“Conservative Exceptionalism”: Even Boko Haram’s Brutality Can Be Politicized
The world is still coming to grips with the recent actions of Boko Haram, the Nigerian group responsible for kidnapping more than 200 schoolgirls. The radical cult’s violence has been “too much” for fellow militants and jihadists, with even al Qaeda keeping its distance from the group.
This week, the scope of Boko Haram’s brutality came into even sharper focus.
Islamist insurgents have killed hundreds in a town in Nigeria’s northeast this week, the area’s senator, a resident and the Nigerian news media reported on Wednesday, as more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by the militants, known as Boko Haram, remained missing.
The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses. When it was over, at least 336 people had been killed and hundreds of houses and cars had been set on fire, said Waziri Hassan, who lives there, and Senator Ahmed Zanna.
The missing schoolgirls have grabbed the world’s attention, and more offers of help poured in to the Nigerian government on Wednesday from Britain, China and France. But Boko Haram’s deadly attack on Gamboru Ngala was similar to many others in the past several years that drew little or no notice beyond Nigeria. Bodies still lay in the street on Wednesday night, said Mr. Hassan, a cement salesman.
The scale of the violence and bloodshed is gut-wrenching, and by all appearances, intensifying.
And yet, as the world watches these events with horror, some American conservatives have decided to use this as an opportunity – to condemn Hillary Clinton.
I’ll confess that I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to exploit Boko Haram as a domestic partisan tool, but here we are.
Following the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls by terrorist group Boko Haram, right-wing media are rushing to smear former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for not designating the group a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), insinuating that the kidnappings might have been prevented had the State Department issued the designation earlier. The baseless attack ignores the facts around FTO designations and foreign affairs.
The cast of “Fox & Friends” told viewers this morning that were it not for Hillary Clinton’s actions, we “could have saved these girls earlier.” National Review went with the tried and true “appeasing Islamists” line of criticism. In an apparent attempt at self-parody, Newt Gingrich today demanded congressional hearings to determine why Clinton’s State Department “refused to tell truth about radical Islamist Boko Haram.”
There’s something inherently troubling about a group of Americans who see a violent tragedy unfolding in Nigeria and, almost on instinct, begin looking for ways to use the developments for political advantage.
As for the substance, it’s true that the State Department declined to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization a few years ago, but as Hayes Brown explained very well, the reasoning matters.
“Designation is an important tool, it’s not the only tool,” a former State Department official told the Beast. “There are a lot of other things you can do in counterterrorism that doesn’t require a designation.” This includes boosting development aid to undercut the causes of unrest and deploying the FBI to assist in tracking down Boko Haram, both of which the U.S. actually did.
In addition, Clinton didn’t act in a vacuum to determine not to designate Boko Haram back in 2011. Scholars on Twitter who focus on the region, terrorism broadly, and Islamist groups in particular were quick to point out that not only were there few benefits and many possible costs to designation, many of them had argued against listing Boko Haram several years ago. In a letter to the State Department dated May 2012, twenty prominent African studies scholars wrote Clinton to implore her to hold off on placing Boko Haram on the FTO list. Acknowledging the violence Boko Haram had perpetrated, the academics argued that “an FTO designation would internationalize Boko Haram, legitimize abuses by Nigeria’s security services, limit the State Department’s latitude in shaping a long term strategy, and undermine the U.S. Government’s ability to receive effective independent analysis from the region.”
For the record, in 2013, the State Department reached the conclusion that the designation could no longer be delayed and Boko Haram was added to the list of entities considered by the United States to be a foreign terrorist organization.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 8, 2014
“Ronald Reagan’s Benghazi”: The Single Deadliest Attack On American Marines Since The Battle Of Iwo Jima
Late Saturday night, at the Vanity Fair party celebrating the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Darrell Issa, the Republican congressman from San Diego, California, was chatting amiably with Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, leaning in to swap gossip and looking very much at ease in his tuxedo. Issa, who has been the lead inquisitor into what, in shorthand, has come to be known as “Benghazi,” was having a busy weekend. House Speaker John Boehner had just announced a plan for a new special select investigative committee, and, on Friday, Issa had announced that he had issued a subpoena to Secretary of State John Kerry for a new round of hearings devoted to searching, against diminishing odds, for some dirty, dark secret about what really happened in Benghazi.
Ever since militant jihadists killed four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador, in an attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in that remote Libyan town two years ago, House Republicans have kept up a drumbeat of insinuation. They have already devoted thirteen hearings, twenty-five thousand pages of documents, and fifty briefings to the topic, which have turned up nothing unexpected. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton, has already accepted responsibility for the tragedy, and the State Department has issued a critical independent report on diplomatic security, resulting in the dismissal of four employees. If the hearings accomplish nothing else, it seems that they promise to keep the subject on life support at least through the midterm congressional elections, and possibly on through any potential Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign. The word “impeachment” has even been trotted out by Obama opponents in connection with this non-scandal.
Watching Issa silhouetted against the Belle Époque windows of the Italian Ambassador’s residence, which were wide open to a garden bathed in colored spotlights, I found myself thinking about another tragedy, thirty years ago, that played out very differently.
Around dawn on October 23, 1983, I was in Beirut, Lebanon, when a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with the equivalent of twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT into the heart of a U.S. Marine compound, killing two hundred and forty-one servicemen. The U.S. military command, which regarded the Marines’ presence as a non-combative, “peace-keeping mission,” had left a vehicle gate wide open, and ordered the sentries to keep their weapons unloaded. The only real resistance the suicide bomber had encountered was a scrim of concertina wire. When I arrived on the scene a short while later to report on it for the Wall Street Journal, the Marine barracks were flattened. From beneath the dusty, smoking slabs of collapsed concrete, piteous American voices could be heard, begging for help. Thirteen more American servicemen later died from injuries, making it the single deadliest attack on American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Six months earlier, militants had bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, too, killing sixty-three more people, including seventeen Americans. Among the dead were seven C.I.A. officers, including the agency’s top analyst in the Middle East, an immensely valuable intelligence asset, and the Beirut station chief.
There were more than enough opportunities to lay blame for the horrific losses at high U.S. officials’ feet. But unlike today’s Congress, congressmen did not talk of impeaching Ronald Reagan, who was then President, nor were any subpoenas sent to cabinet members. This was true even though then, as now, the opposition party controlled the majority in the House. Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, was no pushover. He, like today’s opposition leaders in the House, demanded an investigation—but a real one, and only one. Instead of playing it for political points, a House committee undertook a serious investigation into what went wrong at the barracks in Beirut. Two months later, it issued a report finding “very serious errors in judgment” by officers on the ground, as well as responsibility up through the military chain of command, and called for better security measures against terrorism in U.S. government installations throughout the world.
In other words, Congress actually undertook a useful investigation and made helpful recommendations. The report’s findings, by the way, were bipartisan. (The Pentagon, too, launched an investigation, issuing a report that was widely accepted by both parties.)
In March of 1984, three months after Congress issued its report, militants struck American officials in Beirut again, this time kidnapping the C.I.A.’s station chief, Bill Buckley. Buckley was tortured and, eventually, murdered. Reagan, who was tormented by a tape of Buckley being tortured, blamed himself. Congress held no public hearings, and pointed fingers at the perpetrators, not at political rivals.
If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.
The story in Beirut wasn’t over. In September of 1984, for the third time in eighteen months, jihadists bombed a U.S. government outpost in Beirut yet again. President Reagan acknowledged that the new security precautions that had been advocated by Congress hadn’t yet been implemented at the U.S. embassy annex that had been hit. The problem, the President admitted, was that the repairs hadn’t quite been completed on time. As he put it, “Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.” Imagine how Congressman Issa and Fox News would react to a similar explanation from President Obama today.
By: Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, May 6, 2014
“Bush Revisionism Is Back”: Why This Latest, Pathetic Attempt Is So Dangerous
When we think of the villains of the civil rights movement, former Alabama Gov. George Wallace — he of the infamous “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” battle cry — is perhaps the first face that comes to mind. It was Wallace, after all, who stood defiantly in the doorway of a University of Alabama building, refusing to allow two African-American students to enter until then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (and a few of his friends in the National Guard) persuaded the diminutive demagogue to give way. When we think of the era’s Dixiecrats, those Southern Democrats who spent decades siding with conservatives in order to maintain white supremacy in their apartheid states, we think of men like Wallace: shameless race-baiters whose entire political identities were inextricably bound to bigotry and hate.
But here’s the funny thing about George Wallace: According to his contemporaries, the man was not personally ill disposed toward African-Americans (at least by the standards of the time). Before he became governor, in fact, Wallace was a judge known for moderate-to-liberal views on segregation and race. It wasn’t until he lost his first race for the governorship — during which he was endorsed by the NAACP — that Wallace decided to forge an iron bond between himself and white supremacy, vowing to “never be out-[N-worded] again.” Yet by his final term in the 1980s, Wallace had appointed a record number of African-Americans to jobs in the state government; and he regretted his role as America’s one-time leading segregationist to his dying day.
Why am I thinking about George Wallace? Not because of Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy or Charles Murray. No, the reason I’ve got Wallace on my mind is less straightforward than that. Blame this foray into recent history on a recent execrable piece from Yahoo!’s national political columnist and former New York Times Magazine scribe Matt Bai. The piece is titled “So George W. Bush isn’t a monster, after all” and it encourages an approach to politicians and politics that, if applied consistently, would have us believe that George Wallace was, at worst, misunderstood.
Bai’s piece is not very long, but here’s the short version, nonetheless: When George W. Bush was president, he was maligned, demonized and turned into a loathsome caricature by a political system that encourages divisive partisanship at the expense of humane treatment of the commander-in-chief. “The truth is,” Bai writes, “that Bush was never anything close to the ogre or the imbecile his most fevered detractors insisted he was.” On the contrary, he was “compassionate and well-intentioned” and “the kind of inclusive conservative you can deal with.” Bush, writes Bai, “is enjoying a public restoration,” a claim he supports by referencing a poll about blame for the poor economy and puff pieces about Bush’s kitschy paintings.
Now, as defenses of George W. Bush go, Bai’s is not only exceptionally weak but also quite strange. At no point does he directly mention any of Bush’s policies or decisions; the focus is entirely on the ex-president’s increasingly cuddly public image, which Bai insists is not the consequence of sympathetic media coverage but “has more to do, really, with how we distort the present.” Instead of judging the man by the wars he started, the torture regime he implemented, the city he left for dead or the economy he helped crater, Bai would have us see Bush as the man wants to be seen, as someone who “really does care deeply about the men and women he sent to war” and “really did want to do good for the country.”
Tens of thousands of people are dead today because of George W. Bush’s choices, but he’s quick to get misty-eyed when thinking of the maimed bodies and shattered lives he left in his wake. Isn’t that what really matters?
In response to this flimsy defense, it’d be understandable if one concluded, as some on Twitter have, that Bai is simply a crypto-Republican who is ready to play his part in the epic quest to rewrite the legacy of the 43rd president. It turns out, however, that Bai’s argument is much more expansive — and destructive — than that. It’s not a mere defense of Bush but rather a condemnation of the way we treat our leaders, how we abuse and ridicule them because “[t]here’s a lot of money to be made writing quickie books and giving speeches about the utter depravity of a president.” Bush’s father, Clinton and Obama, too; all are described by Bai as fundamentally good and likable people. (Carter, curiously, goes unmentioned, despite having an average post-presidential approval rating as of 2013 of 56.) Writing of Obama, but implicitly of both Bushes and Clinton as well, Bai claims “we should all be able to grant that he’s at least a good American.”
I’m not sure what being a “good American” quite means — is it better or worse than being a good Frenchwoman or Nigerian or Swede? — but I get the gist of Bai’s piece, and I think it’s terribly mistaken. For one thing, this is an argument already made relatively recently by National Journal’s Ron Fournier and, as a rule, if your article is a rehash of a Fournier troll-job, you’re probably making a huge mistake. More seriously, this view of what makes a person “good” or “bad” is almost shockingly juvenile on its own, and becomes nearly toxic when used to assess politicians. Ignoring my temptation to break Godwin’s Law, I’ll simply note that Richard Nixon and Francisco Franco, two men few of us would consider exemplars of humanity at its best, also sincerely believed that their actions were for the greater good. For that matter, so did Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the Confederacy. Vanishingly few of us deliberately act in an immoral fashion; we’re all the heroes of our own stories.
The need to focus on consequences rather than intentions is all the more pronounced when it comes to politics, the realm in which a person’s decisions, and their consequences, are the only rational metric the rest of us can use in order to judge their suitability. Particularly in America, where the political spectrum is quite constrained, with no real far left and an often marginalized extreme right, and where some of the most heated debates are ostensibly about how best to achieve mutually agreed upon goals, it’s vital that we focus on results. To take an example less fraught than torture or war, if you were someone who believed everyone should have a good-paying job and health insurance, but you were only allowed to consider what each party says it wants to occur, you’d have no way of choosing between Republicans and Democrats, who both say a wealthy and healthy middle class is their ultimate goal.
Or, to return to my initial example, anyone who followed Bai’s advice would have a real tough time reaching a conclusion about George Wallace that the rest of us wouldn’t find obscene and bizarre. What matters more, the fact that George Wallace stoked racial resentment at a time when it was a force powerful and dangerous enough to murder innocent children; or the fact that, while he did so, he went to bed every night knowing that he was not only a beneficiary of hatred but a charlatan to boot? What matters more, the time George W. Bush wrote Ron Fournier a nice thank you card, or the millions of lives that would be better if he had not decided more than 10 years ago to destabilize the world with a war of choice? If we were talking about people whose professional decisions weren’t literally matters of life and death, Bai’s focus on people skills would be defensible. But we’re not, and it isn’t.
In the end, I can’t tell you any more than Bai can whether or not Bush is a “good” person. To paraphrase the former president’s favorite philosopher, that’s above my pay grade. I wouldn’t even know how to pick the right criteria. What I can tell you is that George Wallace, by the time he died, was a born-again Christian who said he believed all forms of racial discrimination were wicked and wrong; and that George W. Bush, today, most likely remains someone many of us would like to have a beer with. The question, then, is this: Who cares and why does it matter?
By: Elias Isquith, Assistant Editor, Salon, May 10
“Denier Vigilantes”: Why It’s So Sad When Conservatives Try To Play The Underdog
Jeffrey Toobin once described the career of John Roberts, the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, this way: “In every major case since he became the nation’s 17th chief justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.”
This is a raw expression of one of the most basic forms of conservatism: The defense of incumbent holders of wealth and power. Of course, it doesn’t account for the whole of American conservatism, but it’s no secret that conservatives are the most outspoken defenders of the 1 percent, from the Wall Street Journal editorial board to the vast bulk of the Republican contingent in Congress.
The rise of the social justice movement has thus presented a persistent rhetorical problem for conservatives. Members of this movement have made a compelling case that the powerful have rigged society against certain groups: minorities, women, the poor, transgender folks, and so on. That rhetorical strength has been a great source of temptation for conservatives, who would strongly like to cast themselves as heroic underdogs fighting against a vile and oppressive regime.
We saw this tendency at work this week, when Bill Nye the Science Guy was on CNN’s defibrillated new version of Crossfire. Nye kept emphasizing that conservatives are simply unwilling to accept the scientific conclusions on climate change, which predict highly alarming consequences if we stay on our current emissions path. In response, host S.E. Cupp accused him of trying to “bully…anyone who dares question” the science.
Take a look: http://youtu.be/iWYQb8K6Tek
Similarly, George Will, the conservative columnist at The Washington Post, recently used conservative conspiracy theories to assert that climate scientists have “interests” that have biased their analysis. “If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don’t question its orthodoxy,” he continued.
Set aside the fact that these conservatives conveniently accept the logic of social justice only when it suits them. The real problem with this kind of analysis is that it makes no sense if you think about it for even five seconds. They have the power imbalance completely backward. Carbon-mining companies are, in fact, among the most profitable industries that have ever existed. Climate scientists have, in fact, been legally and personally harassed by denier vigilantes and their pet hack journalists.
Wouldn’t the incomprehensibly huge piles of money the oil industry spends on political organizing count as some kind of interest that influences society? Not to George Will, which is why he doesn’t provide any evidence whatsoever that there is an actual conspiracy. There is none, because it doesn’t exist. It’s derp all the way down.
And thus we see the problem with Cupp’s analysis as well. Accusations of bullying only make sense if there is an insanely wealthy cabal of climate scientists oppressing someone unjustly. But Nye is simply correct in his description of almost total unanimity on questions of climate change. In particular, he’s right to say that more global warming means more extreme weather, the fact of which conservatives are constantly trying to fudge.
Cupp isn’t being bullied; she’s wrong on the facts, and appropriating social justice rhetoric in the most ham-fisted way to put that position out of reach of criticism.
It’s ludicrous, and people shouldn’t stand for it. But more than that, it’s just kind of sad. Just consider the bizarre spectacle of billionaire Charles Koch, who has whined piteously about a bunch of powerless leftists calling him names. You would think conservatives would be more comfortable being on the side with all the power and money, instead of trying to be something they’re not.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 9, 2014
“Moses, Jesus And Louie”: The Confessing Church Of The Christian Right
Another day, another Louie Gohmert outrage, and another use of Nazi analogies by a Christian Right pol. Nothing to see here, right?
Well, there is one thing I’d like to point out in the context of Gohmert taking to the House floor to complain that gay rights advocates are behaving like Nazis in calling him and people like him “haters” (as reported by TPM’s Tom Kludt). Yes, part of the reason Christian Right types like to use Nazi analogies is that they seem so very apt to those who believe or claim to believe zygotes are exactly like you and me, and thus that legalized abortion (or even post-fertilization forms of birth control) represents a “Holocaust” unlike anything the world has seen since Hitler. But Gohmert’s Nazification of the argument over same-sex marriage puts the spotlight less on his tormenters than on himself and other brave defenders of traditional marriage.
It is amazing that in the name of liberality, in the name of being tolerant, this fascist intolerance has arisen. People that stand up and say, you know, I agree with the majority of Americans, I agree with Moses and Jesus that marriage was a man and a woman, now all of a sudden, people like me are considered haters, hate mongers, evil, which really is exactly what we’ve seen throughout our history as going back to the days of the Nazi takeover in Europe. What did they do? First, they would call people “haters” and “evil” and build up disdain for those people who held those opinions or religious views or religious heritage. And then the next came, well, those people are so evil and hateful, let’s bring every book that they’ve written or has to do with them and let’s start burning the books, because we can’t tolerate their intolerance.
Not even Gohmert is dumb enough to call marriage equality advocates “Nazis,” given, among other things, the murderous behavior of the actual Nazis towards gay people (they also violently opposed abortion, at least among Aryans, but that’s another matter). But what he really wants to do is to claim the mantle of the Confessing Church Christians who opposed the Nazis (hardly anything like a majority of Christians in Germany, BTW, particularly in the case of conservative Christians) out of fidelity to their faith.
This is an old habit in the Christian Right, and an ideal way to turn the tables and pose as conscience-wracked Here-I-Stand dissenters against power instead of defenders of patriarchy and privilege, and with them the enormous power of the status quo ante (or what Chesterton once called “the democracy of the dead”), a power that’s ruled daily life for millennia. Standing up for “your principles” is a lot more attractive than standing up for the day-before-yesterday and oppressing anyone who gets uppity. So of course you want to go there again and again, and if you are Louie Gohmert, why not? Nobody but those guilty of “fascist intolerance” will object.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 9, 2014
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