“Obama Reflects On A Sacred Rule”: We Don’t Leave Our Men Or Women In Uniform Behind
The political discourse over the last few days has been rather surreal. It seemed hard to imagine that the release of an American prisoner of war would spark a fierce partisan backlash, but the announcement that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been freed from his Taliban captors in Afghanistan seems to have done exactly that, with much of the right condemning the move.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned his allies, “Attacking the actions that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is a surefire way to lose in 2014,” but so far, conservatives have ignored the suggestion.
President Obama, in Europe this week, spoke to reporters while in Poland this morning and responded to the burgeoning controversy.
“The United States has always had a pretty sacred rule and that is we don’t leave our men or women in uniform behind,” he said. “We have consulted with Congress for quite some time about the possibility that we might need to execute a prisoner exchange to recover Sgt. Bergdahl.” […]
“I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought it was detrimental to our national security,” he said. “We will be in a position to go after them if they are engaging in activity that threatens our defenses.”
There have been multiple reports that Bergdahl may have been a deserter at the time of his capture. And though we don’t yet have all of the details about what transpired, the president made clear that some of those details aren’t quite relevant to the underlying principle.
“Let me just make a simple point here: regardless of the circumstances, whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period. Full stop. We don’t condition that,” Obama said.
I’m not sure why so many on the right find this hard to understand.
The United States prioritizes the return of American POWs. It’s just what we do. What if the troops were captured due to their own negligence? It doesn’t matter. What if they were taken prisoner as a result of incompetence? It doesn’t matter. What if they gave up their post? It doesn’t matter.
Even by the standards of our contemporary discourse, the past few days have been hard to believe. U.S. officials secured the release of an American prisoner of war and for much of the right, the first instinct was to condemn the president. The second instinct was to condemn the prisoner. And as yesterday unfolded, the third instinct was to go after the prisoner’s dad.
I don’t expect much from the far-right, but this is surprising.
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, said in a joint statement that the prisoner swap that led to Bergdahl’s release “may have” adverse consequences and could put U.S. forces “at even greater risk.”
It’s difficult to say with certainty whether their warnings have merit. But Glenn Thrush asked a good question on Twitter overnight: what endangered the U.S. homeland more: a prisoner swap or invading Muslim country based on fake intelligence resulting in tens of thousands of deaths?
Predicting what U.S. foreign policies “may have” adverse consequences and/or could put U.S. forces “at even greater risk” is tricky, but if we’re making a list, I can think of a few things that would come above “prisoner swaps.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 3, 2014
“One Twisted Sister”: Wingnuts’ War On The Troops, The Ugly Lesson Of Bowe Bergdahl And Sarah Palin
After nearly five years, Bowe Bergdahl, a 28-year-old Idahoan and the last remaining American POW in Afghanistan, is finally coming home. The Obama administration made the announcement during the weekend, framing the deal that swapped Bergdahl for five Taliban-affiliated Guantánamo Bay prisoners as an example of two U.S. promises: to leave no man behind and to finally, mercifully, and after nearly 13 long years, begin to end the war in Afghanistan. For Bergdahl and his family, the move is a blessing. For those who doubt the administration’s commitment to ending the war, it is a reassurance. And for the loudest members of the far right, it is a mistake, a capitulation, a disgrace.
Their argument, in brief: By agreeing to trade prisoners of war with the Taliban, Obama made the U.S. look — what else? — weak. “You blew it again, Barack Obama, by negotiating away any leverage against the bad guys,” wrote the perpetually enraged Sarah Palin on her Facebook page. The deal, argued Palin, had “destroyed troop morale” while causing “Osama Bin Laden’s partners in evil crime” to “joyfully celebrate.” What really infuriated the half-term governor and former vice presidential candidate, though, wasn’t so much Obama’s actions as Bergdahl’s. The price the administration paid for liberating him, Palin intimated, was simply too high. He didn’t deserve it. How come? Because he expressed “horrid anti-American beliefs” and deserted his fellow soldiers prior to his capture.
As you might expect from any Palin story, there are some issues. For one, whether Bergdahl found himself under Taliban control because of bad luck, as the administration claims, or because he decided to abandon his post is up for debate. (And keep in mind that, even if he had deserted, that hardly makes it ethical for the government to abandon him to his captors.) For another, Palin’s note about the deal lacks some crucial information — like the fact that the men released from Guantánamo will have to spend at least a year in Qatar, or that the U.S.’s impending cessation of the war in Afghanistan would necessitate the release of the Gitmo detainees anyway. But for all it lacked in terms of responding to this relatively simple news story in an informed, accurate and insightful way, Palin’s angry Facebook missive was great in one respect: It was a perfect example of what happens when soldiers refuse to live up to the far right’s fantasies.
We’re all familiar with how conservatives — but especially extreme ones like Palin — deify, romanticize and claim ownership of the men and women in the armed forces. We all remember the 2004 Republican National Convention, when President Bush all but dusted off that iconic green “Mission Impossible” flight suit in order to portray himself and his party as the sole guardians and stewards of the military. We all remember the countless times during the Bush years when a Republican or a conservative would ask an antiwar Democrat or liberal why they so hate the troops. We expect to see right-wingers genuflect before the Platonic ideal of an American warrior. We expect to hear more stories about Marine Todd.
“Turn The NRA’s Weapon Against It”: Gun Lobbyist, “I Have Never Believed In The General Practice Of Carrying Weapons”
In 1934, the National Rifle Association’s lobbyist testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee about President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” the lobbyist said. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
The NRA testified, under oath, in favor of the nation’s first federal gun control bill.
Eighty years later, the organization believes not only in “the general practice of carrying weapons” but also, as Ronald Reagan once wrote, that the Second Amendment “appears to leave little if any leeway for the gun control advocate.”
The NRA’s dramatic turnabout, and its decades-long campaign to change American hearts, minds and gun laws, is the subject of Michael Waldman’s compelling new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography”. Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at the New York University School of Law, explains that the authors of the Second Amendment never intended to create an “unregulated individual right to a gun” and explores why, today, we think they did. Published three days before the rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that killed six and wounded 13, the book shows how we got to this moment of routine gun violence — and offers a way out.
The Founders, it turns out, didn’t spend a lot of time discussing the Second Amendment. Skeptical of standing armies, their interest was in protecting “well-regulated” state militias; the phrase “keep and bear arms” was, at the time, a military reference. Scour James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, the states’ ratification debates and the markup of the Bill of Rights in the House of Representatives, as Waldman did, and, “with a few scattered exceptions,” you won’t find “a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation.”
Thus, for two centuries, the mainstream understanding of the Second Amendment was that it had to do not with an individual’s unregulated right to a gun but rather with the citizen-soldiers who would comprise a militia. There were plenty of guns in the United States, but those were subjected to restrictions that were widely accepted as both reasonable and essential.
Then, at the NRA’s 1977 national convention, gun advocates staged what came to be known as the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” replacing the group’s leadership with ideological extremists intent on building a political movement to fight even modest gun regulations and promote their revisionist view of the Second Amendment.
NRA-backed lawyers quietly and consistently churned out law review articles and pseudo-scholarship questioning 200 years of legal understanding. They shamelessly built up a self-referential body of work riddled with historical errors. Over time, these “scholars” toiling at the fringe were joined by a few leading academics, who lent some measure of respectability to this interpretation.
The gun lobby also engaged in a concerted public campaign, not to mention political manipulation. It was so successful that by the time the issue reached the Supreme Court in 2008, “the desired new doctrine fell like a ripe apple from the tree.” In its rotten 5 to 4 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, the majority ruled for the first time ever that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a gun.
The crucial lesson is that the gun lobby’s triumph was not judge-driven; it was judge-ratified. For all of the legitimate frustration with the court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, the real obstacle to sensible gun control is not judicial inflexibility but a lack of political courage. What we need is a sustained, multi-pronged effort to reframe the public debate and pressure our elected leaders into action.
The right’s long, assiduous and destructive march through the courts and the court of public opinion has, perversely, illuminated a path forward for their opponents. Constitutional change happens not by judicial fiat but through a broader dialogue with the other branches of government and, most important, with the people they represent.
That’s why we don’t necessarily need to revise the syntactic mess that is the Second Amendment, as former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens proposed. Cass Sunstein and others have pointed out that “the Court’s rulings continue to leave flexibility to state and federal governments.” Indeed, since the Heller decision, the courts have upheld many gun regulations.
Americans clearly support common-sense regulations; 90 percent support background checks for gun ownership. But because that support hasn’t translated into political action, 90 percent of Senate Republicans opposed a bill to expand background checks. The pleas of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shot by a madman at a congressional event in 2011, and the grieving parents of 20 schoolchildren slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., could not pry their votes, or their consciences, from the NRA’s cold hands. What we need is a movement of everyday Americans who believe in sane gun laws to stand up with the most vocal advocates at the forefront and replicate the passion and intensity of NRA activists.
The NRA demonstrated the power of a long, full jurisprudential campaign. It’s time to use their own weapon against them.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 3, 2014
“His Own Worst Enemy”: The 13 Most Bizarre Things From Edward Snowden’s NBC News Interview
While watching Brian Williams’ interview with Ed Snowden, I actually agreed with Glenn Greenwald about something. Back in 2012, Greenwald referred to Williams as “NBC News’ top hagiographer,” using “his reverent, soothing, self-important baritone” to deliver information in its “purest, most propagandistic and most subservient form.”
It’s worth noting at the outset that Greenwald flew all the way to Moscow specifically for the NBC News interview, and he appeared on camera with Snowden and Williams, answering questions from this so-called “hagiographer.”
Now, I’m not a Brian Williams hater. I think he’s a fine news anchor. But his interview with Ed Snowden was yet another in a long, long line of deferential, uninformed, unchallenging genuflections before a guy whose story and motivations are more than a little specious. But it’s not a stretch to presume that Greenwald, the man who once aimed all of his wordy, caustic vitriol in Williams’ general direction, referring to him as possessing “child-like excitement” over gaining access to a source, probably loved every minute of it. However, don’t break out the champagne just yet, NBC News, Greenwald will immediately shift gears sometime very soon and continue to indict any and all mainstream news outlets, including NBC, as being impotent, pernicious, drooling shills for President Obama and the D.C. elite.
So what about the telecast itself? Here are the 13 most bizarre things from Snowden’s NBC News interview.
1) Snowden claimed he has “no relationship” with the Russian government and that he’s “not supported” by it. That’s odd, given how the Russian government has twice offered him asylum and one of his lawyers, Anatoly Kucherena, is an attorney with the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB (formerly the KGB). Tell me again why anyone should trust this guy?
2) “Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break a law.” So it’s really up to each of us individually to decide whether our own interpretation of “doing the right thing” necessitates breaking the law? A lot of awful things have occurred with that exact justification. Also, what if NSA feels the same way, Ed?
3) Snowden said that no one has been harmed by his disclosures. Yet. Already, though, one of his documents escalated tensions between Australia and Indonesia, and another document endangered lives in Afghanistan to the point where Greenwald refused to publish the name of that country. It’s only a matter of time, sadly.
4) Early on, Snowden said, “I’m not a spy.” Later he famously confessed to being “trained as a spy.” Huh?
5) Snowden said he destroyed his documents before going to Russia. This is really strange. I have no idea whether he really destroyed his NSA files, but he did in fact meet with Russian officials in Hong Kong, when he reportedly celebrated his birthday at the Russian consulate. Did he still have his documents at that point? Earlier, he said his goal was to fly to Latin America, so why did he anticipate being in Russia to the point where he destroyed his documents to prevent Russians from acquiring them? These are all follow-up questions that a journalist who was informed about the details of Snowden’s timeline would’ve asked. Williams was not and therefore did not.
6) NSA can “absolutely” turn on your iPhone, which is “pretty scary.” This section was like whiplash. Snowden started out by sounding reasonable by defining that NSA only acquires data when “targeting” drug dealers or terrorists. And then, BLAM!, this shitola about NSA being able to turn on your phone. If true, why hasn’t this been disclosed from Snowden’s NSA documents?
7) Snowden said that by googling the score of a hockey game, NSA can find out whether you’re cheating on your wife. Someone’s been wearing his tinfoil hat a wee bit too tightly.
8) NSA can observe people drafting a document online and “watch their thoughts form as they type.” Let’s assume for a second this is true. Reading your thoughts (IEEEEE!!!) is a hyperbolic internet-age method of essentially describing a wire-tap. A police detective can get a court order to have a suspect’s phone tapped and listen to that suspect forming thoughts on the phone, too. But to call it a “wire-tap” is too ordinary and familiar, so Ed went with mind-reading.
9) Snowden didn’t deny turning over secrets that would be damaging or harmful. He only said journalists have a deal with him not to do it. Just a reminder: we really have no idea how many reporters or organizations have copies of the documents or the total number of documents (it’s a Greenwald/Snowden secret), but we do know that Snowden documents have been reported by so many publications that the question arises: who doesn’t have Snowden documents?
10) Snowden’s watching HBO’s The Wire. The second season, he said, isn’t so good. He’s right.
11) Snowden said he can’t speak out on Russian issues because he can’t speak the language. Hey Ed, here. Free shipping, too. You’re welcome.
12) “People have unfairly demonized the NSA to a point that is too extreme.” Why is Snowden an apologist for the surveillance state? Drooling! Vast!
13) Snowden said he can “sleep at night” because of his actions. Well, good for him.
Ultimately, Snowden is his own worst enemy and his ongoing ability to say crazy things in a calm, collected voice continues. What’s abundantly clear at this point is that no one will ever land an interview with Snowden who will be as adversarial against the former NSA contractor as Greenwald has been in his own reporting in defense of Snowden. It’ll never happen.
By: Bob Cesca, The Huffington Post Blog, May 31, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Crazy Word Salad On Obamacare”: A Symbol Of GOP’s Larger Mess
Sen. Rand Paul made national news this weekend when he refused to say precisely whether he wanted to repeal Kentucky’s version of the Affordable Care Act, Kynect, along with the federal act itself. He bobbed and weaved like his boy Mitch McConnell, and most people have left it at that: another scared Republican afraid to tell the voters what he really thinks about a program that’s helped many of them. Reporters are used to that. Nobody except liberals even criticize it anymore, sadly.
But I want to look at Paul’s entire ludicrous soliloquy on Obamacare, Kynect and healthcare generally, because it shows how fundamentally unserious he is about domestic policy. Or if he is serious, he’s seriously delusional. It was every bit the nonsensical word salad we are used to being served by Sarah Palin, but maybe it’s sexism: Paul is never called out on it or mocked the way the former Alaska governor was. He ought to be.
I’ve written before that “Paul is what you get when traditional and corrosive American nepotism meets the 21st century GOP echo chamber: a pampered princeling whose dumb ideas have never been challenged by reality.” Ron Paul’s son has a tendency to look proud of himself whenever he shows a passing familiarity with facts and figures and ideas, even if he’s conflating or distorting them beyond any resemblance to reality. It’s on display in this interview with Kentucky reporters.
The junior senator from Kentucky starts out by acknowledging that Kynect gets a lot of praise, locally and nationally.
I think the real question that we have in Kentucky is people seem to be very much complimenting our exchange because of the functionality of it, but there are still the unknown questions or what’s going to happen with so many new people.
OK. Let’s take a look at “what’s going to happen with so many new people.” Here Paul rolls out some brand-new GOP anti-ACA scare tactics. First: The rapid expansion of Medicaid, he claims, is costing jobs.
I mean it’s basically about a 50 percent increase in Medicaid in one year. That’s a dramatic shot to a system. And my question is what will happen to local hospitals. If you look at [Glasgow, Kentucky, hospital] TJ Samson laid off 50 people and they’re saying they can’t afford the huge burden of Medicaid.
Oops, stop right there. While the hospital’s CEO did in fact link the layoff of 49 staffers to Obamacare in April, days later the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services disputed that account. It said the hospital would take in hundreds of thousands of dollars more in Medicaid funding annually, because it’s now being reimbursed for uninsured patients it used to treat without payment. Asked about the discrepancy, Paul just pointed to earlier reporting about the Samson CEO’s remarks and said: “All I know is what I read in the papers.”
So for President Rand Paul, the buck would presumably stop with the papers.
Then Paul raised the specter of folks getting their private health insurance subsidized under the Affordable Care Act, but with such high deductibles that they ultimately won’t be able to pay.
That’s gonna mean … you’re still just a non-payer, probably. And hospitals are going to have to figure out, we won’t know this for six months to a year, how many people who show up with subsidized insurance will actually be able to pay [their] deductible.
This could conceivably be a problem – actually, it was a big problem before the ACA – but Paul has no evidence the ACA made the problem worse. More likely it has helped some, because even with a high deductible plan, many preventive services are now provided without a co-pay. The point is, there’s no evidence of such a problem yet; Paul is just throwing trash at Obamacare to see what will stick. And there’s more:
How many of the new people on Medicaid, how many of those people may have actually had insurance before? Did they go from being a non-payer to being a government payer? Or did they maybe have insurance, but now they’re on Medicaid because it’s easier than having insurance?
Paul could probably find out the answers to these questions, with staff work and a little consultation with the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, but he would never bother. After hearing all of this bad news, much of it invented, a local reporter asked the senator the obvious question:
With all those unknowns, do you think Kynect should be dismantled?
And here Paul joins McConnell and punts. Or lies, since it’s pretty sure from his answer he thinks Kynect should be dismantled.
You know I’m not sure — there’s going to be … how we unravel or how we change things. I would rather —I always tell people there’s a fork in the road.
Oh, that fork in the road. Paul turns to boilerplate conservative rhetoric:
We could have gone one of two directions. One was towards more competition and more marketplace and one was toward more government control. The people who think that the government can efficiently distribute medicine need to explain why the VA’s been struggling for decade after decade in a much smaller system.
Points for working in the VA, the Obama scandal du jour. Let’s leave that alone, it’s a story in itself. Continue, Sen. Paul:
And they also need to explain, even though I think we all want Medicare to work better, why Medicare is $35 trillion short.
Huh? First of all, Paul doesn’t “want Medicare to work better,” he wants to repeal it. That’s something you don’t hear much about, but he sponsored a bill with Utah Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee to replace Medicare with the Congressional Health Care Plan members of Congress buy in to, essentially privatizing it. The bill would also raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 70. That ought to go over well with the GOP’s rapidly aging white base. That’s why Paul is forced to lie about his own Medicare position.
And the allegation that Medicare is “$35 trillion short”? I could find no documentation for it besides a Heritage Foundation blog post, and a ton of YouTube videos where Rand Paul makes the claim on Fox News. It seems to refer to a 2011 estimate by Medicare trustees that the Part A Trust Fund would face a shortfall by 2026 unless payroll taxes were raised or program costs were trimmed – and the Affordable Care Act has been trimming them. It’s bunk.
Then Paul turns briefly to the question of Kynect:
There’s a lot of questions that are big questions that are beyond the exchange and the Kynect and things like that. It’s whether or not how we’re going to fund these things.
But then he detours again, to take us back to the already debunked example of TJ Samson hospital’s Medicaid-induced “layoffs.”
If they lose 50 good paying jobs in the hospital, is that good? Then we’ve got more people in the wagon, and less people pulling the wagon.
With that profound Kentucky take on Paul Ryan’s “makers vs. takers” narrative, he walks away. And we’re back to Mitt Romney’s deriding the “47 percent.” In Paul’s more colorful telling, the problem is that some of us pull the wagon, while freeloaders and layabouts just lounge in it. For 50 years, Republicans have tried to tell voters the folks “in the wagon” are minorities. But in Kentucky, which is 88 percent white, they’re mainly white. So Rand Paul, the great 2016 hope, is really a prisoner of the elitist 2012 narrative that cost the GOP the White House.
Even though there’s so much to explore in Paul’s Kynect two-step – delusion, ideology, outright lies – the media mostly ignored it. Those who’ve paid attention simply covered the admittedly newsworthy Obamacare evasion. But I think Paul’s entire stand-up act, his performance art — Being a Very Serious Senator, or at least playing one on TV — deserves more attention. It’s only the soft bigotry of the media’s low expectations for Republicans, and maybe a little of society’s sexism, that makes Rand Paul someone to contend with in 2016, when Sarah Palin is widely just a punch line.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, June 2, 2014
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