“The GOP’s Obsession With Words”: Those Who Suggest Obama Doesn’t Use The Words They Prefer, ‘He’s Not One Of Us’
I am truly fascinated with the GOP’s obsession with words over actions. It actually goes back much further than the recent nonsense about what President Obama calls the members of ISIS.
Does anyone remember this?
Even people who acknowledge George Bush’s failings point to that as one of the great moments of his presidency. But by 2002, here’s what he said at a press conference.
Asked about the hunt for Bin Laden at a March, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” Bush added.
By that time, President Bush wanted to invade Iraq and wasn’t that interested in the “people who knocked these buildings down.” That task was left to President Obama.
Ten years after 9/11 came the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. Republicans immediately became obsessed with whether or not President Obama had called the perpetrators “terrorists.” It has never mattered much to them that – under this President’s leadership – the U.S. captured the mastermind of that attack.
And now, Republicans have convinced themselves that President Obama doesn’t take the threat from ISIS seriously because he won’t call them “Islamic terrorists.” Recently Peggy Noonan attempted to argue why that is important. She draws her case mostly from an article by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic titled: What ISIS Really Wants. But when Noonan is done quoting what Wood says about the religious beliefs of ISIS, she turns to what he has to say about how to defeat them.
A U.S. invasion and occupation, Mr. Wood argues, would be a propaganda victory for them, because they’ve long said the U.S. has always intended to embark on a modern-day crusade against Islam. And if a U.S. ground invasion launched and failed, it would be a disaster.
The best of bad options, Mr. Wood believes, is to “slowly bleed” ISIS through air strikes and proxy warfare. The Kurds and the Shiites cannot vanquish them, but they can “keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand.” That would make it look less like “the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammed.” As time passed ISIS could “stagnate” and begin to sink. Word of its cruelties would spread; it could become another failed state.
Hmmm…that sounds exactly like President Obama’s “degrade and destroy” strategy.
Noonan simply ignores all that and – in the end – suggests that we should be respectful of ISIS.
It is, ironically, disrespectful not to name what they are, and what they are about.
Talk about PC madness!!!!
I have to admit that when I approach all of this from a logical standpoint, my head starts spinning. That’s when I know it’s time to leave the logic aside and go in search of root causes.
Of course part of this is fueled by those who want to suggest that because President Obama doesn’t use the words they prefer – he’s not one of us. That ignites the underlying racist fears of the GOP base.
But it also feeds into the desire for a “holy war” of Christianity vs Islam – the very same thing ISIS wants. That is exactly why President Obama’s words of caution at the National Prayer Breakfast were so important – and why his refusal to buy into this dangerous language is exactly the right call.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 1, 2015
“Rubio Blasts ISIS Strategy He Supports”: His Own Views On Foreign Policy Need Quite A Bit Of Work
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is clearly aware of the fact that many of the Republican presidential candidates are current or former governors. But the Florida senator believes he would have an important advantage over his GOP rivals.
“The next president of the United States needs to be someone that has a clear view of what’s happening in the world, a clear strategic vision of America’s role in it and a clear practical plan for how to engage America in global affairs,” Rubio said. He added that for governors running for the White House, international affairs will be “a challenge, at least initially, because they don’t deal with foreign policy on a daily basis.”
On the surface, that’s not a bad pitch. Indeed, presidential candidates from the Senate have made similar arguments against governors for many years. But listening to Rubio’s remarks this morning at CPAC, the trouble is that his own views on foreign policy need quite a bit of work.
“ISIS is a radical Sunni Islamic group. They need to be defeated on the ground by a Sunni military force with air support from the United States,” Rubio said.
“Put together a coalition of armed regional governments to confront [ISIS] on the ground with U.S. special forces support, logistical support, intelligence support and the most devastating air support possible,” he added, “and you will wipe ISIS out.”
Rubio’s remarks solicited applause from the mostly college-aged audience, as did the senator’s claim that “the reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” during sensitive negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
Given Rubio’s interest in the issue, and the months of research and preparation he’s completed, I’m genuinely surprised at how bizarre this is.
Right off the bat, the notion that the president wouldn’t go after ISIS because he “doesn’t want to upset Iran” is bizarre – ISIS and Iran are enemies. Tehran is more than happy to see U.S. forces go after ISIS targets; in fact, Iran has done the same thing. When it comes to the terrorist group, Americans and Iranians are on the same side. How could Rubio not know this?
For that matter, the argument that Obama “hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS” is plainly untrue. Rubio should know this, not only because he’s a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an unannounced presidential candidate, but also because Obama’s strategy to defeat ISIS is largely identical to Marco Rubio’s.
The senator fleshed this out at CPAC: target ISIS by using local ground forces, coupled with air support from the United States, all while U.S. officials take the lead in assembling an international coalition.
That, as of this morning, is Rubio’s plan. It’s also exactly what Obama has been doing since August.
This isn’t even the first time the senator has run into this problem. A month after the president launched a military offensive against ISIS targets, Rubio wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post with the following pitch:
To confront the Islamic State terrorists, we need a sustained air campaign targeting their leadership, sources of income and supply routes, wherever they exist. We must increase our efforts to equip and capacitate non-jihadists in Syria to fight the terrorist group. And we must arm and support forces in Iraq confronting it, including responsible Iraqi partners and the Kurds. In addition, we must persuade nations in the region threatened by the Islamic State to participate in real efforts to defeat it.
I’m not accusing Rubio of plagiarism, but this is awfully close to a word-for-word summary of the Obama administration’s policy.
If the senator wants to complain about the pace of progress against ISIS, fine. He’s not alone. But for Rubio to criticize Obama for adopting a policy Rubio endorses, all while getting Iran’s position backwards, is a bad sign for a guy whose “clear view of what’s happening in the world” is supposed to set him apart from his GOP rivals.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 27, 2015
“Just Differing Species Of The Same Family”: ISIS And American Conservatives; If It Looks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck…
Look who just banned teaching evolution in schools:
The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
But instead of compliance, Iraq’s second largest city has — at least so far — responded to the Sunni militants’ demands with silence. Although the extremists stipulated that the school year would begin Sept. 9, pupils have uniformly not shown up for class, according to residents who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. They said families were keeping their children home out of mixed feelings of fear, resistance and uncertainty.
I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud because it’s so outrageous to suggest that ISIS and American conservatives might have anything in common. And obviously the level of outrageous and murderous violence perpetrated by ISIS has no parallel in the American political system–but that’s also because of the secular counterweight of civil society and constitutional democracy. Culturally, there are a lot of striking similarities between the conservative reactionary ethos in both the western and the Islamic worlds.
Hate evolution? check.
Hate sexually liberated and empowered women? Check.
Love guns and hate gays? Check.
Hate big liberal government? Check.
Believe that society should be organized according to religious principles and that secular people should have no right to curtail religious “freedom”? Check.
Want to empower down-home rural principles against those corrupt city bubble dwellers? Check.
Believe in eye-for-an-eye retributive justice? Check.
Love to sport big Duck Dynasty-style beards? Check.
Just how much quacking do we need to see here before we acknowledge they’re just differing species of the same family of ducks?
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 22, 2015
“Fighting The Extremists Within”: As Our History Shows, Best Way To Defeat ISIS Extremists Is For Muslim World To Organize Against Them
One of the things that I find interesting in the conservative outrage over President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast is that most of it is focused on his inclusion of the Crusades (and occasionally the Inquisition). It is an attempt to dismiss what the President said because the events he referred to happened such a long time ago.
All of that ignores that he also included the more recent events of slavery and Jim Crow (the latter of which was still alive and well during my lifetime). For those who suggest the Christian community did not sanction slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates provides us with a quote from Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens showing that the secession of the Southern States over the issue of slavery was defended based on their religious beliefs.
With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system…
It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.
Of course there were also Christians who were part of the abolitionist movement – initially a small minority confined mostly to the Quakers. But the question eventually came down to Christians vs Christians over the question of slavery – to the point of a Civil War.
When the issue of Jim Crow actually comes up in these recent discussions, it is usually conservatives appropriating the mantle of Rev. Martin Luther King as a Christian minister who led the Civil Rights Movement. For example, here’s Tucker Carlson:
And by the way, who ended slavery and Jim Crow? Christians. The Rev. Martin Luther King. Christians.
He’s right, of course. Rev. King based his objection to Jim Crow on his Christian faith. But as we saw with slavery, a lot of white Christians firmly planted themselves on the other side. And it wasn’t just the KKK with their burning crosses. I am reminded of the fact that Rev. King’s most famous written document – Letter from Birmingham Jail – was penned in response to eight white religious leaders in the South who objected to his activities.
What we see from both of these examples is that on the question of slavery and Jim Crow, there were Christians on both sides of the divide. After a lot of suffering and death, the “Christian extremists” in our country were defeated by those who held fast to a faith that practiced what it preached.
That is exactly what President Obama’s foreign policy is attempting to accomplish in the Muslim world today on the question of ISIS. Over and over again he has said that the people of Iraq are going to have to lead the way.
In other words, just as our history shows with slavery and Jim Crow, the best way to defeat ISIS extremists is for the Muslim world to organize against them. Conservative attempts to malign all Muslims for the actions of those extremists actually distract and block that from happening.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 14, 2015
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