“Stop Undermining The President!”: I Am Glad We Have Barack Obama As Our President At This Time In Our History
For a short time after September 11, 2001 anyone who dared to criticize then President Bush was called an unpatriotic traitor. Remember the Dixie Chicks?
But today when international crises occur those same folks pushing that patriotic fervor are quick to find fault with our current Commander in Chief. Whatever happened to putting our country first? It seems to me any global unrest becomes an excuse to bash our President for political purposes.
Take this recent shooting down of Malaysian domestic Flight 17 over the Ukraine. President Obama addressed the disaster the day it happened at an event in Delaware but he was criticized by pundits at Fox News and right wing radio for continuing his speech about building infrastructure. A case could be made that the President wanted to promote calm and business as usual on the home front. On the same day he spoke on the phone with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, who later put the blame on Ukraine.
The next day our President labeled it an “outrage of unspeakable proportions” and a “global tragedy” and asked for a ceasefire between Russia and the Ukraine and called for an international investigation into the incident. He also spoke on the phone to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razale, and Prime Minister Marke Rutte of the Netherlands over the course of the past two days.
In other words, he took the appropriate steps and actions to lead and stay on top of this international crisis. Yet, Senator John McCain pointed fingers at President Obama for not supplying weapons to Ukraine to help fight off the Russian rebels accused of this dastardly deed (whether it was an accident or not.) In fact, President Obama just two days ago announced even tougher sanctions on Russia for its involvement in Ukraine. So he has been taking actions, just not the military ones that war hawks McCain and others in the GOP have been pushing.
Then the Fox pundits, Sean Hannity in particular, compared this situation to President Reagan‘s reaction to a downed Korean passenger airliner by the Soviet Union in 1983. Yes, President Reagan, great actor that he was, condemned it in strong words, but it took him four days to do it and then he never took any action after that. Plus, it was a totally different world then. We were in a Cold War with the Soviets and things are much more complicated today with all of the unrest in the Middle East.
The conservative pundits will never talk about the Iranian passenger plane Air 655 that we shot down by accident in 1988 under President Reagan’s watch. The United States never apologized for it, paid $61 million for the 290 victims’ families, and no one was fired or held accountable for it. Talk about ironic hypocrisy by those who are so outraged by this.
I, for one, am getting tired of hearing about how “weak” our President is regarding foreign policy. Isn’t it possible that calling him that undermines our country and our reputation in the world? He is not weak. He is not John Wayne (emulated by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) but rather Cool Hand Luke. He thinks before he acts. He doesn’t shoot from the hip. He takes his time and consults his advisors and looks at the big picture of any long term effects his decisions may create. This may infuriate the action hero testosterone crowd but I think it is the better approach.
Sure, there are statements and mistakes the President made that he would like to take back like the “red line” in Syria, providing more security in Benghazi, and domestically the “you didn’t build that” (although that was taken outside of context), and “if you like your plan you can keep it” (which I think he really believed.)
But the vitriol and hatred lashed out against our leader is very disturbing and maddening. Many of it is based on lies told against him by his opponents (remember the so-called “apology tour” and “death panels” and the debacle over his birth certificate?)
A Facebook friend accused President Obama of raising his middle finger to Republicans from the beginning. I had to straighten him out by pointing out that right after Obama was inaugurated he invited the GOP over to the White House for a Super Bowl party, he played golf with Speaker of the House John Boehner after the 2010 election, he said in his address to the American people “even if you didn’t vote for me, I am your President too.” He wanted to unite the country. Remember his 2004 Democratic Convention speech about the red and blue states and how we are the United States?
It was the Republicans who turned against him from the beginning. The first day of his Presidency they had a meeting to devise a plan to defeat him. The Senate Minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said his number one priority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president (we all know how that turned out.) Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said in the midst of our Great Recession “I hope he fails.”
You can only extend the hand of friendship and have it rebuffed so many times until you get the message that it is pointless. And I’m not saying it’s racial although there may be elements of that. The GOP did the same thing to President Bill Clinton, leading numerous dead-end investigations until they latched onto the Monica Lewinsky scandal and actually impeached him in the House of Representatives.
The irony is that the oppositions’ constant barrages have actually strengthened the President. I have never heard him speak with more fire than after Boehner announced the GOP were going to sue him. He has become immune to the chatter on the right and has taken up this latest attack as a battle cry for him to “do his job” for the country as Congress has become the least productive branch of government in history.
President Obama has finally gotten the message that FDR, LBJ, Bill Clinton and even Ronald Reagan learned. You can’t please the opposing party so you have to stick to your principles and do what you feel is right for the country.
I don’t know if other Americans are sick of all of this infighting but I have reached my boiling point. I am seriously considering banning Fox News from my channel surfing as it just irritates the heck out of me.
I just wish we as a nation would get behind our President at times of international crises. Maybe that will happen after the mid-term elections, but I am not holding my breath. In the meantime, I am glad we have Barack Obama as our president at this time in our history. We need his calm, cool, clear headed approach to leadership at this time of unprecedented international turmoil. And if enough of us just get behind him, maybe we can once again become the “United States of America.”
By: Joan E. Dowlin, The Huffington Post Blog, July 19, 20
“Moral Responsibility And The Israel-Palestinian Conflict”: No Moral Equivalency, Being Responsible For Your Own Actions
As Israel begins a ground invasion of Gaza in which hundreds of civilians will almost certainly be killed and the endless misery of the people who live there will only intensify, we haven’t actually seen much debate about the subject here in the U.S. There’s plenty of news about it, but unlike most issues, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one we don’t actually argue about much. There aren’t dueling op-eds in every paper the way there are when even a country Americans care far less about, like Ukraine, works its way into our attention.
There are many reasons for that, not least of which is the absurdly constrained debate we have over the topic of Israel. But I suspect that the relative quiet is in part because in a debate where even casting the two sides as equivalent is portrayed as a betrayal of Israel (you’ll notice, for instance, that the White House is careful to say, again and again, that Israel has a right to defend itself, but you’ll hear them say that the Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves at the approximate time the Winter X Games are held in Hell), few people can even manage to say with a straight face that both sides are suffering equally. Having to constantly rush to the bomb shelters and being afraid go outside is awful; I have many relatives and friends in Israel who are experiencing that right now. But it’s different from knowing that there is a good possibility that in the next few days a missile will blow apart a house on your street—as one “targeted” strike after another kills a house full of people—and there are no shelters to retreat to.
It’s been said many times that no government would tolerate rockets being fired into its territory without a response, which is true.But those rockets do not grant Israel a pass from moral responsibility for what it does and the deaths it causes, any more than prior acts of terrorism have. In this as in so many conflicts, both sides—and those who defend each—try to justify their own abdication of human morality with a plea that what the other side has done or is doing is worse. We’ve heard that argument made before, and we’ll continue to hear it. But when we do, we should acknowledge it for what it is: no justification at all.
Actions are either defensible on their own terms or they aren’t. The brutality of your enemy makes no difference in that judgment. It wasn’t acceptable for the Bush administration’s defenders to say (as many did) that torturing prisoners was justified because Al Qaeda beheads prisoners, which is worse. And our judgment of Hamas’s lobbing of hundreds of rockets toward civilian areas tells us nothing about whether Israel’s actions in Gaza are right or wrong.
According to this tally from the New York Times, as of Wednesday, Israeli strikes had killed 214 people in Gaza, most of whom were civilians. One Israeli has been killed by a Hamas rocket over the same period. Yes, Hamas would kill many more Israelis if they could. But if the question you’re asking is what kind of moral responsibility Israel bears for the choices it makes, that fact is irrelevant.
Nor does saying “Hamas is a terrorist organization!” tell you how to judge Israel’s actions. While it doesn’t appear that the group ordered the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teenagers that started this conflagration, Hamas is quite happy to provoke Israel with rockets and watch its own people die in response; I suppose its leaders believe that the more terrible Israeli actions toward Gaza are, the better it is for their position there. Had Palestinians chosen to wage a campaign of nonviolent resistance against Israel, they could have had their own country a decade or two ago. But today, Hamas and Israeli hard-liners, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are partners in maintaining this ghastly status quo, both happy to see Gaza drown in blood and despair so long as a two-state solution never comes to pass and they can both maintain power.
But if you consider yourself a friend of Israel, the next time a bomb kills four kids playing soccer on a beach or buries a family under the rubble of their house, you have a few options. You can condemn it, or you can say it was just an accident, or you can say that regrettable things happen in war and there’s nothing anyone can do. But what you can’t say is that it’s OK because Hamas are terrible people. Israel is responsible for its own actions, just as Hamas is, and everyone else is, and nothing the other side does changes that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 18, 2014
“The End Of The Russian Fairy Tale”: A Nihilistic Disregard For Human Life
Before there is any further discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, an operation deliberately designed to create legal, political, and military chaos. Without this chaos, a surface-to-air missile would not have been fired at a passenger plane.
From the beginning, the Russian government did not send regular soldiers to Ukraine. Instead, it sent Russian mercenaries and security service operatives such as Igor Strelkov—the commander in chief in Donetsk and a Russian secret police colonel who fought in both Chechen wars—or Vladimir Antyufeyev, the Donetsk “deputy prime minister” who led the Latvian KGB’s attempt to overthrow the independent Latvian government back in 1991.
With the help of local thugs, these Russian security men besieged police stations, government offices, and other symbols of political authority, in order to delegitimize the Ukrainian state. In this task, they were assisted by the Russian government and by Russia’s state-controlled mass media, both of which still constantly denigrate Ukraine and its “Nazi” government. Just in the past week, Russian reporting on Ukraine reached a new pitch of hysteria, with fake stories about the supposed crucifixion of a child and an extraordinary documentary comparing the Ukrainian army’s defense of its own country with the Rwandan genocide.
Into this ambiguous and unstable situation, the Russians cynically funneled a stream of heavy weapons: machine guns and artillery, and eventually tanks, armed personnel carriers, and anti-aircraft missiles. In recent days, the separatist forces were openly using MANPADS, and were also boasting of having taken down large Ukrainian transport planes, clearly with Russian specialist assistance. Indeed, Strelkov on Thursday afternoon boasted online of having taken down another military plane, before realizing that the plane in question was MH17. He removed the post. In late June, several different Russian media sources published photographs of BUK anti-aircraft missiles, which they said had been captured by the separatists—though they were probably outright gifts from Russia. These posts have also been removed.
This is the context within which a surface-to-air missile was aimed at a passenger plane: A lawless environment; irregular soldiers who might not be so good at reading radar; a nihilistic disregard for human life; scorn for international norms, rules, or standards. Just for the record: There weren’t any Ukrainian government-controlled anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine, because the separatists were not flying airplanes.
Until now, these unorthodox methods have worked well for the Russians. They unnerved and distracted the Ukrainian government while at the same time allowing foreign governments, and European governments in particular, to turn a blind eye. Because the war was not a “real” war, it could be described as “local,” as “containable,” it could remain a low priority for European foreign policy or indeed for anybody’s foreign policy.
If it has done nothing else, the crash of Flight MH17 has just put an end to the “it’s not a real war” fairy tale, both for the Russians and for the West. Tragically, this unconventional nonwar war has just killed 298 people, mostly Europeans. We can’t pretend it isn’t happening any longer, or that it doesn’t affect anyone outside of Donetsk. The Russians can’t pretend either.
Without the fairy-tale pretense, some things are about to become clear. For one, we are about to learn whether the West in 2014 is as united, and as determined to stop terrorism as it was 26 years ago. When the Libyan government brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the West closed ranks and isolated the Libyan regime. Can we do the same now—or will too many be tempted to describe this as a “tragic accident,” and to dismiss what will inevitably be a controversial investigation as “inconclusive?” It is insufficient to state, as President Obama has now done, that there must be a “cease-fire” in Ukraine. What is needed is a withdrawal of Russian mercenaries, weapons, and support. The West—and the world—must push for Ukrainian state sovereignty to be reestablished in eastern Ukraine, not for the perpetuation of another frozen conflict.
We will also learn something interesting about the Russian president. So far there is no sign of shock or shame in Russia. But in truth, this tragedy offers Vladimir Putin an opportunity to get out of the messy disaster he has created in eastern Ukraine. He now has the perfect excuse to denounce the separatist movement and to cut its supplies. If he refuses, then we know that he remains profoundly dedicated to the chaos and nihilism he created in Donetsk. We can assume he intends to perpetuate it elsewhere. And if we are not prepared to fight it, we should be braced for it to spread.
By: Anne Applebaum, Slate, July 18, 2014
“Peace May Never Be At Hand”: The Passage Of Time Is Imposing A One-State Solution In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Israelis and Palestinians may someday make peace. But the assumption should be that it won’t happen soon — perhaps not in our lifetimes.
How often have we seen this movie? Palestinian atrocity, Israeli reaction escalating into overreaction, rocket attacks aimed at civilian targets in Israel, airstrikes targeting Palestinian leadership and infrastructure in Gaza, heartbreaking pictures of mangled young bodies on the beach. Palestinians say: We will never forgive the Israelis for killing our children. Israelis say: We will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill their children.
I applaud President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry for diving in and trying to forge a peace deal, if only because history suggests that anything is better than leaving the parties to their own devices. But the obvious two-state solution seems an ever more distant dream.
Hamas cannot be bombed out of existence. Its leaders — and if some are killed by Israeli missiles, others will take their place — have no interest in recognizing the state of Israel and living side by side in peace. The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, continues expanding settlements into West Bank territory that would have to be part of any viable Palestinian state. And the Palestinian Authority could never win the battle for popular support against Hamas if its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, accepted any deal that Israel is prepared to offer.
I am not arguing that rocket attacks are equivalent to settlements. I am not arguing that four Israeli lives — three murdered teenagers and one civilian — are equivalent to more than 200 Palestinian lives, including those of four children who died by the sea.
I am simply stating the obvious: Nobody really wants to make peace.
Israel presently feels fairly safe — in relative terms — from the threat of a new intifada. The wall that now cordons off much of the West Bank provides effective protection against would-be suicide bombers. And the Iron Dome system of missile defense is a shield — though not foolproof — against the rockets Hamas fires from Gaza.
I would suggest that this feeling of security is illusory, at least in the long run — and demographic trends back me up. About 8 million people live in Israel proper, including about 1.7 million Arabs. There are roughly 4.4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Given current trends, there will come a day when the Arabs in Israel and the territories outnumber the Jews.
In other words, the passage of time is imposing a one-state solution. How, then, will Israel retain its identity as a Jewish state? How can a democracy govern so many people who do not have full rights of citizenship — and remain a true democracy?
If I were Israeli, I’d probably answer those questions by saying that this is not our doing, that we want nothing more than to live in peace. But Palestinians, too, have a right to feel that they are in a situation not of their own making. The vast majority of people on both sides are too young to remember the events of 1948, when Israel was founded. Many are too young to remember 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. They know only the echoes of those wars, reverberations that never seem to fade.
I wish I could be more optimistic. I continue to believe that the United States can play a constructive role by encouraging dialogue between Netanyahu and Abbas. Even if the talks go nowhere, Winston Churchill was right: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
But I also believe that realistic U.S. policy in the Middle East should assume that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue indefinitely, punctuated by spasms of active warfare.
The close and unbreakable bond between Israel and the United States remains a given. But friends try not to let friends do stupid things. If there are ways in which U.S. advice might shorten this outbreak of violence or delay the next, Obama — and his successors — must speak up. If there is some way to persuade Hamas that the next volley of rockets will be as useless and counterproductive as the last, we should make the attempt.
No conflict lasts forever, but I remember that in my high school history class we read about the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. I fear the Israelis and Palestinians may eventually set a new record.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 19, 2014
“Ignoring Well-Established Law”: Gov. Scott Walker, Allies Knew Prevailing Interpretation Of State Law
Supporters of Gov. Scott Walker have been working hard in recent weeks to conjure up excuses to dismiss the John Doe campaign finance probe.
First, they attacked it as a partisan witch hunt, ignoring the fact that the investigation is led by a Republican who voted for Walker and that it has the participation of both Republican and Democratic district attorneys from across the state.
Then, they tried to dismiss it as a “legally baseless” investigation, and argued that Wisconsin law does not prohibit the Walker campaign and Wisconsin Club for Growth from coordinating on electoral “issue ads” that omit the phrase “vote for” Scott Walker.
Now, Walker’s allies are acknowledging that the probe is grounded in Wisconsin law, but are claiming that prosecutors are enforcing a “zombie law” — allegedly rendered unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court — that the Walker campaign was purportedly free to ignore.
This is not the case.
The governor is endowed with many powers, but he cannot single-handedly rewrite the law or reverse legal precedent.
For decades, Wisconsin law has capped campaign donations to limit the influence of money in elections, and required candidates to disclose major contributions so the public can see who is bankrolling our politicians. Courts have interpreted the law to mean that “issue ads” coordinated with a candidate for state office can be regarded as in-kind contributions to the campaign, because they are of great value to the campaign. Any coordinated issue ad “contributions” that exceed donation limits and are omitted from campaign filings can be illegal. The same is true in federal elections, under federal law.
Even if the Walker camp believed that coordinated issue ads shouldn’t be regulated, or that at some point in the future a court might overrule existing Wisconsin precedent, this belief shouldn’t have given them license to ignore well-established law during the 2012 elections, as the prosecutors’ theory in the case alleges.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never held that counting electoral issue ads as contributions is unconstitutional. In fact, in 2003 the court explicitly upheld a provision of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that treats issue ads that air near federal elections (called “electioneering communications”) as in-kind contributions if coordinated with a candidate. That holding has never been overturned.
And, even as a slim majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at campaign finance limits for PACs and non-profits, it has done so with the express proviso that these groups are “independent” and their activities not coordinated with candidates.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in Citizens United vs. FEC that “the absence of prearrangement and coordination…undermines the value of the expenditure to the candidate.” In other words, if a candidate is coordinating with a third-party group, that group’s expenditures are of value to the campaign — and the contribution limits and disclosure requirements that apply to candidates would be rendered meaningless if politicians can work closely with a group that takes secret, million-dollar donations.
Wisconsin courts have had a similar take, and the John Doe prosecutors are relying on an interpretation of state law established by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in 1999, in a precedent-setting case called Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation.
In that case, the court rejected arguments identical to those now being made by Walker and the Club for Growth, and held that, under Wisconsin law, electoral issue ads coordinated with a campaign count as contributions to the campaign.
Despite the claims of op-ed writers published by the Journal Sentinel, it is not the case that the courts had overturned the Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation precedent or rendered its holding unenforceable in advance of the recall elections. Just ask Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General, J.B. Van Hollen. As thousands of people were occupying the Wisconsin capitol in 2011 — sparking a movement that would lead to the recall elections — Van Hollen was citing Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation in court briefs as controlling precedent.
Just months later, with recall elections heating up, prosecutors believe the Walker campaign and Club for Growth began working together, an alleged violation of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals’ interpretation of state law that Van Hollen had recently endorsed.
The Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation precedent was no secret. It is explicitly cited in the end notes to the Wisconsin statutes, which provide guidance on the prevailing interpretations of Wisconsin law for candidates such as Walker and the raft of lawyers who advise him.
Plus, the Wisconsin Elections Board — the precursor to the Government Accountability Board — issued a 2002 opinion citing both state and federal cases to advise that coordinated electoral issue ads are contributions under Wisconsin law. That opinion was affirmed by the GAB in 2008 and is clearly posted on the GAB website.
If the Walker campaign or Wisconsin Club for Growth believed courts were “moving” toward a different interpretation of Wisconsin statutes, they could have sought an advisory opinion from the GAB, or requested advice from Van Hollen. If they believed that U.S. Supreme Court rulings had made the Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation decision unenforceable, they could have sought a declaratory judgment from a state court.
The Walker campaign and Wisconsin Club for Growth cannot claim they were unaware of the prevailing interpretation of Wisconsin law, and Wisconsinites should know better than to buy their after-the-fact rationales.
By: Brendan Fischer, General Counsel, The Center for Media and Democracy in Madison: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 17, 2014
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