“Trump Speaks The Truth”: The Donald Has The Better Of Jeb Bush In Their Spat Over 9/11
Here at the Country Mart, on the edge of Brentwood and Santa Monica, politics is not on the menu. The Sunday talk shows are no big thing. Imagine, people are not that excited about Hillary Clinton’s upcoming date with Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Benghazi committee.
This is Hillaryland, a rare state with two Democratic women senators. But one flare from the presidential primary season has made its way west: Donald Trump said something simple and true, which needed to be said. I never thought I’d say it, but thanks for clearing the air on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Trump.
The failing presidential contender Jeb Bush has made this absurd statement his signature as a candidate: “My brother kept us safe.” No, President George W. Bush did not do that. Trump only pointed out that almost 3,000 died on that day and the World Trade Center towers fell. That’s the record of a day that broke the nation’s heart.
It happened on President Bush’s watch, while he was ignoring his CIA August intelligence briefings that a plot involving planes was in the air, so to speak. Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan nor Iraq. We stayed friends with the desert kingdom for some reason; the Bushes were chummy with Prince Bandar. Bush fell down on the job, to say the least.
We are still paying dearly for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The fearsome Islamic State group is not keeping us safe, little brother. President Barack Obama had to own that grim truth, keeping more troops than planned in the warring Middle East neighborhood. Much of Syria has been destroyed, like a contemporary Carthage.
“My brother kept us safe” shows a tragic chorus of Bush blind loyalty at work again. Jeb Bush has clearly not learned any lessons from the past, asking the same family crowd of foreign policy advisors to help him, including that shrewd player and hawk, Paul Wolfowitz.
It’s his birthright, his inheritance. Jeb is very proud of being a Bush team player.
Finally, as a matter of finesse, “my brother” sounds like he’s running for home room president. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy always referred in public to his late brother, John F. Kennedy, as President Kennedy. That has more dignity, not the Bush strong suit.
Trump spoke the plain truth. It’s refreshing. Let’s have more of it from Republicans running for president.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, October 19, 2015
“More Irrational Chatter”: Ben Carson Thinks Hillary Clinton Is Going To Jail
Ben Carson has predicted many things in his day. He has claimed that End Times were nigh. He has said that a new Hitler could rise. And yesterday, he said that Hillary Clinton will end up behind bars for her actions as Secretary of State.
“Hillary can well be in jail and it’s hard to run from there,” Carson said bemusedly during an interview on The John Gibson Show. He claimed that Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee less than an hour before the vice president announced that he would not seek the nomination. Gibson’s show runs from noon to 3 p.m.; the announcement came a little before 1 p.m.
“I would think that it would be Biden,” Carson said in his traditional deep-toned whisper, when asked who he would place his bets on.
After Gibson began laughing at the suggestion that Clinton would be in jail, he questioned whether Carson believed that an indictable offense would be discovered in Thursday’s Benghazi hearing.
“Or the computer server—uh—problems,” Carson drawled. Then he started walking it back on the spot.
“I think she may not be actually in jail but I think the controversy swirling around that will have an extremely damaging effect.”
Carson’s campaign did not respond when I asked what Carson had thought of the hearing, now entering its sixth hour, so far.
He spent the remainder of the interview discussing Paul Ryan’s bid for Speaker of the House, which he said he would support if the various caucuses did likewise, and suggested that saying President George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11 is a “blame game” that is not productive.
“Was there chatter going on about terrorist activity?” Carson asked, then proceeded to answer himself. “Of course there was. But not the kind of specific thing that would allow you to, through executive action, prevent such a thing. He certainly went into overdrive after that.”
The campaign has not provided clarification on what he meant by “chatter.”
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, October 22, 2015
“Paul Ryan Is Doomed, Too”: He Will End Up In The Same Position As Boehner — Held Hostage By The Freedom Caucus
A week ago, Paul Ryan looked doomed. Now, he looks really, truly doomed.
The Wisconsin Republican, who achieved national prominence as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, seems more likely than ever to become the next speaker of the House. A devout man of faith, he will need your prayers.
When incumbent John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) announced his resignation, Ryan made clear he did not want the job. Who on earth would? Boehner spent his tenure trying — and failing — to corral ultra-conservative Republicans into a working majority.
GOP victories in the 2010 midterm elections had swept into office a group of nihilistic renegades who believe the way to change Washington is to blow it up.
Now calling themselves the Freedom Caucus, these 40 or so legislative bomb-throwers insisted on fighting battles they had no chance of winning and repeatedly took the country to the brink of calamity.
They threatened government shutdowns (and achieved one). They tried to block routine increases in the federal debt ceiling. They kept the House from passing spending bills in key areas, such as transportation, where there once was bipartisan agreement. They insisted on more than 50 useless attempts to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act, knowing these measures would fail in the Senate or be vetoed by President Obama.
As presumptive speaker, Ryan can look forward to more of the same.
Ryan is seen as the only figure who could potentially unite the fractious GOP caucus. As such, he has leverage — and he is trying his best to use it.
He insisted on having the support of all 247 Republicans before he would accept the job. But now he is reportedly willing to settle for less.
The Freedom Caucus announced Wednesday that a “supermajority” of its members would back Ryan. There was no official endorsement from the group, however, which means the unspecified majority fell short of 80 percent.
That doesn’t sound so bad — perhaps 10 or fewer unreconciled renegades, who theoretically could be marginalized. “I believe this is a positive step toward a unified Republican team,” Ryan said. But in courting the ultra-conservatives, he reportedly made concessions that seem to guarantee that the speaker’s gavel will be a symbol of misery, not of power.
The main problem is that Ryan is said to have promised to follow the “Hastert rule,” named for former speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), requiring that legislation have the support of a majority of the GOP caucus before it is brought to the House floor.
Boehner had to break the Hastert rule whenever ultra-conservatives threatened to bring about disaster — a potentially catastrophic default because the debt limit needed to be raised, for example. In those instances, Boehner got the legislation passed with a cobbled-together majority comprising Democrats and moderate Republicans.
To keep his job, Boehner generally kept to the Hastert rule on other, less critical legislation. This is what made the Congresses he led so spectacularly unproductive.
In 2013, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Had Boehner brought the legislation to the floor of the House, it almost surely would have passed — but with the votes of Democrats and GOP moderates. A majority of the Republican caucus opposed comprehensive reform, so Boehner never allowed a vote on it.
Immigration, at least, is a hot-button issue; transportation is not. Yet Boehner could not even get a majority of his caucus to support a routine six-year transportation bill. This is the kind of legislation that used to be a simple matter of arithmetic and routinely passed with broad bipartisan support. For today’s House Republicans, however, fixing roads and bridges is somehow an ideological issue. Just about everything, in fact, is an ideological issue.
If Ryan does become speaker and respects the Hastert rule, he will end up in the same position as Boehner — held hostage by the Freedom Caucus. In his meeting with the group, moreover, he reportedly softened his demand to eliminate a House procedure in which any member can call for a vote to “vacate the chair,” or kick the speaker out of his job. And he also reportedly promised to devolve more power to the rank and file, which is precisely the opposite of what needs to happen.
If Ryan gets the job, he will likely enjoy a honeymoon period. But the fundamental problem — no functional GOP majority — will remain. Ryan believes government should be small. Much of his caucus believes it should be thwarted.
Sounds like doom to me.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 22, 2015
“This Hearing Was A Dreadful Mistake”: GOP’s Benghazi Committee Comes Unglued
It’s easy to forget that when the Republicans’ Benghazi Committee initially sought testimony from Hillary Clinton, GOP officials wanted her to provide private, closed-door testimony. The former Secretary of State was eager to answer questions publicly, for all the world to see, but Republicans desperately wanted the discussion to be kept far from public view.
And after watching this farce unfold today, we now know why.
It’s hard to say exactly when today’s hearing descended into total farce, but it was arguably when Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), for reasons that didn’t appear to make any sense, quizzed Clinton repeatedly on her correspondence with informal adviser Sidney Blumenthal. The New Republic’s Brian Beutler highlighted the problem.
Republicans have intoned darkly about this relationship and played up, in deceptive fashion, Blumenthal’s influence over Clinton’s policy in Libya – despite the fact that he has no Libya expertise, and has apparently never been there. Republicans even deposed him for hours. But here’s the catch: while they continue to make an issue of Blumenthal’s relationship with Hillary Clinton, and their email correspondence, they’ve refused to release the transcript of that deposition, where he had a full opportunity to contextualize it.
Today, after Gowdy pressed Clinton on this – reinforcing every suspicion about the entire exercise being brazenly partisan and political – Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) couldn’t take it anymore. The Maryland Democrat insisted that if Republicans are going to reference Blumenthal’s role, then the committee has a responsibility to release the full transcript of Blumenthal’s testimony to the public.
Gowdy refused and a shouting match ensued. The far-right chairman, however, simply couldn’t defend his position or explain why GOP lawmakers insisted on keeping relevant information hidden from view.
It was arguably a low point in the hearing, but it had plenty of competition in the category.
It’s practically impossible to go through the several hours’ worth of exchanges we’ve seen so far, but I sincerely hope that it’s dawned on Republicans that this hearing was a dreadful mistake.
Whether GOP lawmakers realize it or not, they created a platform for the leading Democratic presidential candidate to speak before the nation and appear knowledgeable, articulate, compassionate, and competent. Simultaneously, the committee’s Republicans, who spent months preparing for today’s epic showdown, were hopelessly clueless and small.
Which strategic genius in Republican Party thought it’d be a good idea to pit Hillary Clinton against obscure, unprepared, far-right members of Congress? Why on earth would the GOP go out of its way to make the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination look like the adult in the room?
Clinton has often been blessed by incompetent opponents, but this is ridiculous.
What’s more, it’s too common. In early August, congressional Republicans scheduled hearings on the international nuclear agreement with Iran, and despite having months to prepare their best arguments and sharpest questions, they had nothing. Slate’s William Saletan attended all three hearings and came away flabbergasted: “Over the past several days, congressional hearings on the deal have become a spectacle of dishonesty, incomprehension, and inability to cope with the challenges of a multilateral world…. I came away from the hearings dismayed by what the GOP has become in the Obama era. It seems utterly unprepared to govern.”
A month later, congressional Republicans scheduled hearings on Planned Parenthood, and once again, they had months to prepare, organize their thoughts, coordinate their lines of attack, read their own charts, etc. And yet, they again seemed hopelessly lost.
As we discussed in September, conservative partisans should see congressional Republicans as poor allies, in large part because they don’t seem to do their homework especially well. They create opportunities to advance their interests, but then let those opportunities pass as a result of negligence and incompetence.
Disclosure: My wife works for a Planned Parenthood affiliate, but she played no role in this report and her work is unrelated to the September congressional hearing.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, October 22, 2015
“Free Weekends Back In Wisconsin”: The Freedom Caucus’ Dilemma; Veto Ryan Or Surrender
According to the most authoritative account we have of what went down when House Republicans met last night, from WaPo’s Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis, Paul Ryan’s agreed to be Speaker if and only if an unprecedented array of “conditions” are met. Some involve his much-reported demands for free weekends back in Wisconsin and reduced fundraising duties. But the real challenge he’s posing is the requirement that the House Conference’s main ideological groupings all endorse him by Friday and essentially promise in advance that they will never threaten him with the kind of defenestration suffered by John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy. In fact, he’s proposing to remove the very lever that led to Boeher’s early departure: a mechanism whereby a majority of House members can at any moment remove a sitting Speaker.
So in effect Ryan’s telling the House Freedom Caucus, the only grouping likely to resist his takeover, that they have the power to veto him between now and Friday, but if they don’t they’d better put on the party harness.
What’s unclear is where Ryan is on the “procedural reforms” Freedom Caucus members keep talking about that would reduce the Speaker’s power to control what legislation comes to the floor and the sanctions that can be used to suppress dissent. They certainly cut against the consolidation of power Ryan clearly wants. But he did make one substantive concession to the ultras: he promised not to bring any comprehensive immigration reform bill to the House floor any time soon (presumably one like the Senate bill, that could be passed with Democratic votes).
In another account of developments in the House last night, National Review quoted Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) complaining at some length about Ryan’s conditions.
“The best thing I can assume is that he really doesn’t want the job,” he says. “You put forth a list of conditions that nobody is going to throw their weight behind, and force people to tell you ‘no,’ rather than the other way around . . . that’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
If the Freedom Caucus does tell Ryan “no,” the assembled Republican Establishment and MSM commentariats are going to come down on them with thunderous condemnations. It will be fascinating to see if they seize their one avenue to a demonstration of power, or go quietly into probable irrelevance.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, Octoer 21, 2015
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