On Tuesday I posted an audio track of a conversation between Mark Larsen and Mitt Romney on the morning of the Florida primary. Today a reader replied to that post with the following comment:

Intrigued, I listened. I don’t get it.

1.) Romney and Larsen discuss tax policy. Larsen mentions Ron Paul.

2.) Romney dismissively says Ron Paul wants to do away with the CIA and FBI.

3.) Larsen is pissed because Romney quotes Ron Paul “out of school.” Lets say this is correct and that Romney is completely out of line. Larsen should then correctly quote Ron Paul and explain why Romney’s dismissive comments is both incorrect and unbecoming of a presidential candidate. That would have been powerful.

Instead, Larsen comes unglued, “I’ve got 4,000 dead soldiers Iraq… trillion dollars… lies… debacle… and Romney is laughing about it.” Say what? Romney laughs at Ron Paul’s purported desire to dismantle the CIA, and suddenly that’s laughing at 4,000 dead soldiers?

Jeez, you’re using Larsen misquoting Roney misquoting Ron Paul to prove the election is a sham? The only sham I see here is listening skills.

You just can’t separate the economy from the war. Why did we go to war? Because of bad intelligence from these agencies.

Romney is trying to use the increasing Social Security and military expenses to justify his argument against the “one tax” or the “no income tax” Ron Paul proposes.

It’s a simple concept that if we stop financing our needless 2-trillion-dollar-war with Iraq and scale back our police-the-world foreign policy, we could easily afford to lower taxes.

When Romney laughs at Ron Paul about his views on dismantling the CIA and FBI, he is wrong because he’s not making the connection between the war, 4000 troop deaths, and the failing economy.

Our intelligence agencies have failed us miserably despite their $40 billion annual budget. They failed to prevent 9/11. They provided Bush with false WMD information which led to the Iraq war. This in turn has accounted for almost a MILLION Iraqi deaths and over 4000 deaths of our troops along with hundreds of thousands injured and disabled.

If this isn’t glaring evidence that these departments are broken, I don’t know what is. For Romney to laugh off the idea of revamping and improving the agencies that caused this mess is ludicrous and shameful. ESPECIALLY when so much human life has been needlessly lost as a result. This angered Larsen and it should anger you.

Romney is “out of school” by his sneers because Ron Paul does NOT want to eliminate the concept of intelligence gathering, he wants to improve accountability so they do their job CORRECTLY having only the best interest of the American people at heart. And Romney knows it.

If the FBI & CIA did their jobs, we would not be at war and our economy would not be on the brink of recession. We would be able to have lower taxes, have a strong economy, and we would be safer by having our military HERE protecting OUR borders, not Iraq’s.

It is our duty as American citizens to be educated and make these connections and judging by the results of the primaries so far, most of us are failing to do so.

Not only is Ron Paul the only candidate making these connections, he’s the only one who has a real plan to fix it.

Thomas Boldt (also known as Tab) of The Calgary Sun in Alberta, Canada has an excellent political cartoon on Bush’s State of the Union address the other night.

It pretty much sums up what I was thinking when I listened to it. It was a great speech and all, but what country was W talking about - Sweden?

Click image to view the full-size cartoon