Saturday, February 4, 2012

Maybe Europe is Nice After All

I have been taken aback by Romney's unrelentingly campaign rhetoric and unsupported vilification of "failed" European socialism.  I previously raised this concern in my post "Romney on the Economy". Finally, someone else has spoken-up.

Martin Klingst, in a Washington Post opinion piece titled "The GOP’s ‘Europe’ is a land of make-believe", writes "Lately it seems that not a day goes by without a Republican presidential candidate portraying Europe as a socialist nightmare. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum paint a picture of the Old World as unfree, strangulated by bureaucratic and inefficient welfare systems, and unable to reform and modernize. To these Republicans, Europe seems to be the antipode to everything America is meant to be.  ... My problem as a European living in the United States is that it is not Joe the Plumber who is bashing Europe but three longtime politicians who want to be president — people who should know better. ... framing Europe simply as inflexible and outdated, or backward and socialistic, is shortsightedand wrong. Romney, Gingrich and Santorum should know as well as anyone that the globe is no longer flat."

We need to seriously question statements by politicians running for office.

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