Romney to mother of Army daughter: How can Obama sleep at night?
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
(CBS News) DAYTON, Ohio - A woman at a rally here tearfully asked Mitt Romney on Saturday why her Army daughter is still in Afghanistan nearly a year after the death of Osama bin Laden. He seized on her question to accuse President Obama of failing to clearly communicate the mission to U.S. troops serving there.
Vicki Chura, 54, of Fairfield, Ohio, said her daughter calls home constantly from Bagram Air Base, where she serves with the 82nd Airborne Division, and is confused about why she is still there. She asked Romney what he would do to speed the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
"Her first deployment, she never once said 'I want to come home,'" Chura said of her daughter, who has been in the Army for more than three years. "This deployment has been extremely hard, not only for her, but for my husband and I. Every email, every time we Skype, we hear 'I want to come home now'. There is no mission here. We have no definition of a mission."
Romney jumped on Chura's complaint and attacked Obama on the war. "If your daughter is not familiar with the mission that she's on, how in the world can the commander in chief sleep at night, knowing that we have soldiers in harm's way that don't know exactly, precisely, what it is that they're doing there?" he asked.
The former Massachusetts governor said he found the president's failure to make the mission clear one of the "most disturbing and hard to explain" elements of Obama's tenure. Though American troops may have a hard time finding clarity in their mission, Romney said, he fully understood its purpose to be helping Afghan forces to achieve sovereignty and security. However, he continued, "We will not, we will not be able to hand on a silver platter their freedom. They will have to fight for that, earn it, keep the Taliban from taking it away from them. But we've given them that opportunity. We need to finish the job of passing it off to them, and bring our troops home as soon as humanly possible."
Romney has criticized Obama for announcing a withdrawal schedule and for the pace of the withdrawal. Some 10,000 U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2011 and another 23,000 are scheduled to withdraw by this summer, leaving 68,000. The plan is for Afghan forces to be entirely in charge of security by 2014. Polls show most Americans want the war to end.
Chura said she hasn't decided yet whether to vote for Romney or former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum in Tuesday's Republican presidential primary. She said Romney's lack of foreign policy experience will not be a factor because she trusts he will have a strong advisory team. Nor did Romney's answer to her question disqualify him. She said her maternal instincts led her to hope he might say he would bring her daughter home immediately, but "he showed determination and backbone" by not over-promising.
Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith said that the under Obama's leadership, "we are decimating al-Qaeda" and the Afghans are preparing to take over their own security. She said Romney "has failed to outline any plan at all for what he would do in Afghanistan and has even made clear that he would leave our troops there indefinitely."
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to war with Iran now!! Maybe we can keep your daugther deployed
overseas for 11 more years in another worthless war like this one
George Bush got us into. So make sure you vote for the
republican war mongers and never see your daughter again!!!!!!!!
Tomorrow Mitt will change his mind.
The giant corporation who run the government have become the problem in America. They want free reign to rape and pillage the earth. They want to keep inflicting their unregulated predatory capitalism on the weak and poor. They ARE the problem and must be neutralized.
Now on the other hand we have Obama, kissing their ***** until his nose is all the way up there!
To the girl who wonders why she is still in Afghanistan, just ask Bush and his Daddy!
why they are there seeing the SCUMBAG lied to get the us there
obama hasn't had a chance to do anything about the military or the ecomony because the republicans block everything
1) He lied 8 times in promises to televise the health care discussions openly on CSPAN.
2) He made deals giving one premium health care plan to union members (supporters) and another to the rest of the country.
3) He stood by and allowed the House and Senate to buy health care votes using taxpayer money.
4) He allowed the health care bills to be fashioned behind closed doors and be filled with political favors. This disaster of a health care law increases the cost of health care by imposing fees on medical devices (like pacemakers). He and they took over the nations health care by the federal government - most Americans did not want this extreme action - and still do not. This horrible law will cause the majority of Americans to have higher health care cost in rising premiums. We already can not afford the size federal government that we currently have, with a $16 trillion national debt. It imposes $billions of unfunded mandates on struggling states to provide greater Medicaid coverage. 27 states are suing the federal government over this nonsense, as they don't have the money to pay for this. Businesses are not hiring because of the additional cost PER EMPLOYEE that is caused by this law.
5) President Obama has continued at least a 8% unemployment rate for three years.
6) He irresponsibly overspent 100s of billions of dollars the US didn't have on bailouts (President Bush started it and President Obama accelerated it) and bogus stimulus packages. Progressives in Congress have refused to do their jobs to allow a national budget be established since 2009.
7) President Obama has behaved in the most partisan manner of any recent President, after promising bipartisanship. He has arrogantly trashed everyone who has not agreed with his socialist agenda - even the Supreme Court.
8) Instead of securing the border and enforcing federal immigration laws, the President has made war on Arizona Americans as they attempt to protect themselves from an invasion of illegal immigrants.
9) The President's man, AG Holder, dropped his case against the Black Panthers who blatantly intimidated voters at the polls. Now, Holder may finally be kicked out over "Fast and Furious" - the program that sold guns to Mexican cartels, guns used to kill a US border agent.
10) This President has focused on an extremist agenda of "fundamentally transforming" the US from a democratic republic into a socialist democracy, instead of the millions without jobs. We are all witnessing the collapse of European socialist democracies, yet this does nothing to stop this President from pushing us down that road of disaster.
11) President Obama imposed a moratorium on drilling in the gulf, throwing thousands more out of work. One foreign oil company screwed up, and the President decided to punish other oil companies that have drilled responsibly for decades.
12) President Obama wanted the President Bush tax cuts to expire, which would have resulted in redirecting money away from the economy and pushing it into Washington. The President held on to this until he was forced to change by the pounding the Democrats took in the 2010 election. Still, he promises to increase taxes next year.
13) The President and other progressives in Congress have imposed oppressive additional expenses and regulations on private sector businesses that are crippling the private sector jobs market, while expanding the federal government and public sector jobs. Anyone with any economic sense knows that you need tax revenues from a healthy private sector jobs market to fund public sector expansions, and the money is just not there.
14) With gas prices rising and projected to hit record levels by summer 2012, President Obama stops the Canadian pipeline deal that would reduce the US dependence on middle- eastern oil. His entire energy policy is idiotic, and leaves the US damaged. His impractical policies have included pumping public funds into "green energy" companies that have gone bankrupt, and even GM recently announced it will discontinue the manufacturing of the Volt electric car - they are unable to sell them.
15) In President Obama's 2012 budget, he never addressed serious issues threatening the future of the nation (like the fact that if Medicare and Social Security are not restructured, they both are projected to collapse by 2037). In fact, in the face of a staggering $16 trillion national debt - he proposed that we add another $trillion to it.
Just to name a few. The perfect word for President Obama is "irresponsible".
The problem is the filthy rich are still controlling congress. Congress needs WAKE UP and vote for the country - NOT for themselves. I agree with Debby - let's get this Democratic country moving again.