More evidence that Mitt Romney did say no Muslims in his cabinet.
You can’t make this stuff up. Scott Bloch, the guy investigating politicization in the Bush Administration, is himself under investigation, and called Geeks on Call to come and erase his computer hard drive. Now he’s under investigation for that, too.
With Mitt and Muslims, it’s a pretty extraordinary statement that a presidential candidate would, on principle, rule out members of an entire religion for high office in his administration. And it’s not an entirely theoretical question. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American and Muslim, has been a senior member of President Bush’s foreign policy team from the start. He has been successively, US Ambassador to Afghanistan (2003-05), US Ambassador to Iraq (2005-07) and now US Ambassador to the United Nations (2007-).
He’s often discussed as a potential Secretary of State should a Republican win the presidency in 2008.
So again, this isn’t as hypothetical a question as you might think.
For all that, though, I think Romney’s bigger problem is that he seems to be lying. Yesterday he denied unequivocally that he said he wouldn’t appoint a Muslim to his cabinet in his conversation with Mansour Ijaz. Ijaz is sticking by his story. And now three Republicans are on the record saying that Romney said the same thing back in September. And there’s now an additional, contemporaneous account adding further weight to their claims.
Romney didn’t specifically reference that earlier conversation, but presumably he’s not just saying that he didn’t say this to Ijaz but that he didn’t say it ever.
We’ll check to see whether he addresses this again today.
Kos is right about this. It may turn out that Hillary’s falling behind her GOP rivals. But Zogby’s web polls, as opposed to his phone polls, are junk — unproven methodology backed up by poor results. They shouldn’t be discussed in the same breath as legit, randomized phone surveys. So there’s just no evidence for it at the moment. And it’s not special-pleading by the Hillaryites for saying so.
Having trouble keeping up with Romney’s latest story on whether he’d appoint a Muslim to serve in his administration? We try to unravel the fast-breaking bamboozlement in today’s episode of TPMtv …
We asked an Iraqi government spokesman about the permanent troop presence negotiations. He seems to have learned the bobbing and weaving lessons pretty well.
As the White House tries its hand at Middle Eastern peace negotiations, Dana Perino attempts to explain the President’s role in the talks:
Wild Bill’s claim that he opposed the Iraq War “from the beginning” goes to the crux of the debate between the Clinton and Obama camps over the run-up to the invasion.
You probably know DOJ voting section chief John Tanner for doing his level best to crack down on minority voting and telling an audience that voter ID laws aren’t a problem since blacks and hispanics don’t live that long anyway.
Now it seems he’s gotten in a bit of hot water for using his job to take a bunch of snazzy vacations on the taxpayer dime.
When Rudy was Mayor he billed city agencies for trips to booty calls out in the Hamptons.