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.

Interviewing Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild on Democracy Now! (5/1/09), Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman get the now 100-year-old magazine's high-minded take on the threatened existence of other periodicals:

Rothschild: Well, the magazine industry is in crisis. The newspaper industry is in crisis. A lot of the news weeklies don’t know how to function right now; the idea that you have a Newsweek magazine right now, that's antiquated. That's a dinosaur. People get the news within minutes or hours; they don’t need to go find it a week later as to what happens. So the intellectual reason for being for these magazines is kind of kaput. And their economic model is kaput, too.

So I think magazines, to the extent that they're going to be able to survive and the Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can't find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.

The "cardinal principles" to which Rothschild ascribes his publication's longevity: "We're still fighting corporate power. We're still fighting for civil liberties and human rights and against these foreign interventions that just help the corporations."