Some may think Mitt Romney is not a team player. Perhaps. But on one point he was right: Russia.

FNC: “Nearly 10 years ago, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney scolded his future opponent for telling Russian President Dmitry Medvedev he’d have more ‘flexibility’ toward the country after his election.

‘This is to Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe,’ he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on March 26, 2012. ‘They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that [President Barack Obama] has some more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling, indeed.’

While the Russia comment was ripped by Democrats and the media as a gaffe underscoring Romney’s foreign policy inexperience at the time, it’s viewed now as prescient. It’s also seen by critics as a stark example of the mainstream press echoing Democratic talking points, particularly in light of subsequent years of fervent Russiagate media coverage and bellicose actions by autocratic Russian leader Vladimir Putin, like this week’s invasion of Ukraine.”

“You don’t call Russia our No. 1 enemy unless you’re still stuck in a Cold War mind warp,” Obama said. What an idiot.

The liberal press, of course, bent knee to Obama. “Mitt Romney rather unproductively distracted everyone from focusing on the critique he was making of President Obama,” Eric Randall wrote in The Atlantic. The Boston Globe said that Romney “seems intent on screaming ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, even if his audience doesn’t seem to be responding. He should choose his words more wisely. Diplomacy, far more than campaigning, requires finesse.”

The New York Times editorial board said Romney’s “comments display either a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.”

“A throwback to the Cold War,” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell said of Romney’s comments in 2012. “I mean, we work with Russia all the time.”

“It looks more like a signature [bias] moment in retrospect, that everyone can recognize Romney was right … just as they now recognize Romney was a much more decent chap than they painted him,” Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center told Fox News Digital. “But in the ardor of battle, in reelecting Obama, demonizing was king.”

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This piece was written by David Kamioner on February 23, 2022. It originally appeared in DrewBerquist.com and is used by permission.

 

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