“Stop Listening To John Bolton”: He Has No Idea What He’s Talking About, And It’s Scary He Was Ever In Power To Begin With
There’s an old joke, or sort of joke, about how bombing for peace is like f*cking for virginity. In that analogy, John Bolton is trying to f*ck us all over.
Bolton, United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, has written an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, the United States should bomb Iran. This “reasoning” is as reckless and unreliable as its messenger.
It has been reported that “almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions,” according to Israel’s former chief of defense forces. Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under both Bush and Obama, cautioned against military strikes in Iran, warning, “A military solution, as far as I’m concerned … it will bring together a divided nation. It will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. And they will just go deeper and more covert.”
Gates said the only long-term solution is convincing Iranians that nuclear weapons capacity is not in their interest—the goal of current diplomatic talks.
Even the director of the CIA under Bush said that the Bush Administration explored but ultimately rejected a military strike on Iran, concluding it would only “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent—an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.”
News reports suggest that the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are making headway in diplomatic negotiations with Iran that would halt nuclear weapons development in Iran for at least a decade and submit the country to rigorous inspections. But Republicans, so eager to bash President Obama on any count, have not only immorally (and possibly illegally) undermined U.S. diplomacy and credibility in the international community, they have argued President Obama is somehow causing brinksmanship by relying on smart diplomacy to avoid nuclear war.
We are supposed to believe this because John Bolton tells us to.
Bolton also asserts that somehow, though Israel having nuclear weapons has not been perceived as a threat in the region, “Iran is a different story.” Oh, okay. Why, exactly? “Extensive progress in uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing reveal its ambitions.” So Iran’s nuclear enrichment is extra-threatening because Iran is engaged in nuclear enrichment? I’m not saying we shouldn’t be treating a nuclear Iran as a major and especially-dangerous problem—clearly the Obama Administration is taking the threat seriously. No one is arguing, especially given Iran’s recent expansionist push into Yemen and Iraq, that Iran should be taken in general as anything other than a serious threat to the world, no matter what and even more so with nuclear capacity.
But Bolton is employing “just trust me” reasoning to hype military action. “Saudi, Egyptian and Turkish interests are complex and conflicting, but faced with Iran’s threat, all have concluded that nuclear weapons are essential.”
How do you know that, Mr. Bolton? “Obviously, the Saudis, Turkey and Egypt will not be issuing news releases trumpeting their intentions. But the evidence is accumulating that they have quickened their pace toward developing weapons.”
Would that be the same evidence you relied on to assert that Saddam Hussein was developing WMDs—the same intel the administration used as the justification for going to war in Iraq? Bolton provides little solid evidence of his sky-is-falling assertions. We’re just supposed to trust him, I guess, based on his reputation.
Now, I realize this is the point in the article where Republicans will drone on about liberals reliably pointing to George W. Bush as a way to avoid scrutinizing Barack Obama. Whine away, but the fact is that when veterans of the Bush Administration’s disastrous foreign policy drag their own selves out of the dustbin of history to proclaim their expertise and wisdom, reminding the nation of the bountiful evidence to the contrary is entirely fair game.
When former Vice President Dick Cheney went on Fox News to attack President Obama’s strategy in Iraq, host Megyn Kelly shot back, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir.” Kelly listed Cheney’s failings: “You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; you said we would be greeted as liberators; you said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes back in 2005; and you said that after our intervention, extremists would have to, quote, ‘rethink their strategy of jihad.’ Now, with almost a trillion dollars spent there, with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”
Cheney’s response was to disagree with Kelly’s characterization—and keep asserting his righteousness. And so it also goes with John Bolton.
In 2002, while serving as Bush’s Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bolton said, “We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq.” And regarding launching war in Iraq, Bolton assured, “I expect that the American role actually will be fairly minimal. I think we’ll have an important security role.” And now Bolton is the foreign policy advisor for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. Which doesn’t exactly burnish his credibility.
Now Mr. Bolton wants to lead the charge, once again, into war. In fact, he’s gone a step further this time. In the case of Iraq, at least Mr. Bolton and the Bush Administration could claim preemptive military action against a tyrannical government that had allegedly actually obtained weapons of mass destruction, even though those allegations ultimately (knowingly?) were false.
But here, Bolton is using the future threat of acquisition of nuclear weapons to justify preemptive military action now. In 1992, right-wing hawk Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was just “three to five years away” from nuclear weapons capacity. Should we have preemptively bombed them then? I mean, facts schmacts right?
Secretary of State John Kerry says that Iran is still six years away from nuclear capacity. Others say it’s more like two or three, but even still: Reasonable people would argue there’s still time to let a diplomatic solution be worked out and tested. And reasonable people would try other plausible solutions before resorting to all-out war. But Republicans are, increasingly, not reasonable—perpetually too eager to both criticize President Obama and pull the trigger on war regardless of the fact that their track record has been a perpetual f*cking mess.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, March 26, 2015
“We Are Koch”: We Make Your Planet Warmer And Water More Flammable
Koch Industries, considered Public Enemy Number One by many environmentalists, is blanketing the airwaves with an ad campaign touting its contributions to society.
Charles and David Koch, billionaire moguls of a fossil fuel empire, sign off their company’s self-aggrandizing ads with the triumphant exclamation “we are Koch!”
The main ad in their series of spot commercials features a kaleidoscope of bucolic farms as well as bustling factory workers and lab technicians. A narrator informs us that the company has a 60,000 strong workforce dedicated to providing a broad range of products to” help people improve their lives.” [“We Are Koch.”]
There is no mention of this second largest privately held company in the nation being slapped with numerous fines for pollution offenses. There is nary a word about the Koch brothers using their immense wealth to finance the debunking of climate change. No reference is made to the company’s lobbying efforts to thwart clean, renewable energy expansion and weaken anti-pollution regulations.
One of the ads features Claire Johnson, an environmental engineer lauding the work of her employer, Flint Hill Resources, a Koch chemical refining multi-site operation.
“If a pollution incident does occur,” Johnson declares as she stares into the camera, “we are great at self-regulation…” [We Are Koch.]
Koch’s perception of its self-regulatory skills is not shared by government authorities responsible for safeguarding our air, water and land. You can understand why when you learn that the very same Flint Hill Resources was recently fined $350,000 for allowing a Texas chemical plant to leak a lethal amount of hazardous emissions.
To counter the Koch’s pervasive propaganda, an advertising rebuttal is needed. Television satirist Jon Stewart took a one-time stab with a video parody displaying oil fields and polar bears. The video was accompanied by a supposed Koch narrator rhapsodizing that “with our devotion to fossil fuels, we [Koch] make your planet warmer and water more flammable while lubricating your birds and displacing your polar bears.”
Unfortunately, Stewart doesn’t have the resources to saturate the electronic mass media with his visual message. It is a shame there is no major ad campaign offering such responses as something like the following. Picture a Koch Industries chemical plant discharging suspicious-looking affluent into a waterway with a narrator boasting “here is a Koch plant operating at full tilt.” A sonorous voice then intones “They Are Koch.”
How about a video in which a melting iceberg collapses into the sea as a Koch narrative drones “global warming is a natural phenomenon. There is no human-induced climate change. They Are Koch.”
The camera zooms in on a bulldozer unloading toxic coal residue into a hazardous waste landfill with a voice-over proclaiming “renewable energy at this stage is unaffordable. That leaves the plentiful coal and other fossil fuels we supply as the only practical alternatives for the foreseeable future. They Are Koch.”
Koch Industries employs a lot of people, but it jeopardizes a lot as well.
By: Edward Flattau, The Blog, The Huffington Post, March 25, 2015
“The Inevitable Questions”: Jeb Bush And The Two Types Of Electability Arguments
Not that it matters much now, with all the fascinating campaigning still to come, but I still think that Jeb Bush is the most likely Republican nominee, for reasons I outlined here. Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal, however, says that one of the cornerstones of Jeb’s appeal to Republican primary voters—that he’s the electable candidate—isn’t something they’re buying, partly because there isn’t a whole lot of evidence for it, other than the fact that Jeb is the kind of candidate who would seem to be more able to appeal to a general electorate. Ed Kilgore follows up:
Electability is supposed to be the Republican Establishment’s ace-in-the-hole, the argument carefully conveyed over time that wears down “the base’s” natural desire for a True Conservative fire-breather. In your head you know he’s right is the not-so-subtle message. But Jeb’s electability credentials are as baffling to regular GOP voters as they are obvious and unimpeachable to elites. And unless Jeb’s backers can supply some more convincing evidence than “trust [us] on this,” these doubts may never be quelled, particularly when you’ve got somebody in the field like Scott Walker who can boast of three wins in four years in a state carried twice by Obama—and without compromising with the godless liberals like Jeb wants to do.
Looking at it more generally, the jury is out as to whether the appropriate precedent for Jeb is somebody like Mitt Romney, who gradually won over intraparty skeptics by dint of money, opportunism, and a ruthless ability to exploit rivals’ vulnerability, or somebody like Rudy Giuliani, a guy who looked great until actual voters weighed in. And even that contrast may not capture Jeb’s problem: Rudy did well in early polls.
To the extent that Jeb does ultimately rely on an electability argument, he’s in danger of resembling a much earlier precedent: Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, whose late push to displace Richard Nixon was instantly destroyed by polls showing him performing more weakly than Tricky Dick in a general election. That’s actually where Jeb is right now. Unless and until his general election numbers turn around, and he’s running better against Clinton than anybody else, it’s going to be tough for him. All the money and opinion-leader endorsements and MSM adulation in the world cannot win the nomination for a candidate unless these resources at some point begin to translate into actual votes by actual voters. If they don’t like Jeb to begin with and think he’s a loser to boot, that may never happen.
Here’s the thing about electability: If you’re making an electability argument based on type, it’s probably full of holes, whereas if you’re making the argument based on this particular individual, it stands a better chance of being true. To take just one example, in 2008 there would have been a lot of good arguments for why a candidate like Barack Obama was unelectable. A senator hadn’t become president since John F. Kennedy, Obama only had a few years in office, he was young, and, oh yeah, he was black. But all of those were reasons why a candidate like Barack Obama wasn’t electable. That particular Barack Obama, however, turned out to be extremely electable.
There’s an anti-Jeb electability argument based on someone like Jeb, which says that when the GOP has nominated moderates it has lost, but when it has nominated conservatives it has won. This is basically Ted Cruz’s argument, and it’s true in some ways but very wrong in others. The anti-Jeb electability arguments based on this particular Jeb, especially the fact that his last name creates problems that Walker or Rubio wouldn’t have, are much more persuasive.
The electability debate figures into every primary campaign at some point, and there may be other ways in which Jeb can argue that he’s really the electable one. I still think that he’s more Romney than Giuliani, but this is obviously something he’s going to have to spend some time thinking about so he’s ready to answer the inevitable questions he’ll get from voters about it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 25, 2015
“Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop”: GOP Will Never Stop Coming For Obamacare
Obamacare turned 5 on Monday, a birthday achieved despite sustained and repeated efforts to smother the law in its cradle.
The law has taken some hits, including a 2012 Supreme Court decision that buckled the knees of the bill’s backers but seemed to make the Affordable Care Act the settled law of the land.
Now the Supreme Court has again taken up another challenge to the law.
King v. Burwell hinges on whether or not four words buried deep in the text of the law contain the seeds of Obamacare’s destruction by eliminating tax subsidies for people living in states that declined to set up their own insurance exchanges.
But even if they lose again at the court, conservatives say that they will continue to try to undo the law through the courts.
Michael Cannon, a health-policy expert at the Cato Institute, said the most promising challenge to the ACA comes from the state of Maine, which, after the Roberts court ruled in 2012 that the federal government was limited in how much it could compel states to expand Medicaid, sued to roll back its existing Medicaid coverage.
Last year, a federal appeals court ruled against the state, but Gov. Paul LePage has appealed to the Supreme Court, even as Maine’s attorney general has refused to represent the state in its challenge of the law.
Other remaining challenges include Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which argues the ACA is unconstitutional because it violated the Constitution’s origination clause that states spending bills must originate in the House, not the Senate.
“They are both kind of long shots,” acknowledged Cannon, noting that “the Supreme Court has never struck anything down on origination grounds” and that the House likely lacks standing in its lawsuit against the administration.
If the administration loses King v. Burwell, most health-policy experts predict that it will create a “death spiral” as low-income beneficiaries lose their subsidies in states that did not set up their own exchanges, and insurers are forced to raise rates. But conservatives say they will not delay in kneeing the law into the grave by filing lawsuits in states that set up their own exchanges.
Because many states rushed to do so, conservatives say they expect that governors and their health departments may have violated their state constitutions, and so even residents of those states that believed they were immune from the Burwell decision could face a loss of subsidies as well.
If the Supreme Court decides in favor of the government in King, conservative legal scholars said that what they decide to do in the future to tear down the law depends upon precisely the way in which the judgment is rendered. Halbig v. Burwell mirrors the King case in many respects, but other cases could still go forward, in particular one in Indiana in which several dozen school districts have argued that the employer mandate to provide health insurance puts too much of a burden on state and local governments.
Smaller challenges to the law, meanwhile, continue to mount. Little Sisters of the Poor sued to exempt themselves from the contraceptive mandate. If successful, the suit would allow more organizations to opt out than the Hobby Lobby decision did.
Another challenge, brought by the Goldwater Institute of Arizona, takes aim at the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which was designed to permit the Executive Branch to limit Medicare payments. Even some of the law’s liberal supporters, like former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, have said that the board should be eliminated or rethought.
Meanwhile, conservative legal scholars say they continue to pore over the text of the law in the hopes that they will find some other legal weaknesses that were not readily apparent. The King case, after all, hinges on four words in the text that were discovered by a legal scholar months after the law was passed.
“This law is so complicated that even those who have read it don’t understand the depths of it,” said John R. Graham, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. “Every time we look at it, we find something else to take to a judge.”
And such lawsuits, he added, help galvanize opposition to the bill years after it has passed.
“They keep the energy up, keep Obamacare on the front pages, keep hope alive.”
Which is necessary, because many conservatives still hope that the law will collapse under its own weight.
“They have really reached the limit of sign-ups. Enrollment is flattening as people see more and more how expensive the coverage is, how high the deductibles are, all the hoops they have to jump through, and they realize it is just not very attractive insurance,” said Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute. She said that many states would be able to opt out of some of the law’s provisions in 2017, and find their own alternatives.
“There is going to be huge momentum going forward to make changes to this law,” Turner said. “I could go on forever about how damaging this law has been to people’s lives. It has to be changed.”
By: David Freedlander, The Daily Beast, March 25, 2015
“Religion Won’t Save Cruz’s White House Bid”: Evangelical Appeal Only Takes You So Far
Given that Ted Cruz formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in the most overtly religious way possible, pollsters, pundits, and the public will quickly begin to speculate about the role of faith in the 2016 GOP nominating contest.
Unfortunately for Cruz, there is little reason to believe that the Republican Party is going to nominate someone who looks and talks like a televangelist. Yet evangelical elites’ stature within the GOP coalition assures that the party will cater to some—though not all—of their priorities.
Cruz announced his candidacy to a packed convocation at Liberty University. Founded by Jerry Falwell, the famed fundamentalist pastor and political operative who died in 2007, the Lynchburg, Virginia, campus is a bastion of cultural conservatism. The optics of Cruz’s speech, which reporters likened to a sermon, were clearly designed to highlight his evangelical bona fides.
Americans, and especially Republican primary voters, will now take a closer look at Cruz.
Well-known in political circles for his Tea Party-fueled campaign for Senate in 2012, Ted Cruz defied the Beltway expectation that freshmen senators should learn the ropes, quietly deferring to and learning from party elders. Instead, Cruz quickly jumped headlong and uninvited into high-profile political fights, taking it upon himself to help sabotage the Senate’s relationship with the Obama administration and with the House of Representatives.
Never missing an opportunity to grandstand, Cruz has shown that he has the ambition and sense of self-importance to think himself the best person for the job, but only his most ardent supporters could possibly think he seems “presidential.”
Cruz’s path to the GOP nomination (if there is one) centers around one goal: becoming the conservative movement’s alternative to the party establishment’s candidate of choice. Unfortunately for Cruz, it will not work.
With varying degrees of success, GOP presidential aspirants titillate conservative evangelicals with the idea that someone who shares their values could become president. A generation ago, Pat Robertson and Patrick Buchanan gave voice to grassroots longing for rhetoric about faith and values in Republican politics. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won eight states and more than 4 million primary votes before withdrawing in March. A motley crew of characters split evangelicals’ allegiances in 2012. Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic, received vital evangelical support in winning primaries in six conservative states.
Evangelicals often prefer GOP primary candidates who end up losing the nomination to whoever the party establishment prefers. The nominee ends up being someone the party feels is a safer bet for the general election but whose religious commitment evangelicals greet with private, and sometimes public, skepticism.
Pundits overstate the notion that evangelicals “hold their noses” to vote for candidates like John McCain or Mitt Romney. But it is clear that evangelical leaders harbored doubts about recent GOP nominees’ personal faith and commitments to evangelicals’ core issues.
McCain somewhat overcame his failure to win over evangelicals by adding Sarah Palin to the 2008 ticket. Romney’s Mormon faith was an issue because a majority of evangelicals do not consider Mormons to be Christians.
But McCain’s and Romney’s success ironically points to the reasons for Cruz’s pending failure. Political science research points to the outsized and unseen power of party insiders in presidential nominations. Less scientific but no less true is the oft-made observation that the GOP in particular defers not only to the establishment, but also to whichever candidate has “paid his dues” and seems to be “next in line.”
Cruz has repeatedly defied and alienated the Republican establishment, and no candidate has ever won the nomination without significant support from party insiders.
After the Liberty University speech, a Cruz staffer employed a March Madness metaphor, claiming that the senator is the top seed in the Tea Party bracket and in the evangelical bracket.
Unfortunately for Cruz, whichever candidate wins the establishment bracket will almost certainly win the nomination.
Activating a key GOP constituency like anti-government libertarians or conservative evangelicals is only a viable strategy if it is combined with significant establishment appeal. For this reason, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and even Rand Paul are better positioned than Ted Cruz.
In previous Republican nominating contests, Cruz’s outspoken evangelical faith could have been a political advantage. But white evangelicals are now so used to working with Catholics on sex-related issues that a candidate’s evangelical identity hardly matters.
This cycle’s GOP nominating contest features a large number of Catholic candidates. Given evangelicals’ primary support for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum at various points in the 2012 race, Catholic GOP politicians who share evangelicals’ opposition to abortion and concerns about religious liberty should feel secure in their ability to attract and retain evangelicals’ support.
Fears that Ted Cruz would be trounced in November 2016 like “a Republican George McGovern” are vastly overstated. But Ted Cruz’s fervent evangelical faith, however sincere, does nothing to advance his credibility as a contender for the nomination.
By: Jacob Lupfer, The Daily Beast, March 24, 2015
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