John Cassidy sums it up.
... Romney ignored the reporters. But Ron Gorka, one of his spokesman, said to them, “Kiss my ass. This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.” Gorka also told one reporter to “shove it.” ...Cassidy, New Yorker
There's something about that "kiss my ass" and "holy site for the Polish people" in one compact outburst that just gets under the skin, doesn't it?
Cue yet another wave of stories about the Romney campaign’s blunders and screwups. Also cue the desperate attempt by Stuart Stevens to put some lipstick on the pig that was this trip. According to a Washington Post story datelined Warsaw, Steven said of his boss, “He has a tendency to speak his mind and to say what he believes, and whenever you do that, there will be those that disagree with you, and there will be those that agree with you…I think people like that. I think that this idea that you have to not speak your mind is something that’s not very appealing to people.”
A translation of that passage from campaign spin into English might run as follows: “Even in an operation like ours, which is almost wholly based on turning the election into a referendum on Obama, we have to occasionally let the candidate depart from his standard stump speech. Sometimes when we do that, he says things he shouldn’t. That’s not great, but at least it shows people that he’s human.”
Stevens also defended Romney’s fitness to be President, saying, “I think that given his background, his stature, what he’s accomplished, his age, that he is someone that people think is qualified and ready to be president.” His age? When a campaign strategist is reduced to citing how long his man has been alive—sixty-five years—as a reason to vote for him, you know something is terribly amiss. ...Cassidy, New Yorker
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The New York Times may think of itself as "prissy" because it doesn't like (and didn't report) the language Ron Gorka threw at the press, but the Times sure 'nuff understands what made Gorka explode and what it means.
In Poland today, Mitt Romney’s traveling press secretary, Rick Gorka, yelled at reporters who had the temerity to try to ask the candidate a question. Actually, he cursed. And you can read what he said here, since I’m too prissy to print his words on this blog.
His excuse was that the reporters asked Mr. Romney a question somewhere in the vicinity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, “a holy site for the Polish people.”
When press aides start lashing out at the press, it’s generally because something is wrong in the campaign. Certainly Mr. Romney has not gotten the kind of coverage he wanted from his Big Foreign Trip.... The press never has and never will decide an election, but it’s always tempting to blame coverage of one’s actions or statements or policies rather than the actions themselves. ...Andrew Rosenthal, NYT
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The Wall Street Journal editorial says that Romney may have gotten off on the wrong foot but "don't be silly -- no damage done!"
So Mitt Romney's foreign tour has ended, and the media verdict is that it rated somewhere between an embarrassment and a fiasco. We guess that's one way to describe a trip that garnered virtual endorsements from Israel's Prime Minister and Poland's most famous citizen, raked in $1 million or so in campaign cash, and gave the presumptive GOP nominee a chance to lay out a foreign-policy agenda. ...WSJ
That was a foreign policy agenda? Osama bin Laden had a clearer foreign policy agenda when he went to war against a "culture" than our Mittens does.
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Mitt’s foray showed some new colors, as he intended, but they were not flattering ones. We now know how little he knows about the world, how really slow on his feet he is, what meager social and political agility he has.
Wherever he went, whatever situation he was in, he remained frozen in himself. It was reminiscent of the stinging review of an Oscar Wilde lecture by Ambrose Bierce, who wrote that Wilde was a “gawky gowk” who “wanders about posing as a statue of himself.” ...Maureen Dowd, NYT
Wilde? Maybe. But the scale of the bloopers and the depth of the embarrassment to the US reminds me of another "W".
