“The Right’s Rekindled Affection For Russia’s Putin”: Back To Drawing Hearts On Their Pictures Of Putin
It was early last year when Republicans decided Russian President Vladimir Putin was an autocrat worthy of their gushing affections. In March 2014, Rudy Giuliani (R) said of Putin, “That’s what you call a leader.” The same month, Mike Rogers, at the time the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, expressed his own admiration: “Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close. They’ve been running circles around us.”
At one point last summer, a Fox News personality went so far as to say she wanted to see Putin serve as “head of the United States,” at least for a little while.
By late last year, however, Republicans were no longer drawing hearts on their pictures of Putin. Russia’s economy was deteriorating quickly; Putin was isolated on the international stage; Russia’s standing and credibility around the world was in tatters; and the sanctions President Obama helped impose on Russia were making a real difference.
Suddenly, the U.S. conservatives who’d enrolled in the Putin fan-club fell quiet, realizing that their contempt for the American president led them to praise the wrong foreign leader.
As of this week, however, many Republicans have apparently come full circle.
One day after President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin made little headway in their standoff over Syria at their first formal meeting in more than two years, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is agreeing with Putin on his backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad. […]
“I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, [Putin’s] getting an ‘A’ and our president is not doing so well,” he said.
Jennifer Rubin, a conservative voice at the Washington Post, added this morning, “In taking this action just days after meeting with President Obama, Putin is delivering one more finger in the eye of a president whom he continues to out-wit and out-muscle.”
Yes, we’ve apparently reached the point again at which Republicans once more see Putin as some kind of strategic mastermind.
As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman explained yesterday, [T]oday’s reigning cliche is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart…. Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power.”
For Republicans, the response seems to be, “At least Putin is going after targets in Syria.” What the White House’s GOP critics have refused to acknowledge for the last 14 months is that President Obama has launched thousands of airstrikes against ISIS targets.
There are two main differences between Putin’s engagement in Syria and Obama’s. The first is that the size of Obama’s military commitment is vastly larger. The second is that Russian lawmakers actually authorized Putin’s mission, while the Republican-run Congress in the United States has done literally nothing since the American military offensive began in August 2014, preferring to watch developments unfold on TV while Obama’s mission continues.
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum added this morning, “Do you know how many military bases the US has in the Middle East? Nearly two dozen. Plus the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. Plus a whole bunch of close allies. And we’re supposed to be quaking in our boots because Putin hastily upgraded a single aging base in Latakia under pressure from his sole remaining ally? You’re kidding, right?”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 1, 2015
“The Republican Brand Is Tea Party”: GOP Reactions Are Revealing, Especially Among Senators Facing Voters In Blue And Purple States
House Republicans will hold their leadership elections next week and all signs point to them remaining more interested in appeasing a narrow base than governing a diverse country.
Consider: The only woman positioned to run for Majority Leader, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, decided not to make a bid. The two men competing for the job are conservatives from the Deep South. The favorite for Speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California, is less experienced than John Boehner, less accomplished, and — if he follows through on private promises — more confrontational.
McCarthy has already signaled with a potentially costly gaffe that he may not be ready for primetime. It came when he boasted to Sean Hannity on Fox News that the House investigation of the 2012 murders of Americans in Benghazi has done serious damage to Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought and made that happen,” he said.
Not that this was a secret, but thanks for the gift of a sound bite that makes clear the Benghazi probe — the latest of many — is not entirely about getting to the truth. The incident recalls a classic moment in 2012 when Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, ran down a list of achievements that ended: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Later that year, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by 5 percentage points in Pennsylvania. And a judge ultimately struck down that voter identification law. The larger point is that until Turzai’s brag, conservatives across the country had religiously stuck to talking points about good government and rooting out (virtually nonexistent) fraud, as opposed to giving their side an edge by making it harder for some people — like urban minorities — to vote.
One of the deepest rifts in today’s chasm-ridden GOP is whether to try to attract a larger swath of voters or to double down on the party’s dwindling core of loyalists. The latest test — over whether to shut down the government in an attempt to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood — illuminated the divide. Republican reactions were revealing, especially among senators facing voters next year in blue and purple states.
You had Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire demanding of Sen. Ted Cruz, presidential candidate and chief agitator in the upper chamber, exactly what he hoped to accomplish when the Senate GOP did not have 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster, much less 67 to override a veto by the Democratic president. And Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois tweeting Wednesday, after the Senate passed a bill to fund the government (including Planned Parenthood), “When our govt shut down in 2013, it cost U.S. $24 billion. We were elected to govern responsibly, not by crisis.” And Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who tweeted “Troubling that a #governmentshutdown was even an option, causing great economic hardship to the 15,000 Alaskans employed by the fed. gov.”
I don’t doubt the sincerity or passion of conservatives fighting abortion. I don’t even argue with the idea that by giving Planned Parenthood money for services like contraception, cancer screenings and STD tests, the federal government frees up money for the group to perform abortions. But the facts on the ground are stark. It will take a Republican Senate supermajority and a Republican president to get what conservatives want, and what they want does not have broad public support. That’s the case whether the issue is defunding Planned Parenthood, curbing abortion, or shutting the government.
Only 36 percent in a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll said more restrictive laws on abortion would be a step in the right direction. Majorities in that poll and two other new ones, meanwhile, said Planned Parenthood should continue to receive federal funds. One of the polls, from Quinnipiac University, found sentiment running 3 to 1 against shuttering the government over the issue. Only 23 percent favored a shutdown.
To cap off the bad-news week for the GOP, Planned Parenthood had a 47 percent positive rating in the NBC poll — the highest of any entity or person tested. Obama came closest at 46 percent, followed by the Democratic Party at 41 percent and Joe Biden at 40 percent. The most positively viewed on the Republican side were presidential candidate Ben Carson and the party itself, each at 29 percent.
Democrats have their own problems, but they are far more in step with mainstream America on a number of important issues — not least the idea that shutting down the federal government is an acceptable substitute for winning the elections you need to prevail.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, October 1, 2015
“Why The GOP Is The True Party Of ‘Free Stuff'”: Bush’s Logrolling Directs Almost All The Benefits To People Who Don’t Need It
While other candidates are a lot crazier, Jeb Bush is clearly the most fumble-brained option in the presidential race. He can’t seem to string two words together without committing a grievous political faux pas. Whether it was his call for “phasing out” Medicare, or his scorn for women’s health issues, or his claim that Asians are the real anchor babies, he’s got a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease.
Now he’s out with a fresh clunker, this time about how Republicans, unlike Democrats, won’t try to lure black voters with “free stuff.” Primary voting is months away, and already Bush is flirting with language that may have lost Mitt Romney the election.
Bush’s argument — that Democrats cynically use welfare to buy black votes and thereby trap them in a cycle of dependency — is seriously mistaken, as well as deeply hypocritical. But a more fundamental mistake is the picture of government Bush envisions. Put simply, handing out “free stuff” of one sort or another is perhaps the most important job governments can do.
First, let’s tackle why black people vote Democratic. I think the answer can be illustrated best in two words: Strom Thurmond. He was a South Carolina Democrat when he broke the record for the longest Senate filibuster ever trying to stop the 1957 Civil Rights Act. But after a much more aggressive civil rights bill passed in 1964, he switched parties, eventually followed by most of the other Dixiecrats. As Philip Bump demonstrates, blacks unsurprisingly did the opposite at the same time, shifting very heavily towards the Democratic Party.
In other words, government benefits play, at best, an incidental role in black support for the Democrats. Republicans today are not segregationists, but they are the inheritors of a legacy of outright white supremacy. Thurmond was in the Senate until 2003. At his 100th birthday party in 2002, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) praised Thurmond’s 1948 run for president under a third party apartheid ticket. (Lott later resigned as leader after his comments were made public.) Democrats have not been the finest stewards of black fortunes, but it’s pretty obvious that they’re better than the alternative.
That brings me to the hypocrisy. While Democrats support social benefits in a wishy-washy way, conservatives are absolutely obsessed with directing huge monetary benefits to their favored constituencies — namely, the rich.
George W. Bush’s tax cuts were violently skewed towards the wealthy — over 73 percent of the benefits went to the top income quintile, and fully 30 percent to 1 percenters alone. Jeb Bush aims to pull the same trick, proposing another corpulent set of tax breaks — only this time, over half of the benefits would accrue to the top 1 percent alone. You can’t win an election solely with the support of billionaires, of course, but Bush and his allies have also already raised over $120 million. Not, one suspects, a coincidence.
Overall, welfare benefits for the top income quintile — largely a result of conservative policymaking — cost roughly $355 billion yearly. Meanwhile, what passes for new policy in Republican circles — a child tax credit — is a government benefit for middle- and upper-class parents that carefully and deliberately excludes the poor.
But it would be a mistake to stop here. Good government types often rail against the blatant cronyism of Bush family politics — i.e., you give me hundreds of millions of dollars for my presidential campaign, and I’ll cut the capital gains tax so you can better loot your company — but making good policy isn’t as simple as being against patronage in general. As Francis Fukuyama points out in Political Order and Political Decay, Boss Tweed-style patronage politics can also be a first step towards an efficient, decent modern state. There is no bright line between handing out jobs to one’s ethnic community in return for votes, and constructing a modern bureaucracy that provides universal social benefits like clean air and water, low crime, a safety net, and so forth.
For what are governments good for, if not providing universal security and prosperity for as many citizens as possible? Even in a jalopy country like the U.S., the vast majority of state activity is dedicated towards this end, at least ostensibly. The military, to defend the nation; Social Security, to provide for the retired and disabled; Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare, to provide universal access to health care; various safety net programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit, to keep people from destitution — these together, plus interest on the national debt, account for 84 percent of direct federal spending. Many of these could be improved, or are badly misused, but that’s their bedrock ideological justification. Other nations with better versions of similar policies show that universal high-quality health care and an end to poverty are easily within our grasp.
So the problem with Bush’s logrolling — and Republican policy in general — is mainly that it directs almost all the benefits to people who don’t need it.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, September 28, 2015
“The GOP’s Delusions”: Politicians And Voters, Both Pretending Their Party Can Do Things It Can’t
These days, conservatives have to take their victories where they can find them. After all, the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land, gay people are getting married, our noble job creators suffer under the tortuous and unjust burden of high marginal income tax rates, the government continues to provide food stamps to layabouts who think their children ought to eat, immigrants walk amongst us speaking strange and indecipherable tongues, and worst of all, that usurper Barack Obama strolls into the Oval Office every day like he’s the president or something.
In the face of all this horror, even small victories can be cause for celebration. So it was when Marco Rubio told attendees at the Values Voter Summit on Friday that Speaker of the House John Boehner had announced his resignation, and was met with whoops and cheers lasting a full 30 seconds. I couldn’t help wondering: What exactly do they think is going to happen now? Is there any way that Boehner’s departure makes it more likely that any of the things conservatives say they want will actually come to pass?
Today’s Republicans are hardly the first party to spend more time worrying about betrayal from their colleagues than from their opponents on the other side; it’s a dynamic nearly as old as politics itself. But they truly have created not just a politics of anger, but a politics utterly removed from any substance at all. Policy goals may be the nominal justification for all the anger, but in truth nobody bothers figuring out how they might be achieved. The performance is its own end.
Ted Cruz is in many ways the prototypical legislator for this Republican era. On the campaign trail, he tells audiences he has “a proven record” that qualifies him for the presidency. But what is that record? Since he got to Washington two and a half years ago, he has not authored any legislation that passed, or used his position on various committees to some important policy purpose. He’ll tell you a lot about “standing up” — against Obamacare, against increasing the debt ceiling, against Planned Parenthood. And what were the results of all that standing? Did Ted Cruz get the Affordable Care Act repealed, get taxes cut, get government restrained — did he get a single solitary thing that conservatives would look at and say, “Yes, that was one of our goals, and he helped make it happen”?
Of course not. Cruz is not a legislator, he’s a performer, a kind of right-wing version of the Code Pink activists who disrupt Capitol Hill hearings. He doesn’t accomplish anything, but he certainly does stand up. So it’s no accident that many House Republicans look to him as a mentor when they’re considering shutting down the government — another bit of political performance art that inevitably gains conservatives nothing, as long as you’re thinking about the goals they claim to espouse.
You might say it’s not his fault — after all, he’s a first-term senator in the party that doesn’t control the White House. The problem is that Cruz and others like him continually tell their constituents that none of that will matter as long as Republicans despise Obama with sufficient fervor and show sufficient immovability once they do all that “standing up.” And so their voters are inevitably disappointed.
You can blame ignorant voters who expect things they’ll never get, but the greatest responsibility lies with the politicians who keep telling them to expect it. At that same Values Voter Summit, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (Is there anyone who has been more diminished by running for president this year?) got up and told the crowd, “That’s one down and 434 to go,” adding, “Here’s what I say in response to Speaker Boehner stepping down: Mitch McConnell, it is now your turn.”
Yeah, if every member of Congress were ousted, that would…um…I don’t know, but to hell with them! The fact is that no one has done more to thwart Barack Obama over the last seven years than Mitch McConnell has, and there is no Republican in Washington more shrewd. Tea Partiers hate him not because he’s some kind of moderate compromiser, but because he’s realistic about what is and isn’t possible — and because he isn’t shy about expressing his dislike for ultra-conservative members of Congress who couldn’t strategize their way to passing a National Puppy and Kitten Appreciation Week.
Jindal isn’t the only one saying conservatives should turn their unquenchable rage on McConnell now that Boehner is out of the way. And there’s no doubt that the idea that Boehner and McConnell have been ineffectual is driving much of the success of Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson, as they feed the childish and ignorant idea that an outsider president can swoop into Washington and make everything work through the force of his or her will. But to repeat the question I asked earlier, what do they think is going to happen now? If the next speaker of the House is conservative enough, will that mean Barack Obama will suddenly start signing all the ridiculous bills the House passes? Of course he won’t.
Intra-party conflict and tumult can leave a party stronger, as new ideas get tested and fresh approaches find their way to implementation. But it’s awfully hard to look at the GOP today and say that they are going to emerge from this period primed for great policy victories. They’ve got the anger thing down pat though.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, September 27, 2015
“Ill Suited For The Historical Moment”: Was John Boehner A Victim Of Circumstance Or An Incompetent Bumbler?
You can’t fire me, John Boehner just told House Republicans, because I quit!
Amid yet more talk about a coup by ultra-conservative Republicans looking to replace him with one of their own — talk that has emerged seemingly every few months since he became Speaker of the House after the 2010 election — Boehner has finally decided to pack it in. And he’s not even waiting until his term runs out; instead, he’ll retire from Congress next month, presumably to become a spectacularly well-remunerated lobbyist.
Even Boehner’s most stalwart allies would have trouble arguing that his tenure was anything other than a failure. But the question is, how much of it was Boehner’s fault? Was he in an impossible situation from which no speaker could have wrung much success, or was he just terrible at his job?
The answer, I’d submit, is both. Boehner’s circumstances made success somewhere between unlikely and impossible. But along the way, he proved himself incapable of changing that situation in any way, seeming to make the worst of every crisis and showdown.
Let’s look at Boehner’s accomplishments in his nearly five years as speaker. Well, there’s…um…hmm. Can you think of any?
Conservatives might say that by joining with Mitch McConnell in a strategy of total and complete opposition to this administration, he helped stop Barack Obama from doing some things Obama might otherwise have done. Or I suppose one might argue that he limited the damage members of his own party could do to the country. Despite threatening to shut down the government more times than you can count, there was only one actual shutdown, in 2013. And we didn’t default on our debt by not raising the debt ceiling, which would have been catastrophic.
But that’s not much of a record of success. Boehner can’t say that he achieved any conservative ideological goals. But he did hold 50-odd votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is just about the opposite of a substantive achievement.
Granted, when your party doesn’t hold the White House, you aren’t going to be passing significant legislation to accomplish your own objectives. But you still might work with the other party to get some things done. That has happened in the past — legislative leaders have worked with a president of the other party to do big things like tax reform. But not anymore.
You also might mold your caucus into a unified force of strategic opposition, not just making the president’s life difficult but setting the stage for a successful wave of legislation the next time you do have control of both the legislative and executive branches. That’s what Nancy Pelosi succeeded in doing when George W. Bush was president, in advance of the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. But Boehner couldn’t do that either — his speakership was spent fighting with members of his own party, and each successive crisis only made them look less and less serious.
From the beginning, Boehner may have been ill-suited to the historical moment. He was an old-school pol, the kind who favored hashing out deals over cigars and whiskey, but he was elevated to the speakership in a revolution fueled by anger, resentment, and distrust of party leaders. He spent his time as speaker trying constantly to mollify a group of unreasonable members for whom any compromise was betrayal, and the idea of strategically avoiding a confrontation today to put yourself in a better position tomorrow was just too sophisticated for them to wrap their heads around. They’re a group of bomb-throwers and lectern-pounders, who (like their mentor Ted Cruz) think that “standing up to Obama” is a substantive accomplishment in and of itself to be proud of.
That’s not to mention the fact that the rightward drift of the Republican Party, particularly in Boehner’s House, has made strategic action in the party’s long-term interest virtually impossible. The best example is immigration, where everyone including Boehner acknowledged that the party needed to pass comprehensive reform in order to prove to Hispanic voters that the GOP was not hostile to them. But it couldn’t happen because so many in Boehner’s caucus are ultra-conservative members who hail from conservative districts where they need only fear a challenge from the right. So they don’t want comprehensive reform, and neither do their constituents.
Could a more skilled speaker have found a way out of that conundrum? It’s hard to see how, other than the obvious way: by passing reform using a combination of votes from Democrats and sane Republicans. This was the option Boehner faced again and again on funding the government, and he only took it when things reached the point of crisis. Every time, observers wondered if it would lead to a revolt that would displace him as speaker, but his saving grace turned out to be that the job was so miserable that nobody else wanted it.
It’s still unclear how Boehner’s announcement will affect the current shutdown crisis we’re approaching, but since he no longer has to worry about his job, he may just bring it to a quick conclusion by throwing the conservatives some meaningless bone of a symbolic vote on Planned Parenthood, then putting a clean continuing resolution up to a vote (that seems to be the direction they’re moving). The CR would probably pass with Democratic support, and then doomsday could be avoided for a while, with Boehner’s replacement left to enact the next iteration of this absurd ritual once the CR runs out.
It would, in its way, be a fitting end to the Boehner speakership: a needless crisis driven by ultra-conservative members Boehner can’t control, finally resolved — but only temporarily — in a way that leads those members to call him a traitor and sets the stage for yet another crisis before long.
Can anyone blame him for wanting to get the hell out?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 25, 2015
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