“Professional Bashers”: GOP Will Find A Way To Blame President Obama On Ukraine Jet Downing
The monstrous downing of a Malaysian jet liner apparently by Russian backed separatists in the Ukraine did something that few thought could happen. It has gotten GOP leaders momentarily to agree with President Obama when he pointed the finger squarely at Russia for the horrific attack. But don’t expect the GOP’s hand hold with Obama to last. GOP leaders have been relentlessly snipping at Obama from the moment that Russia muscled into the Ukraine, lopped off slices of its territory, and cheered on and supplied pro-Russian separatists in the nation with sophisticated weapons. Presumably those weapons include the kind of missile thought to have taken down the jetliner. If it’s shown beyond doubt that the rebels downed the plane and did it with a Russian supplied missile, GOP leaders almost certainly will renew their barrage of attacks on Obama.
As always, their attacks will have absolutely nothing to do with indignation and outrage over the mass killing. It will have everything to do with politics. In April, when Obama first talked with Russian President Vladimir Putin to get him to stand down on stirring up tensions in the country, GOP leaders pounced. They branded him as too weak, soft and conciliatory. The smear was a rerun of the same smears it has repeated time and again against him on the issues of national security and foreign policy.
The GOP has dusted off the script on every foreign policy crisis that’s popped up since Obama entered the White House. The list is endless: Somalia, Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran and, of course, Benghazi. In each instance, just change the names and the rap is till the same, he’s weak, indecisive, and soft, and always the charge is that his alleged weakness somehow puts the nation at mortal risk. As in every one of the crisis’s that Obama allegedly bungled and jeopardized the nation’s security, the unreconstructed cold war hawks and professional GOP Obama bashers flatly declare that the U.S. must get tough, firm and resolute up to and including a military and even nuclear a saber rattle against a perceived American foreign enemy.
The Ukraine crisis has been no different. GOP leaders have called for Obama to do everything short of putting boots on the ground in the Ukraine to battle the Russian backed separatists. The only thing that has stopped those tempted to cross that line and make that call is the vehement overwhelming opposition of the American public. As horrible, bloody and now humanly catastrophic with the jetliner attack, the conflict is, it’s still a regional conflict in which the U.S., no matter how long and loud the saber rattle from the GOP, can do little beyond the strongest political and moral condemnation and sanctions. In themselves they are weak and for the most part ineffectual. As morally odious as the conflict is especially with its latest horrific turn, it still poses no direct threat to American security.
However, that means little to a GOP determined to score big in the mid-term elections. It will do everything it can to turn the heinous downing of the jetliner into yet another political indictment of Obama. They will scream louder to slap even tougher sanctions on Russia. Some of which are border on the absurd. This includes proposals to bar Russia from landing its Aeroflot planes in the U.S and other Western nation airports and even more dangerous and counterproductive, demanding that the U.S. arm the Ukraine military to the teeth. This almost certainly will guarantee a frantic arms race with Russia shipping even more heavy weaponry to the Rebels. The GOP nowhere explains exactly how any of this will bring Russia to its knees, to stop it from aiding the rebels or make airspace over Ukraine any safer.
Obama’s sensible option continues to be to redouble efforts through a combination of new sanctions which he did a day before the jetliner debacle that involved energy and banking transactions and negotiations aimed at stopping the flow of weapons and military support to the rebels. No matter how loud the war hawks scream about Obama’s actions, he has little choice but to try and help craft a solution through diplomacy. This hardly shows weakness, but recognition that the U.S.’s options are few.
The Malaysian jet liner downing was a senseless and heart-breaking tragedy that served absolutely no political or military purpose for the rebel separatists, if they indeed committed the dastardly deed. It will fuel even further the justifiable worldwide public rage at Russia and Putin. It will push Russia further to being branded a rogue state. Obama’s careful measures in dealing with the conflict have done much to insure that’s the case. The GOP’s inevitable finger point at him for the latest tragedy in the Ukraine will stand again as nothing more than the usual false, phony and opportunistic political pandering.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Associate Editor of New America Media; The Huffington Post Blog, July 19, 2014
“Addicted Republicans Wage War On Latino Voters”: The GOP Is Rolling The Dice While Standing On Quicksand
It’s an addiction. Republicans really can’t help themselves — when they see an opportunity to irritate the Latino electorate, they go for it with gusto.
Republicans have transformed the humanitarian crisis of children at our southern border into an “invasion” that must be repelled with soldiers.
This is war!
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), speaking on Glenn Beck’s program, said “We are under invasion, and this president will not protect our country, and he will not step in and enforce the law as it is.”
Of course, it’s President Obama’s fault. Because anything that goes wrong in this world is either Obama’s overreaching or disengagement. There is no issue to which the Republicans will not attach one of these labels — a cognitive dissonance that seeks to depict Obama simultaneously as a power-mad dictator and, in Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) unfortunate depiction, a president who sleeps through crisis.
Playing on this meme, Michael Reagan, son of the president that signed the amnesty bill in 1986, wrote recently: “Emperor Obama is the culprit in chief.”
Yet the law is being enforced. According to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, these kids have a right to due process. They cannot simply be shoved into a bus and dropped like cargo in Mexico. Or sent first class on a plane, as Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (R) suggested as a bizarre solution.
Republicans’ aggressive response against these kids is baffling as both a matter of policy and politics. The border kids crisis is not about immigration. The flows of unaccompanied minors over the last few months (estimates put the number of kids at over 57,000) has many causes: brutal violence, chaos, mortal fear and hope.
The violence and related mayhem in Central America has reached a critical juncture. The toxic cocktail of narco-mafias, violent gangs, acute poverty and corrupt governments has created dangerous instability and the subsequent need to flee from a life-threatening situation.
Ironically, much of this instability can be directly traced to America’s multi-decade, failed and wildly expensive “War on Drugs” that has made these countries transit points for America’s illegal drug imports.
The narco-mafias are multi-billion dollar “enterprises” with the economic capacity to cripple governments, field heavily armed guerrilla armies and an addiction to violence that terrorizes a vulnerable population that has been largely abandoned to fend for itself by the weak governments in the region.
Politically, the GOP is like a man standing on quicksand. After killing immigration reform in Boehner’s House of Representatives, voting to deport the Dreamers and urging the faster deportation of the border kids, the party’s chances of attracting a sizable percentage of Latino voters needed to win national elections recedes with every acrid declaration by Republican politicos seeking to court the far-right midterm election voters they need to win the Senate in November.
The GOP is rolling the dice with its future by seeking the older white vote while simultaneously repelling large swaths of the electorate – women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, gay people, young people, Latinos, etc. — with its antediluvian policies.
While some analysts on the right have concluded that this is the optimum approach to win the midterm election — an assumption predicated on the expectation of low turnout of those same constituents that have largely voted for Democrats in past elections — that’s an awfully big bet when the very future of the GOP is at stake.
What happens if the unthinkable becomes reality? What’s the future of the GOP if come November 2014 furious Latinos turn out at the same rate as they did in the 2012 election? Or women outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision that a corporation’s newly “discovered” religious rights trump a woman’s right to control her own health?
Yes, the projecting of voter turnout is based on past voter participation. But as Mitt Romney’s failed campaign for president in 2012 showed, predictions of turnout can be wrong — very wrong.
In particular, Republicans underestimate the blowback from Latinos. This year in the California congressional primaries, I endorsed a moderate Republican, part of the reform wing of the party. The reaction from the audience of my radio program, and especially through social media, was swift and brutal. Hundreds of Latino voters told me I was crazy – and that they would never vote for Republicans after they killed immigration reform in the House.
As Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) and other big name Republicans continue to call for a military response to this crisis by deploying the National Guard, the image of a GOP actively vilifying children and comparing them to foreign invaders is bound to further crystalize Latino anger and voting patterns.
Whatever else, should the National Guard be deployed because of these GOP demands, the effect on public opinion could further sink the Republican Party.
Republicans will crash with a harsh reality of their own making: soldiers versus 10-year-olds is a “battle” with the optics of Birmingham, Ala. in 1963.
By: Fernando Espuelas, The Huffington Post Blog, July 20, 2014
“Neocons Have Learned Nothing”: Rand Paul Faces Challenge In Opposing GOP War Hawks
Kentucky senator Rand Paul is a curious vehicle for reformation of the Republican Party. He’s not a font of creative ideas; he’s hobbled by intellectual contradictions; he’s viewed skeptically by his party’s establishment. Still, Paul brings a refreshing view of the limits of warfare to a GOP that has spent the last several decades enthusiastically embracing military interventions across the globe.
So here’s to the senator’s efforts to help his party lay down its battle armor and beat its swords into plowshares. The country needs no more Dick Cheneys and far fewer John McCains.
Paul won’t easily transform the Republican Party’s views on military might. Earlier this month, Texas governor Rick Perry wrote an opinion essay criticizing him as “curiously blind” to the threat represented by international jihadists. “Viewed together, Obama’s policies have certainly led us to this dangerous point in Iraq and Syria, but Paul’s brand of isolationism (or whatever term he prefers) would compound the threat of terrorism even further,” Perry wrote in The Washington Post.
As much as anything, that’s a sign that Perry is considering once again seeking the GOP nomination for president and sees Paul as a significant rival. One way to knock off Paul, Perry believes, is to play to the GOP’s armchair hawks, who haven’t tired of sending other people’s sons and daughters to war.
Paul immediately fought back with an op-ed of his own, published in Washington-based Politico. “Unlike Perry, I oppose sending American troops back into Iraq. After a decade of the United States training Iraq’s military, when confronted by the enemy, the Iraqis dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and hid. Our soldiers’ hard work and sacrifice should be worth more than that,” he wrote.
While Paul’s views are closer to those of the American people, there is still a significant partisan divide — a challenge for the senator. Half of Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, while only 38 percent say it was the right decision, according to the Pew Research Center. (The rest are undecided.) But a closer look at polling shows that 52 percent of Republicans still believe toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.
That may simply reflect the reluctance of Republican voters to admit the failings of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. And GOP leaders know there is a lot of political fodder in knocking President Obama’s foreign policy, even if few of them present alternatives. They denounce the president’s international leadership as feckless, weak and naive — red-meat rhetoric that fires up the base.
That means Paul will have to be not only smart but also courageous if he is to help his party find a more reasonable response to a complex world. The impulse to bend the globe to our will ought to be resisted, as should the instinct to continue to feed the military-industrial complex by draining the national treasury.
One of the reasons we ended up on a misguided mission in Iraq was that Democrats failed to put up enough resistance to the neocons who were then firmly in charge of the GOP. The doomed Vietnam War (though prosecuted by Democratic presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) had left Democrats labeled wimps and cowards — a reputation they couldn’t shake. As a result, too many who should have known better, including then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, voted to give Bush the authority to oust Saddam.
It took Obama’s victory — he campaigned as a critic of the Iraq invasion — to help leading Democratic pols find the courage to resist a “dumb war.” There are still military interventionists in the Democratic Party, but there are far fewer who would support a war in hopes of appearing strong on the national stage.
The Republican Party hasn’t yet managed that transition. Its neocons have learned nothing from their years of folly, with Cheney and the entire cohort of Iraq War cheerleaders refusing to admit their mistakes. But if Paul can win enough support from his party’s base, he can help the GOP come to terms with a world America cannot rule.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia, The National Memo, July 19, 2014
“From Extreme To Extreme-Lite?”: “Religious Liberty” Campaign Not Working Out That Well
In the wake of a predictable GOP filibuster of a Senate bill seeking to reverse the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, Republicans are publicly complaining that Democrats are trying to “change the subject” from this or that issue (real or imaginary) they want to talk about, but are privately conceding the peril for their team of any extended conversation involving reproductive rights. At National Journal Sophie Novack reports they’d just as soon not go there:
Republican strategists who were around for [Todd] Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment in 2012 warn candidates to tread carefully on the issue. The GOP’s continued meetings on how to connect with women show the party is still haunted by his loss, and members have denounced his return to the political scene with the release of his new book.
“The fact that the Supreme Court made the decision—Republicans should let that stand and not engage in the debate. It will get them nowhere and take them off the message of real issue Americans are concerned about,” said Ron Bonjean, a GOP strategist and former spokesman for House and Senate leadership. “I think Republicans saw what happened with Todd Akin—it was a stupid and bad campaign strategy. It would be political malpractice for Republicans to engage with that kind of conversation.”
This is another way of admitting that the effort begun in 2012 to reframe the GOP’s extremist position on reproductive rights as a defense of “religious liberty” hasn’t worked as well as party strategists had hoped. Indeed, by shifting the focus from abortion to “abortifacient” birth control, the “religious liberty”-driven attack on Obamacare’s contraception coverage mandate has actually increased opportunities for Republican pols to say things that sound stupid or crazy to a big percentage of the population.
Was Akin’s disastrous “legitimate rape” commentary really any farther from the mainstream than talk about IUDs being little Holocaust machines? Is there really any way to frame the unchanging extremist position on abortion (life begins when ovum fertilized; ban all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest) most Republicans embrace in a way that doesn’t hurt the party with swing voters generally and single women in particular? I don’t think so. But I also think “don’t talk about it” demands like Bonjean’s will infuriate the antichoice activists who set the GOP’s position in the first place and convince them to demand even more demonstrations of loyalty.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 17, 2014
“The Bigoted Republican Two-Step”: The GOP’s Ridiculous Executive-Authority Hypocrisy
Speaker of the House John Boehner wants to sue President Obama. Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants to impeach President Obama. And Republicans across the board are in a froth over the president’s allegedly aggressive use of executive authority.
And yet, there are some issues that have so discombobulated Republicans that they are turning their lonely eyes to Obama for answers: Namely, the influx of Central American child migrants on America’s southern border. Faced with the unappealing prospect of using their own congressional power of the purse to solve the problem, Republicans are reacquainting themselves with the allure of executive power.
The current border crisis is the result of Obama following a law signed in 2008 by President George W. Bush and designed to save children from human trafficking. The law created different rules for children hailing from nations contiguous to America — Mexico and Canada — and children from elsewhere. For children coming from the two contiguous nations, Border Patrol agents can use their discretion to quickly send them home to their families. But since repatriation is more logistically complicated for children coming from farther away, the law requires the Department of Health and Human Services to provide housing and care as well as the guidance to seek legal counsel, which generally puts them on a path for a formal judicial review.
Speaker Boehner has now proposed changing that law, saying last week, “I think we all agree that the non-contiguous countries, that now we’re required to hold those people, I think clearly, we would probably want the language similar to what we have with Mexico.” But to apply the language we have with Mexico to Central American child migrants, you’d have to empower Obama’s Border Patrol agents — and effectively, Obama — to decide if those children must go back.
While Boehner wants to pass new legislation expanding Obama’s executive power, other Republicans just want Obama to assert his Oval Office authority without action by Congress. On Fox News Sunday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeatedly shrugged off the stipulations of the 2008 law and suggested Obama solve the problem on his own by deploying the National Guard to block entry at the border. Fox’s Brit Hume incredulously responded, “Are they really going to be deterred by the presence of troops along the border who won’t shoot them and can’t arrest them?”
House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers said on Meet The Press that Obama “has tools in his toolbox that he can use immediately to stop this,” citing Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s interpretation of the 2008 law which she co-authored. What Rogers chose not to highlight on national television is that Feinstein says Obama has the power to modify how the law is being implemented by directing the Department of Homeland Security to write new regulations — exactly the type of action that has prompted all the Republican talk of lawsuits and impeachment on other issues.
This may seem like your standard-issue Washington hypocrisy: Shake your fist against presidential power when you don’t like what the president is doing, and then pound your fist to demand presidential action to shift focus away from your reluctance to take any responsibility for governing the country.
But the Republican two-step is about more than hypocrisy. Their sudden renewed attraction to executive power lays bare how empty their excuses are for burying comprehensive immigration reform.
If Republicans really believe Obama is too slippery to trust with any legal directives to “secure the border,” they would be pushing for laws that tie his hands, such as mandatory deportations without judicial review and mandatory increases of National Guard or Border Patrol troops on the border.
They’re not, because deep down Republicans know their talking points about a lawless, trustless president are bunk. And the only thing stopping Republicans from passing comprehensive immigration reform is the fear of losing votes from anti-immigrant bigots. Any other excuse has been rendered inoperative.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, July 16, 2014
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