have made a more positive influence on the world in general), I couldn’t help but retch slightly at Presidential hopeful (or Hopefully Not) Mitt Romney’s comments to CNN who called the choice, “disgusting.”
Disgusting?
Maybe “lame”, or “poor”, or even “hideous.” But disgusting?
What’s really disgusting is Romney’s “clear” choice for who should have been Person of the Year… Gen. David Petraeus, who he has said, “has brought success in Iraq.”
Are you kidding me!!??
Barring for the moment that “success” in Iraq actually exists in ANY form (it doesn’t, but as long as we’re in dreamland…) wouldn’t it have been better to nominate someone who wasn’t just DOING THEIR JOB? You ask ANY serious political advisor (or historian for that matter) and they will tell you that any meaningful change in Iraq is going to come through politics and governmental change within Iraq itself. The fact that we blasted our way into a few choice areas and killed some “evildoers” to make the area temporarily “safer” for it’s residents is MEANINGLESS PROPAGANDA by this administration to make it look like we are making a difference. But any true stability is NOT going to come from any amount of soldiers or tactical “successes” on the battlefield (read “residential communities”). So it just boggles me that anyone with half a brain would choose a man that 99.9% of the world wouldn’t have even known existed six months ago. It wasn’t until Bush used his report to pat his own back that most of us in the U.S. even learned his name. His leadership of our military hasn’t brought light and power, healthcare or improved living conditions to the people of Iraq (or anywhere else in the world). He hasn’t changed the political atmosphere in that country so that even HALF of the essential benchmarks that everyone agreed needed to happen actually happened.
So WHY?
Why would you give a Person of the Year nomination to a man who is essentially responsible for the deaths of thousands of American citizens and has cost the country literally trillions of dollars doing his job??
Is it purely political? Was his “clear” choice just a pundit pandering to show his affiliation with our current administration? Does he really believe that’s a good thing? If I was in ANY way considering Mitt Romney as our next president based on his stance on the issues, that all just flew out the window. Bye bye. There is NO WAY I would ever vote for a man that would make such a blindly idiotic remark.
Oh, and just as a means of comparison…
President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings are routinely around 70% in his country. Bush hit a high recently of 37%. In Russia, workers’ salaries have more than doubled since 2003 and their economy has grown an average of 7% a year for the past five years. They have paid off foreign debt and have gone from being fractured and economically tenuous, to a major player in the world market. It may not be good news for America, but Russians have a lot to be happy about. Back in the U.S. of A. we are seeing record housing foreclosures, huge foreign debt, a decreasing stake in world economy, lackluster economic growth, all with hundreds of billions of dollars siphoning off to support a war effort that over two thirds of the American population doesn’t even approve of.