“Illusions Of Grandeur”: Imaginary Republican Scandals Don’t Need Distractions
The “White House rocked by scandals” narrative clearly didn’t work out well for President Obama’s critics. The Benghazi conspiracy theories proved baseless; the IRS story quickly evaporated (even if most of the political world ignored the exculpatory details); and the AP subpoenas and NSA surveillance programs turned out to be policy disputes — on which many Republicans agreed with the administration’s position. As Jon Chait recently put it, “The entire scandal narrative was an illusion.”
But a funny thing happened after Scandal Mania 2013 ended: the right decided to pretend the narrative remained intact.
National Review ran a fairly long piece this week, arguing, “The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known.” The headline read, “Obama’s Watergates.” (Yes, the president doesn’t have a Watergate; he has multiple Watergates.)
Yesterday, Marc Thiessen’s latest Washington Post column insisted that the IRS’s “political targeting of [Obama’s] conservative critics” — which, let’s remember, didn’t actually happen — is “undermining our nation’s security” and “has exposed Americans to greater danger.”
And on Fox News, Steve Doocy has cooked up a conspiracy theory that addresses his conspiracy theories.
“Remember last week all the talk was about ‘phony scandals’ and all that other stuff and the NSA and the IRS and suddenly we get this alert that something could be happening in the Arab world somewhere toward western interests, and it is pro-administration. We’ve heard this a million times. […]
“Just that they would reveal such detail. They burned a source and a method, and that’s the problem. They could still say be careful if you’re in these areas. But to be so specific to make it look like the administration is working overtime, look at these fantastic avenues of intel, that is troubling.”
So, for Doocy, the White House leaked sensitive national-security information to distract attention from scandals that don’t actually exist.
It’s awfully difficult to take this line of argument seriously.
Several news organizations learned of the administration intercepting al Qaeda communications — we do not yet know the source of the leaks — which led to the closings of many U.S. diplomatic outposts in the Middle East and North Africa. For some on the right, this was part of an elaborate White House scheme.
But that really doesn’t make any sense. For one thing, Scandal Mania is over, and there’s no incentive for the administration to turn attention away from stories that the political world has largely given up on. For another, the administration doesn’t gain anything by leaking news of the intercepted messages.
Wait, the right responds, the White House now gets to implicitly argue, “NSA surveillance is really important so these programs shouldn’t be shut down.” But the administration doesn’t need to say that — efforts to stop NSA surveillance aren’t going anywhere, at least not now, and the programs were going to continue anyway.
There are no Watergates for the right to play with here.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 7, 2013
“More Republican Fringe Views”: Tinfoil Hats, Black Helicopters, And The Politics Of Paranoia
Public Policy Polling released the results of an interesting survey this week, which you probably heard a bit about — it dealt with public attitudes towards conspiracy theories (some of which weren’t really conspiracy theories). Not surprisingly, we learned that a lot of folks believe a lot of strange stuff.
But it’s worth appreciating the fact that this phenomenon isn’t limited to the general public. We’re occasionally reminded that federal lawmakers buy into some bizarre conspiracy theories, too.
We talked yesterday, for example, about the Arms Trade Treaty at the United Nations, and the oddity of watching Republicans align themselves with the position adopted by Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Let’s also take a moment, though, to highlight the GOP’s reasons for doing so. For example, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) appeared on a right-wing radio show yesterday, arguing that the treaty would “literally change” and “essentially repeal” the Second Amendment. This is patently ridiculous, but Fleming said it anyway.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), whose affinity for conspiracy theories is bordering on unhealthy, wrote a fundraising letter on the treaty for the National Association for Gun Rights that was truly crazy, even for him.
“I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick. […]
If we’re to succeed, we must fight back now. That’s why I’m helping lead the fight to defeat the UN “Small Arms Treaty” in the United States Senate. And it’s why I need your help today.
Will you join me by taking a public stand against the UN “Small Arms Treaty” and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey right away? Ultimately, UN bureaucrats will stop at nothing to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU.
Paul’s letter added that the United Nations intends to “force” the United States to “CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL ‘unauthorized’ civilian firearms,” while creating “an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION,” which isn’t part of the Arms Trade Treaty and also isn’t sane.
But it does offer a reminder about why the politics of paranoia makes governing so difficult.
Reflecting on the hysterical opposition to the ATT, Greg Sargent raised an important point yesterday.
Republican Senators (and too many red state Dems) have fallen into line behind the NRA’s lurid claims not just about the treaty, but also about gun control, endorsing its paranoid and false claim that expanding background checks would create a national gun registry. With United States Senators eagerly feeding such fringe views rather than engaging in genuine policy debate, is it any wonder that it’s a major struggle to implement even the most modest and sensible effort to limit the ongoing murder of innocents, one that is supported by nine in 10 Americans?
I strongly agree, and the more I thought about it, the more I started noticing how broadly applicable this is.
We couldn’t pass a disability treaty because Republicans believed conspiracy theories. We can’t address global warming because Republicans believe the entirety of climate science is a giant conspiracy. We couldn’t pass bipartisan health care reform in part because Republicans were too heavily invested in the “death panel” conspiracy theory.
This problem, in other words, keeps coming up, and probably won’t get any better until the electorate sends fewer conspiracy theorists to Washington.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, April 4, 2013
“The Pretzel Logic Of The Right”: Another Perceived Attack On The Sovereignty Of America, God And Family!
It’s hardly news any more when conservatives oppose ratification of a treaty reflecting widely shared American values. Concern for U.S. “sovereignty,” often based on conspiracy theories about the United Nations and other multinational organizations the U.S. helped create, has become a reflexive excuse for a kind of rigid unilateralism once associated with the John Birch Society or even older, isolationist conservatives.
But the current conservative fight to kill ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is especially interesting because the most avid opponents are the cultural conservatives who often profess solidarity with the disabled as part of their fight against legalized abortion. Anti-choicers and home-schoolers, however, have declared war on the convention on the theory that it confirms the “reproductive rights” of people with disabilities, and/or might confer other rights upon them that intefere with the absolute power of the family (presumably a servant-leader male-directed family) to raise children as they wish.
Thus it’s not surprising that Rick Santorum is at the head of this particular parade in the Senate, which raises the ire of WaPo’s Dana Milbank:
The former presidential candidate pronounced his “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people with AIDS, who are blind, who use wheelchairs and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared at a news conference….
[Mike] Lee, a tea party favorite, said he, too, has “grave concerns” about the document’s threat to American sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification, and I have secured the signatures of 36 Republican senators, all of whom have joined with me saying that we will oppose any ratification of any treaty during this lame-duck session.”
Lame or not, Santorum and Lee recognized that it looks bad to be disadvantaging the disabled in their quest for fair treatment. Santorum praised Lee for having “the courage to stand up on an issue that doesn’t look to be particularly popular to be opposed.”
Courageous? Or just contentious? The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”
Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.
And so, Santorum brought his famous daughter Bella, who suffers from a severe birth defect, to the hearing where he fought against acknowledgement of the rights of people like her.
This is where the pretzel logic of the Right can lead.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 27, 2012
“It’s Always In The Future”: When Do We Get To See Obama’s Radicalism?
Last week I wrote a post mocking conservatives for their relentless search for the next secret videotape that will expose Barack Obama as a dangerous radical, the latest of which was the shocking revelation that as a law student, he supported his professor Derrick Bell’s efforts to diversify the Harvard Law School faculty. Unsurprisingly, conservatives reacted by saying that I just didn’t get it (here‘s a sample). It’s worth saying a bit more about this phenomenon, because we surely haven’t seen the last of it, both in the campaign and in Obama’s second term, should he win one.
The search for the radical associations in Obama’s pre-political history began almost as soon as Obama’s presidential candidacy began in 2007. Some conservatives (and that’s an important qualifier; many conservatives understand that this stuff is nuts) have been positively obsessed with uncovering Obama’s radical associations. They have also insisted that those associations are closer than anyone thinks. So it isn’t enough that Obama once served on a charitable board with former ’60s radical Bill Ayers; some want us to believe that Ayers actually ghostwrote Obama’s books! Obama didn’t just speak at a rally supporting Derrick Bell; he hugged Bell, which just shows how close they were!
And all of this is supposed to lead to something, something about Obama’s presidency. Not even the craziest among the conspirators thinks that Obama is, today, taking orders from Ayers. But they would no doubt assert that he doesn’t have to, because in his youth Obama drank so deeply from their cup of extremist America-hating that he will be doing what the likes of Ayers want anyway.
So here’s my question: When do we get to see Obama’s radicalism?
I’m not talking about Affordable Care Act-type radicalism. I mean the real radicalism. The Weather Underground radicalism. The Black Panther radicalism. The dismantling of capitalism, the closing of the Defense Department, the demotion of white people to second-class citizenship. When is that going to come? Can they give us the litany of Obama policies that represent the realization of the visions of the ’60s radicals who supposedly control his mind across the decades?
Because after all, the point of the supposedly shocking revelation about Obama’s past isn’t to help us understand what has already happened but to give us a preview of what is to come. For instance, some conservatives believe the auto bailout is a key component of Obama’s nefarious socialist plan. But you don’t need to know when Obama spoke with Bill Ayers 15 years ago or what he said about Derrick Bell 20 years ago to understand the auto bailout. You can look at the actual auto bailout. No, the shocking revelation is supposed to warn us about new radicalism, the radicalism to come that can only be appreciated if you grasp the full implications of the people Obama was hanging around with a couple of decades ago.
So what exactly is it that they’re warning America about? When do we get to see this crazy radical Obama? If they’re pressed, there is an answer to this question: In his second term! That’s when the mask will be torn off, and the true Obama revealed. Sure, he might be governing like your average center-left Democrat now, but that’s only because he’s been lulling us into a false sense of security, so he can get re-elected and then begin his true project of remaking America, when Angela Davis gets nominated to the Supreme Court, private property is outlawed, and half the public gets herded onto collective farms. Or something.
To people who have a grip on reality, the things Barack Obama will do in a second term aren’t particularly mysterious. We don’t know exactly what will happen, of course, but we’ve got a pretty good idea. He’ll try to solidify the ACA, his signature legislative accomplishment. He may try to achieve tax reform, which could involve slightly higher rates for the wealthy, although he’ll need Republican cooperation to do it. He’ll try to extricate us from Afghanistan, and he doesn’t seem too keen on starting a war with Iran. And so on. Conservatives will dislike most of what he does, and liberals will like most (but not all) of it. In short, though the details aren’t easy to predict, in its broad strokes a second Obama term will probably be a lot like the first Obama term. You’d have to be pretty crazy to believe otherwise.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 12, 2012
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