“A Profound Test Of Their Principles”: Republican Candidates’ Despicably Lukewarm Criticism Of Donald Trump
You may remember that a year ago, Jeb Bush was musing on the Republican primary when he said that a winning GOP candidate would have “to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to… lose the primary to win the general [election] without violating your principles.” While the assumption at the time was that Bush was thinking mostly about immigration, it turns out that what we might call Bush’s Paradox applies to a whole range of issues.
Right now, the candidates are facing that paradox, in a profound test of their principles. And they’re failing.
The proximate cause is Donald Trump, who has moved from being a comical if repellent figure to being truly ghastly and sinister. As Trump has taken his xenophobia and outright hate-mongering to ever-increasing heights, the most stinging rebuke most of his opponents can offer in response is, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
You might think I’m misrepresenting their statements, downplaying the degree to which they’ve condemned Trump for his ugly Islamophobic remarks. But if we look closely at what they’ve said, it’s clear that they’re being careful not to criticize him too harshly, lest they offend the voters who seem to be flocking to him precisely because he’s the one giving fullest expression to their hatred and fear.
But before we get to that, a brief review. Trump’s latest bit of demagoguery is a proposal (though I use the term loosely) to prohibit any Muslim from entering the United States — as an immigrant, as a businessperson, even as a tourist. Trump would even apply that to American citizens who had traveled out of the country and want to return. This follows on his extended insistence that “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims celebrated the fall of the World Trade Center, which was notable not just for the fact that it’s false, but for its purpose. In harping on this myth, Trump was trying to convince people that other Americans are untrustworthy, suspect, each one a terrorist sympathizer if not an outright terrorist. Add that to his assertion that mosques should be under surveillance and his toying with the idea of the government keeping a list of all Muslims for regular monitoring.
And it isn’t like Trump’s Islamophobia is unique to him. After the Paris attacks, all the Republican candidates seized on the issue of Syrian refugees to stoke fear of terrorism in the hearts of voters (even though going through the lengthy process of obtaining refugee status is about the most cumbersome and time-consuming way to reach the United States; if the attackers in Paris had wanted to come here, all they would have had to do is buy a plane ticket). Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz both said that we should accept Christian refugees, but not Muslim ones. Ben Carson said that no Muslim should be allowed to be president unless they disavowed their religion.
And how have Trump’s opponents reacted to the river of hate that gushes forth every time he steps up to a microphone? With the utmost care. “I disagree with that proposal,” Ted Cruz said about excluding Muslims from the United States. “Donald Trump is unhinged. His ‘policy’ proposals are not serious,” said Jeb Bush. “I disagree with Donald Trump’s latest proposal,” said Marco Rubio. “His habit of making offensive and outlandish statements will not bring Americans together.” Chris Christie said that the remarks showed that Trump didn’t have enough experience to deal with terrorism. “Unfortunately I think Donald Trump’s over reaction is as dangerous as Obama’s under reaction,” said Carly Fiorina. John Kasich called it “outrageous divisiveness,” mustering the strongest condemnation.
What we have there are varying degrees of disagreement, but about the worst any of them can bring themselves to say is that Trump’s ideas are nutty. Not that he’s a bigot, not that he’s using the politics of hate, not that he’s falling in line with a sordid history of racism. And certainly none of them are speaking directly to American Muslims — just imagine if they pandered to that community the way they pander to a dozen others whose votes they want.
There is one exception, who should be given all the credit he deserves: Lindsey Graham. Trump, Graham said in a recent appearance on CNN, is “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.”
Perhaps it’s because Graham barely registers in the polls that he feels free to speak plainly about Trump, because those polls also show that there’s a substantial audience for what Trump is offering. Republicans give Muslims lower favorability ratings than any other group. One recent poll found that only 49 percent of Iowa Republicans thought Islam should be legal. And ugly anti-Muslim incidents, ranging from harassment to outright hate-crimes, are cropping up all over.
While Trump may not have much support for his specific ideas from other Republicans, the conservative media reinforces the mindset that produces them each and every day. Josh Marshall recently described the discussion of these issues on Fox News as “a whole tapestry of falsehoods, that combined with incitement and hysteria create a mental world in which Donald Trump’s mounting volume of racist incitement is just not at all surprising.” Fox regularly gives airtime to bigots and xenophobes to spout off about the threat not only from abroad but from American Muslims (though a lot of that shows up on other cable networks as well), rhetoric that is echoed on one conservative talk radio show after another. And don’t think Republican politicians don’t know who’s watching and listening.
So is anyone going to be surprised if next week some heavily armed right-wing terrorist walks into a mosque or a Muslim community center and starts killing as many innocent men, women, and children as he can? After all, he keeps hearing about how they’re terrorist sympathizers, how they need to be watched, how they need to be kept out, how they need to suspected and feared and hated.
I don’t know how long this ugly period will last, but I do know that history is going to judge those who created it harshly. And those who stepped carefully around a demagogue like Trump, always worried that they might offend his followers? Their cowardice will be remembered too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, December 9, 2015
“Mass Shooting Talking Points”: Conservative Media Use Oregon Community College Shooting To Revive “Gun-Free Zone” Canard
In the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, conservative commentators instantly referred to the school as a “gun-free zone,” falling back on conservative media’s go-to mass shooting talking point.
At least 10 people were reported killed, and many others injured October 1 during an Oregon community college mass shooting, and as facts concerning the shooting remained scarce, media figures immediately made references to the campus as a “gun-free zone” on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, the Drudge Report, and other conservative websites.
But these references of “gun-free zones” represent a red herring because they rely on the assumption that more people carrying guns would stop mass shootings, when in reality there is no evidence to support such claims.
The overwhelming majority of mass shootings actually occur where guns are allowed to be carried. And according to an analysis of 62 public mass shootings over a 30 year period conducted by Mother Jones, not a single shooting was stopped by a civilian carrying a firearm. Mother Jones also found that gunmen do not choose to target locations because guns are not allowed, but rather other motives typically exist for choice of location, such as a workplace grievance.
As Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes explained in a commentary for The Trace, the idea that “gun-free zones” attract mass shooters is based on the faulty assumption that the shooters are “rational actors”:
Perhaps the most glaring flaw in the argument against gun-free zones, in the context of mass shootings, is its underlying assumption that shooters are rational actors. Lott himself admits that about half of criminals who commit mass shootings have received a “formal diagnosis of mental illness,” yet his model requires them to act precisely as we know they don’t: as hyperrational, calculating machines, intentionally seeking out gun-free environments for the sole purpose of maximizing causalities.
In reality, many shooters target a location based on an emotional grievance or an attachment to a particular person or place. An FBI study of 160 active shootings (defined as a shooter actively attempting to kill people in a populated area, regardless of the amount of fatalities) between 2000 and 2013 — including the high-profile mass shootings in Tucson and Aurora — shows that of the shootings that occurred in commercial or educational areas, the shooter had some relationship with the area in 63 percent of the cases.
By: Timothy Johnson, Media Matters for America, October 1, 2015
“Wallowing In Ignorance”: Epistemic Closure Comes Back To Haunt The GOP
Five years ago Julian Sanchez did us the favor of defining a pattern among conservatives that he called “epistemic closure.”
One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile…If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely…And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation.
The entire basis for the existence of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is the belief that the “mainstream media” cannot be trusted to tell the truth because they are all “liberals.” This fed something that we as human beings already tend to do anyway – reject information that doesn’t conform to our already-established beliefs. It feels good to not have to grapple with the cognitive dissonance that comes with consideration of conflicting facts. But the end result is that it kills curiosity and we wallow in ignorance.
The disastrous results of epistemic closure for conservatives have been on display for some time now. It explains how they continue to deny the science of climate change, assume that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is “cooking the books” on unemployment data and led to a whole movement during the 2012 election to unskew the polls. But for everyone from Murdoch to GOP leaders, it worked to keep the base angry and engaged.
And then…it got out of control. Take a look at the results of Frank Lunz’s focus group with Trump supporters.
“They’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,'” Luntz said. “And (Trump) personifies it: Each sees in him what they want for the country. They want him to fix what makes them mad, and they believe he will.”
It is Trump’s ability to reflect back to voters their most fervent wishes for the nation, Luntz said, that makes the political outsider so dangerous to the rest of the 16 other GOP 2016 hopefuls. The main reason for this, Luntz found, was what he termed a willingness of Trump supporters to live in “an alternative universe” in which any attempt by the media to point out inconsistencies in Trump’s record or position was seen as a politically motivated conspiracy.
“When the media challenges the veracity of his statements, you take his side,” Luntz asked of his focus group. Only one person sat quietly, her hands in her lap, as 28 other arms shot up in agreement.
For these participants, the Republican establishment (and perhaps even Fox News itself) have now joined the liberal New York Times in peddling a politically motivated conspiracy when they challenge Donald Trump. That should come as no surprise when these same people have been told for years that they can pick and chose their facts based on how they make you feel. Stephen Colbert was positively prophetic when he coined the term “truthiness.” And now it’s all coming back to haunt the GOP.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 26, 2015
“The New Willie Horton?”: This Particular Story Is A Microcosm Of The Republican Challenge On Immigration
Is Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez the new Willie Horton?
There are some people who would obviously like him to be. The story, which is about an undocumented immigrant who allegedly murdered a young woman in San Francisco named Kathryn Steinle after having been released from jail, has gone national. And it’s working its way into the presidential campaign. The way the candidates deal with it (or not) will tell us a lot about the state of immigration politics today.
It’s important to understand that there’s no consensus even on the right about how much attention to give to Lopez-Sanchez’s case. Most of the Republican candidates are treading carefully so far. While they oppose the “sanctuary city” policies that meant that Lopez-Sanchez wasn’t turned over to immigration authorities when he had been arrested for lesser crimes, they haven’t yet tried to use this case as a bludgeon to attack Democrats. (The unsurprising exception to this is Donald Trump; meanwhile, for the record, many Democrats have said that a sanctuary city policy should still have allowed someone like Lopez-Sanchez to be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
Yet at the same time, conservative talk radio and Fox News are practically vibrating with delight over this story. When I checked in to the network’s web site this morning, it was the subject not only of the main screaming headline, but five other written stories and four videos, with more coming all the time.
What does this one case tell us about crime in America and our immigration policies? The real answer is not much, because one case is always just one case. According to the latest FBI crime statistics, around 38 Americans are murdered each and every day; every one is a tragedy. We know that as a group, immigrants are actually much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. And though it illustrates an extreme negative consequence that can come from a sanctuary city policy, police in cities with sanctuary policies often argue that they help fight crime by allowing residents of immigrant communities to work with law enforcement without the fear that they’ll be turned over to immigration authorities.
Nevertheless, we’re always looking for individual stories through which we can understand larger issues, and those stories can be used for good or ill. For instance, the case of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who contracted HIV in 1984, taught the country that AIDS wasn’t just a disease of people who (at the time) were on the fringes of society; after his death in 1990, Congress passed a bill expanding funding for AIDS research and treatment in his name. Then there are stories like Horton’s, which was supposedly about criminal justice policies but was actually just a way for George H.W. Bush to stir up racist fears among white voters in the 1988 election.
If Republican candidates are treading more carefully with regard to this story, it isn’t just because the two cases are different — it’s because there’s serious political danger in trying to make Lopez-Sanchez a reason why people should vote against Democrats. Don’t forget that Bush’s use of Willie Horton worked. Laden with the theme of dangerous and hyper-sexualized black men terrorizing white women while their emasculated husbands looked on helplessly, it resonated with white voters and didn’t produce any noticeable backlash, at least not enough to overcome the benefit Bush got from repeating the story.
But if someone like Scott Walker or Jeb Bush tried to make Lopez-Sanchez the new Horton — a symbol of fear meant to get whites to pull the lever for the GOP — he would undermine all the party’s efforts to convince Hispanic voters that whatever the party’s history on immigration reform, it isn’t blatantly hostile to them. As Michael Gerson advised yesterday: “As the old Southern strategy fades, it would be a terrible mistake to replace it with a different form of fear and exclusion.”
So we’re left with a situation where most of the candidates will criticize sanctuary city policies and make a case for tougher border enforcement, but they’ll be doing it within a context created by their side’s media, the media the primary voters they’re trying to win over are watching and listening to every day. And the Lopez-Sanchez story is exactly the kind of tale that the conservative media feast on: personal, vivid, tragic, just waiting to have all the outrage and anger they can muster poured into it. While the candidates say, “Yes, this is terrible,” behind them will be the media figures Republican voters trust, screaming at the top of their lungs that everyone should be enraged.
In that way, this particular story is a microcosm of the Republican challenge on immigration. Caught between a base eagerly eating up the red meat conservative media are feeding them and a general electorate they can’t afford to alienate, they still haven’t quite figured out how to chart a path that avoids those dangers and gets them to the White House.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 8, 2015
“Closet Confederate Sympathizers?”: The Clinton-Confederate Flag Conspiracy Theory Is A New Low
Out of the swirl of chaos, grief, grace, and courage that has followed the Charleston shooting, partisan politics has mostly kept its rightful place nowhere near the state of South Carolina.
But the national debate over the future of the Confederate flag that flies in front of the state’s capitol has unwittingly given rise to one of the more bizarre Clinton conspiracy theories to date: that Bill and Hillary Clinton, despite decades as civil rights advocates and their right-wing caricature as Northeast liberal elites, are closet Confederate sympathizers.
The meme took off on Sunday, when The Daily Caller ran a story under the headline “Flashback: Bill Clinton Honored the Confederacy on Arkansas State Flag.”
The next morning, the hosts of Fox & Friends debated whether Hillary Clinton had refused to denounce the Confederate flag flying in front of the South Carolina (though she actually did denounce it in 2007) out of loyalty to her husband, who, Elisabeth Hasselbeck said, “signed a law honoring the Confederacy in Arkansas and about the flag’s design in 1987…that stated, ‘the blue star is to commemorate the Confederate states of America.”
The legislation that The Daily Caller, Fox & Friends, and now dozens of conservative blogs are referencing was a bill to make the flag that Arkansas had flown since 1924 the state’s official flag. That flag includes four stars, three to symbolize the countries that held the Arkansas territory—Spain, France and the United States—and the fourth, as Hasselbeck said, “to commemorate the Confederate states of America.”
Nowhere in the state’s legislative history does it explain why the 63-year-old flag needed to be made official, but Arkansas historians have two explanations. First, the legislature was moving to give the state a number of “official” designations—think “official state butterfly,” “official state grain”—as it celebrated its sesquicentennial.
Second, Bill Clinton and the state legislature were pushing through a series of measures to ban flag desecration as the U.S. Supreme Court debated and eventually struck down the 48 state laws against flag burning, including Arkansas’s ban. Historians told me they believed the 1987 flag bill was passed to specify the official design of the state flag in conjunction with that effort. As governor, Clinton later signed a bill making it a crime to burn or deface a flag, a move that drew vocal complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union.
It is true that Clinton did nothing in his time as governor to remove the state flag’s reference to Arkansas’s role in the Confederacy. But by all accounts, the bill he signed making the state’s flag official was not created as a Confederate memorial. The sponsor of the bill, longtime Arkansas legislator W.D. “Bill” Moore, has since died, but former Representative Steve Smith said, “I served with Bill Moore in the early 1970s, and he was hardly a neo-Confederate. Nor was Bill Clinton.”
The more recent Clintonian history related to the Confederate flag is easier to find and may be one of the more straightforward positions either Clinton has ever taken. Both have been consistently, unambiguously against its use.
During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, he endorsed Georgia Governor Zell Miller’s fruitless attempt to remove the St. Andrews Cross from the Georgia state flag, a change that eventually came nine years later, and made Miller the keynote speaker at Clinton’s 1992 Democratic National Committee nominating convention.
In 2000, as South Carolina wrestled with the future of the Confederate flag that still flew above its capitol, then-President Clinton gave the state his unsolicited advice during a visit to Allen University, a historically black college in Columbia, just miles from the state capitol: Take the flag down. “As long as the waving symbol of one American’s pride is the shameful symbol of another American’s pain, we have bridges to cross in this country and we better get across them,”’ he told the students.
When Hillary Clinton became a candidate for president herself in 2007, she said much the same thing during her own visit to the state, telling the AP she thought South Carolina should remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds entirely, not just from the front of the capitol.
And Tuesday, after South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s call to finally remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds in the wake of the Charleston tragedy, Hillary Clinton called it the right thing to do.
“I appreciate the actions begun yesterday by the governor and other leaders of South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House, recognizing it as a symbol of our nation’s racist past that has no place in our present or our future,” Clinton said. “It shouldn’t fly there, it shouldn’t fly anywhere.”
There are more than enough reasons for members of the conservative media to be dubious about the Clintons: the deleted emails, the paid speeches, the Friends of Bill you thought went away with the Y2K bug but were actually just sitting on the Clinton Foundation payroll waiting for the next Clinton administration to begin.
But accusing either Clinton of being a Confederate sympathizer, past or present, is a conspiracy beneath even its creators.
By: Patricia Murphy,
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