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“Sleeping Under A Rock”: Foreign Policy And The Definition Of ‘Manhood’

On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sounded a deeply pessimistic note about Russian incursions into Ukraine. “I think we’re going to lose eastern Ukraine if we continue as we are, and I think it’s going to be a geopolitical disaster if that occurs,” Corker told David Gregory.

Naturally, the Republican senator blamed the Obama administration, complaining that U.S. foreign policy “is always a day late and a dollar short,” adding that Russia’s actions are emblematic of the “era of permissiveness the U.S. has created around the world.”

It was the New York Times’ David Brooks, however, that took this same line of criticism to its “crude” limit.

“Basically since Yalta we’ve had an assumption that borders are basically going to be borders and once that comes into question if in Ukraine or in Crimea or anywhere else, then all over the world all bets are off.

“And let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a – I’ll say it crudely – but a manhood problem in the Middle East. Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he’s not tough enough.”

As Ben Armbruster noted, Chuck Todd echoed the sentiment, adding, “By the way, internally, they fear this. You know, it’s not just Bob Corker saying it, okay, questioning whether the president is being alpha male. That’s essentially what he’s saying: He’s not alpha dog enough. His rhetoric isn’t tough enough.”

It’s tough to know what to make of this, but it’s clearly important so let’s unpack it a bit.

Right off the bat, let’s note that it’s arguably well past time for the political world to stop equating “manhood” with “cruise missiles.” Being an “alpha male” or an “alpha dog” may somehow seem impressive, in a junior-high-school-yard sort of way, but when analyzing geopolitical crises, we need a different kind of framework.

There’s apparently a knee-jerk assumption among too many that “real men” use bombs, not diplomacy. If memory serves, President Obama’s predecessor, whom no one accused of having a perceived “manhood problem,” often thought the same way. The foreign policy consequences, however, were nevertheless disastrous.

What’s more, I’m struck by Brooks’ assumption that the White House isn’t “tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad.” Indeed, that already happened last year, when Obama threatened military force and Assad agreed to give up his chemical-weapons stockpiles.

Indeed, perhaps the strangest thing about asserting as fact that “there is an assumption” that Obama is “not tough enough” is all of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – even if we define “tough” in a way Brooks and others find satisfactory. It was this president who escalated the use of force against al Qaeda; it was this president that launched the mission that killed bin Laden; it was this president who increased the use of predator drones to strike at terrorist suspects (including killing Americans affiliated with al Qaeda living abroad); it was this president who helped assemble an international coalition to strike at the Gadhafi regime in Libya; and on and on.

If you knew literally nothing about the last five years, you might hear this chatter about “manhood” and “alpha males” and assume that President Obama was a pacifist, reluctant to use military force under any circumstances. But given what we know about what actually happened over the last five years, the scuttlebutt is just bizarre.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 21, 2014

April 23, 2014 Posted by | Foreign Policy, Middle East, Russia | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Manly Men Condemn Obama’s Lack of Manliness”: An Immature, Infantile Conception Of Foreign Affairs

Here’s a question: If Hillary Clinton becomes president, what are conservatives going to say when they want to criticize her for not invading a sufficient number of other countries? I ask because yesterday, David Brooks said on Meet the Press that Barack Obama has “a manhood problem in the Middle East.” Because if he were more manly, then by now the Israelis and Palestinians would have resolved their differences, Iraq would be a thriving, peaceful democracy, and Iran would have given up its nuclear ambitions. Just like when George W. Bush was president, right?

It really is remarkable how persistent and lacking in self-awareness the conservative obsession with presidential testosterone is. Here’s the exchange:

DAVID BROOKS: And, let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a (I’ll say it crudely) but a manhood problem in the Middle East: Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad, somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair. But certainly in the Middle East, there’s an assumption he’s not tough–

CHUCK TODD: By the way, internally, they fear this. You know, it’s not just Bob Corker saying it, okay, questioning whether the president is being alpha male. That’s essentially what he’s saying: He’s not alpha dog enough. His rhetoric isn’t tough enough. They agree with the policy decisions that they’re making. Nobody is saying– but it is sort of the rhetoric. Internally this is a question.

Because Brooks is a somewhat moderate conservative who writes for a paper read mostly by liberals, he naturally equivocates a little, distancing himself from the assessment even as he’s making it. Chuck Todd too trots out the passive voice, to impute this decision to nameless others. “Internally this is a question”—what does that mean, exactly? That members of the White House staff spend their days fretting about the President’s manliness?

This kind of infantile conception of foreign affairs, where countries and leaders don’t have interests or incentives or constraints that need to be understood in order to act wisely, but all that matters is whether you’re “tough” and “strong,” is distressingly common among people on the right who think of themselves as foreign policy experts.

And of course, neither Brooks nor Todd says exactly what form the manliness they wish to see in Barack Obama ought to take. Should he challenge a group of neighborhood toughs to a fight? Overhaul the transmission on the presidential limousine? Shoot an animal or two? (And by the way, a child can shoot an animal—if you want to convince me hunting is manly, I’ll believe it when you kill a mountain lion with your bare hands.)

As Todd says, “it is sort of the rhetoric,” meaning that the only bit of “toughness” they can imagine is rhetorical toughness. If Obama would start droppin’ his “g”s, maybe squint his eyes when he’s mad like Dubya used to do, and issue the occasional threat—”If you go any farther, you’re gonna be sorry, pardner”—then other countries would do exactly what we want them to. Oh wait, I know what he should do: land on an aircraft carrier, then strut around for a while in a flight suit.

Back in the real world, that isn’t just idiotic, it doesn’t actually work. Again, George W. Bush was about as “tough” as they come by these standards, and no sane person could argue that made his foreign policy brilliant and effective.

So the next time anyone says Obama should be “tougher” or “stronger” or “more manly,” they ought to be asked exactly what actions they’re recommending. And if they say it’s a matter of rhetoric, then the next question should be, “Do you believe that a change in Obama’s rhetoric would fundamentally alter the situation in [Ukraine, Syria, wherever]? They’ll probably respond, “Of course not, but…” And that’s all you need to hear.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 21, 2014

April 22, 2014 Posted by | Foreign Policy, Middle East, Ukraine | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Travesty In Chattanooga”: Republicans Making Sure Their Own People Are Kept In As Submissive A Position As Possible

I wish I could say I’ve never seen the likes of the campaign of intimidation that led to the vote against UAW representation at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday. But I did, as a child growing up in a Georgia textile company town in the early 1960s, where public schools began the year on Labor Day, the word “union” was not said out loud, and people still graphically remembered National Guardsmen being called out to break a strike at Callaway Mills back in 1935—the same year Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act.

I’m a little rusty on my labor law, but I’m reasonably sure that any employer who issued the sorts of threats made by Republican politicians in Tennessee (including Sen. Bob Corker, Gov. Bill Haslam, and a variety of state legislators, backed by national conservative figures like Grove Norquist) against a unionization effort would have been in blatant violation of the NLRA. But that’s what makes the incident such a travesty: it wasn’t the employer fighting the union (VW by all accounts was neutral-to-positive towards unionization, which would have facilitated establishment of the kind of “work council” the company had set up at other international plants to help maintain good employer-employee relations). As Brent Snavely of the Detroit Free Press reported (probably incredulously):

The crusade by anti-union forces in Tennessee, including the state’s governor and senior senator, is as much a fight with Volkswagen management as with the UAW.

Not only are Republican legislators accusing Volkswagen of backing the UAW, some of their leaders on Monday threatened to withhold tax incentives for future expansion of the three-year-old assembly plant in Chattanooga if workers vote this week to join the UAW.

So addicted are Tennessee Republicans to the “race to the bottom” approach to economic development that they are willing to risk the good will of an existing employer in their zeal to make sure their own people are kept in as submissive a position as possible. President Obama’s reported comment during a Democratic retreat last week that the pols involved in this union-busting effort are “more concerned about German shareholders than American workers” is one way to put it; I’d say they’ve internalized the ancient despicable tendency of the southern aristocracy to favor the abasement of working people as an end in itself.

This incident is also a pretty good symptom of the radicalization of the Republican Party. It’s one thing to oppose collective bargaining rights for public employees, or to defend “right-to-work” laws that interfere with the contracting rights of employers and employees and create “freeriders” who benefit from union collective bargaining without paying dues. But now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.

I thought it was bizarre when SC Governor Nikki Haley said in her 2012 State of the State address: “We don’t have unions in South Carolina because we don’t need unions in South Carolina.” Turns out she was ahead of the curve.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 17, 2014

February 18, 2014 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Unions | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Preserving The Race To The Bottom”: Just How Much Do Republicans Hate Unions?

If you ask Republicans about their antipathy toward unions, they’ll say that letting workers bargain collectively reduces a company’s ability to act efficiently in the marketplace. If you knew anything about business, the market advocates will patiently explain, you’d understand that unions, with all their rules and conditions and strike threats, only make it harder for the company to make its products. Let management make decisions about things like wages and working conditions, and the result will be higher profits and more jobs, which will benefit everyone. In almost all cases, the corporation agrees; after all, union workers always earn better wages than their non-union counterparts, and they give power to the employees, which no CEO wants.

What most people probably don’t realize is that this inherently hostile relationship between management and unions isn’t something that’s inherent in capitalism. In fact, in many places where there are capitalists making lots of money, corporations work—now hold on here while I blow your mind—cooperatively with unions. One of those places is Germany, and one of the biggest German companies, Volkswagen, is right now embroiled in a union election in Tennessee that has turned into a bizarre spectacle that is showing the true colors of American conservatism. If you thought conservative were just laissez faire capitalists, seeking freedom for businesses to create prosperity, you’re dead wrong. What they actually want is something much uglier.

On Monday, our own Harold Meyerson explained the context and history driving this election, but the short version is that in its Chattanooga plant, Volkswagen wants to create a “works council” of the kind that companies in Germany use, which is a system where management and workers come together to set policies, plan strategy, and solve problems. The details of U.S. labor law require a union if such a council is going to be created, which is one reason VW has seemed supportive of the United Auto Workers organizing the plant. Although VW hasn’t come out and said they support the union, the signals they’ve sent strongly suggest that they do. “Our works councils are key to our success and productivity,” said the VW executive who runs the Chattanooga plant.

So faced with a union-friendly corporation, what have Republicans in the state done? One might expect them to say, “Every company should have the freedom to decide how to deal with its own workers; we may not be big fans of unions, but that freedom is what capitalism is all about,” or something like that. But no. The Republican governor and state legislators have begun issuing threats that there won’t be any future tax incentives for the company if the union wins the election. In other words, tax incentives are vital to bring jobs to the state—but if they’re union jobs, we don’t want them. We’d rather see our constituents unemployed than see them get jobs with union representation. So what you now have is Republicans fighting against a corporation to try to impose their vision of management-labor relations, one the corporation doesn’t want.

Then yesterday, Republican Sen. Bob Corker claimed, “I’ve had conversations today and based on those am assured that should the workers vote against the UAW, Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will manufacture its new mid-size SUV here in Chattanooga.” There are two things to understand about Corker’s statement. First, it doesn’t pass the smell test: the Chattanooga plant is the only Volkswagen factory in the world that doesn’t have a union, and the company has already made its good relationship with unions in general, and its desire for a works council there in particular, quite clear. And second, that kind of blatant attempt to intimidate workers into voting against the union when the election is going on is probably illegal, and could result in the election being halted and rescheduled.

What this issue has revealed is that while one might have thought that as far as conservatives are concerned, the creation of workplaces in which employees are given low wages and few benefits, and generally treated like crap, was merely a means to an end, the end being corporate profits and maximum freedom for business owners. But what we’re now seeing is that a powerless and beaten-down workforce isn’t a means to a larger end, and it isn’t a byproduct. It is the end in itself. It’s the goal. Here you have a highly profitable company that wants to have a more cooperative relationship with its workers, and obviously sees a union as a path to that relationship, because they know that they can work that way with unions, since they do it already all over the world. But the Republican politicians don’t care about what the corporation wants. They are so venomously opposed to collective bargaining that they’ll toss aside all their supposed ideals about economic liberty in a heartbeat.

One of the absurd arguments they’ve made is that other companies, like suppliers, won’t want to come to Tennessee if there’s a unionized auto plant there, as though it were some kind of infection others would fear they might catch. That’s ridiculous, of course—if you have a company that makes car parts, and VW wants to buy thousands and thousands of your parts, you’re damn sure going to set up shop next to their factory if that’s the best way to make money. What Republicans are really afraid of is that the union will come in to the Chattanooga plant and things will work well. If that happened, the rationale for the race to the bottom would be severely undermined. And the idea that corporations can do well by treating their employees like partners and not like enemies might indeed spread.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 13, 2014

February 14, 2014 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Unions | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Very High Price”: A Lesson For Moderates In The Government Shutdown Denouement

We should never govern ourselves like this again. We cannot create absolutely pointless crises that make our great democracy look foolish around the globe. We cannot give Chinese government propagandists fodder as they call for “a de-Americanized world.” We must not allow the extremist politics of a tea party minority to turn our republic upside down.

Our nation escaped the worst. But there were consequences to the decision of a craven House Republican leadership that knew full well it was picking a fight it could not win. House Speaker John Boehner did the right thing at the very end but only after a series of time-wasting gestures designed to coddle his party’s radical wing. These are the folks who denied the dangers of going past the debt ceiling, see the Affordable Care Act as a Stalinist adventure, compare President Obama to Al Capone and, in many cases, still aren’t sure where our twice-elected president was born or what his religion is.

As long as Boehner permits this lunatic fringe — there’s no other way to describe it — to have a virtual veto power in his caucus, we will descend into chaos again and again. And as long as more middle-of-the-road conservatives hang back because they fear primary challenges, scoldings from Heritage Action or occasional insults from the talk-show barons, the Republican Party will remain in receivership.

Those who genuinely want a more moderate approach to politics must also reflect on what just happened. Obama and an astonishingly unified Democratic Party insisted that there could be no negotiation over raising the debt ceiling. It was time, they said, to stand up against government by intimidation. This made many who chase the political center, no matter how far to the right conservatives might drag it, uneasy. Their critiques took many forms: that Obama should “lead” more, that he should be more “involved,” that refusing to negotiate sounded so ill-tempered.

The irony the centrists must confront is that there is now a larger opening for moderate governance precisely because foes of the far right’s extra-constitutional abuses of the congressional process stood firm. In doing so, they brought a large majority of the American people with them. Republicans paid a very high price for a benighted strategy, which gives the most thoughtful among them at least a chance of pushing their party back to more reasonable ground.

And because the effort to hold the country hostage to right-wing demands failed, a crisis of this kind is less likely in the future. Sen. Ted Cruz and those who joined his doomed crusade against Obamacare find themselves discredited. Cruz acknowledged as much when he slipped away, announcing he would not block a deal of the very sort that, just days earlier, he was denouncing as a shameful sellout.

Obama needs to build on this victory. He must push the national and congressional agendas back toward the issues the nation cares about — above all, shared and more rapid economic growth and lower unemployment. This, in turn, means a real effort over the next two months of budget talks to ease deep sequester cuts that are harming the economy in exchange for the first steps toward longer-term deficit reduction.

To keep the initiative, Obama needs to engage with Congress as he never has before. His recent efforts to build relationships with more level-headed conservatives such as Sen. Bob Corker appear to have paid off in this round, and he could use help from such Republicans again. He should extend his diplomacy to members of his own party who stood with him in this fight and who would be bolstered by expressions of presidential gratitude that they have not always received. His task is to build a broad front against crisis-to-crisis governance by rebuilding confidence in government itself and the role it plays in American life.

But nothing good can happen unless Republicans take on their extremists and unless everyone acknowledges that ,at the moment, there is no equivalent on the left side of American politics to the right-wing radicalism that has just put our country through this wasteful and dangerous exercise.

In condemning the paranoid politics of the John Birch Society in 1962, William F. Buckley Jr. asked his fellow conservatives whether they would “continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false.” This is, alas, a live question again. It must be answered forcefully and fearlessly.

 

By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 16, 2013

October 17, 2013 Posted by | Debt Ceiling, Default, Government Shut Down | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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