Mitt Romney says this and Mitt Romney says that and never the twain shall meet. But every once in a while the Republican presidential candidate says something we should pay attention to.

At one of those multitudinous debates, he said:

If Barack Obama is reelected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon; if Mitt Romney…- if I am elected Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.

I don’t recall the moderator asking him what he meant by that. I took it to mean that this mild-mannered Mormon was promising to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

Now, I know you don’t take Mitt Romney’s remarks seriously. He is like the weather these days – wait a minute and it will change. But I don’t think he’s going to flip-flop this time. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on MSNBC the other night, he has surrounded himself with “advisers” from the neoconservative phalanx that persuaded George W. Bush to invade and occupy Iraq. So it looks as if he’s hell bent on another war.

The prospect of more war makes me want to curl up in a corner and stick my thumb in my mouth.

As an American taxpayer, I just hate the thought of any more people dying and being maimed in my name. These politicians are supposed to represent me, and the last thing I want them to do with my taxes is kill unfortunate civilians and their children – who probably did nothing more sinister than get born in a foreign land where America’s leaders don’t like the government. And, left to me, U.S. troops would stay home to guard their native land, not travel all over the world killing and getting killed.

And I cringe at the expense. America has spent about $1.3 trillion – so far – on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don’t propose to debate the justification for those conflicts. Some people insist they’re “just wars.” But don’t you think we could have found a better way to spend that trillion-plus in these hard times?

Yes, I know the defense industry provides jobs. Thousands of jobs. But doesn’t your blood grow cold thinking of the price of those jobs?

How many children must go hungry to pay for the wars? How many war widows must cry themselves to sleep? How many orphans must grow up without knowing their parents? How many parents must grieve the loss of a son or daughter?

I wonder whether these thoughts bother Mitt Romney. He seems so unperturbed.

Is he like Rick Perry who has never lost a night’s sleep over the possibility of signing the death warrant for an innocent person?

Or Ron Paul who regards the death of an uninsured accident victim as the “price of freedom”?

Or Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain who are eager to bring back water boarding?

Or Newt Gingrich who served his cancer-stricken wife with divorce papers as she lay in her hospital bed?

The thought of having any of these heartless humanoids as America’s president fills me with dread.