There's a profile of Mitt Romney in the NYT which argues his two-year mission in France was his defining moment. While I won't argue that, I did notice this:
Mr. Romney, though, said that he sometimes had wished he were in Vietnam instead of France. “There were surely times on my mission when I was having a particularly difficult time accomplishing very little when I would have longed for the chance to be serving in the military,” he said in an interview, “but that was not to be.”
Huh? "I would have longed for the chance to be serving in the military but that was not to be?" What, divine intervention prevented you? Um, enlistment was an option, Mitt. That's what I did.
The Republicans spent the better part of the 1992 campaign maligning Bill Clinton for not serving in a war he opposed. Now we see that Mitt Romney claims to have supported it, but didn't serve due to a religious mission deferment and regrets it.
Shades of Dick Cheney ("better things to do") and Tom Delay ("some minority guy took my spot") and, lest we forget, George W. Bush ("Texas Air National Guard when I felt like it").
Posted by Linkmeister at November 15, 2007 11:40 AM | TrackBackAnd don't forget that one republican who suffered under his Viet Nam era military service protecting Alabama's border from invasion by Georgia and Mississippi...perhaps even Tennessee - oh make that maybe.
Posted by: Karan at November 15, 2007 08:22 PMDid you read the piece on Romney in Rolling Stone recently? God bless Matt Taibbi. Fascinating and spot-on. Definitely check it out.
Posted by: Craig at November 19, 2007 01:17 PM