Retro Romney, "Polyushka Pole!", and "The Russians Are Coming!"

Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 on "building a bridge to the 21st century". Mitt Romney is trying to paddle us back by canoe to the 1950s!

What's with this guy? He is so retro! He uses expressions no one's used for 50 years. I'm 76 years old, and he sounds out of date even to ME! He also acts and talks like women are still "the girls", and he says that if he wants to know something about them, he'll ask his wife. Doesn't he know any women? Or does he run with a retro crowd where women sit on one side of the room and men on the other. Or "the girls" aren't allowed in the room at all, like at Augusta.

But that's not the worst of it. He wants to revive the Cold War. While Obama can give Medvedev a wink and a nod and a chummy pat on the knee, Romney instead wants to stir up fear of the "Soviets".

Yeah, the "Soviets"!

That's the exact label one of his foreign policy advisers just used in a radio interview attacking Obama's foreign policy.  (Hint, hint, fella:  the Soviet Union has not been around for about 20 years!)

 Romney himself has attacked Obama for confiding in Medvedev that he'd catch Putin later, i.e. when the election is over. Romney calls that "secret" dealing with the Russians.

I personally love an American president giving a chummy pat on the knee to a Russian leader. Having spent 43 years of my life in dread of nuclear war with the "Soviets", as far as I'm concerned Obama can chum with any Russian leader any time, even give him a hug.

Or even sing to him: "I'm so in love with you...."

The motto should be: "Whatever works." Obama worked together with the Russians on getting a nuclear arms reduction treaty. Remember that? Bet you didn't. It got little play at the time and lots of silence since. But it was monumentally important. Actually more important than killing bin Laden. Bin Laden killed about 3000 Americans on 9/11. A nuclear bomb on New York would kill millions. Not that Russia would lob one at us. Thankfully that horror is behind us (though not in Romney's "back to the future" take on things). The real deal is to keep nuclear weapons or materials from getting into the wrong hands or proliferating. The Russians are bright about this point. We CAN work together with them on it. We can and we must.

Another of Romney's foreign policy advisers was on the radio chastizing Obama for having withdrawn our nuclear defense stuff from "Poland and Czechoslovakia". Where does Romney find these guys? There hasn't been a Czechoslvakia since the early 1990s. (That nation split in two.)

It's hard to decide whether the bulk of Romney's campaign is built on willful ignorance or on deliberate lies or on dangerous nostalgia.

As for refighting the Cold War as he and his advisers seem to want to do, let's give him instead a hot war, a real fight for the election!  He wants war? Let's beat the hell out of him in November and then celebrate by watching the great movie "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" It's the wildly wonderful depiction of Cold War hysteria that got a standing ovation in Moscow and is beloved in the USA by anybody who has ever seen it.

Then hug the nearest Russian, grab some beers and take turns singing "Yankee Doodle" and "Polyushka Pole".

Like the young Russian submariner says in the film, "I don't want to hate anybody!"

Except Retro Romney! Because his ignorance, lies and backward-turning scare me. And they should scare YOU too!