“Regrettable Indeed”: John McCain’s Allies In Syria Are Suspected Terrorist’s Who’ve Sworn Allegiance To Al Qaeda
A couple of weeks ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was stressing his position for U.S. policy in Syria: the senator wants the U.S. to provide Syrian rebels with extensive support, including “heavy weapons.” ABC’s Martha Raddatz reminded the senator that some of these Syrian rebels are terrorist who’ve sworn their allegiance to al Qaeda.
McCain said it’s a “legitimate” question, but he wants to support them anyway. After all, he said, “there aren’t that many” terrorists among the Syrian rebels he wants to give “heavy weapons” to.
Just two weeks later, McCain quietly traveled to Syria, and his office distributed photos from his visit to news organizations. One image, in particular, has generated some unexpected attention.
Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims.
The photo, released by McCain’s office, shows McCain with a group of rebels. Among them are two men identified in the Lebanese press as Mohamed Nour and Abu Ibrahim, two of the kidnappers of the group from Lebanon.
McCain’s office insists the senator was not aware that he’d met with Nour and Ibrahim — if they are, in fact, the men in the photograph — and they had not been identified as such during his trip. The spokesperson added that if McCain had unknowingly met with kidnappers, “that is regrettable.”
It is, indeed.
McCain’s office went on to tell BuzzFeed that it “would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms.”
And to be clear, I don’t think anyone has suggested McCain is somehow sympathetic towards kidnappers. Rather, the point is the senator is eager to provide extensive resources to Syrian rebels, but he may not fully appreciate who his new allies are.
McCain added some additional thoughts on the subject last night.
When [Anderson Cooper] asked McCain how weapons would be prevented from falling into the hands of extremists, the senator said extremist fighters compose a small fraction of Syria’s rebel forces: 7,000 pro-al Qaeda fighters from the al-Nusra front among some 100,000 insurgents.
“Every single day, more and more extremists flow in … but they still do not make up a sizable portion,” McCain told Cooper. “We can identify who these people are. We can help the right people.”
Maybe, maybe not. But whether McCain can say with certainty who the “right people” are is very much in doubt.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2013
“Unhinged Insanity”: Michele Bachmann’s Powerful Legacy
Michele Bachmann’s retirement from the House of Representatives is an obvious loss for political journalists and their editors, who could guarantee web traffic by just reprinting anything she said, with minimal comment. That was especially true during the Republican presidential primaries.
In her short time as a candidate, Bachmann blamed natural disasters on America’s unwillingness to cut non-defense discretionary spending, accused Texas Governor Rick Perry of spreading autism with mandatory vaccinations, warned that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had plans to bomb the United States with a nuclear weapon, and pushed for a full ban on pornography.
The unhinged insanity of all of this is worth noting. But what we should also point out is that none of this disqualified her from consideration as a presidential candidate. Not only did Bachmann win the Iowa straw poll—a symbolic victory, but a victory nonetheless—but at one point, she led her competitors for the nomination. In a July survey from Public Policy Polling, 21 percent of Republican primary voters said she was their top choice for the nomination, compared to 20 percent for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, 12 percent for Rick Perry, and 11 percent for Herman Cain.
In other words, Bachmann may embarrass GOP elites, but actual Republicans don’t seem to have a huge problem with her or her antics. Indeed, if there’s a “Bachmann style” in conservative politics, it’s only grown more prominent since her moment in the spotlight. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is building his national brand by appealing to the same right-wing fever swamps. Conservatives describe him as a new “standard-bearer” for “constitutional conservatism”—a term popularized by Bachmann.
The entire Republican Party has taken a page from the Minnesota congresswoman with its obsessive focus on the Benghazi “scandal” and the situation at the Internal Revenue Service, using both to accuse President Obama of outright treason (in the case of Benghazi) and Nixonian tactics of intimidation (in the case of the IRS). The main difference between Bachmann and many of her Republican colleagues was of form, not content. Her view of President Obama—a dangerous left-wing tyrant—is shared by many on the right.
Look, for example, at Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination who has also been known to moonlight as a conspiracy- monger. Earlier this month, he lent his name to a fundraising email that accused Obama of working with “anti-American globalists plot[ing] against the Constitution.”
It’s of a piece with South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham’s assertion that the Obama administration manipulated talking points to avoid political blame for the attacks in Benghazi during the presidential election. “This is a story of manipulation by the government with the president being complicit of trying to tell a story seven weeks before an election that was politically beneficial for the White House, but did not represent the facts on the ground,” Graham said during an interview on Fox News two weeks ago.
And that’s just the national Republican Party. In states like Virginia, the party has elevated candidates who take Bachmann’s extremism and dial it to 11. E.W. Jackson, the Virginia GOP’s nominee for lieutenant governor, has already made national news with his furious denunciations of same-sex marriage, LGBT Americans (they’re “sick people psychologically, mentally, and emotionally”), and Planned Parenthood (it’s worse than the Ku Klux Klan). Their gubernatorial nominee, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, differs only by degree. He won’t accuse reproductive rights advocates of engaging in an anti-black genocide, but he will go after groups that attempt to dispense accurate information on sexually transmitted infections, contraceptives, and sexual health.
Observers from across the political spectrum are cheering Michele Bachmann’s departure from politics, and for good reason: She was a toxic influence on public life. But it’s worth remembering that what she represents—extreme right-wing paranoia—is still present and powerful on the national stage.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 29, 2013
“Credibility Gap”: Study Finds Republicans Lie More Than Democrats
According to a new study from the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, Republicans are significantly more likely to lie than Democrats — and the gap is widening as President Barack Obama spends more time in office.
The study examined how Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check site PolitiFact.com rated 100 statements involving factual claims from the first four months of President Obama’s second term — 46 of the claims were made by Democrats, and 54 were made by Republicans.
CMPA found that PolitiFact rated 32 percent of the Republican claims as “false” or “pants on fire,” compared to just 11 percent of the Democratic claims. Along the same lines, PolitiFact rated just 11 percent of the Republican statements as “entirely true,” compared to 22 percent of the Democratic statements.
Just 18 percent of the Republican claims were rated as “mostly” or entirely true, compared to 54 percent of the Democratic claims. Conversely, 52 percent of the Republican statements were rated as mostly or entirely false, while just 24 percent of Democratic statements received the same designation.
In other words, as CMPA President Dr. Robert Lichter put it: “While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party.”
Notably, the credibility gap seems to be growing with time. In May, as Republicans have obsessively tried to tie the president to a series of scandals, their percentage of false claims has risen to 60 percent.
PolitiFact editor Bill Adair responded to the study in an email to Politico’s Dylan Byers:
PolitiFact rates the factual accuracy of specific claims; we do not seek to measure which party tells more falsehoods.
The authors of this press release seem to have counted up a small number of our Truth-O-Meter ratings over a few months, and then drew their own conclusions.
We’ve rated more than 7,000 statements since we started in 2007. We are journalists, not social scientists. We select statements to fact-check based on our news judgment — whether a statement is timely, provocative, whether it’s been repeated and whether readers would wonder if it is true.
You can read the full results of the CMPA study here.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, May 29, 2013
“Opportunistic Capitulation”: For The GOP, Spending Cuts For Thee But Not For Me, Because It’s Different This Time
But this time it’s different…
How many times have we heard those words – not as an apology for past mistakes but as a justification for one’s current actions?
It seems the GOP excels at this justification. Whether it be championing spending cuts, but then seeking to restore funding for the Federal Aviation Administration because “it’s different when they have to wait in line at the airport,” or Michelle Bachman decrying Obama’s stimulus package as “fantasy economics” and an “orgy” of government spending, but then being the first to request funding to stimulate projects in her home state of Minnesota. Ah yes, it’s just “so different.”
Recently, we saw two more such examples of opportunistic capitulating. In 2008, Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., bragged in a press release after then-President Bush declared 24 Oklahoma counties eligible for disaster aid due to severe weather, “I am pleased that the people whose lives have been affected by disastrous weather are getting much-needed federal assistance.” But four years later he voted to deny emergency funding for those areas affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Then, when confronted with the prospect of providing federal disaster aid money to those decimated in Moore, Oklahoma following the devastating tornado, Inhofe pledged his unqualified support, stating on MSNBC that unlike Sandy, this is “totally different.” Really? When Americans lose their homes, possessions and livelihood due to uncontrolled natural forces, I didn’t think there really was a difference or justification for politicians to pick and choose the winners and losers.
And then there’s Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., who was elected on the tea party platform vowing to reform government such as farm programs and cut wasteful spending. During the recent House Agriculture Committee’s markup of the Farm Bill, he lived up to his promise and voted to cut $20 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – formerly known as food stamps – but then turned around and SUPPORTED an increase and expansion of crop insurance subsidies by $9 billion over the next 10 years.
In committee, he claimed that SNAP funding, which goes to those whose income is below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, (mainly children, elderly and military retirees), is stealing “other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending,” but yet, somehow, he has no issue spending “other’s people money” to fund crop insurance subsides because they are “so different.”
The kicker: According to research by the Environment Working Group, Fincher is the second most heavily subsidized farmer in Congress and one of the largest subsidy recipients in Tennessee history. From 1999 to 2012, Fincher received $3.48 million in crop insurance subsidies.
I guess the rule-of-thumb is when it affects your personal bottom line – either financially or by impacting your prospective political longevity, things truly are different.
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, May 29, 2013
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