Maureen Dowd is far from the only one to somehow attempt to blame both Bush and Romney for the recent unrest in the Arab world, while refraining from placing any blame on the current occupant of the Oval Office:
You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?
After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.
The neocons aren’t slithering back. Obama has been going along with their strategic insanity to nearly the same extent as Bush. But that’s not enough for them – one wonders what would be enough – and ominously, Mitt Romney is showing every sign that he will make Bush’s foreign policy look like the humble one it was once promised to be by comparison.
But the media must be truly fearful about the electoral backlash facing Obama as a result of the recent incidents in Libya and elsewhere across the Arab world, considering their desperate attempts to change the subject to Bush, or Romney, or anything but the man who is nominally in responsible for addressing them. And they must be terrified about what he’s going to say next after producing that “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally” gem about Egypt.