If you've paid attention to the presidential campaign season, you've no doubt been entertained by the string of embarrassments and gaffes: Rick Perry blows the voting age! Herman Cain can't remember what to say about Libya! Mitt Romney talks about the upside of a murderous dictatorship!

Wait--what?

In the November 22  debate, Romney gave this answer to a question about what to do about Pakistan:

We don't want to just pull up stakes and get out of town after the enormous output we've just made for the region. Look at Indonesia in the '60s. We helped them move toward modernity. We need to help bring Pakistan into the 21st century, or the 20th, for that matter.

That's an astonishing comment--and one that was hardly noticed in the corporate media.

To people who were paying attention, Romney would seem to have been praising the reign of Indonesian dictator Suharto, who took power in the mid-'60s. As Ed Herman wrote in Extra! (9-10/98):

Suharto's overthrow of the Sukarno government in 1965-66 turned Indonesia from Cold War "neutralism" to fervent anti-Communism, and wiped out the Indonesian Communist Party--exterminating a sizable part of its mass base in the process, in widespread massacres that claimed at least 500,000 and perhaps more than a million victims. The U.S. establishment's enthusiasm for the coup-cum-mass murder was ecstatic (see Chomsky and Herman, Washington Connection and Third World Fascism); "almost everyone is pleased by the changes being wrought," New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger commented (4/8/66).

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full-page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

The Progressive's Matt Rothschild called Romney's answer the "most outrageous comment of the whole debate," noting that the "new leadership" he referred to was a dictator "who killed between 500,000 and 1 million of his own citizens with the help of the CIA. A little follow up from Wolf Blitzer would have been nice there."

One of the only other journalists to catch this was Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor, who spent a decade reporting from Indonesia. As Murphy wrote, the 1960s saw

the systematic destruction of Indonesia's nascent democratic institutions and political parties (which had already been taking a beating under Sukarno); state repression of opponents with torture, targeted killings and long jail terms; and a military-backed dictatorship that persisted until a popular uprising in 1998 pushed Suharto, finally, from power.

The first sentence of Murphy's piece was "I don't generally write about U.S. politics." Indeed. Hundreds of journalists who spend every day writing about U.S. politics apparently did not find it newsworthy that Romney endorsed a bloody dictatorship.

Michael Schwartz' (TomDispatch, 7/9/09) quote from a New York Times Baghdad report that "much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night" includes the reason for this secrecy having to "take place at night": "Fewer Iraqis are likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total."

To Schwartz, "acting in the dark of night, in fact, seems to catch the nature of American plans for Iraq in a particularly striking way":

Last week, despite the death of Michael Jackson, Iraq made it back into the TV news as Iraqis celebrated a highly publicized American military withdrawal from their cities....

Unfortunately, not just for the Iraqis, but for the American public, it's what's happening in "the dark"--beyond the glare of lights and TV cameras--that counts....

An anonymous senior State Department official described this new "dark of night" policy recently to Christian Science Monitor reporter Jane Arraf this way: "One of the challenges of that new relationship is how the U.S. can continue to wield influence on key decisions without being seen to do so."

Without being seen to do so.... As a result, the crucial thing you can say about the Obama administration's military and civilian planning so far is this: Ignore the headlines, the fireworks and the briefly cheering crowds of Iraqis on your TV screen. Put all that talk of withdrawal aside for a moment and--if you take a closer look, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness.

Schwartz predicts that, "as your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, you begin to identify a deepening effort to ensure that Iraq remains a U.S. client state." In fact, "what seems to be coming into focus shouldn't be too unfamiliar to students of history. Once upon a time, it used to have a name: colonialism." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Catherine Lutz on Iraq Bases" (6/13/08).

During his regular review of scientific reporting for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Boyce Rensberger describes (5/7/09) how the "11-year (give or take) sunspot cycle, associated with a periodic reversal in the sun’s magnetic poles" means that "the number of sunspots increases in the years just before a reversal." But Rensberger notes that "Where are we now?" depends on "Who you gonna read?":

The Christian Science Monitor says the next reversal, expected in 2012, could be associated with an unusual number of sunspots and solar flares. Those flares send out barrages of charged particles that can cause problems on Earth. The story carries this hed: "Solar Storms Ahead: Is Earth Prepared? / Sunspot Cycle Beginning in 2012 May Put Satellites, Power Grids at Risk." The story, by James Turner, focuses strongly on the threat of coming solar storms.

But over at the National Geographic, a different story. Anne Minard writes about a “prolonged lull in solar activity” (the recent absence of sunspots has gone on longer than expected) and whether it might bring another “little ice age.” Minard writes: "The sun is the least active it's been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years." She goes on to talk about the past little ice age during the sun's so-called Maunder minimum, when Europe saw harsher than average winters. She does include scientists' belief that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since then would swamp any solar-forced cooling.

Meanwhile, almost inevitably, into this otherwise reasoned debate wades a less-than-scientific outlet reaching its own conclusions: "Fox News, predictably, notes the Geographic story and plugs it with this hed: 'Quiet Sun May Trigger Global Cooling.'"