“Scary Cruz Control”: Republican Leaders Don’t Know How To Control The Monster They’ve Created
Is there nobody who can tell Ted Cruz to shut up?
The young senator from Texas has been on the job for about 100 days, but he has already turned the Senate’s ancient seniority system upside down and is dominating his senior Republican colleagues. He’s speaking for them on immigration, guns and any other topic that tickles his fancy; Republican leaders are seething at being outshone yet are terrified of challenging him.
Consider his news conference this week to promote the Republican alternative to gun control. With Cruz on the stage in the Senate TV studio: the bill’s primary author, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a 32-year Senate veteran and longtime chairman or ranking member of the finance and judiciary committees; Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (10 years in the Senate and eight in the House); and Dan Coats of Indiana (12 years in the Senate and eight in the House).
But Cruz took over the lectern and refused to relinquish it. He spoke 2,924 words for the cameras, more than Grassley (904), Graham (1,376) and Coats (360) — combined. Factoring in his dramatic pauses to convey sincerity and deep thought, Cruz’s dominance was even more lopsided. The others shifted uncomfortably and looked awkwardly around the room. At one point, Graham requested a chance to speak. “Can I?” he asked Cruz.
Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration. Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year with the insinuation that Chuck Hagel, now the defense secretary, may have been on the payroll of the North Koreans. Cruz also wrote in Politico that “Hagel’s nomination has been publicly celebrated by the Iranian government.” He later alleged that Democrats had told the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.”
Now Cruz is turning his incendiary allegations against fellow Republicans. On immigration, he has described as amnesty the compromise that Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and three other Republicans negotiated with Democrats. Cruz said such a plan would make “a chump” of legal immigrants. On guns, he said the background checks Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated in a bipartisan compromise would lead to a national gun registry — an outcome the doomed proposal explicitly prohibited.
Democrats see a potential bogeyman in Cruz because of his outrageous pronouncements, and reporters love his inflammatory quotes. Republican leaders, however, don’t know how to control this monster they created.
GOP lawmakers encouraged the rise of the tea party, which now dominates Republican primaries and threatens the same leaders who nurtured it. Cruz’s fellow Texan, John Cornyn, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, could face a primary challenge next year and therefore can’t afford to cross Cruz, who beat an establishment Republican in the 2012 primary. Likewise, the Senate GOP leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is up for reelection and has to keep on the good side of tea party favorites such as Sen. Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, and Cruz.
I’ve argued before that Cruz is more cunning than ideological. He’s Ivy League-educated and a skilled debater who has perfected a look of faux earnestness that suggests his every pronouncement is the most important oration since Gettysburg. Cruz has correctly calculated that the way to power among Senate Republicans is through attention-grabbing accusations.
On immigration, his Latino credentials have helped him undermine Rubio’s bipartisanship. When Rubio made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows April 14, he was confronted with Cruz’s criticism by both NBC’s David Gregory and ABC’s Jon Karl.
On guns, Cruz’s high profile required Grassley to give the upstart a premium chunk of floor time for his trademark falsehoods. Cruz claimed that his bill was the “result of multiple hearings in the Judiciary Committee.” (It was never brought before the panel.) He claimed the opposing legislation would extend “background checks to private transactions between private individuals.” (The bill applied to only advertised sales.) Off the floor, he made the patently false claim that the “so-called ‘gun show loophole’ ” doesn’t exist.
If Republicans are willing to look the other way when Cruz assaults the facts, they may find it increasingly grating to endure his assaults on their dignity. At their news conference on guns, Grassley was made to stand silently for half an hour while Cruz gave an eight-minute opening statement (more than twice the length of Grassley’s) and fielded six questions before yielding to his senior colleague. “I’m just going to say one thing,” Grassley said, “and then I’m going to have to go.”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 19, 2013
“Soft On Crime”: The NRA And Republicans Protecting The “Second Amendment Rights” Of Thugs And Terrorists
What can Americans learn from the bitter debate over the gun reform bill? Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that the leadership of the National Rifle Association, the Gun Owners of America, and their tame Republican politicians have all earned an epithet of derision they used to hurl regularly at liberals.
Yes, the gun lobby and its legislative servants are “soft on crime” — although they routinely pretend to be tough on criminals.
During the Clinton presidency, NRA president-for-life Wayne LaPierre raised vast amounts of money with direct-mail campaigns against both Bill and Hillary Clinton for supposedly coddling criminals. Dubbed “Crimestrike,” the NRA crusade pushed prison construction, mandatory minimum sentencing, and sundry other panaceas designed to position the NRA as the bane of muggers, rapists, and murderers. Those themes echoed traditional Republican propaganda messages dating back to the Nixon era, when the presidential crook himself often derided judicial concerns about civil liberties and promised to restore “law and order.” (When Nixon henchmen like the late Chuck Colson went to prison themselves, they often emerged as prison reformers and civil libertarians, of course.)
But in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, with the NRA angrily opposing any measure designed to hinder criminals from acquiring firearms, the public is learning who is really soft on crime.
Police officials across the country want universal background checks, magazine limits, and stronger enforcement against illegal weapons sales, but the NRA and its Republican allies insist that such changes will penalize legitimate gun owners. Or they complain that criminals mainly obtain weapons by stealing them, so restrictions on sales won’t make any difference.
Even a cursory examination of the facts demonstrates those claims are false. Gun trafficking experts at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have long known that less than 15 percent of all crime guns are stolen from their original owners. Much more common sources of guns used by criminals are so-called “straw purchases,” where a person with a clean record buys a gun on behalf of a criminal, and corrupt purchases, where a licensed gun dealer knowingly sells to a criminal. Bipartisan gun legislation now before the Senate would crack down on these sales, by increasing penalties for straw purchasers who willfully help criminals buy guns. The NRA has offered tepid support for that provision — but it is virtually meaningless without universal background checks, which the gun lobby opposes.
As Will Saletan pointed out in Slate last January, the NRA has consistently (and successfully) sought to kill the most basic efforts to keep guns away from convicted criminals and other dangerous characters — including abusive spouses under court protection orders, drug dealers, and even individuals listed on the Justice Department’s terrorist watch list.
In the wake of the Boston bombing, as the nation ponders how to bolster its security, the gun lobby’s tender concern for the Second Amendment “rights” of terrorists and thugs ought to permanently discredit them and their political servants. Instead they have achieved another bloody victory in Washington.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, April 18, 2013
“The Lineage Of Today’s Republican’s”: What Rand Paul Doesn’t Get About Abe Lincoln, Abe Vigoda, And Black Voters
Here’s something that someone might want to share with Rand Paul. Abraham Lincoln was a president. Abe Vigoda was an actor. The fact that they both have the same first name, does not make them the same person.
That may seem obvious to you, but it’s something that I feel compelled to share. Because after listening to his Howard University speech, I’m not sure it’s a concept that Senator Paul fully understands.
Here’s why: On some basic level, Paul’s speech was an inquiry into the alienation that exists between the GOP and African-Americans. His conclusion: It’s all just a big misunderstanding.
You see, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It was Democrats who led the South’s retrenchment after Reconstruction, established segregation and fought tooth and nail to protect Jim Crow. So it’s Republicans, not Democrats, according to Paul, who have always been the party of civil rights.
So why aren’t more African-Americans Republicans? Paul has an explanation: Having achieved electoral and civil rights African-Americans wanted economic equality, too. Republicans offered one way to get it, according to Paul, the free market, while Democrats offered another, government largesse. Thus far, Paul says, African-Americans have preferred the latter path to the former and what Republicans need to do is better explain why African-Americans should instead embrace the free market model. That’s his theory anyway.
Here Paul’s trying to pull off an interesting trick: using Republican performance from the pretty distant past to try and credential current policies. But in his historical retelling, Paul essentially collapses the timeline and says: look, we’ve always been for civil rights, and our free market prescriptions are just the latest iteration of that.
Now, it may be that this is the argument the GOP’s been looking for. Perhaps, having heard it, African-Americans will vote Republican in droves in 2014. But I’m not convinced.
First, despite Paul’s convictions, there’s a pretty obvious reason why African Americans vote for more Democratic candidates than Republicans: They prefer Democratic policies. That’s how most voters decide who to vote for – they review the candidate’s positions on issues important to them, and then vote for the one whose views are more in sync with their own.
Paul probably wouldn’t contest that – but he’d place the blame for Republican losses on someone who you might not expect: the voter. Instead of concluding that to compete for African-American votes Republicans have to change their policies, he suggests that the problem is the failure of African-Americans to fully comprehend the policies Republicans propose. That’s what he means when he says that Republicans have to find a different way to talk about them, right? The policy isn’t the problem, it’s your ability, (or lack thereof) to grasp it.
And here, Paul finds himself on something of a slippery slope. I mean, politics isn’t rocket science. And somehow every couple of years voters across the country manage to sift through the various policy papers and pronouncements of politicians up and down the ballot to make decisions about who to support. It’s peculiar (at the very least) to suggest that African-Americans are somehow incapable of engaging in the required analysis to do it when it comes to Republicans.
There’s something else about Paul’s thesis that just doesn’t add up. Yes, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and Democrats dominated southern politics during segregation. But really, which of these parties of the past has more in common with the iterations that exist today?
If the answers not obvious to you, there’s another bit of history that can help clear it up. Starting in the 1940s and accelerating in the 1960s national Democratic attitudes about segregation moved to the left, while the attitudes of the southern conservatives who had long affiliated with the Democratic Party pushed further to the right. This created an untenable intraparty tension that couldn’t last forever. And it didn’t, because southern conservatives found a new, more comfortable party to call home, one that expressed values in sync with their own. It was the Republican Party. They switched to it in droves.
All of which means, you guessed it, the lineage of today’s Republican party traces much more directly to those pro-segregation Democrats than it does to any southern Republicans who may have been around in that day.
So let’s be clear: Yes, Rand Paul is a Republican but when it comes to civil rights, his version of the GOP has about as much in common with the one that helped free the slaves as Abe Lincoln has with Abe Vigoda.
Which is to say: once you get past the name, not very much at all.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, April 12, 2013
“Mr 13 Percent”: Why Are Congressional Republicans Taking Dick Cheney’s Advice On North Korea?
Former vice president Dick Cheney reportedly issued a stern warning on North Korea to Congressional Republicans Tuesday, and in the process raised an important question: Why on Earth would anyone listen to Dick Cheney’s foreign policy advice?
According to a CNN report, a cowboy hat-wearing Cheney told the attendees of a GOP leadership meeting that “we’re in deep doo doo” with regard to North Korea.
“Here’s a young guy we don’t know very much about — have very little intel on him, so we just need to make sure that we don’t assume why he’s doing what he’s doing because he could be doing what he’s doing for any number of reasons,” Cheney told the Republican lawmakers, according to Representative Steve Southerland (R-FL).
Cheney attended the meeting as an invited guest of the third-ranking Republican in the House, majority whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
The notion that House Republicans would seek out Cheney’s counsel is rather mind boggling. Should a group with a pathetic 24 percent approval rating really be taking advice from a man who left office at a startling 13 percent?
It’s not as if Americans rejected Cheney for no reason. On almost every major foreign policy issue — including Iraq, Afghanistan, torture, climate change, and everything in between — Cheney pushed the Bush administration in often catastrophically wrong directions.
North Korea is no exception. As Fred Kaplan explained in a 2004 piece for Washington Monthly, the Bush administration entered the White House with the stage set for diplomatic progress — only to have the neoconservative foreign policy team shut down all negotiations. Kaplan singled out Cheney for resisting engagement, describing the vice president’s general position as “As long as the North Koreans were pursuing nuclear weapons, even to sit down with them would be ‘appeasement,’ succumbing to ‘blackmail,’ and ‘rewarding bad behavior.’”
As a result, the Bush administration all but ignored North Korea’s steady march towards construction of a nuclear weapon — even intentionally covering up information on North Korea’s nuclear program to avoid distracting the public from its misguided case for war in Iraq.
By 2002 the administration’s approach had proven so ineffective that James Kelly — then the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs — told Kaplan that then-South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun told him, “‘I wake up in a sweat every morning, wondering if Bush has done something unilaterally to affect the [Korean] peninsula.”
So if America is now in “deep doo doo” with a nuclear North Korea, Cheney has no one to blame but himself and his former Bush administration colleagues. And if House Republicans insist on trying to bring back the Bush foreign policy team, then they will have no one to blame but themselves when their approval rating plummets all the way down to Cheney territory.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, April 11, 2013
“Smart People Believing Stupid Things”: When Irrational Right Wing Thinking Trumps Science
So after a brief moment in the spotlight, it appears that Ben Carson will not be this week’s Savior of the Republican Party after all. But his quick rise and fall raise an interesting question: Why are some people incredibly smart when it comes to some topics, and incredibly stupid when it comes to others?
To bring you up to speed, Carson is a noted neurosurgeon who, among other things, was the first to successfully separate conjoined twins joined at the head. He’s also extremely politically conservative (and African-American), which made him a popular, though by no means nationally famous, figure in some conservative circles. Then in February, he gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, in which he took the occasion to sharply criticize President Obama (who was sitting right there) and advocate for a flat tax, which as everyone knows is pleasing unto the Lord. The Wall Street Journal then ran an editorial titled “Ben Carson for President,” and he was off to the races, making media appearances, appearing at CPAC, and obviously seriously considering a run for the White House. Until he went on Hannity and said no one should undermine traditional marriage, “be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality,” a comment that the PC police took issue with. And now it turns out that in addition to his anti-gay views, Carson also believes that the world is 6,000 years old, and evolution is just some crazy idea for which there’s no more evidence than there is for the biblical story of creation.
It’s this last part that I find particularly interesting. Elitist that I am, I tend to think of young-earth creationists as poorly educated, backwoods folk. This isn’t a matter of religious belief versus lack of belief, either. The Catholic Church, which is run by some fellows who are pretty serious about their religion, says that evolution is perfectly compatible with the biblical creation story, properly understood. I really don’t understand how one could make it through college and med school (with all those science prerequisites!) and sustain those beliefs. After exposure to not just the discoveries of science but to scientific thinking and methods themselves, you have to go through some incredible mental gymnastics to believe that it’s all just a lie. There have been other prominent Republican politicians who have advocated intelligent design (Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum did last year), but if you’re going for the top job, young-earth creationism is an entirely different level.
And that’s not all. Carson also seems to be something of a biblical literalist, also a belief system no person with an IQ higher than that of a turnip could reasonably hold to, unless he were also willing to advocate the stoning of rebellious children, the death penalty for working on the sabbath, and all the juicy polygamy, genocide, slavery, and rape that make the Old Testament such a page-turner. But maybe his views on those things are more nuanced than they appear.
We all have subjects we know nothing about, and things we struggle to understand. For instance, I’m pretty handy around the house when it comes to mechanical systems or anything that is made of wood, but I find electricity baffling. Circuits, ohms, volts, watts— for some reason I find it kind of confusing, as evidenced by that time I shorted out half the house trying to install a simple light switch. That being said, I wouldn’t assert that it’s all phony mumbo-jumbo, and trained electricians are nothing but a bunch of con artists. There are people who are insightful at understanding literature but terrible at understanding physics, or vice-versa. What’s so jarring about Carson is that his area of accomplishment is a scientific one, yet he seems incapable of thinking rationally when his religious beliefs touch on areas his scientific mind ought to help him understand.
It’s Carson’s venomous views on gay people, and not his crazy views about geology and biology, that will keep him from becoming the mainstream figure some had hoped. But I suspect he’ll do just fine, finding a Palin-esque niche on the right to occupy. It may not be the White House, but it’s a pretty good gig.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 1, 2013
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