Romney to Obama: You're timid, dude

Erstwhile Presidential aspirant Mitt Romney writes a scathing editorial in the National Review Online today (read it here) in which calls President Obama "a timid advocate of freedom at best." He blasts the President for sitting through Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's blistering 50 minute attack on the United States at the Summit of the Americas and offering only what Romney sees as a mild rebuke in return. He admonishes the President for not responding to the North Korean missile launch with financial punishments or sanctions, and for offering "no hint of military options" toward Iran for violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. "Ahmadinejad can act with confidence that the forceful options once on our proverbial table have been shelved," Romney writes. He fails to note, predictably, that the enhanced capabilities in North Korea and Iran in question were largely developed under President Bush's watch. And although he criticizes Obama for failing to deter nuclear brinkmanship, he doesn't mention the President's proposal for a new arms control regime or his anti-nukes speech in Prague. Still, it is a forceful, uncompromising critique that is bound to get conservative hearts racing. 

Romney has been a fairly regular face on cable TV over the past few months, and up until now has offered measured criticism of the administration. That he would choose foreign policy as the subject for his most vigorous attack, when his notable strong suit is economics and finance, is a likely window to his barely sublimated Presidential ambitions. And that he chose conservative magazine the National Review to publish this attack, rather than the Wall Street Journal or the Boston Globe where he has published before, gives us a clue as to just who he is burnishing his foreign policy credentials for: GOP party faithful.

Here's a taste of his oped (after the jump):

At last week's Summit of the Americas, President Obama acquiesced to a 50-minute attack on America as terroristic, expansionist, and interventionist from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. His response to Ortega's denunciation of our effort to free Cuba from Castro's dictatorship was that he shouldn't be blamed "for things that happened when I was three months old." Blamed? Hundreds of men, including Americans, bravely fought and died for Cuba's freedom, heeding the call from newly elected president John F. Kennedy. But last week, even as American soldiers sacrificed blood in Afghanistan and Iraq to defend liberty, President Obama shrank from defending liberty here in the Americas.

In his first press interview as president, he confessed to Arabic television that America had "dictated" to other nations. No, Mr. President, America has fought to free other nations from dictators. And in Strasbourg, the president further claimed that America has "showed arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." London's Daily Telegraph observed that President Obama "went further than any United States president in history in criticizing his own country's action while standing on foreign soil." Of course, it was not just the Daily Telegraph that was listening: People around the world who yearn for freedom, who count on America's resolve and support, heard him as well. He was heard in China, in Tibet, in Sudan, in Burma, and, yes, in Cuba.