The worst week ever for an LDS senator?
Mitt Romney is an embarrassment and should resign immediately
Mitt Romney apparently wants to be known as the worst LDS senator ever.
Over the weekend he accused former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies” regarding Russia. And then yesterday he was the only Republican senator to vote to continue to force everybody — including two-year-olds — to wear masks. The Utah senator voted against lifting an HHS mandate, and as another senator said:
“Really, what we’re doing is just punishing children,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said. “The rest of America is insulted by you telling them that their kids who are not at risk from dying from this disease, are not spreading it, that somehow we’re going to force these kids to keep wearing masks. It’s unscientific, it’s inhumane and it stunting their learning.”
Despite urgings from other Republicans, the amendment ultimately failed. Even though swing Republicans such as Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted to unmask the children, Romney crossed the aisle and helped doom two-year-olds to wearing face coverings even though most adults in cities, schools, and workplaces don’t have to any longer.
Just a few days ago, Romney sent out an embarrassing tweet that received nationwide scorn:
What was Tulsi Gabbard’s supposed treason?
Gabbard’s crime was that she echoed twenty years of statements by U.S. officials and scholars across the spectrum by arguing that NATO expansion up to the Russian borders, and particularly the prospect of membership for Ukraine, was genuinely threatening to Moscow; thus, she argued, the U.S. and NATO, in order to attempt to diplomatically avert a horrific war, should formalize its intent not to offer NATO membership to the country occupying the most sensitive and vulnerable part of the border with Russia…..
On Sunday night, Gabbard posted a two-minute video online in which she said something completely indisputable: “indisputable” in the sense that the U.S. Government itself admits it and nobody contests it. She did not say that there are bio weapons labs in Ukraine: either ones funded by the U.S. or anyone else. What she did say — in her characteristically clear and blunt manner — is that there are labs in Ukraine in which dangerous pathogens are being cultivated and stored, and that it is reckless in the extreme for the U.S. and/or Ukraine not to have secured or disposed of them when Russian troops were massed on the Ukrainian border, indicating the high possibility of an invasion that could result in these pathogens being accidentally released during war.
Gabbard’s warning is scarcely different from what U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said when testifying last Monday in the Senate, in response to Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) question of whether “Ukraine has biological or chemical weapons” (we examined Nuland’s response here); what U.S. officials themselves claimed in response to questions about Nuland’s comments; and what Reuters reported were the warnings from the World Health Organization about the dangers of Ukrainian labs. A separate Reuters article designed to debunk Russian accusations about bioweapons labs in Ukraine noted that Ukraine’s “laboratories have received support from the United States, European Union and World Health Organization.”
And as we documented in a video report broadcast this week, the distinction between a “bioweapons lab” and what Nuland described as Ukraine’s “biological research facilities” is often mere semantics in U.S. jargon. The U.S. indisputably develops biological weapons (the 2001 attack using highly sophisticated weaponized anthrax strains came from a U.S. Army lab, according to the FBI, and the U.S. has funded the work of Chinese scientists to manipulate coronaviruses to make them more contagious and lethal), yet nonetheless insists they are not “biological weapons” because the motive in developing those weapons is to study, not deploy, them. Thus, if Ukraine’s labs had weaponized biological pathogens but the U.S. believed they were developed for the purpose of studying rather than unleashing them, the U.S. would insist that there are no “biological weapons” in these labs even though they are identical to what one would manufacture with a more nefarious intention.
So, to sum up: Tulsi Gabbard said things that are common knowledge among foreign policy experts and state department bureaucrats. And somehow Mitt believes these are “treasonous lies?”
Does Mitt Romney know that the United States is not at war with Russia and does he know that the U.S. Constitution has a specific definition of treason?
Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution states:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
One of the reasons treason is the only crime specifically outlined in the Constitution is that the Founders wanted to prevent using claims of “treason” to prevent political speech. It is not treason to say something that another person disagrees with politically, which is what Mitt Romney is claiming. Treason against the United States has a specific political meaning only involving clear support of a country in which the United States is engaged in active combat. And the United States is not in combat against Russia, despite such a combat being the apparent goal of warmongers like Mitt Romney.
The claim is especially rich given that Lt. Col. Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran with years of military service, and Romney avoided the draft in the 1960s. (Mitt’s route to avoid the draft included serving as a missionary, which is obviously an honorable and godly pursuit — my point is that it is a bit much for a man who has never served in the military to accuse somebody who has served of “treasonous lies.”)
I would like to also point out that we have been hearing for years now from LDS intellectuals that President Trump’s rhetoric was out of line and unbecoming of a politician. I agree. Will the same people who condemned Trump come out against Romney’s completely unnecessary attack on a former U.S. congresswoman? And, again, this attack involves literally the most heinous crime of which you can accuse a person in the United States, ie treason.
I agree with Tulsi Gabbard’s defense of herself:
“Romney, please provide evidence that what I said is untrue and treasonous. If you cannot, you should do the honorable thing: apologize and resign from the Senate,” she said.
There is no evidence that anything Tulsi Gabbard said is a lie, and there is certainly no evidence it is treason. Mitt Romney is an embarrassment and should resign immediately.