“It Was ‘Partisan Garbage’ Then”: When Fox News Didn’t Blame The (GOP) President For Beheadings
After terrorists kidnapped and beheaded two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, while releasing gruesome videos of the act, Fox News focused much of its ire on President Obama, portraying him as a source of troubling weakness.
“The president stuck his head in the sand, and now we’ve seen two Americans have lost their heads,” insisted Fox analyst K.T. McFarland. Colleague Ralph Peters claimed of the president’s foreign policy, “We have a president who has a real physiological problem: that he can’t face responsibility and certainly not the responsibilities of his office,” while Sean Hannity wondered if Obama’s “radical indoctrination” had clouded his judgment.
On and on it goes, as the blame-America finger pointing takes up hour after hour of programming. The Washington Times’ Charles Hurt on Wednesday wanted to know when Obama would stop acting like a community organizer and start hunting down the killers. Charles Krauthammer condemned Obama for not rising to the occasion, while former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Fox to claim world leaders see the president as “weak and ineffective” in the wake of the most recent beheading.
That last part is telling because in the spring of 2004, when Cheney was vice president and the misbegotten war he championed was raging in Iraq, two American citizens, Nick Berg and Paul Johnson, were also kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and were also beheaded for the world to see. But of course, Cheney didn’t see that as a sign of President Bush’s weakness and ineffectiveness, and neither did the White House’s loyal band of professional defenders at Fox News.
Even six years into Obama’s presidency, it’s still stunning to see how radically different Fox presents the news and frames its commentary based entirely on which party controls the White House. When Bush was president, Fox talkers urged that Americans come together and support the administration as it battled lawless killers (“murders,” “sadists,” “savages”) who decapitated Americans.
In 2004, Fox hosted long conversations about the beheadings and Bush’s name was often never even mentioned. He was a non-player in the story. But today, the beheadings revolve around Obama.
With a Democratic president, many of those same 2004 talkers now turn their attention, and their wrath, to Pennsylvania Avenue and use the deaths as a cudgel to bash the president as being impotent. i.e. He didn’t prevent the deaths! Of course neither did Bush, but the Fox rules of propaganda were different for him.
Nick Berg was working in Iraq as an independent contractor fixing antennas. He disappeared on April 9, 2004. His decapitated body was found near an overpass in Baghdad, and soon a video of the beheading appeared on a website associated with al Qaeda. (On his radio show, Sean Hannity aired the unedited audio of Berg’s dying screams.)
Four weeks after Berg’s murder, terrorists abducted Paul Johnson, a Lockheed Martin engineer who lived in Saudi Arabia. They demanded the Saudi government release all its al-Qaeda prisoners. Days later, on June 18, Johnson was murdered on tape. (After the beheading news broke, Bush made a brief public statement and then boarded a plane to attend a Bush-Cheney `04 campaign rally in Nevada.)
That day, Fox News host Oliver North appeared on Hannity & Colmes and announced that the media and Democratic politicians, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, “had blood on their hands” because they had been denouncing the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers; torture that Johnson’s killer’s cited in his death video.
Unlike today, the president in 2004 was completely blameless in the beheading deaths, according to Fox News. Democrats? Not so much.
Obviously, news of Americans being beheaded by terrorists ran counter to Bush’s 2004 re-election claim of being able to protect citizens in the War on Terror. Hannity at the time, who can’t stop criticizing Obama today, was adamant that Democrats stop criticizing Bush.
In June 2004, Hannity used news of Johnson’s death as a reason Democrats should stop attacking the president politically while the country was engaged in “World War III” [emphasis added]:
HANNITY: Richard, the shrillness of the rhetoric, a vice president of the United States screaming that — Al Gore screaming Bush betrayed America. Are we taking limited resources and the president and his cabinet have to spend all that time fighting politically when they ought to be focused in on World War III? It’s time that we now unite a country, using this as the latest example that we have been warned. They want to kill us all?
RICHARD MINITER: I completely agree. I think politics should stop at the water’s edge. We should go back to the Scoop Jackson Democrats where they would argue like heck about domestic policy, but during a war they would not attack the president or the military.
On that point, Hannity and colleague Bill O’Reilly were in complete agreement. From The O’Reilly Factor on June 18, 2004, commenting on Johnson’s repulsive execution:
O’REILLY: It is becoming readily apparent that the United States, we, the people, have to unite. And if we don’t unite, we’re going to see this happen more and more, and then on a mass scale.
We’ve got to stop with the partisan garbage, because that’s what it is, and we’ve got to stop with the selfishness and understand that this is a war. This is something we have never faced before. And stop the grand standing. And the politicians who exploit this for partisan benefit on both sides have got to be voted out of office. We have got to unite.
Contrast that with O’Reilly on Wednesday night’s program when he urged Obama to “stop his confused posture, his stammering, stuttering” in the wake of the beheadings. O’Reilly attacked the president for wanting to “punt” on the crisis and said he would be doing Americans a “great disservice” if he refused to “formally declare war on Muslim terrorism.”
Today, good luck finding calls on Fox News for unity – the network is too busy trying to use the tragic murders to damage and debase the president.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, September 5, 2014
“A Bid To Remain Relevant”: Rand Paul’s Flailing Search For A Hawkish Foreign Policy
Rand Paul this week derided President Obama’s approach to ISIS, then explained what he would do differently if he were president. It turned out, though, that the Republican senator from Kentucky and the president pretty much see eye to eye on the issue.
In a Time op-ed, Paul wrote that he would have “acted more decisively and strongly against ISIS” by launching airstrikes, arming the Kurdish rebels, bolstering Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense, and securing the U.S. border.
One problem: Obama has already done just that, or most of it, anyway. Obama has ordered more than 125 airstrikes in the past month against ISIS; shipped arms to Kurdish forces; provided $225 million in emergency funding for the Iron Dome; and, in the face of GOP obstructionism on immigration, eyed executive action to strengthen the border.
The only area where Paul diverges from Obama is that he would order Congress back from vacation to hear his plan. Given Congress’ apparent reluctance to take on this issue, this is the foreign policy equivalent of Vanilla Ice’s claiming that adding one more note to Ice, Ice, Baby meant he wasn’t ripping off Freddie Mercury.
Paul’s excoriation of Obama is remarkable given that only a few months ago, he explicitly defended the president and blamed ISIS’ proliferation on former President George W. Bush and his gung-ho interventionism.
“I don’t blame President Obama,” he said in a late June appearance on Meet the Press. At the same time, he threw cold water on the idea of a U.S. military intervention, saying, “I’m not so sure where the clear-cut American interest is.”
And as recently as August, Paul wrote a column arguing that hawkish interventionists had “abetted the rise of ISIS.”
On the one hand, it’s not surprising Paul is cribbing the administration’s ideas. Grandstanding aside, almost everyone is pretty much on the same page about how to handle ISIS.
But Paul’s newfound hawkishness is remarkable given his past tendency toward isolationism, which formed the heart of his unique appeal within the GOP. It was also the greatest obstacle to his winning the GOP presidential nomination in a party full of foreign policy hawks.
That dovish position grew even more problematic once Russia invaded Crimea, and once ISIS began swarming across Syria and Iraq. Though Pew last year found Americans’ appetite for foreign entanglements waning, that trend has now reversed, most sharply among Republicans.
Paul is now racing to shed the “isolationist” tag that dogged his proto-presidential candidacy. His Time op-ed even bears the none-too-subtle headline, “I am not an isolationist.”
But Paul is also spitting the same anti-interventionist lines that boosted him in the first place among his war-weary, libertarian faithful. Paul is speaking out of both sides of his mouth, and as a result his Time column reads like a bunch of flip-flopping nonsense.
Paul insists he is merely adapting: “I am not an isolationist, nor am I an interventionist,” he wrote in Time. “I look at the world and consider war, realistically and constitutionally.”
It’s certainly possible for changing circumstances to alter one’s global calculus. But they can just as easily alter one’s political calculus, too. In Paul’s case, it’s hard to see his abrupt about-face as anything but a bid to remain relevant as his party lurches rightward on foreign policy.
By: Jon Terbush. The Week, September 5, 2014
“Mitt Romney, The Charles Atlas Of International Relations”: It’s A Wonder This Guy Didn’t Get Elected President
In today’s Washington Post, one Willard Mitt Romney — you remember him — has penned an op-ed lamenting the fact that the United States military has grown so itty-bitty that it’s left us unable to accomplish anything on the world stage. In an epic feat of straw-man construction, Romney boldly takes on those who want to leave America defended by nothing more than a few pea shooters and sling shots, demanding that we vastly increase our defense budget. Let’s take a look at some of what he has to say:
Russia invades, China bullies, Iran spins centrifuges, the Islamic State (a terrorist threat “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” according to the defense secretary ) threatens — and Washington slashes the military. Reason stares.
“Reason stares”? I’ll have to confess my ignorance of whatever literary reference Mitt is tossing in here (the Google machine is unhelpful on this score, so I can’t be the only one who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about), but is Washington really “slashing” the military? According to the most recent budget documents, the total defense budget for 2014 is $620 billion; the Pentagon wants just over $600 billion for 2015. That’s a bit less than we spent in the last few years (the budget peaked in 2011 at over $700 billion), but that’s in large part because we’re no longer fighting in Iraq and we’re winding down our war in Afghanistan; budget sequestration also imposed some cuts. We still account for over a third of the entire world’s military spending. It hardly seems like we’re “jettison[ing] our reliance on U.S. strength,” as Romney asserts. Let’s move on…
Some argue that the United States should simply withdraw its military strength from the world — get out of the Middle East, accept nuclear weapons in Iran and elsewhere, let China and Russia have their way with their neighbors and watch from the sidelines as jihadists storm on two or three continents. Do this, they contend, and the United States would be left alone.
“Some argue”? Who are these “some”? He won’t say, because no one is actually arguing those things. Some also claim that Mitt Romney employs a team of commandos who kidnap small children and bring them before their master so he can feast on their sweet flesh, but I emphatically reject that charge, no matter what “some” would have you believe.
Mitt then argues that the fact that we have a huge military budget only conceals our true weakness:
More relevant is the fact that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is significantly greater than our own and that, within six years, China will have more ships in its navy than we do. China already has more service members. Further, our military is tasked with many more missions than those of other nations: preserving the freedom of the seas, the air and space; combating radical jihadists; and preserving order and stability around the world as well as defending the United States.
I’ll agree that we deploy our military to the four corners of the globe more than any other nation. But look at what Mitt is concerned about. Russia has more nuclear bombs than we do! When we launch an all-out nuclear exchange with them and every human being on the planet has either been vaporized or is dying of radiation poisoning, they may be able to continue to drop bombs on the scarred moonscape that once was America! My question is this: why has Romney not addressed the mineshaft gap? And how can we possibly feel safe when the day comes that China has more ships than we do? After all, a lengthy sea war with the Reds is all but inevitable.
Romney doesn’t mention a single conflict — past, present, or future — that would turn out differently if our military was bigger. For instance, he’s very concerned about Ukraine. And if we had an even larger military, then…what? We’d be happy to start a war with Russia? Or if we boosted our military spending then it would change the calculation of some other adversary?
The fact is that we face plenty of challenging foreign policy situations around the world. Romney ticks off many of them. But in not a single one, or in all of them combined, is the problem that we don’t have enough guns and bombs to do the job. We don’t want Iran to become a nuclear power, but we also really don’t want to invade Iran to stop it from happening. It’s not that we can’t reduce the whole nation to an endless field of rubble, because we can. But it would be a terrible idea. ISIS presents a conundrum, but that’s not because we don’t have a sizeable enough force to take them on; the problem is that launching a re-invasion of Iraq and a new invasion of Syria would create more problems for us than it would solve. Russia’s actions in Ukraine are deeply troubling, but the outcome of events there won’t be determined by whether we have sufficient stockpiles to defeat Russia in a land war. We do, but that’s not the issue.
Like most conservatives, Romney fetishizes “strength” as the sole determining factor in any international conflict and the essence of leadership. And this is what so infuriates them about the current president: Barack Obama understands, and isn’t afraid to say, that strength may be important, but it’s not enough, and sometimes it’s utterly beside the point.
Now wipe away a tear as Mitt closes:
Washington politicians are poised to make a historic decision, for us, for our descendants and for the world. Freedom and peace are in the balance. They will choose whether to succumb to the easy path of continued military hollowing or to honor their constitutional pledge to protect the United States.
Yes, freedom and peace are in the balance. Increase military spending, and all international challenges will melt before us like the frost on spring’s first morning; cut that spending by a few billion, and freedom will die a quick death. With informed, sophisticated thinking like that, it’s a wonder this guy didn’t get elected president.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 5, 2014
“The Republican Quasi-Isolationists Change Their Tune”: America Can Solve All The Worlds Problems Again!
It looks like the debate over what to do about ISIS has given Republicans one fewer thing to argue about:
A roiling national debate over how to deal with the radical Islamic State and other global hot spots has prompted a sudden shift in Republican politics, putting a halt to the anti-interventionist mood that had been gaining credence in the party.
The change is evident on the campaign trail ahead of the November midterm elections and in recent appearances by the GOP’s prospective 2016 presidential candidates, with a near-universal embrace of stronger military actions against the group that has beheaded two American journalists.
A hawkish tone has become integral to several key Republican Senate campaigns, with a group of candidates running in battleground states calling attention to their ties to veterans and their support for the U.S. military at every turn.
The most notable shift has come from Rand Paul, who used to talk a lot about the dangers of interventionism and foreign entanglements, but is now ready for war. “If I were president,” he told the AP, “I would call a joint session of Congress. I would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.”
This follows on a recent Pew Research poll which found that while last November only 18 percent of Republicans said the U.S. does too little to solve the world’s problems and 52 percent said we do too much, today 46 percent say we’re doing too little and only 37 percent say we’re doing too much.
It’s possible that all those Republicans have changed their perspective because circumstances have changed. ISIS in particular certainly looks much stronger and more threatening than it did a few months ago. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what has changed is Barack Obama. Once the old conservative narrative that he’s a weak weakling endangering us with his weakness reasserted itself, most of those alleged quasi-isolationists, including the one who wants to be president, scuttled back to the fold.
This highlights a simple fact about today’s Republicans: After six years of the Obama presidency, they define themselves almost entirely by being the opposite of whatever the guy in the White House is. I guarantee you that if Barack Obama did exactly what Rand Paul seems to be recommending—a full-scale war against ISIS—he and millions of other Republicans would change their tune in short order, now claiming that he was pulling us into another quagmire, and America can’t solve all the world’s problems. And they’d be completely sincere.
This is an extension of the way Republicans have been thinking throughout his presidency. As we know, whenever Obama has embraced one of their ideas, like the cap-and-trade carbon-reduction plan, or the conservative health-care plan that became the basis of the Affordable Care Act, they immediately decide that not only is it the soul of evil, but that they’ve always believed that, like the Party in “1984” declaring that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
To a degree, that’s natural. When the other side’s guy is president for two terms, he shapes the whole debate and even how you wind up thinking of yourself. But Republicans have been unusually reactive, I think in part because their abhorrence of Obama is so intense. He could say that he enjoys ice cream, and a million conservatives would swear never to let the vile frozen sludge pass their lips again.
Of course, there’s a core of conservatism that is unchanging, no matter who the president is—taxes and regulations are bad, the rich are noble job creators, the safety net is for leeches, and so on. But on all those other issues that don’t necessarily occupy their ideological core, it does make you wonder if they’ll be able to figure out who they are once Obama is gone come 2017. I guess then they’ll define themselves as against whatever President Clinton is for.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 4, 2014
“When Revenge Rules Foreign Policy”: Intense Rage At Violations Of Our National Honor Creating Self-Defeating Responses
In my earlier post on the IS “crisis” I suggested it’s irrational for American foreign policy to turn itself inside out over the barbaric murder of two (or in the future, perhaps more) U.S. journalists, horrible as it is. Peter Beinart has a very persuasive column at The Atlantic today arguing it’s important we understand the public reaction to the beheadings is entirely irrational, but reflects the enduring “Jacksonian” strain of U.S. foreign policy whereby intense rage at violations of our national honor justify completely disproportionate and sometimes even self-defeating responses:
Last September, when YouGov.com asked Americans whether they supported air strikes “against Syria,” only 20 percent said yes. Last week, by contrast, when it asked whether Americans supported strikes “against ISIS militants in Syria,” 63 percent said yes.
In narrow policy terms, the arguments for military intervention have not improved over the last two weeks. It’s still not clear if Iraq’s government is inclusive enough to take advantage of American attacks and wean Sunnis from ISIS. It’s even less clear if the U.S. can bomb ISIS in Syria without either empowering Assad or other Sunni jihadist rebel groups.
But politically, that doesn’t matter. What’s causing this Jacksonian eruption is the sight of two terrified Americans, on their knees, about to be beheaded by masked fanatics. Few images could more powerfully stoke Jacksonian rage. The politicians denouncing Obama for lacking a “strategy” against ISIS may not have one either, but they have a gut-level revulsion that they can leverage for political gain. “Bomb the hell out of them!” exclaimed Illinois Senator Mark Kirk on Tuesday. “We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” added Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These aren’t policy prescriptions. They are cries for revenge.
Well, they could represent something a lot worse than that. If you look back at how we got into the Iraq War, the simple political dynamics were that the Bush administration exploited a national desire for revenge (“Let’s Roll”) to launch not one but two wars, on the highly cynical but accurate assumption that many Americans held Arabs or maybe even Muslims collectively responsible, and that the absence of a second 9/11 retroactively justified the “revenge.” Many of the Republican pols now howling for revenge have recently howled for violence against Iraq, against North Korea, against Syria, against Russia and (perpetually) against Palestinians. Who can tell how many agendas will eventually be lashed to the project of making IS pay for its barbarism?
More immediately, as Beinart points out, Obama is especially unlucky in encountering (potentially) the same combination of developments that undid a certain predecessor:
All of a sudden, the domestic politics of foreign policy bear a vague resemblance to the late Carter years. The Iran hostage crisis did not lend itself to a simple policy response either. But to many Americans, it represented a primal humiliation, broadcast on screens across the world. And the hostage crisis primed Americans to see the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year as yet another example of Jimmy Carter failing to prevent America from being disrespected around the world. The danger for Obama is that the ISIS beheadings color the public’s view of his Russia policy in the same way.
Having spent a good part of the 2012 presidential cycle trying to convince Americans that they were actually reliving 1980 and needed to get that wimpy Democrat out of the White House, Republicans can be expected to resume making this connection directly. But even without the potent Russia/hostage combo, the politics of restraining the Jacksonian impulse could be as difficult for Obama as for Carter.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 4, 2014
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