Mitt Romney's Chicken Hawk Past — And Present

Mitt Romney is only the latest, whose turn has come, of hawkish right wing Republicans to evade the Vietnam draft. Before him in this cowardly lineup of infamous deferments came Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, and lest we forget, dishonorable mention to the actual leader of the Republican Party Rush Limbaugh who avoided service with an ass cyst that may actually have been his brain. George W. Bush enlisted daddy's help to get him into the "Champagne National Guard" where privileged kids were parked stateside to avoid going to Nam, in case the Viet Cong invaded Texas through Mexico. These are only the 2012 highlights. The cowardice of Republicans is legion, and quite possibly pathological.

Enter Mitt Romney. In this Boston Globe article Romney claims with his now infamous "pious baloney" that he "longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam."

Yeah, right. As a privileged, protected Mormon whose daddy was Michigan governor, Romney "received a deferment from the draft as a Mormon 'minister of religion' for the duration of his missionary work in France, which lasted two and a half years. Before and after his missionary deferment, Romney also received nearly three years of deferments for his academic studies." But, he insists, "I really don’t recall thinking about political positions when I was knocking at the door in France."

His 'missionary work' in France wasn't quite like ministering to impoverished third-world populations as in the work done by Peace Corps volunteers in Africa and South America. Romney lived in France like a Mormon Maharajah "in a Mormon palace with chef and houseboy." Strangely, the Mitt Romney who doesn't "recall thinking about political positions" felt comfortable enough in his draft-protected skin to pick up a sign and demonstrate in favor of his university releasing draft information of others, not-so-fortunate-sons and joining snarky counter-demonstrations to an anti-war sit-in. If he wasn't "thinking about political positions" he was certainly taking them as a creature of the establishment elites, even then. Here are heartwarming photos of Mitt's reactionary Vietnam War political demonstrations, courtesy of the Mail Online:

Willard Mitt Romney is only the latest in the line of Republican draft dodging Chicken Hawks who never served in Vietnam to eargerly propose a do-over of the Bush-Cheney endless wars horror show, with chest-thumping bellicosity toward Iran, steep increases in our bloated military budget, and a wholesale rejection of the last honest and true Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower: "Beware of the military-industrial complex."