STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Mitt Romney: 21st Century Joseph Smith

As many of you know, Mitt Romney is a Mormon. But I suspect very few of you have really learned much about the history of Mormonism---not the theology.

I am not writing this blog to attack the religion or Mormons. Like any people, there are good,  the bad and the awful.  But Mitt is neither one of those three.

  He is my opinion the 21^st century Joseph Smith.
Joseph Smith invented the religion of ‘mormonism’ in the early 1800’s in Palmyra, New York.  He was illiterate, ambitious, and organizationally quite savvy. He saw a ‘vision’ and as a ‘result of some tablets’ he derived ‘revelations’.

  You get the idea. The story or narratives of most religions go pretty much the same way. Joseph was a clever, cunning fellow who could manipulate, deceive, and extract false promises wherever he went. 

  In the best American tradition,  he was an early 1800’s Elmer Gantry.  He lied, cheated, and committed bigamy and manipulated and deceived those who followed him.
He was the first real American to create a truly American religion based on individual enterprise, ambition and dreams of greater glory. 

Nothing wrong there!

We had, in 1800’s,  a slew of new religions and self-proclaimed prophets in abundance as we did in the days of Josephus.

But what made Smith quite exceptional was two things. One he created a very successful religion based on all kinds of financial, political and personal chicanery, bobbing and weaving whenever and wherever he needed to do so.  Secondly, he had the incredible audacity to proclaim before his untimely death, “that no man knows my history”. The point of fact is that we in America know everything but everything about Mormonism.  It has been documented, studied and investigated.

I don't want to go into the history of this successful American religion but rather to demonstrate one single point that I realized last night while watching the final debate between Obama and Romney.  And that point is that Mitt for all of his slickness and guile reincarnated not the personal traits that made Joseph Smith so successful.  Those traits were sheer ignorance….but rather a characterological quality which is a major capacity to lie and deceive others as well as himself.  Mitt is just brash enough to think that those of us who might know something more than a ‘smitten of foreign affairs’ would be convinced by his performance.

In thirty years of being a registered Republican,  I have never, but never witnessed, a more inept candidate for the presidency who knew less about foreign affairs than Mitt. 

Months ago I had written a blog saying that Mitt had one of the best foreign policy teams in the Republican party.  But this evening that was not apparent. When Obama had to explain to Mitt’s statement that we need a larger navy force, the President correctly pointed out to him that we did not need more ‘navy ships’ and that ‘the bayonet and horse had disappeared’ and that in the place of the navy vessels we had submarines, cyberwar, Space War, etc. 

You get the idea. 

  What makes me upset is not that I find Romney incompetent. I have said that along time ago to my friends in the senior Republican circles.  But what was more disturbing is that he clearly did not utilize the wisdom of some of the real political operatives whom he had on his team.   Quite frankly, even though I supported John Huntsman, who's qualifications were stellar- a former Ambassador to Singapore and China, and a Deputy Trade Representative for the US and a man ten times wealthier than Mitt, the senior operatives of the party---Mallick, Rove, Ailes and others decided to go with an obvious loser.

I wrote, over a year ago, to a friend of mine who works for Mitt that Mitt has a serious characterological failures---flip-flop, insincere, deceitful, self-delusional, arrogant, untutored in the ways of the world, and really illiterate about matters in general that involve the gestalt of American society and world affairs.  It would have done him some good, if he had only read a series of Stratfor Reports on geopolitics and force structure.  It would have helped him to learn about psychological warfare, counter terrorism, covert operations, Counter Intelligence, military transformation, the importance of Cyberwar and cyber terrorism.  It would have been important for him to have learned the history of submarine warfare and it’s importance in the Cold War. It would have been better if he really knew anything about Reagan, other than Newt’s absurd comments on Reagan’s economy.  It would have been important for Mitt to understand how Nancy Reagan helped Reagan to decide on the take down of the ICBMS. It would have also been of some value of someone in the group had mentioned something about the exceeding importance of George H. W. Bush Sr and James Baker in the take down of the Berlin Wall and the de-Sovietization of Eastern Europe. 

  But of course, when you have incompetent Republicans like Condoleezza Rice, the worst NSA and Sec State we have ever had and Karl Rove,  a despicable detritus than there is very little that can be done to help someone as arrogant, ignorant and bullheaded as Mitt.

Here is the real problem for me.  Mitt is only about four years younger than I am- He is better looking,  in better health and richer.  But he failed the one test that I had always demanded of my leaders—Democrat or Republican—that they serve our country for only a while.  Not a life-time.  Not in the military only but just serve our country for nothing more than a foolish concept called ‘duty, honor and gratitude’. 

Huntsman served our country many times as I have already mentioned.  Bush Jr did not. Clinton did not.  Bush Sr did.  Reagan did.  Ford did.  Nixon did. And Carter did.

And here is the clincher. As much as I disliked the lie that Obama had killed Osama bin Laden because OBL was already dead for over ten years, Obama and his relatives had served our country nobly.

Now what do I mean? 

  Obama’s mother was a CIA operative in Indonesia.  She was trained at the East –West Center in Hawaii in both Russian and Indonesian . She volunteered to go into a dangerous zone where military coups occurred on a daily basis. 

Obama’s grandmother worked in a bank in Hawaii that was a front for the CIA where she was in effect a ‘paymaster’ for CIA assets. This fact was also true of his maternal grandfather.

  So Obama who was sold as 'community organizer’ and Lecturer in Government had given of himself by also working as an asset for the CIA.  His mentor was none other than Peter Geitner,  the father of Tim Geitner, our present Secretary of the Treasury. Obama’s history was correctly blacked out for ‘national security reasons' which I don’t happen to agree. 

  What I am saying now is not a secret but a deduction from a Four Time Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President’s Nixon, Ford, Carter and Bush Sr.

 Also I worked extensively to provide ‘cover’ for our brave ‘intelligence operatives’ all over the world.  But it is not violating any oath of office that I did not take or have to take to make these declarations. 

So when Mitt was talking like a ‘poorly prepared rich school boy’ , he was in fact talking to a President who in my humble estimate and those of other senior operatives in foreign policy deserves a B plus for the work he has done around the world . 

But the real problem is not Obama .

The real problem lies within an antiquated, arrogant, self-delusional, regressive Republican Party that chose to support someone whose past records screamed out ‘incompetence’, ‘deceitfulness’ and most disturbingly, ‘cowardice’—failure to serve our great nation in time of war.
  In the 1960’s when I was drafted into the military,  I was against the war in Vietnam.  I 'understood' the war from my teenage years growing up in the failed state of France that had been losing Indochina for decades.  But despite my personal and professional dislike of that war,  I was honored to join the Nixon Administration and also join the military to serve on the Evacuation of the Saigon Embassy and deal with the beginning of the downfall of the Soviet Union.  At the very same time that I had joined the military, Mitt Romney the man who professes to ‘love this country so much’ ran off to Paris, France  in order to avoid the draft in order to convert the Catholics of France [which included the Corsican part of my family] into Mormons. 

 Of that episode the embellished it into a narrative that made him sound ‘brave’, ‘steadfast’ and ‘fortunate to have survived an accident’.

  Mitt created the fanciful lies and tales just like Joseph Smith,  to hide his tendency to distract, deceive and run away from serious world problems and hide into the insular world of solipsism and shadowy nonsense. 

In my world, he was and is a coward. Simple as that.

  In fact, his need to parade his stepford family and ken-doll looking sons convinces me more than ever that he and his wife live in a bubble of fantasy and fiction. It is fascinating that not one son or member of his entourage offered to serve in our military.  Instead the poor sons with the silverspoons in their mouth were given as a present ‘ten million dollars’ to start their own hedge fund. 

How patriotic and how entrepreneurial!

Welcome back Joseph Smith! Mitt,  you and he did more financial chicanery to deceive the federal government and innocent investors than an other ‘true blooded’ American I know, other than your bankers, Goldman Sachs.

  So, my final message is not to the inevitable loser -the Republican Party who deserved to be slammed down with their arrogance, ignorance, bravado and obscene wealth, but to us the ordinary American Citizens ---let us wish for two new candidates for 2016—General Petreaus and maybe Michael Bloomberg. 

But of course no one knows what history holds in store for us.