“A New Round Of Conservative Complaints”: Even A Response To Ebola Can Apparently Be Politicized
President Obama traveled to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta this week to unveil an ambitious U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak in Africa, including money, materials, and military and health personnel.
It’s one of the most aggressive responses in U.S. history to a disease outbreak. Michele Richinick reported that “as many as 3,000 military personnel will assist in training new health care workers and building treatment clinics in the countries affected by the disease,” and some of our financial resources will be used to “construct 17 new treatment centers, each with 100 beds, and 10,000 sets of protective equipment and supplies to help 400,000 families protect themselves from the epidemic that is spreading exponentially.”
A day later, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, announced plans to establish “a new on-the-ground mission in West Africa to coordinate the struggle against Ebola,” while the World Bank Group issued a report warning of a “potentially catastrophic blow” to the economies of countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
Given all of this, it seems like an odd time for conservative media to start a new round of complaints.
Right-wing media are using President Obama’s plan to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as another opportunity to attack him. Conservatives are calling the president a “hypocrite” because he’s sending “more soldiers to fight Ebola than we are sending to fight ISIS”; labeling the plan “arrogant” because of problems with HealthCare.gov; and accusing him of trying to “change the subject” by “fighting a really bad flu bug.”
It was former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) who equated the Ebola virus with a “really bad flu bug.”
Rush Limbaugh added, “We are sending more soldiers to fight Ebola than we are sending to fight ISIS or other Muslim terrorists…. I didn’t know you could shoot a virus. Did you?”
For what it’s worth, there’s a credible argument to explain why a military component should be part of the response to an outbreak like this. Julia Belluz had an interesting piece on this yesterday, noting the larger debate.
Obama has repeatedly referred to the threat of Ebola in security terms, arguing the virus could cripple the already fragile economies in the African region. He’s made the case that this will have consequences for not only the security of countries there, but also for nations around the world – even if the virus doesn’t spread beyond Africa.
For examples of this war-like mentality, look no further than the president’s address, delivered Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta: “If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected, with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us. So this is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security – it’s a potential threat to global security if these countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic. That has profound effects on all of us, even if we are not directly contracting the disease.”
It’s a fairly easy argument to make. There are critics of the “securitization” of these public-health crises, but in countries facing “potentially catastrophic” economic and destabilizing conditions, it’s not hard to imagine unrest and possible violence.
The point is not to “shoot a virus”; it’s to create conditions in which people who contract the virus can receive care.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 18, 2014
“Suffering Is The Whole Point”: This Is Going To Hurt You More Than It Hurts Me
We’re now having a national debate on the merits of corporal punishment, an issue that has many facets and brings up all kinds all kinds of complications involving religion, culture, gender, authority, and tradition. I’m not going to begin to address even a small portion of them, but I do want to talk about one thing that gets me a little perturbed about this discussion.
If you actually look at what corporal punishment advocates (and yes, there are people who do that on a semi-professional basis) say, there’s a constant effort to characterize “good” corporal punishment as something that isn’t really all that unpleasant for the child. They say it should never be done in anger (and if more than one out of 20 actual spanking incidents in the real world isn’t done in anger, I’d be shocked), but only in a controlled, limited way that is over quickly, causes no injury, produces only temporary discomfort, and carries the ultimate message, “I love you.”
As Focus on the Family founder James Dobson wrote in his book Dare to Discipline, which has sold millions of copies, a bit of “minor pain” is the way nature instructs us about things that are unwise to do. “God created this mechanism as a valuable vehicle for instruction,” he writes. Dobson also recommends using a “neutral object” of some sort, “because the hand should be seen as an object of love.” And if your child cries for more than five minutes after a spanking, you can shut that whole thing down “by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.”
I will give Dobson credit for not shying away from the central philosophical underpinning of corporal punishment, which is that the infliction of pain and fear on your child is the whole point of the practice.
The assumption of corporal punishment is this: the child did something wrong, and in order to convince the child not to do it again, I will subject them to physical anguish. Thereafter, their fear of living through that anguish again will be so powerful that it will constrain their behavior. That this is the logic at work is utterly undeniable. If that wasn’t the logic, there would be no point. You can’t say the purpose of a pain-based physical punishment is to “get their attention,” because there are a hundred ways to get someone’s attention. The purpose is to hurt them and render them fearful of reliving that pain.
By that logic, Adrian Peterson’s actions only seem a tad overenthusiastic. His four-year-old son snatched a video game controller from another kid, and as a consequence got a vicious beating from a muscle-bound adult. You can bet he won’t be snatching any more game controllers from anyone! Mission accomplished.
Or maybe he will; there’s a raft of research showing that “short-term compliance” — i.e., stopping what the kid is doing right at that moment — is pretty much the only positive outcome from corporal punishment, while it’s associated with a range of negative long-term psychological and behavioral outcomes. But even if you think that it’s good for your kid (or somebody else’s), you should at least have the courage to acknowledge that making the child suffer is the whole point.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 18, 2014
“No Dramatic Headlines Here”: Benghazi Select Committee Hearings Begin; Craziness Inevitably To Follow
There’s a lot going on in the world: we have a new war ramping up, Ebola is spreading, and various NFL players are discovered beating the crap out of women and children (and I for one am shocked that a group of men who have spent their lives being rewarded for cultivating their most violent instincts and abilities would turn out to be prone to violence). So it may have missed your notice that today marks the beginning of public hearings in the select committee on Benghazi, or as Ed Kilgore has termed it, Benghazi! In advance, Democrats on the committee have set up a website showing how all the questions the committee is asking have already been answered, while a Republican PAC is already airing Benghazi-themed ads against Hillary Clinton. But if you were hoping to tune in this afternoon for thundering denunciations and dark warnings of conspiracy, you may be disappointed, as David Corn reports:
In a surprising move that might disappoint right-wingers yearning for proof that Benghazi is Obama’s Watergate (or worse!), the session will not focus on whether the White House purposefully misled the public about the attacks on the US diplomatic compound in that Libyan city that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Nor will it probe the favorite right-wing talking point that President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, for God-knows-what reasons, ordered US forces to stand down and not respond to the murderous assault. Instead, the committee will examine the State Department’s implementation of the recommendations made by the Accountability Review Board, an independent outfit that investigated the attack and in late 2012 issued proposals for improving security for American diplomats and US diplomatic facilities overseas.
That’s actually a worthy topic of discussion! I suppose committee chair Trey Gowdy deserves some credit for starting things off by trying to show everyone that this is going to be a serious undertaking. That isn’t to say there won’t be plenty of time given over to bashing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because there surely will be. But on its first day, the committee looks unlikely to generate dramatic headlines.
So how is this all going to play out? As I see it, there are three general possibilities:
1. For the most part, the committee goes about its work in a responsible way. While there are some angry confrontations with witnesses, on the whole things are pretty boring. Without much in the way of fireworks, press coverage of the hearings is rather perfunctory. Base Republicans wind up feeling disappointed and even betrayed, assuring themselves that the Republicans on the committee wimped out, perhaps because they knew that if they got too close to the truth, State Department assassination squads would take out their families. The true scope of the conspiracy remains buried under a mountain of lies and cowardice. Odds: 37%
2. Full-on circus. Republicans on the committee do a great deal of shouting; photos of the aftermath of the attacks are repeatedly projected on the wall of the hearing room. News coverage is somewhat greater, as nothing draws a crowd of reporters more than politicians yelling at each other. Despite the fact that the “truth” is never fully revealed, the GOP base is pleased. Yet the net effect of the whole thing is to make Republicans look like crazy people. In a cruel irony, this result greatly aids the presidential campaign of one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is able to say that she’s being attacked by a bunch of crazy people, and say it with a smile that drives Republicans around the bend. Odds: 62.99%
3. The committee actually discovers that there was a sinister conspiracy that led to the Americans’ deaths, with high-ranking administration officials at its center. All their accusations, not to mention the creation of this committee, are vindicated, and the moral rot at the heart of the Obama regime is finally revealed for all to see. Odds: .01%
Those are my predictions, anyway. But who knows — maybe they’ll surprise us.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 17, 2014
“de-Baathification Program”: Bush/Cheney Created Conditions That Led Directly To ISIL
It takes a lot of gall for people like Dick Cheney to utter even one critical word about President Obama’s strategy to eliminate the threat of ISIL in the Middle East.
In fact, it was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL).
Former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker said as much on this week’s edition of “Meet the Press.” He noted that after the first President Bush had ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. had refrained from marching on Baghdad precisely to avoid kicking over the sectarian hornet’s nest that was subsequently unleashed by the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in 2003.
But it wasn’t just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni’s and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.
Bush’s “de-Baathification program” eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn’t change it. He didn’t make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today’s ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.
General Petraeus took steps to reverse these policies with his “Sunni Awakening” programs that engaged the Sunni tribes against what was then known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the progress he made ultimately collapsed because the Bush/Cheney regime helped install Nouri Al-Maliki as Prime Minister who systematically disenfranchised Sunnis throughout Iraq.
And that’s not all. The War in Iraq — which had nothing whatsoever to do with “terrorism” when it was launched — created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.
And after all, contrary to Dick Cheney’s absurd assertion that U.S. forces would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators,” no one likes a foreign nation to occupy their country.
The War did more than any propagandist could possibly do to radicalize vulnerable young people. And by setting off wave after wave of sectarian slaughter it created blood feuds that will never be forgiven.
The Iraq War — and the Sunni power vacuum caused first by U.S. policies and then Al Maliki — created the perfect conditions that allowed a vicious band of extremists to take huge swaths of territory.
And now many of the same people who caused this foreign policy disaster have the audacity to criticize President Obama’s measured efforts to clean up the mess they created. And they do so often without ever saying what they themselves would do to solve the horrific problems that they created.
It reminds you of a bunch of arsonists standing at the scene of a fire criticizing the techniques used by the firefighters who are trying to extinguish the blaze they themselves have set.
Oh, they say: “If you had just left a residual force after the withdrawal of U.S. troops everything would be hunky dory.”
Do they really think that several thousand U.S. troops would have solved Iraq’s problems when hundreds of thousands failed to do so?
And of course they conveniently forget to mention that neither the Iraqi’s nor the U.S. voters wanted a “residual” force to remain in Iraq. And they forget that the Iraqi government would not agree to conditions that would allow a “residual” force to be stationed in Iraq.
Or perhaps they wish U.S. troops were now going door to door in Iraq cities rooting out adherents to ISIL? Only a few neo-con die-hards want more U.S. troops on the ground in the Middle East.
Or then there is the refrain that President Obama should have helped “arm” the moderate Syrian opposition earlier. Let’s remember that had he acted at an earlier point it is entirely likely that many of those arms would now be in ISIL hands — and we must be extremely careful even now to avoid precisely that problem in the days ahead.
The president’s response to ISIL is supported by almost two-thirds of Americans because it seems to be the only reasonable response where the cure is not worse than the disease.
It recognizes that the problem posed by ISIL must first and foremost be dealt with by other Sunni’s in the region. It is aimed at building an international coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy the ability of this vicious organization to threaten people in the Middle East or elsewhere. And it relies on American airpower to bolster the abilities of other Sunni forces to accomplish this goal.
But most Americans also realize this will not be easy — and they’re right. It won’t be easy to clean up the horrific mess created by the Bush/Cheney policies in the Middle East.
Frankly, I don’t think that any of the architects of the Iraq War should ever be invited on TV to say one word about foreign policy — and especially the Middle East. They have zero credibility to comment. They have been wrong over and over again and created the conditions that spawned the problems we face today.
But if they are invited to act as “talking heads,” interviewers must at least have the common decency to point out their failed track record — and to demand that they do more than criticize the president’s efforts to clean up their mistakes. They must also be required to tell us exactly what they would do to fix it.
And if any of them actually do propose a course of action, you can pretty much be sure that based on their past track records, that course of action is wrong.
By: Robert Creamer, Partner, Democracy Partners; The Huffington Post Blog, September 15, 2014
“Sniveling Little Children”: Boehner Laments ‘Knuckleheads’ Within House GOP
Once in a while, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sounds like a man who isn’t entirely fond of his ostensible followers.
Speaker John Boehner said that he’s got a “few knuckleheads” to deal with, and that’s largely why the Republican majority in the House looks good on paper but doesn’t always pan out with votes.
“On any given day, 16 of my members decide they’re going to go this way, and all of a sudden, I have nothing,” he said, describing the reality of his “paper majority” in the House, The Hill reported. “You might notice I have a few knuckleheads in my conference.”
According to the report in the conservative Washington Times, Boehner went on say, “Dealing with Democrats is one thing. Dealing with the knuckleheads is another.”
Whether he finds one easier to deal with than the other was unclear.
These comments come just five months after the Ohio Republican publicly mocked his own members over their reluctance to work on immigration reform.
“Here’s the attitude: ‘Oh, don’t make me do this. Oh, this is too hard,” Boehner said, in a tone deriding House Republicans as if they were sniveling children. He added, “We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems, and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to.”
Remember, this was the Republican Speaker referring to Republican House members. Now Boehner is also willing to concede an unknown number of his members are “knuckleheads,” too.
The candor is certainly welcome, though the larger point is how understandable the Speaker’s dissatisfaction is.
As we were reminded in late July, when House Republicans killed Boehner’s border bill, the Speaker has surprisingly limited influence over what his members actually support.
A Democratic source on Capitol Hill recently sent around a brutal collection of bills Boehner asked his members to support, only to see his own House GOP conference reject his appeals: a grand bargain, a debt-ceiling bill in 2011, a payroll tax extension, a transportation bill, a farm bill, one fiscal-cliff bill, another fiscal-cliff bill, another farm bill, and then yesterday. I think my source might have even missed a couple, including the collapse of Boehner’s debt-ceiling bill in February 2014.
What’s more, think about how regularly Boehner is pushed around. He didn’t want to initiate a debt-ceiling crisis, but his members didn’t give him much of a choice. The Speaker didn’t want to hold several dozen ACA repeal votes, but his members called the shots on this, too.
Four years after taking hold of the Speaker’s gavel, Boehner has no legislative accomplishments and has developed a reputation as the weakest Speaker in modern times.
The surprise isn’t that Boehner calls his members “knuckleheads”; the surprise is that he doesn’t use stronger language in public.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 17, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 