“What Exactly Is Going On Here?”: An Interview, Arranged By Republican Strategists
President Obama made clear this morning that when it comes to rescuing American POWs, the nation’s commitment is unconditional. “Regardless of the circumstances,” he said, in reference to a question about Bowe Bergdahl, “whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period. Full stop.”
Those comments, however, have not stopped questions about how Bergdahl was captured and whether he deserted his post. The New York Times reports this morning on an account from “a former senior military officer briefed on the investigation into the private’s disappearance,” who claims Bergdahl “had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan and was leaving to start a new life.”
The furious search for Sergeant Bergdahl, his critics say, led to the deaths of at least two soldiers and possibly six others in the area. Pentagon officials say those charges are unsubstantiated and are not supported by a review of a database of casualties in the Afghan war.
“Yes, I’m angry,” Joshua Cornelison, a former medic in Sergeant Bergdahl’s platoon, said in an interview on Monday arranged by Republican strategists.
Though we don’t yet have all the details, and some of the allegations may be “unsubstantiated,” the emotional reaction from servicemembers is easy to understand. But it was those other eight words that also raised eyebrows: “an interview on Monday arranged by Republican strategists”?
What exactly is going on here? The release of an American POW from his Taliban captors in Afghanistan has become a political operation in which Republican strategists direct reporters to specific sources?
BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray and Kate Nocera reported this morning on the behind-the-scenes effort.
A former Bush Administration official hired, then resigned, as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman played a key role in publicizing critics of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the released prisoner of war.
The involvement of Richard Grenell, who once served as a key aide to Bush-era U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and later worked for Romney’s 2012 campaign, comes as the Bergdahl release has turned into an increasingly vicious partisan issue.
The piece added that similar interviews were arranged with a variety of conservative media outlets, including The Weekly Standard, the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News.
One of Grenell’s partner at Capitol Media Partners told BuzzFeed the firm is not being paid for these efforts.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, June 3, 2014
“GOP Civil War?”: More Like Petty Wrangling Over Infinitesimal Ideological ‘Distinctions’
Mississippi primary voters just could not decide whether they wanted to nominate a very conservative Republican or a very conservative Republican for the US Senate.
Very nearly 50 percent of Tuesday’s primary voters favored a right-wing stalwart who opposes abortion rights and marriage equality, supports restrictive Voter ID laws, promises to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rips “Obamacare,” the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trashes “entitlement” programs.
Very nearly 50 percent of Tuesday’s primary voters favored another right-wing stalwart, who opposes abortion rights and marriage equality, supports restrictive Voter ID laws, promises to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rips “Obamacare,” the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trashes “entitlement” programs.
But Mississippi Republicans couldn’t quite get to a majority opinion about which conservative was conservative enough. So with virtually all the votes counted (and with a tiny percentage of the total streaming off to a little-known third candidate), the good Republicans of the Magnolia State appear to have decided to have another go at it—setting up a June 24 runoff that will require several more weeks of wrangling over what to most Americans will seem to be infinitesimal ideological “distinctions.”
That’s the thing to remember about the fabulous imagining that there is a meaningful difference between “establishment Republicans” and “Tea Party Republicans.”
Yes, there are stylistic distinctions to be noted between incumbent Senator Thad Cochran, a relatively distinguished senior senator, and state Senator Chris McDaniel, a relatively undistinguished challenger who says his campaign “had nothing to do with this sad incident” where a conservative blogger photographed the incumbent’s bedridden wife. Yes, the two Republicans now appear to be set for a high-profile runoff race that will be portrayed as a “GOP civil war” over emphasis and approach.
But that does not place them anywhere near the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
Cochran is identified as the “establishment” choice, which means he is favored by the US Chamber of Commerce and the CEOs and Wall Street financiers who support its campaign to elect a Senate that will rubber-stamp a wildly pro-corporate agenda.
McDaniel is identified as the “anti-establishment” Tea Party insurgent, which means that he is favored by the Club for Growth and the CEOs and Wall Street financiers interests who support its campaign to elect a Senate that will rubber-stamp a wildly pro-corporate agenda.
For the most part, this year’s supposedly significant Senate contests between the establishment and the “Tea Party” have explored the range of opinion from what would historically have been understood as the right wing of the Republican Party to what is now understood as the right wing of the Republican Party.
Some very wealthy people take these distinctions very seriously. They have money to burn, and they are burning it up this year on political purity tests that pit those who like their economic and social conservatism straight against those who want it with a twist of Ted Cruz.
This has already made for an expensive race in Mississippi. Roughly $8 million in outside spending has been lavished on the state’s television stations—in addition to big spending from the Club for Growth, Citizens United and the Tea Party Patriots for McDaniel and big spending from the Chamber and the National Association of Realtors for Cochran. The race has seen $1.1 million spent by “Senate Conservatives Action” for McDaniel and $1.7 million spent by the “Mississippi Conservatives” super PAC for Cochran.
Confused? Don’t be.
McDaniel is a conservative.
And so is Cochran.
Despite the theater-of-the-absurd campaign, it is even more absurd to suggest that Cochran is a liberal with a Southern accent. Mississippi is not in the habit of populating the Senate with progressives. The incumbent’s latest US Chamber of Commerce rating is 100 percent, while his National Education Association ranking is zero. Cochran’s latest ACLU rating is zero, while the American Security Council Foundation has got him at 100 percent. Cochran gets 100 percent from the National Rifle Association and he’s at zero with the American Association of University Women. His latest rating from the National Right-to-Life Committee is 100 percent, while NARAL Pro-Choice America has him at zero—as does the latest assessment from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
It is true that Cochran has, on rare occasions been a reasonable player. But those are pretty much the same rare occasions when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, another Tea Party target this year, has chosen not to follow Cruz off whatever deep end the Texan might be approaching. Usually, what passes for reasonableness is a vote to take care of some pressing home-state business—such as, in Cochran’s case, specific support for disaster assistance after hurricanes hit the Mississippi coast and general enthusiasm for military spending that keeps Mississippians employed.
That may make Cochran insufficiently “pure” for the purists.
But it is not a distinction that the vast majority of Americans need bother with, unless, of course, they really do imagine that Thad Cochran and Mitch McConnell are liberals.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, June 4, 2014
“Shared Values, Shared Goals”: Another Data Point Against False Equivalence
Via MoJo’s Molly Redden and Dana Liebelson, here’s a little taste of the conversation on a conference call held by Bishop E.W. Jackson on which the junior senator from Kentucky was a participant:
During the call, Paul generally gave routine answers to questions on abortion, border security, and the size of the military. One caller did ask Paul if he supported Obama’s recent declaration that June was LGBT Pride Month and if he believed homosexuality is an illness. The question was reminiscent of a tweet Jackson wrote in June 2009, when Obama designated June as Pride Month: “Well that just makes me feel ikky all over. Yuk!”
“I don’t think that there’s really a role for the federal government in deciding what people’s behavior at home should be one way or another,” Paul said. “It’s not something the federal government needs to be involved in.”
After Paul left the conference call, Jackson said he suspected the caller who asked about Pride Month was trying to harass them. “Thank god he was respectful,” Jackson said. “But I just want to encourage everybody, that they are going to talk about us like [we’re] dogs because all they know is hatred, because all they know is anger and bitterness, because there’s something wrong with them on the inside…And by the way, they also want to destroy us…We are in a fight for our very lives, for our survival.”
Jackson then discussed Obama’s announcement of the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier captured in Afghanistan. He said that the president “could not help but smile” when Bergdahl’s father, Robert, said “allahu akbar—or whatever it is they say” at the press conference.
Jackson continued: “I have been roundly criticized for saying the president has Muslim sensibilities. That’s not my statement—that’s just a statement of fact…In this situation you would think he would have restrained himself. But he could not help but smile when that man said ‘Praise be to Allah.'”
None of this, of course, was particularly unusual for Jackson. So what on earth was Rand Paul doing on this conference call? And lest anyone of the False Equivalence tribe dismiss the incident as an example of the craziness that can be found in the “extremes” of both parties, let’s remember Jackson was a Republican nominee for statewide office in Virginia just last year. Is there anyone remotely “equivalent” to Jackson among statewide Democratic nominees anywhere? And even if you can scrounge up one, is there anything on the progressive side of the political spectrum remotely like the dozens of Republican pols who sound just like Jackson in their homophobia, Islamophobia, and crazy-talk about Obama every single day? And if there were, would any Democrat running for president do anything other than run away from these people as rapidly as they could, maybe attacking them for good measure?
No, no and no. And the sad thing is that we barely even notice any more that to an alarming extent the GOP is divided between these people and those who curry their favor and hasten to assure them they share their values and goals.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 4, 2014
“Guns And Mental Illness”: Maybe We Should Be Making It Harder To Get Guns, Period
It is difficult to read stories about Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who went on a murderous spree in Isla Vista, Calif., last month, without feeling some empathy for his parents.
We know that his mother, alarmed by some of his misogynistic YouTube videos, made a call that resulted in the police visiting Rodger. The headline from that meeting was that Rodger, seemingly calm and collected, easily deflected the police’s attention. But there was surely a subtext: How worried — how desperate, really — must a mother be to believe the police should be called on her own son?
We also learned that on the day of his murderous rampage, his mother, having read the first few lines of his “manifesto,” had phoned his father, from whom she was divorced. In separate cars, they raced from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara hoping to stop what they feared was about to happen.
And then, on Monday, in a remarkably detailed article in The New York Times, we learned the rest of it. How Rodger was clearly a troubled soul before he even turned 8 years old. How his parents’ concern about his mental health was like a “shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life.”
Constantly bullied and unable to fit in, he went through three high schools. In college, he tried to throw a girl off a ledge at a party — and was beaten up. (“I’m going to kill them,” he said to a neighbor afterward.) He finally retreated to some Internet sites that “drew sexually frustrated young men,” according to The Times.
Throughout, said one person who knew Rodger, “his mom did everything she could to help Elliot.” But what his parents never did was the one thing that might have prevented him from buying a gun: have him committed to a psychiatric facility. California’s tough gun laws notwithstanding, a background check would have caught him only if he had had in-patient mental health treatment, made a serious threat to an identifiable victim in the presence of a therapist, or had a criminal record. He had none of the above.
Should his parents have taken more steps to have him treated? Could they have? It is awfully hard to say, even in retrospect. On the one hand, there were plainly people who knew him who feared that he might someday harm others. On the other hand, those people weren’t psychiatrists. He was a loner, a misfit, whose parents were more fearful of how the world would treat their son than how their son would treat the world. And his mother, after all, did reach out for help, and the police responded and decided they had no cause to arrest him or even search his room, where his guns were hidden.
Once again, a mass killing has triggered calls for doing something to keep guns away from the mentally ill. And, once again, the realities of the situation convey how difficult a task that is. There are, after all, plenty of young, male, alienated loners — the now-standard description of mass shooters — but very few of them become killers.
And you can’t go around committing them all because a tiny handful might turn out to be killers. Indeed, the law is very clear on this point. In 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that nondangerous mentally ill people can’t be confined against their will if they can function without confinement. “In California, the bar is very high for people like Elliot,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center. In a sense, California’s commitment to freedom for the mentally ill conflicts with its background-check law.
Torrey believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge.
In this, however, he is an outlier. The mainstream sentiment among mental health professionals is that there is no going back to the bad-old days when people who were capable of living on their own were locked up for years in mental hospitals. The truth is, the kind of symptoms Elliot Rodger showed were unlikely to get him confined in any case. And without a history of confinement, he had every legal right to buy a gun.
You read the stories about Elliot Rodger and it is easy to think: If this guy, with all his obvious problems, can slip through the cracks, then what hope is there of ever stopping mass shootings?
But, of course, there is another way of thinking about this. Instead of focusing on making it harder for the mentally ill to get guns, maybe we should be making it harder to get guns, period. Something to consider before the next mass shooting.
By: Joe Nocera, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 2, 2014
“John McCain Position Switch On Bergdahl Deal”: Is He The Most Disingenuous Member Of Senate Or Simply Unfit To Serve?
It is not uncommon for politicians from all parties to be caught in the occasional act of political hypocrisy.
Still, Arizona Republican and one-time presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, has set a new high watermark when it comes to committing an act of hypocrisy so disingenuous as to raise the bar for all politicians seeking to achieve professional status in the time honored political tradition of speaking from both sides of the mouth.
Appearing this past Sunday on “Face The Nation”, McCain expressed his profound concern for the trade involving five top ranking terrorists for the return of Bowie Bergdahl.
Watch: http://youtu.be/QzFPm3QA568
Nothing much to see there, yes? After all, there is nothing unusual nor surprising in Senator McCain’s words given that there are is no shortage of people on both sides of the political divide who have some serious reservations as to the wisdom of the deal.
Certainly, Senator McCain, who has rarely met a war he didn’t like, would be expected to voice his concern and criticism.
The only problem is that just three months ago, Senator McCain, appearing on CNN, voiced his support for the very same deal that he now finds to be so profoundly disturbing.
Watch: http://youtu.be/8x9PQUBlFYs
While McCain notes that he objected to an earlier proposal that would have called for releasing the very same high value terrorists as an act of “confidence building” with the Taliban, he clearly states that he would support the release of these people if the prize were to be the American soldier being held by the Taliban. He later modifies his response to say that if the exchange were for one of these terrorists—whom he told us just this past Sunday were people responsible for the deaths of thousands—he would support the deal.
Does anyone out there believe that the critics would have been silenced if the exchange had only involved one terrorist…or two…or three? If you believe that our policy of not negotiating with terrorists is the correct policy, does negotiating for the release of one high ranking terrorist make it better? Yet, there is Mr. McCain voicing his support for a deal that , just three months later, he would go on TV to condemn.
I don’t think anything more need be said except that we should all be embarrassed and deeply concerned that this man continues to hold such an important position in our government.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, June 4, 2014
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