Chris Hayes notes Romney’s silence on Afghanistan

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One interesting thing about Clint Eastwood’s bizarre appearance at the Republican National Convention, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said on Up With Chris Hayes Saturday, was that Eastwood explicitly mentioned the U.S. war in Afghanistan, something the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, didn’t discuss at all.

Eastwood stumbled his way through criticizing Obama for setting a 2014 target date for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan – one of only two mentions of the war, one of only two references to Afghanistan during the convention, according to the New York Times.

But Romney’s omission also stands in marked contrast to the forceful tone he adopted when it came to foreign policy and other nations.

“To go into this revelry about all the places you basically want to start something with,” Hayes marveled, before showing a clip from Romney’s own speech at the convention that included a remark about a “united America” that had “a military so strong that no nation would even dare to test it.”

For Romney to be able to get away with not mentioning Afghanistan once in his remarks, Hayes said, illustrated a double standard.

“If a Democratic president had gotten up and given that speech – a nomination speech – and not mentioned the current war in which we are engaged, that would be the Drudge [Report] headline, the Fox headline, that would have dominated the entire coverage,” Hayes told panelists Bob Herbert, Ana Marie Cox, Josh Barro and David Sirota. “I was flabbergasted.”

Watch the segment from Up With Chris Hayes, aired Saturday, below.

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