Romney is giving his campaign-suspension speech now. He started it off by bragging about how America never takes land from others. Apparently (and most ironically), he derived this bit of flummery from an Israeli:
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Simon Peres, in a visit to Boston, was asked what he thought about the war in Iraq. “First,” he said, “I must put something in context. America is unique in the history of the world. In the history of the world, whenever there has been conflict, the nation that wins takes land from the nation that loses. One nation in history, and this during the last century, laid down hundreds of thousands of lives and took no land. No land from Germany, no land from Japan, no land from Korea. America is unique in the sacrifice it has made for liberty, for itself and for freedom loving people around the world.”
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I guess our wars with Mexico and Spain, herding our native populations onto the least arable land possible (until we wanted that, too), and building permanent bases in Iraq don’t count. Maybe, for Israelis, the “history of the world” began in 1948. Or 1967.
Romney is now spewing “Jihad” and “Jihadists” as is required of all Republicans paying lip service to the dismal failures of he-who-must-not-be-named (Prince George’s name never comes up in the speech). He’s just repeated the canard that if we don’t kill them over there (speaking of Iraq), they’re going to kill us over here. So he’s tossing the ball to McCain because, in his words, continuing would “make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”
Here’s the entire text, in case you ate too much and have an urge to purge:
http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-romneys-speech-withdrawing-from-the-race/