While the swirling debate continues about whether or not Mitt Romney is the most shoot-from-the-hip-inclined, gaffe-tastically inappropriate, poorly prepared for the commander-in-chiefdom presidential candidate evah, here’s what he was saying about his plans for America’s future security while on the stump in Virginia today. Click the image to watch, via RCP:

If I’m president of the United States, we will restore our military commitment and keep America the strongest military in the world. The world needs American leadership. The Middle East needs American leadership and I intend to be a president that provides the leadership that America respects and keep us admired throughout the world.

Capitalizing on the momentarily revived foreign-policy focus, Team Romney also released a new ad criticizing President Obama’s handling of China’s ill-begotten and insidious economic rise.

Besides pointing out that President Obama has backtracked on still more of his campaign promises (in this case, to brand China a currency manipulator and stop driving up our deficit and borrowing money from them — major fails on both counts), this ad implicitly makes another excellent point that should have come up more during Team Obama’s “outsourcing” attacks. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with offshoring itself if it’s born of free, cooperative trade and buying goods and services from wherever they’re most cheaply and efficiently produced, because that’s what drives economic growth and prosperity; but when we’re incentivizing businesses to relocate facilities and jobs overseas because of our uncompetitive tax codes and by allowing other countries to avoid playing by the rules of free trade, then it’s a problem. President Obama and company have quite the penchant for blaming the symptoms instead of the disease, a.k.a. blaming the wealthy and businesses for moving away from America’s shores, but they consistently fail to change the tax code that drives them to do so — they only continue to drive up taxes and regulation and make it even worse.