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From C-SPAN’s Book TV, Mitt Romney attacks President Obama while discussing his new book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and praises George W. Bush for his "strength in defending this country" and says that President Obama “is going to have to move in that course or he will be seen as being a weak President on the international stage”. He also claims that Bush would not have attacked Iraq if Saddam had just let the weapons inspectors in. And yes that is Juan Williams interviewing him and not asking any follow up questions to this nonsense.

Williams: So people are going to say it looks like you’re on a campaign tour. And the one line in the book that is so critical of President Obama is given all the foreign policy issues we’ve touched on, that this President seeks to present himself as somehow transcendent, transcendent of America, American values and American interests, as opposed to being an advocate for American values and Americans’ interests. That would seem to be almost like a campaign slogan where you have to reduce it in size… but the idea is that you believe we needed an American President who stands for America and you do not see that in this President Obama who seeks to transcend, to be greater or larger than America.

Romney: Well I think any time the President of the United States travels the world and is critical of the United States that it’s going to lead to the kind of stories that came out of the British press saying this President has been more critical of his home country of foreign soil than any American President in history and that creates a very real impression that he’s somehow thinks he is above America and its history, or there’s something he needs to distance himself from. I think that’s a mistake.

He goes on yammering about how we need to be spreading our “values” and “freedoms” and uses the old campaign rhetoric that we heard about Obama being on an “apology tour”. He then heaps some praise on President Bush with this bit of revisionist history.

Romney: We were hit on 9-11. He took out the Taliban in Afghanistan. We believed we were receiving threats from Saddam Hussein who by the way could have removed the threat instantly by saying come on in, all of my facilities are open, the international inspectors could look in the palaces, they could look in the, you know the COM military fissile and take a look here because we don’t want to have America come after us. He did not do that. He could have done that and would not have suffered the fate he did had he been willing to open up his nation to that kind of inspection; but those things being said I respect President Bush’s strength in defending this country and I think President Obama is going to have to move in that course or he will be seen as being a weak President on the international stage.

For more on Romney's book there's this article by Spencer Ackerman.

Romney’s ‘No Apology’ Outlines Foreign Policy for Fantasy World:

Mitt Romney’s just-published book, “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness,” is a bid to bolster the former Massachusetts governor’s nonexistent national-security and foreign policy portfolio ahead of a possible 2012 presidential run. But a glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

Romney’s central contention is that there are four “strategies” for global power: the United States’ blend of benevolent, market-based hegemony; the Chinese model of political autocracy and unrestrained industry; Russia’s energy-based path to resurgence; and the “violent jihadists,” an agglutination of scary Muslims. Trouble in paradise, according to Romney, comes from President Obama’s “presupposition” that “America is in a state of inevitable decline.” As a result, Romney must warn the nation to continue to lead the world, lest one or more of these competitors overtake America. “[T]here can be no rational denial of the reality that America is a decidedly good nation,” writes Romney, or perhaps a third grader. “Therefore, it is good for America to be strong.” Read on...

And there's this from Jason Linkens at the HuffPo.

Romney Got Assist On Book From Fortune's Nina Easton [UPDATE]:

According to the Boston Globe, when former presidential contender Mitt Romney needed help communicating his ideas with the non-Cylons living in America in his latest book "No Apology: Bleep Blorp Blorp America", he got an assist from Fortune Magazine's Washington bureau chief Nina Easton. That book hits the shelves today, and already, Washington Post Media-Type Guy Howard Kurtz feels "funny" about this latest intersection between journalists and political figures.

According to Boston Globe reporter Sasha Issenberg, Easton is credited in Romney's acknowledgments thusly: "Nina Easton, the noted journalist and commentator, advised me on ways to make the message of what I had written more clear and compelling." Easton is connected to Romney through her husband, Russ Schriefer, who worked on Romney's 2008 campaign. Read on...

And there's this from Spencer Ackerman as well.

Sarah Palin Is No Longer The Stupidest Republican Presidential Hopeful:

I have just read the foreign policy sections of Mitt Romney’s brand-new book No Apology: The Case For American Greatness and filed a piece about them for the Washington Independent. (Hence today’s slow posting.) It’s currently being edited. My biggest concern for the piece is that I simply lack the narrative and argumentative skill to convey to you, sufficiently, how deeply and thoroughly stupid the political persona known as Mitt Romney is. It’s causing a bit of an internal journalistic crisis in my brain. Read on...