You may remember Paul Ryan’s new senior advisor, Dan Senor, as the spokesman for the US-led provisional government in Iraq, or as Rachel Maddow called him on Friday's The Rachel Maddow Show, “the guy trying to convince all the reporters the invasion was going awesome when of course, in fact, it was a disaster.”
We have some history on how Senor operates. According to Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Senor did “a masterful job of spinning the media,” and once told reporters, “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”
Now, this long-time Romney foreign policy adviser is also Paul Ryan’s senior adviser. Time’s Massimo Calabresi described possible reasons for the decision:
“Under real-world rules, Dan Senor should not be anywhere near Mitt Romney’s foreign policy inner circle…but under Washington rules, Senor makes perfect sense. He went to Iraq to serve a Republican Administration, and faced with the job of spinning a disaster, he kept his cool and stayed just this side of the line in painting a rosy picture of a living nightmare.”
Senor’s track record is a problem because we’re still at war, and things aren’t going well in Afghanistan. There have been seven attacks in the past two weeks, with six American troops killed last Friday. According to NATO, there have been 39 “green on blue” attacks, or insider attacks where people are supposed to be working together, on coalition forces in 2012 alone. In 2011, there were 11, and five in each of the years before that.
Maddow explains why she finds this incredible:
“Nobody expected this was going to be a foreign policy election. But we are at war. Tens of thousands of Americans are in harm’s way right now and their families are hanging on every word from the war zone. What is politically incredible is not so much that we can have an election without talking about that war, what’s even more incredible than that is that the Ryan/Romney ticket is so confident that they won’t be asked any questions about this war or the last one, that they have put the spokesman for the last disastrous war right at the top of their campaign.”
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I do believe that the operative word to define Dan Senor is "spin". Seems that the GOP has been well into this mode, for a considerable number of years. Why change, when they don't know how to run an election any other way?
Neo-conservatives dragged this country into unnecessary war and penury with slick operatives like Mr. Senor sugar-coating the obscenity in practiced frontman double-speak. Now they're back, coopting Romney's rudderless campaign in a calculated pursuit of power. That Romney would put Senor in such a public position underscores his hapless naivete in foreign affairs. Or maybe they're just counting on American political amnesia.