No, Killing Of Bin Laden Does Not Represent ‘Continuity’ With Bush
Conservatives have attempted to credit George W. Bush for President Barack Obama’s success in killing Osama bin Laden in various ways, from exaggerating the role of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” to praising Bush’s unsuccessful seven year attempt to do so.
Today, Ross Douthat offers the latest version of this argument: That killing Bin Laden constitutes “the most visible proof” so far of Bush-Obama continuity in matters of national security:
The death of Osama bin Laden, in a raid that operationalized Bush’s famous “dead or alive” dictum, offered the most visible proof of this continuity. But the more important evidence of the Bush-Obama convergence lay elsewhere, in developments from last week that didn’t merit screaming headlines, because they seemed routine rather than remarkable.
This is an odd formulation that ignores that the hunt for bin Laden predated the Bush administration — remember that conservatives accused President Bill Clinton of “wagging the dog” when authorizing missile strikes against al Qaeda in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Yet Douthat does not praise Clinton in making this argument about “continuity,” because doing so would acknowledge that any president, regardless of party, would regard it as part of his duty to defend American citizens from terrorism.
While there are indeed many examples of Obama continuing Bush-era policies to the frustration of liberals, killing bin Laden is not one of them. Rather, Obama’s focus on bin Laden represents a departure from his predecessor, who had decided shortly after 9/11 that bin Laden was “just a person who’s been marginalized,” just a small part of a much larger battle. As Michael Hirsh wrote last week, Obama rejected the Bush approach that “conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah,” replacing it with “with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.”
During the 2008 election, Bush mocked Obama for asserting he would target bin Laden if he was hiding in Pakistan. GOP presidential candidate John McCain attacked Obama as “confused and inexperienced” for saying so.” It is a bit rich to regard the results of an operation that Bush and McCain would have opposed as “continuity” with the prior administration. There are a number of disturbing continuities between Bush and Obama on national security, but the singular focus on bin Laden isn’t one of them.
What is notable however, is that the major distinction between Obama and Bush that has formed the basis of GOP criticism of Obama — the President’s rejection of torture — has proven so decisively wrongheaded. Conservatives attempting to attribute successfully killing bin Laden to torture are merely attempting to take credit for what President Bush pointedly failed to do. Far from yielding the necessary intelligence, the two al Qaeda suspects who were waterboarded pointedly resisted identifying the courier whose activities lead to the U.S. discovering Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. The pro-torture argument ignores the obvious — that if torture was so effective, bin Laden would have been dead long ago. Bin Laden was found through years of painstaking intelligence gathering, not through the barbarous methods supported by many Bush apologists.
One cannot discount how shattering the Obama administration’s killing of Bin Laden has been to the self-image of conservatives who have convinced themselves of that the fight against al Qaeda hinges not just on torture, but on how many times the president says the word “terrorism,” or on Obama’s refusal to engage in juvenile expressions of American toughness.
While we’re far from the moment where terrorism ceases to be a threat, what torture apologists fear most now is a future in which al Qaeda is destroyed without the U.S. embracing the war-on-terror “dark side” that’s become central to their identity. Indeed, having rejected torture, Obama has nevertheless lead the country to its greatest victory in the fight against al Qaeda.
By: Adam Serwer, The Washington Post-The Plum Line, May 9, 2011
Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!: It’s A Bad Sign When One Of Your Errors Is Your Book Title
This was the week we’ve been waiting for! Decades into the future, you will be able to tell your grandchildren where you were when Mitt Romney announced that he had formed a presidential exploratory committee.
Who knew he needed to explore? He said he was running on his Christmas card, for Lord’s sake.
My job today is to give you a run-through of every book Mitt Romney has ever written. Fortunately, there are only two: “Turnaround,” which is about his stint as the leader of the troubled 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games, and “No Apology,” his campaign tome, which used to be subtitled “The Case for American Greatness” but is now “Believe in America.”
Perhaps three. When the new paperback edition of “No Apology” came out in February, early readers noted that not only had Romney added a new subtitle but also a new preface, ranting about the founders-hating big spenders who are now running the country. And, most notably, he had also changed some critical chunks of the original to make the text more Tea Party-friendly.
For instance, paperback Romney has now noticed that the Massachusetts health insurance law that he championed as governor does have some flaws, all of which are because of anti-freedom provisions that the Democrats in the State Legislature put in. Also, the stimulus was way, way worse than he originally thought.
We all know that Mitt has a habit of, um, mutating to the political winds. So even in its earlier incarnation, the book had a decidedly uneven tone. “Despite my affiliation with the Republican Party, I don’t think of myself as highly partisan,” Moderate Mitt wrote toward the end. This comes after 300 pages of unrelenting attacks on Barack Obama and every member of his party since Andrew Jackson. He blames Bill Clinton for everything from cutting military spending to presiding over an administration during which “birth to teenage mothers rose to their highest level in decades.” I’m sure this week’s Romney does not regard that as a partisan statement even though teenage birth rates actually fell spectacularly during that exact period.
The book is heavy into policy and rather sparse on personal history, except for the parts that relate to his dad being a successful businessman and Mitt himself being an entrepreneurial hero along the deal-making, business-closing, job-slashing private equity line. Romney’s earlier book, “Turnaround,” had some great stories about his Mormon ancestors, including a great-grandmother who single-handedly drove her children to Mexico in a covered wagon during the Indian wars. “At one point along the way, she came across freshly slaughtered U.S. Cavalry horses. She paused only long enough to pry the shoes from the wasted horses, re-shod her own wagon horses, and journey on,” he wrote. Truly, “No Apology” could use a whole lot more of Hannah Romney and a whole lot less about the causes of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Also, there is not a single mention in “No Apology” of the fact that Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car. I regard this as a critical oversight, although perhaps it was Seamus that Romney was thinking of when he chose his title.
But, according to the book, “No Apology” refers to Romney’s objections to President Obama’s alleged habit of going around the world, asking other countries to forgive America for its faults. This Obama apologizing tour is an article of Tea Party faith, but one that PolitiFact analyzed a while back and found it to be false. (“Yes, there is criticism in some of his speeches, but it’s typically leavened by praise for the United States and its ideals.”)
Anybody can make a mistake, but it’s a bad sign when one of your errors is your title.
Of all the awful books by presidential candidates I have read this year, “No Apology” was the hardest to get through. To be fair, Romney does write a lot about the issues, but in a way that makes you feel as if you’re trapped at a school assembly where a long-winded donor is telling you what life is all about. (“If I may return to my engine analogy from earlier in this chapter: Our economy is powered by two pistons …”)
“Turnaround” is a much easier book to read, even though it requires a pretty keen interest in how the Salt Lake City Olympics planners saved the day after Mitt took over in 1999. I was particularly fascinated by Romney’s insistent contention that he is a fun guy. (“I love jokes, and I love laughing.”) There is not much evidence of actual humor, although Romney says that when he visited the Clinton White House, he prankishly protested being given a visitor’s badge that had a red A on it, saying, “I’m not the one that cheated on my wife.”
Maybe you had to be there.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 15, 2011
“I’m Not A Politician So Let Me Be Perfectly Clear”: Raise America’s Taxes!
President Obama in his speech on Wednesday confronted a topic that is harder to address seriously in public than sex or flatulence: America needs higher taxes.
That ugly truth looms over today’s budget battles, but politicians have mostly preferred to run from reality. Mr. Obama’s speech was excellent not only for its content but also because he didn’t insult our intelligence.
There is no single reason for today’s budget mess, but it’s worth remembering that the last time our budget was in the black was in the Clinton administration. That’s a broad hint that one sensible way to overcome our difficulties would be to revert to tax rates more or less as they were under President Clinton. That single step would solve three-quarters of the deficit for the next five years or so.
Paradoxically, nothing makes the need for a tax increase more clear than the Republican budget proposal crafted by Representative Paul Ryan. The Republicans propose slashing spending far more than the public would probably accept — even dismantling Medicare — and rely on economic assumptions that are not merely rosy, but preposterous.
Yet even so, the Republican plan shows continuing budget deficits until the 2030s. In short, we can’t plausibly slash our way back to solid fiscal ground. We need more revenue.
Kudos to Mr. Obama for boldly stating that truth in his speech — even if he did focus only on taxes for the very wealthiest. I also thought he was right to say that we need spending cuts — including in our defense budget. Mr. Obama didn’t say so, but the United States accounts for almost as much military spending as the entire rest of the world put together.
As I see it, there are three fallacies common in today’s budget discussions:
• Republicans are the party of responsible financial stewardship, struggling to put America on a sound footing.
In truth, both parties have been wildly irresponsible, but in cycles. Democrats were more irresponsible in the 1960s, the two parties both seemed care-free in the ’70s and ’80s, and since then the Republicans have been staggeringly reckless.
After the Clinton administration began paying down America’s debt, Republicans passed the Bush tax cuts, waded into a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, and approved an unfunded prescription medicine benefit — all by borrowing from China. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney scoffed that “deficits don’t matter.”
This borrow-and-spend Republican history makes it galling when Republicans now assert that deficits are the only thing that matter — and call for drastic spending cuts, two-thirds of which would harm low-income and moderate-income Americans, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To pay for tax cuts heaped largely on the wealthiest Americans, Republicans in effect would gut Medicare and slash jobs programs, family planning and college scholarships. Instead of spreading opportunity, federal policy would cap it.
• Low tax rates are essential to create incentives for economic growth: a tax increase would stifle the economy.
It’s true that, in general, higher taxes tend to reduce incentives. But this seems a weak effect, often overwhelmed by other factors.
Were Americans really lazier in the 1950s, when marginal tax rates peaked at more than 90 percent? Are people in high-tax states like Massachusetts more lackadaisical than folks in a state like Florida that has no personal income tax at all?
Tax increases can also send a message of prudence that stimulates economic growth. The Clinton tax increase of 1993 was followed by a golden period of high growth, while the Bush tax cuts were followed by an anemic economy.
• We can’t afford Medicare.
It’s true that America faces a basic problem with rapidly rising health care costs. But the Republican plan does nothing serious to address health care spending, other than stop paying bills. Indeed, Medicare is cheaper to administer than private health insurance (2 percent to 6 percent administrative costs, depending on who does the math, compared with about 12 percent for private plans). So the Republican plan might add to health care spending rather than curb it.
The real challenge is to control health care inflation. Nobody is certain how to do that, but the Obama health care law is testing some plausible ideas. These include rigorous research on which procedures work and which don’t. Why pay for surgery on enlarged prostates if certain kinds of patients turn out to be better with no treatment at all?
Ever since Walter Mondale publicly committed hara-kiri in 1984 by telling voters that he would raise their taxes, politicians have run from fiscal reality. As baby boomers age and require Social Security and Medicare, escapism will no longer suffice. We need to have a frank national discussion of painful steps ahead, and since I’m not a politician, let me be perfectly clear: raise my taxes!
By: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, April 13, 2011
With Truants And Teabaggers In Congress, How Do We Stop The Next Shutdown Threat?
I began work as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore on Nov. 13, 1995, one day before the first of two government shutdowns that year. I arrived to find a stack of furlough forms on my desk; I spent the day introducing myself to new colleagues . . . and laying them off. Throughout the building unease was palpable: People had bills to pay, and junior White House staffers had little cushion in their bank accounts.
Too many in government faced, and narrowly escaped, that same fate last week. The prospect of future shutdowns still looms, and the pain from a shutdown of any duration would be widespread. Effects of the 1995 shutdown included a halt in toxic cleanups at more than 600 sites; delays in deploying hundreds of new border agents and processing more than 200,000 passports; and closure of more than 300 parks, with losses to the tourism economy.
How did we get to the brink? And what lessons can we apply from the past to ensure this scenario doesn’t arise again?
There would be no political winners in a shutdown. Many Democrats recall the 1995 shutdown as a pivotal point in the Clinton presidency — the moment when his political comeback was cinched and the GOP began its slide to defeat in 1996. But the truth is more complicated. President Bill Clinton’s approval ratings fell during the shutdown and rose again only after the government reopened. The GOP’s political debacle stemmed in large part from Newt Gingrich’s comment that the shutdown was “payback” for a bad seat on Air Force One — a remark that former representative Tom DeLay later described as causing “the whole moral tone of the shutdown [to be] lost.” While Democrats emerged from this confrontation with a strong hand, there is no guarantee that a future crisis will end well. Undisciplined mistakes could foil their party as easily as the GOP.
Republicans would approach the next juncture in an even weaker position. Recent events showed that some learned from the severe political fallout from the 1995 shutdown, but others still believe the real mistake was compromising with Clinton to end the standoff. House Speaker John Boehner said last week that “there’s no daylight between the Tea Party and me,” just a day after Tea Party protesters chanted “shut it down, shut it down” near his office. And this deal didn’t make it less likely the speaker will reach one next time.
President Obama won this round, navigating difficult currents to take command of the situation and protecting nascent economic growth.
But this economy will continue to be far more fragile than the one Clinton managed during the confrontation in 1995, so simply putting this crisis behind us isn’t enough.
To lessen the odds of a repeat when the current year’s appropriations inevitably remain unfinished this fall, the president should do four things.
First, he has to continue to drive home — as he has in recent days — what the American people have at stake in a government shutdown. Obama must seize the moment, as Clinton did in 1996, to prepare for future confrontations; highlighting the Tea Party’s lusty cheering for a shutdown underscores both an ideological zeal that is indifferent to a shutdown’s real-world effects, and a contrast that can shape the governing and political dynamic for the final two years of his term.
Second, he should use this reprieve to direct his advisers to reexamine the basic legal framework for any future government shutdown: a January 1981 memo from outgoing Attorney General Ben Civiletti, and a subsequent directive from the Office of Management and Budget, that created the dichotomy that sends most federal workers home in a shutdown, except those whose activities are deemed “essential.” The attorney general could preemptively broaden the list of activities considered essential, substantially lessening the stakes in future standoffs. A 1990 amendment to the relevant federal statute narrowed room for creative interpretation of the law, but in the 1995 shutdown Clinton authorized 50,000 workers to return to their jobs, saying that their processing of Social Security and veterans benefit applications was “essential” to avoid a soaring backlog. A similar expansion of the definition of “essential activities” would minimize the portion of the government that could be held hostage in a future stalemate.
Third, he can explore the path employed to end the U.S. government shutdown in January 1996 — which ended not with a year-long agreement to fund the government (that didn’t come until April) but with a continuing resolution that included language categorizing all activities by federal workers as essential, allowing them to return to work even when funding expired. Putting such a measure in place now, in advance of the next crisis period, would ensure that workers remain on the job even when future battles over policy riders and spending levels rage.
Finally, the president should use the momentum gained in this confrontation to press for enactment of an automatic continuing resolution that would keep the entire federal government functioning at the prior year’s spending level when no other funding plan is in place. Congress has passed the regular appropriations bills on time in fewer than 10 of the past 60 years; the odds of success this year are remote. Tolerating unmanaged uncertainty about government funding is like walking around Washington in April without an umbrella: You will get wet; the only question is when.
President Obama averted disaster this time. But steps must be explored to prevent such near misses in the future.
By: Ron Klain, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 8, 2011
Republican Balanced Budget Amendment: The Worst Idea In Washington
Bruce Bartlett takes a look at the Balanced Budget Amendment all 47 Republicans signed their names to and pronounces it “quite possibly the stupidest constitutional amendment I think I have ever seen. It looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin.”
I think “stupid” is the wrong word. “Dangerous” is more like it. And maybe “radical.” This isn’t just a Balanced Budget Amendment. It also includes a provision saying that tax increases would require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress — so, it includes a provision making it harder to balance the budget — and another saying that total spending couldn’t exceed 18 percent of GDP. No allowances are made for recessions, though allowances are made for wars. Not a single year of the Bush administration would qualify as constitutional under this amendment. Nor would a single year of the Reagan administration. The Clinton administration would’ve had exactly two years in which it wasn’t in violation.
Read that again: Every single Senate Republican has endorsed a constitutional amendment that would’ve made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional. That’s how far to the right the modern GOP has swung.
But the problem isn’t simply that the proposed amendment is extreme. It’s also unworkable. The baby boomers are retiring and health costs are rising. Unless you have a way to stop one or the other from happening — and no one does — spending as a percentage of GDP is going to have to rise. This proposal doesn’t interrupt those trends. It simply refuses to acknowledge them — or, to be more generous, it rules them unconstitutional. This is the equivalent of trying to keep your kid cute by passing a law saying he’s not allowed to grow up.
Another problem: In a recession, tax revenue plummets and GDP stops growing, but spending has to be sustained, or even increased, to a) give people unemployment insurance and Medicaid and other services they need and b) keep the economy from contracting violently. This amendments includes no provisions for recessions, meaning that when the economy contracted, the government would have to contract as well. That is to say, we’re still not out of one of the deepest recessions in American history, and every Senate Republican has co-sponsored a constitutional amendment to make future recessions worse. It’s just breathtaking.
A world in which this amendment is added to the Constitution is a world in which America effectively becomes California. It’s a world where the procedural impediments to passing budgets and raising revenues are so immense that effective fiscal management is essentially impossible; it’s a world where we can’t make public investments or sustain the safety net; it’s a world where recessions are much worse than they currently are and the government has to do more of its work off-budget through regulation and gimmickry. I would like to say something positive about this proposal, say there’s some silver lining here. But there isn’t. This is economic demagoguery, and nothing more. It’s so unrealistic that it would’ve ruled all but two of the last 30 years unconstitutional, which means it’s so unrealistic that there has not yet been a Republican president who has proven it can be done. And that doesn’t just suggest it can’t be done: It suggests that when Republicans are actually in power and have control of the budget, they know perfectly well that it shouldn’t be done. They’re just pretending otherwise for the moment.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, April 1, 2011
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