“No, Eric Cantor Did Not Lose Because He’s Jewish”: There Were No Other Elephants In The Room
Eric Cantor’s primary defeat by David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, sent the pundits scurrying. Shocked and bewildered, they searched around for theories to makes sense of what they had not anticipated happening. Hundreds of articles were written and dozens of explanations were offered.
One of the more fascinating threads that emerged from the cacophony of ideas put forward in the days following the primary was the effort to find a Jewish dimension to the story. Cantor, the House Majority Leader, was the highest ranking Jewish lawmaker in American history, with aspirations to be Speaker of the House. When one adds to that the fact that Brat is a religious Christian who speaks frequently of his faith, the temptation to uncover a Jewish angle became irresistible. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the leading Jewish weekly the Forward, and a variety of other publications duly turned out articles examining, from every perspective, the Jewish and religious sides of the election.
The problem was that there was no Jewish angle, at least not one of any consequence.
David Wasserman, a normally sensible political analyst, got things going with a much-quoted statement to the Times suggesting that anti-Semitism was at play in Cantor’s defeat. Cantor was culturally out of step with his redrawn district, according to Wasserman, “and part of this plays into his religion. You can’t ignore the elephant in the room.” Sensationalist headlines soon followed. The Week, a news magazine, ran a story entitled “Did Eric Cantor lose because he’s Jewish?” And the Forward ran an opinion column with the headline “Did Eric Cantor Lose Because He’s Jewish? You Betcha.”
But there was no elephant in the room. There wasn’t even a mosquito in the room. Nobody could turn up a single statement or piece of literature coming from the Brat campaign or anyone else that was even remotely anti-Semitic. And sensationalism aside, the ultimate consensus of virtually everyone was that anti-Semitism was not a factor of any kind in Cantor’s loss.
Conservatives, including Jewish conservatives, cried foul, charging that the point of the coverage was a deliberate attempt by liberals to smear Republican voters as bigots. Perhaps, although my own view is that it reflected media sloppiness and obsessiveness more than political conspiracy.
Another claim was that even in the absence of explicit anti-Semitism, the Brat victory represented a victory for evangelicalism and Christian politics and therefore a long-term threat to Jews and all non-Christian minorities. Vigilance about church-state separation is always appropriate, of course, but it is hard to see the threat here. Brat is often described as aligned with the Tea Party, which is a motley collection of organizations and activists; it has ill-defined religious positions not at all identical with those of evangelical groups, which are diverse themselves. Most important, there is much evidence that Americans are becoming less religious and not more so, and, as the gay marriage issue demonstrates, more tolerant in their religious outlooks.
Mr. Brat, of course, likes to talk publicly of his belief in God, and that is distressing to some people, both Jews and Christians. But God talk is acceptable in America, and people with liberal religious outlooks, President Obama included, also make reference to their religious beliefs from time to time. The key for politicians is to be sure that they ground their statements in a language of morality that is accessible to everyone; Americans need a common political discourse not dominated by exclusivist theology. As long as Brat—and others—stay on the right side of that political line, there is no reason to see this election as a religious watershed for Jews or anyone else, or a victory for religious coercion.
A third claim is that the Cantor defeat represents a disastrous decline of Jewish political fortunes. In this view, Cantor’s defeat is seen as part of a broader pattern: There are 33 Jews in the current Congress, both the House and the Senate, as compared with 39 in the previous one. But here again, this seems like an altogether arbitrary and unfounded assumption. Jews are well represented in all areas of America’s educational, business, and political life, and that is not changed in any way by the defeat of a Jewish Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.
Eric Cantor’s fall from political power is interesting and in some ways important. For decades to come, politicians and professors will study it as an example of what happens when a serious but self-referential politician loses touch with the things that ordinary Americans care about and gets caught up in the big-dollar culture of Washington. But they will say very little about the Jewish dimension of this affair—and that is for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist.
By: Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, a Writer and Lecturer, was President of the Union for Reform Judaism from 1996 to 2012; Time, June 16, 2014
“Are Our Memories Really So Short?”: It’s Impossible To Reconcile Members Of The Bush/Cheney Team Pretending To Have Credibility
Politico published a piece over the weekend about President Obama’s challenges in Iraq, which was otherwise unremarkable except for a quote about midway through the article.
“This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people [and] to the American national interest,” said Doug Feith, a top Pentagon official during the George W. Bush administration.
“They were pretty blase,” Feith said of the Obama team. “The president didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.”
The piece added that Feith would, true to form, like to see the White House deploying a “residual force” to Iraq.
That Feith disagrees with the Obama administration hardly comes as a surprise, but what was striking about all of this is the context of his criticisms: Politico presents Feith’s condemnations as if they have value. Indeed, Feith is presented to readers as a credible voice whose assessments of U.S. policy in Iraq have merit.
The article never mentions, even in passing, that Feith was a national laughingstock during his tenure in the Bush/Cheney administration, getting practically everything about U.S. policy in Iraq backwards. General Tommy Franks, the former Commander of the U.S. Central Command, once famously referred to Feith as “the dumbest f***ing guy on the planet.”
And yet, there Feith is in Politico, taking shots at Obama, without so much as a hint that news consumers may – just may – want to take his perspective with a healthy dose of skepticism, given his humiliating track record.
Of course, my point is not to pick on Politico alone. It’s not the only major news organization that’s stumbled into familiar mistakes. Take the major Sunday shows, for example.
Bill Kristol, for example, was on “This Week” yesterday, sharing his criticisms of Obama’s handling of Iraq – and no one laughed in his face. On “Meet the Press,” viewers saw Paul Wolfowitz. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made not one, but two Sunday show appearances, popping up on “Face the Nation” and “State of the Union.”
When most media professionals reflect on the period preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there’s a general consensus that it was not American journalism’s finest hour. News organizations needed to be skeptical, but weren’t. Reporters needed to push back against dubious sources, but didn’t. Nearly everyone in the business realized that we’d all have to be better next time.
Over the weekend, then, it was hard not to wonder: are our memories really so short?
More broadly, it’s nearly impossible to reconcile members of the Bush/Cheney team pretending to have credibility. Feith is an easy target, but he’s hardly the only one: Dick Cheney is offering guidance to congressional Republicans on, of all things, foreign policy; Donald Rumsfeld still shows in face in public and is sought after in GOP circles; and Condoleezza Rice presents herself as a successful former official.
The political world never fully came to terms with the scope and the breadth of the Bush/Cheney failures. In more ways than one, we’re still dealing with the consequences.
Update: Regina Schrambling reminds me that Paul Bremer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s another piece of a twisted mosaic.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 16, 2014
“Oh, The Wayward Priorities”: If Republicans Hated War Like They Hate Obamacare, There Wouldn’t Be an Iraq Debacle
The Affordable Care Act might eventually be a terrible idea for the country. Perhaps, as Paul Broun (R-GA) once said, “Obamacare is going to destroy everything that we know as a nation.” Maybe Michelle Bachmann is right when she claimed, “I believe God is going to answer our prayers and we’ll be freed from the yoke of Obamacare.”In addition to GOP lawmakers making statements vehemently condemning the Affordable Care Act, they’ve tried over 35 times to repeal the law in Congress.
When it comes to big government healthcare programs, conservatives have likened the ACA to everything from communism to death panels. However, when it comes to war, the GOP doesn’t see Uncle Sam picking the pockets of citizens. The $4 to $6 trillion that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars will cost taxpayers never evokes anger from the Tea Party. Rather, it’s funding someone else’s surgery that really gets conservatives furious. Sadly, if Republicans viewed healthcare programs in the same manner as they viewed war over a decade ago, we wouldn’t be in the gigantic debacle called Iraq.
Soon after the death of three thousand Americans on 9/11, Republicans worked vehemently to sell the Iraq War. In 2002, the same Bill Krystal who now bemoans Obamacare believed a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”In 2002, Vice President Cheney in a speech stated the “entire world knows beyond dispute that Saddam Hussein holds weapons of mass destruction in large quantities.”In early 2003, the Bush administration told the UN Security Council, “Either you’re with us or against us.”
Any opposition leading up to the Iraq War Resolution was met with political attacks and even Vietnam War heroes weren’t safe from Karl Rove and a united Republican Party. Rove and Rep. Saxby Chambliss led the charge against Senator Max Cleland and questioned his patriotism for criticizing the impending insurgent war in the Middle East. Chambliss attacked the triple amputee Vietnam Veteran “for breaking his oath to protect and defend the Constitution,” in addition to besmirching his character for having the audacity to be against the Iraq War Resolution. In order to better understand the mood of the time period, it’s important to note that Chambliss got a medical deferment from Vietnam because of a football injury to his knee and Rove has never joined the military.
When General Eric Shinseki advocated a far greater troop level before the invasion-closer to a number like 300,000 soldiers — he too was denigrated by Republicans. However, by 2007, even Lindsay Graham was quoted in a New York Times article as admitting Shinseki was right. As a result of invading and occupying a country as large as Iraq with an insufficient number of troops (in addition to a number of other mistakes), Bush announced a surge of troops in 2007. Essentially, this surge worked as a draft in that it prolonged tours of duty, keeping American soldiers in combat longer than in any other war in U.S. history. This prolonged time in battle directly led to the record number of PTSD cases as well as exacerbating the issue of suicide in the military.
The Iraq War Resolution passed with 215 House Republicans voting for it and 126 Democrats voting against the war. In the Senate, 48 out of 49 Republicans voted for it while 21 Democrats voted against going into Iraq. After the initial invasion, President Bush addressed the United Nations in late 2003 and declared America’s invasion a noble endeavor:
The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder, and refused to account for them when confronted by the world… Across Iraq, life is being improved by liberty.
While the country was still in shock, President Bush spoke confidently about the reasons for U.S. involvement in Iraq.
In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld justified the rush to war (and the fact Humvees weren’t protected from IED’s with extra armor) by saying, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” In 2007, after a civil war between Shia and Sunni threatened to destroy Iraq, President Bush addressed the nation in a speech defending a surge in troop levels:
The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Changing his tune from 2003, and possibly forshadowing 2014, Bush advocated widening the war because “the consequences of failure are clear.”
Today, after all the monumental sacrifices made by American soldiers and their families, and with all the money spent nation building in Iraq, America has to contend with a new threat. Extremist militants named ISIS now have control of Fallujah (a one hour drive from Bagdad) and just recently conquered Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities and the home of two million people. Of course, the GOP is now changing the narrative from Bush’s speeches to a recent call for further military action in Iraq. Interestingly, no word yet has been heard from the Tea Party about the financial cost of further military action in Iraq.
It says something about a political party when a health care law is the end of the world, but an insurgent war is something worthy of attacking even a triple amputee war veteran to defend. If only one could go back in time and tie in an amnesty clause or a nationalized healthcare law to the Iraq War Resolution, then maybe GOP lawmakers wouldn’t have worked so hard to send the United States into the Iraq debacle. The truth is that the ACA, even if it falls short of its promises, won’t do nearly as much damage to this country as the Iraq War. Analyzing the GOP’s reaction to both will give you a good idea of its priorities.
By: H. A. Goodman, The Huffington Post Blog, June 15, 2014
“A Clairvoyant Invader”: Did George W. Bush Foresee What’s Happening In Iraq?
In their rush to blame the escalating violence in Iraq on President Obama, Republican critics brush off any suggestion that his predecessor may also be to blame, offering up some version of “Oh yeah, Democrats always want to blame Bush, but Obama has been in office for more than five years.”
As annoying as that theme may be (there is in fact a direct correlation between current events and Mr. Bush’s decision to destroy the Iraqi government, military, courts and police force and do too little, too late to rebuild them), the latest talking point on the right is even more irritating and absurd.
Mr. Bush, this line of “reasoning” goes, was prescient. He foresaw the unraveling of Iraq if the United States pulled out its military prematurely. As Igor Volsky reported this morning on Think Progress, Fox News obligingly explained “how the president who first invaded the country was also the region’s most clairvoyant analyst.” According to this narrative, Mr. Bush “pretty much laid this out as it is happening,” way back in July 2007.
Mr. Bush did say there would be more violence if the United States left too early. But he let military commanders set the timetable (as was reasonable) and military commanders suggested the end of 2011. Mr. Bush began the drawdown in September of 2008, at the tail end of his presidency.
After Mr. Obama took office the following January, he urged Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to sign an agreement allowing America troops to stay on longer than Jan. 1, 2012. But those talks fell through and the military recommended withdrawing as scheduled.
In 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates (a Republican who served under both Bushes) said Iraq would face security problems after a U.S. withdrawal. But, he pointed out, “it’s a sovereign country. And we will abide by the agreement, unless the Iraqis ask us to have additional people there.”
The Iraqis did not ask, and U.S forces withdrew. Mr. Obama did his best to clean up a huge mess left by his predecessor (and Iraq was far from the only one). To heap all the blame on him now is partisan hackery.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 16, 2014
“It’s Not The Motive, It’s The Gun”: Those With Political Axes To Grind Want To Shoehorn The Killer’s Motive Into Their Own Political Agenda
Every time there’s another mass or campus shooting people always want to know why the killer did it. What was the motive? What could lead to such evil? More often than not, those with political axes to grind want to shoehorn the killer’s motive into their own political agenda.
After an Islamist extremist went on a murderous rampage at Fort Hood, the Right used it for weeks as a club against Islam itself–just as they did with the DC sniper years earlier. After a angry misogynist opened fire in Santa Barbara, the shooting immediately became a touchstone for women’s groups to discuss sexual entitlement. When a conspiracy theorist couple killed a police officer recently in Nevada, the left had a field day over their recent stay at the Bundy Ranch, while many on the right attempted to call the shooters leftists.
Yesterday brought news of yet another new motive–this time in a school shooting in Oregon earlier this week:
The 15-year-old freshman who opened fire on his Oregon high school Tuesday wanted to kill “sinners,” the teen wrote in his diary.
Jared Padgett, an active member of an Gresham, Ore., Mormon church, shot and killed a student and injured a teacher during the attack on Reynolds High School before turning the gun on himself, police said.
It would be easy to turn this into an attack on conservative values. Certainly, it makes a mockery of claims by some on the far right that mass shooters aren’t conservatives–this kid certainly was.
But as I have noted before, the common denominator is always the gun. The Oregon shooter was even more obsessed with firearms than with religion. There will always be crazy, unbalanced people in this world with strange obsessions. The difference between the ones in other countries and the ones in America is simply the gun. We all play the same video games, we watch the same movies, we have the same neurology, we suffer from the same pathologies, and we worship (or don’t) similar gods.
Without a mass killing device, a pathetic misogynist is just a pathetic misogynist. Without a mass killing device, an angry theocrat is just an angry theocrat, be it Christian or Muslim. Without a mass killing device, paranoid conspiracy theorists and trenchcoat-wearning kids are just disaffected outsiders.
It’s not the motive. It’s never about the motive. It’s always about the gun.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 15, 2014
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