“This Ugly Atmosphere Feels A Bit Familiar”: It’s Beginning To Feel Like 2002 All Over Again
At the end of last week, the liberal group Media Matters noted that in the wake of the Madrid bombings in March 2004, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly asserted that “If al-Qaeda attacks here, President Bush is re-elected in a heartbeat,” since “unlike the Spanish,” who are passive sheep (or something), the strong American public “won’t surrender, they’ll get angry.” But after the recent attacks in Paris, O’Reilly sang a different tune: “We get hit, [Obama] goes down as the worst president in U.S. history. No doubt.”
While Media Matters’s purpose in juxtaposing these two quotes was surely to mock O’Reilly for his partisan hypocrisy, you can look at it another, much more depressing way: O’Reilly was probably right both times.
Not about history’s judgment of Obama, obviously. But given what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, it’s becoming hard to hope that anything resembling a rational reaction to the events in Paris will take hold. As I wrote last week, Republicans are rushing to exploit the attacks in the most cynical and repugnant ways, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. But the real problem is that most of the public is going to eat it up.
That’s partly because of what they’re hearing from their leaders. Today’s Republicans would never consider rallying around President Obama if there were an attack in the U.S. the way Democrats did after September 11. They might gather on the Capitol steps, but it wouldn’t be to sing “God Bless America” as Democrats and Republicans did soon after the attacks; it would be to rush to the cameras to condemn Obama for having blood on his hands. Indeed, they already have; “John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have all served as apologists for radical Islamic terrorism,” said Ted Cruz last week.
People of all parties take cues from their leaders, which helps explain why support for Bush was so universal in the days after 9/11, and why Republicans’ hatred of Obama only grows when they’re made to feel vulnerable to foreign threats. But today’s Republicans are harvesting fertile soils of fear and hate.
People like me can explain until we’re blue in the face that becoming a refugee to Europe is nothing like becoming a refugee to the United States, a process that can take two years; and that sneaking someone into the U.S. posing as a refugee is probably the single hardest way to get them to the U.S. (as opposed to, say, buying them a plane ticket). We can explain that the threat to you and your family’s lives from terrorism is infinitesimal (the number of Americans who have been killed in the U.S. by jihadi terrorists since 9/11—26—just happens to be the same number of Americans who have been killed by lightning in 2015 alone). But it won’t much matter.
A majority of the public opposes bringing in refugees from Syria. Americans now cite terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, though by any logical standard it most certainly is not (for instance, it takes less than two days for more Americans to die from gun violence as died in the Paris attacks). In the wake of those attacks, Donald Trump remains strongly in front in the Republican presidential primary race. As Politico reports, conservative voters in Iowa may be turning away from Ben Carson and toward Ted Cruz now that they’re thinking about terrorism. In truth, Cruz has the same amount of foreign policy experience as Carson (zero), but he’s a lot angrier about it, which seems to be the order of the day in the GOP.
Reporters have spent much of the last week or so trying to pin Trump down on whether he thinks the government should create a database that every Muslim in America would have to register with, a positively fascistic suggestion that he may or may not have been unfairly entrapped into supporting. Like everything else related to government policy, Trump obviously hasn’t given it any serious thought, but reporters are operating on the quite reasonable assumption that it would be scandalous if he actually believed such a thing. But would it?
At least in the Republican primary, where virulent xenophobia now seems to be the order of the day, the answer is probably not. Trump is now talking about putting Muslim houses of worship across the country under surveillance, Marco Rubio agrees, and most voters may find that to be utterly untroubling; after all, it’s not their freedoms being taken away. Trump also wants to begin torturing prisoners again (not that we have any ISIS prisoners), Chris Christie says he wouldn’t even allow a 5-year-old orphan from Syria into New Jersey, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush say we should only accept Christians but keep out Muslims, and Ben Carson compares refugees to rabid dogs. Nothing that any of the candidates have said since Paris suggests that there is any position they could take or thing they could say that would be regarded by their voters as beyond the pale.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that heightened fears of ISIS will sweep the Republicans into the White House next year; there’s lots of time between now and then, and other issues will grab the electorate’s attention. The American public and its political elite may not have taken leave of their senses to quite the degree they did in the months and years after September 11, when no restriction on individual liberty went far enough, no expansion of government power was too much, and invading a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on us seemed like the perfect way to handle our fear and anger. But the increasingly ugly atmosphere is beginning to feel awfully familiar.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 23, 2015
“Paris, The City Of Light”: Light Reveals Bankrupt Ideologies For The Failures They Are
“I believe the light that shines on you will shine on you forever … though I can’t guarantee there’s nothing scary hiding under your bed.”
“Father and Daughter” by Paul Simon
—
My wife has a bad knee and isn’t much for long walks, so that night after the Chunnel train had brought us over from London and we set out on foot from the hotel to do some exploring, I wasn’t expecting to go far. Maybe a block, maybe two.
I have no idea how far we actually went, but I know it was a lot further than a couple blocks. I kept asking if she was okay. Marilyn kept assuring me that she was and wanted to keep going.
She was enraptured, as was I. Walking through Paris was like walking through magic. We went down a fairytale street, paused on a bridge overlooking the Seine to watch the glass-topped dinner cruises plying the water, ended up at the Place de la Concorde, looking west along the Champs-Elysees. In the distance the Arc de Triomphe glowed.
Some cities disappoint you. Some cities you visit and that thing they are known for, that thing people come from around the world to experience, turns out to be exaggeration, myth or mirage. In the ’70s, I used to feel sorry for tourists who came to Hollywood (which has since been largely redeveloped), only to find that the fabled film capital was little more than office buildings, souvenir shops and street corners where prostitutes gathered six deep.
But Paris is exactly what they say. Paris is, in reputation and in fact, the City of Light.
So I suppose we ought not be surprised that it now finds itself under attack from the forces of shadow.
By now, you’ve already heard all you can stand — and then some — about the series of coordinated terrorist assaults by ISIS that left well over a hundred people dead on Friday. By now, you have already wept or prayed or vented your fury or wondered aloud what this world is coming to or simply stood mute in the face of humankind’s seemingly bottomless capacity for savagery.
I almost called it animalism, but that’s an insult to animals. They, after all, kill to feed or defend themselves. Only human beings kill for beliefs — in this case, a twisted, fundamentalist strain of Islam.
And it’s no accident it was Paris. Like New York City 14 years ago, it was a representational target. New York stands for American power and Sept. 11 was meant to spit in the eye of that power. Paris stands for light and the events of Nov. 13 sought to eclipse the glow — not simply the glow of beauty and romance, but also of enlightenment and hope.
Paris has always been a beacon of such things. That may have been part of the reason Adolf Hitler ordered the city destroyed when his troops were driven out in 1944. It may have been part of the reason Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz disobeyed the order.
The quote at the top of this column is from a song not about terror, but about a father’s love for the bright light that is his daughter and his promise to be there for her in a world of uncertainty and threat. But though they were not crafted for this moment, the words feel apropos to it.
No, it is not monsters hiding under the bed by which civilization is menaced. But it is monsters just the same, forces of savagery, ignorance, hatred, fundamentalism and extremism striking from corners where light does not reach. And no one can guarantee perpetual safety against such threats.
But we can strike back hard when they come, as France is doing now. In the long run, though: It isn’t bullets and bombs these monsters fear the most, hate the most, or that hurts them the most. No, that which lurks in shadow despises light — and well it should. Light reveals bankrupt ideologies for the failures they are. Light draws people together. Light gives courage. And light gives hope.
So Vive la France!
And shine on.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald: The National Memo, November 18, 2015
“More Irrational Chatter”: Ben Carson Thinks Hillary Clinton Is Going To Jail
Ben Carson has predicted many things in his day. He has claimed that End Times were nigh. He has said that a new Hitler could rise. And yesterday, he said that Hillary Clinton will end up behind bars for her actions as Secretary of State.
“Hillary can well be in jail and it’s hard to run from there,” Carson said bemusedly during an interview on The John Gibson Show. He claimed that Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee less than an hour before the vice president announced that he would not seek the nomination. Gibson’s show runs from noon to 3 p.m.; the announcement came a little before 1 p.m.
“I would think that it would be Biden,” Carson said in his traditional deep-toned whisper, when asked who he would place his bets on.
After Gibson began laughing at the suggestion that Clinton would be in jail, he questioned whether Carson believed that an indictable offense would be discovered in Thursday’s Benghazi hearing.
“Or the computer server—uh—problems,” Carson drawled. Then he started walking it back on the spot.
“I think she may not be actually in jail but I think the controversy swirling around that will have an extremely damaging effect.”
Carson’s campaign did not respond when I asked what Carson had thought of the hearing, now entering its sixth hour, so far.
He spent the remainder of the interview discussing Paul Ryan’s bid for Speaker of the House, which he said he would support if the various caucuses did likewise, and suggested that saying President George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11 is a “blame game” that is not productive.
“Was there chatter going on about terrorist activity?” Carson asked, then proceeded to answer himself. “Of course there was. But not the kind of specific thing that would allow you to, through executive action, prevent such a thing. He certainly went into overdrive after that.”
The campaign has not provided clarification on what he meant by “chatter.”
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, October 22, 2015
“Appealing To Fear In The Name Of Security”: Marco Rubio Wants To Scare Americans Into Voting For Him
The 2014 midterm was the election of fear, and offered a likely foreshadowing of the strategy the Republicans will use to try and win the White House in 2016. In the midterms, the GOP stacked up impressive victories by brilliantly stoking a nightmare vision of an America about to be overrun by Ebola patients, anchor babies, and ISIS assassins. In their quest to replace Barack Obama, Republican presidential hopefuls are making the starkest possible case that security is the primary issue, eclipsing all others.
Yesterday, Marco Rubio announced the new theme of his campaign: “The fundamental problem we have in America is that nothing matters if we aren’t safe.” According to Rubio, “The world has never been more dangerous than it is today,” which means “the economic stuff” has to take a backseat to national security. Rubio’s emphasis on safety echoed a remark made by his rival Chris Christie the same day: “You can’t enjoy your civil liberties if you’re in a coffin.”
These statements are startling in the all-or-nothing choices they offer. Without security, “nothing matters.” If we don’t have security, we’ll be in a coffin. This black-and-white language negates the possibility that security is one value among others, that it needs to be balanced against competing values such as liberty or peace. It’s hard to imagine cruder appeals to fear.
And by appealing to fear in the name of security, they only ensure they’ll get less of what they say they want.
While some political leaders have relied on fear-mongering since time immemorial, the specific national security based anxiety voiced by Rubio and Christie has a particular lineage. According to George Mason historian Peter N. Stearns in his 2006 book American Fear, “American culture launched a really distinctive approach to fear only in the twentieth century: There was no long legacy of public fearfulness. Indeed, current standards are particularly striking in their contrast with nineteenth-century norms, which quite explicitly called on Americans, at least American men, to face fear directly and stare it down.”
Stearns locates the origins of fear culture in modern American politics in the Cold War. His argument is in keeping with findings of many historians that the very idea of “national security” as a pre-eminent goal crystallized in the early days of America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson said it was necessary to “scare the hell out of the country” in order to shore up support for an anti-communist foreign policy.
In his 1974 work The Logic of World Power, historian Franz Schurmann argued the Cold War consensus was based on “a new ideology” and “the key word and concept in that new ideology was security.” For Schurmann, part of the power of the concept of security was that it encompassed domestic economics as well as foreign policy. Social Security, after all, was the cornerstone of the New Deal. The promise of “national security” as a foreign policy goal was that it would bring the same type of peace of mind that Social Security gave to citizens.
In practice, the excessive weight given to security produced not greater calm but more fear. The search for absolute security could brook no opposition, so the enemy became not just Stalin’s USSR but the idea of communism, leading to a global crusade abroad and an ideological purge at home. As the conservative foreign policy analyst Robert W. Tucker noted in his 1971 book The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, “By interpreting security as a function not only of a balance between states but of the internal order maintained by states, the Truman Doctrine equated America’s security with interests that evidently went well beyond conventional security requirements.”
The hair-trigger overreactions of the early Cold War were revived after 9/11, when policymakers once again launched a global war on the grounds that it was needed to ensure security on the home front. The best articulation of the post-9/11 culture of fear—and the concomitant willingness to do almost anything to secure an impregnable level of safety or security—can be seen in the 1 percent doctrine as articulate by Vice President Dick Cheney: “If there’s a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” In effect, Cheney was calling for the United States to become one giant safe space, even if it meant massively overreacting to threats abroad.
Because of the language of security originated in the New Deal, the earliest critics of this discourse came from the political right. Throughout the early Cold War, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, the stalwart of the Republican right, warned that America was becoming “a garrison state.” In his libertarian classic The Road to Serfdom (1944), F.A. Hayek argued that, “nothing is more fatal than the present fashion among intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom. It is essential that we should relearn frankly to face the fact that freedom can be had only at a price and that as individuals we must be prepared to make severe material sacrifices to preserve our liberty.”
Hayek was of course writing about the economic realm, but his insistence that security needed to be balanced against liberty applies just as well to foreign policy. If Rubio and Christie had any interest in moving beyond the politics of fear, they could do well to read that earlier right-wing thinkers warned that the idolatry of security brings not safety but unending jitters and a loss of liberty.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor, The New Republic, May 19, 2015
“Rudy Giuliani’s Raging Bull”: Another New Yorker Who Held Onto The Spotlight For Too Long
So here we are at the start of a week after the country witnessed Rudy Giuliani doing a backstroke through the gutter of American politics. Apparently desperate for attention, the former mayor of New York jumped out of his seat at a gathering of wealthy Republicans who had assembled at the 21 Club in Manhattan in order to do a loud, please notice me, clown act.
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say,” Giuliani began his wrecking ball speech, “but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”
(Let’s pause right here in this off-the-cliff assault by the former mayor to remind everyone of something Obama’s loudest critics always insist is the case: This is not about race because it’s never about race when it comes to nut-boys attacking the President of the United States. Sure!)
“Going after patriotism is one thing,” Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary, was saying, “but the really, really bad stuff is, ‘He wasn’t raised the way you and I were.’ There’s only one connotation for that kind of stuff and that’s directly out of what some people were saying in the Alabama of the 1960s.”
From mid-morning September 11, 2001, and for many days to follow Giuliani was an admirable figure. He provided his city and his country with a wall of courage, resolve and determination to stand straight and move forward through the shock, the death and the ashes of what terror had done to America’s most visible city.
He behaved nobly. Attended hundreds of funerals for the fallen. Stood like a sentry, a permanent reminder in those awful days of that awful Fall that America would not–could not–be defeated by a cult of religious zealots who prayed for the death and demise of the United States.
Now, all these years later, he has evolved into a pathetic, political version of Jake La Motta.
La Motta, another New Yorker out of an earlier time, was “The Raging Bull” who fought his way to the world middleweight championship. He lost his middleweight title to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951 after one of the great prize fights of all time.
So La Motta decided to jump up one division in the hope of greater success. He joined the light heavyweight ranks. He was out of his league, out of his class and, soon, out of the ring completely.
But he loved the lights, the publicity, the attention, the fleeting fame that still surrounded him in New York. With some of the money he made with his fists, he bought a couple bars and ended up entertaining friends at bar-side and acting as both owner and bouncer too.
Punch drunk and clinging to a sad celebrity, he tried to be a stand-up comic but his act was sad, stale, and simply not funny. He was married seven times. He was a grifter, his best days all in history’s rear-view mirror.
Now, in this corner, wearing completely contemptible trunks, from the village of his own mind and memory, we have Rudy Giuliani wallowing in a bucket of resentment. He too is out of his league, punching way above his class.
In the other corner, we have the President of the United States, who emerged in the big ring on the evening of July 27, 2004. Then, Obama had been chosen to give the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention held in Boston.
“Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, “ Obama told the crowd, “America, that’s shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him.”
“…My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or ‘blessed,’ believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.”
“…I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
Four years later he won the presidency and four years after that he was re-elected President of the United States. His judge will be history. The verdict of his daily fight against constant opponents named global terror, fear, economic inequality, global warming, inequitable tax codes, inadequate health care, an incompetent Congress and a claque of politicians determined to destroy rather than simply defeat him will be rendered on some day down the road.
The clock on Rudy Giuliani’s end of days began ticking as soon as he walked out of City Hall. He ran for president once, his candidacy going up in flames nearly the moment he first opened his mouth. Now he’s opened it again and all that emerges is bitterness and a contempt that borders on hate. What a brutal end; a self-inflicted TKO.
By: Mike Barnicle, The Daily Beast, February 22, 2015
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