“The Absence Of His Convictions”: The Tough-Talking Chris Christie Suddenly Seems Rather Shy
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) held a wide-ranging press conference yesterday at an event in Tennessee, inexplicably calling the Affordable Care Act a “failure” despite all the evidence to the contrary, and blaming violence in Israel on the Obama administration for reasons that don’t make sense.
But those rhetorical shots were easy, and the fact that there were wide-ranging questions doesn’t necessarily mean there were wide-ranging answers. Time’s Zeke Miller reported that Christie is “making moves to prepare for a presidential run,” but the governor does not “answer questions like a presidential candidate.”
Sometimes the straight-talking governor of New Jersey doesn’t talk all that straight. Gov. Chris Christie casts himself as a decider, steering his state through rough economic waters, while setting himself up for a run for the White House. At the National Governors Association meeting in Nashville on Saturday, Christie lambasted the Obama administration’s Middle East policy and its inability to negotiate with Congress.
But he skipped as many issues as he took on. Just what he would do when faced with some of the nation’s hardest policy challenges remains unclear.
Should lawmakers raise the gas tax to pay for transportation projects? Christie didn’t want to give an opinion. Should unaccompanied minors from Central America be sent back? Christie said he’s “not going to get into all that.” Should the U.S. intervene militarily against Hamas? Christie dodged that, too.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it keeps happening. Christie presents himself as a bold trailblazer, ready to lead his party and his nation, but when asked for his opinions on current events, suddenly the tough-talking governor seems rather shy.
Two weeks ago, for example, Christie was asked for his opinion on the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby/contraception ruling. He refused to give an opinion either way. It followed an interview in which Christie refused to give an opinion on immigration reform, declining to even reiterate support for public remarks he’s already made.
Before that, when the U.S. policy in Syria reached a crisis point, Christie refused to take a stand on that, too.
In an interview earlier this month, the New Jersey Republican actually took some pride in his ability to dodge questions, saying it’s the mark of “a good leader.”
It’s actually the opposite. Good leaders generally aren’t afraid to answer questions about current events, afraid of what one constituency or another might say in response. As we talked about at the time, Christie used to present himself as a no-nonsense straight talker, afraid of nothing and no one. Now the prospect of sharing his take on the major issues of the day makes him uncomfortable.
Is this really the “brand” Christie wants to cultivate in advance of a national campaign?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 14, 2014
“Pro-Punishment”: Right-To-Lifers Are Hypocrites — And Here’s Why
A caveat: I don’t include nuns in this formulation, simply because “right-to-life” has come to mean the anti-abortion movement exclusively. Nuns have the ethical and spiritual integrity to be consistent in their belief that all life (as they define it) is sacred. In fact, that consistency is what illuminates the hypocrisy of the anti-choice movement.
Right-to-lifers (unlike many nuns) do not hold candlelight vigils outside prisons when a death row inmate is about to be executed. No buffer zone needs to be established, corrections officials don’t have to worry about their personal addresses being posted, or their facilities being bombed. Wardens are not shot by those who insist “Thou Shall Not Kill” is a commandment that must be respected no matter what the circumstances. In fact, these Biblicists are just as informed by the Hammurabi code: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” They adhere to the notion that the “right” to life can be revoked; it is conditional on one’s actions.
This tacit admission that life is not universally deserved is a crucial crack in their stance against abortion. They don’t decry our military engaging in “just” war, in the execution of murderers and terrorists. Ironically for the Tea Party libertarians among them, they don’t even object to the right of the state to determine whether some citizens should forfeit their lives for some crimes. But they object to the right of a woman to decide for herself whether her fetus, or even a fertilized egg not yet attached to the uterine wall, should be carried to term. In their thinking, fetuses have done nothing to “deserve” their fate.
You can’t, on the one hand, claim that all life is sacred, and then remain silent when men and women — some later determined to be innocent — are executed. That silence is a concession to the principle that the right to life is conditional. One can see this psychology of “deservedness” in the present humanitarian crisis on the border. The angry anti-immigrant placard-wavers are overwhelmingly rightwing, of the very same ilk that decries abortion. The right-to-lifers ringing abortion clinics have not abandoned their posts to run to the border in defense of real woman and children. For “they” do not “deserve” a chance at life in the United States, free from the violence and deprivation they are fleeing. They are “illegal.” They “bring disease” (an absurd charge that has become ubiquitous.) By extension, those yearning masses puff up the inner contention of the flag-waving nationalists that being born here is some sort of accomplishment instead of an accident of birth. As if learning English as a toddler was an extraordinary feat of patriotism: Congratulations, your racism comes without an accent!
If we concede that some life is deserved and some not — after all, very few liberals cried at the death of Osama Bin Laden — then we can confront the thorny question of whether some fetuses somehow deserve to live while others do not. I would reframe the issue as whether every child deserves to be wanted, to be welcomed without resentment, to have a mother who doesn’t consider her offspring a burden. How many millions have to grow up in poverty, fill our foster care systems, endure sexual, physical and emotional abuse, end up in prison or even on death row for the right-to-lifers to acknowledge that life without sufficient love or resources breeds despair without hope?
Let me state, for those who are prone to confuse “unwanted” with “unplanned,” that I fully support the decision of all women who may have conceived accidentally to bring the birth to term — whether she brings up the child herself or chooses to provide a loving family with an adoptive gift. Pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion. The irony, of course, is that those who support a woman’s right to choose are also the most fervently pro-access-to-contraception while the right-to-lifers are the most hostile to it, as evidenced in the recent Hobby Lobby decision. This has always made no sense. Those who oppose abortion should be the most passionate in making it as rare as possible.
The truth is that it is not the right of the fetus to life that really drives them. It is their belief that woman who have sex for pleasure should bear the “consequences” of their decision. The hostility is tangible — I have the hate-tweets to prove it. For men, not so much. Hobby Lobby had no objection to reimbursing Viagra and Cialis, made no stipulation that it be made available for married men only. The sole purpose of these two drugs is to facilitate sexual pleasure in the male. For those men who wish to procreate, an additional benefit is the ejaculation only an erection allows. I have heard of no right-to-life organization offering to pay for paternity suits to force men to bear the consequences of not using contraception. Practically speaking, a man who doesn’t want to take responsibility for a child he has sired rarely has to.
Many of course, do the “right” thing. And therein, I suspect, lies the true source of the hostility toward woman who wish to have sex without risking having a baby. Shotgun weddings are practically an institution in the states where the fever against reproductive rights runs hottest. How many unhappy marriages have resulted from a hormonal impulse between teenagers? How many unions of obligation have turned into nightmares of incompatibility, ending in divorce, custody battles or worse? How many husbands and wives caught for life in unplanned parenthood would do it all again if they could relieve the moment they chose passion over purity?
They aren’t pro-life, they are pro-punishment. Murderers must be executed, the undocumented must be deported, and women who dare to control their destiny as they themselves did not cannot be allowed to get away with it.
By: Mark Olmsted, The Huffington Post Blog, July 11, 2014
“No Will To Legislate”: The GOP’s Completely Incoherent Stance On The Border Crisis
Republicans are furious about the flood of children streaming across the US-Mexico border, and are criticizing the president for not deporting the children fast enough. But now that Obama has asked for nearly $4 billion to help kick the kids out more quickly, they don’t want to fund the emergency measures.
The $3.7 billion Obama requested would boost border security as well as housing and legal services for the children, the majority of whom are fleeing violence in Central America. According to Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has become the GOP’s figurehead on the issue, too much of that money is going to shelter, healthcare and legal assistance, and not enough to enforcement. “President Obama’s appropriations request only deals with one aspect of the current crisis on our southern border, while barely addressing its root cause: an unsecured border,” Perry wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday. He wants Obama to send surveillance drones and 1,000 National Guard troops to the border.
Most minors are simply handing themselves over to border patrol agents, suggesting that a porous border isn’t really the problem. And even if the border were completely sealed, there’s still the question of what to do with the tens of thousands of children here already. Perry ignored the fact that the Obama administration is bound by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which bars the government from immediately deporting children from countries that do not share a border with the United States—such as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where the bulk of the children are from. The law requires border patrol to turn the children over to Health and Human Services and entitles them to due process so they may apply for humanitarian relief. Obama is trying to speed up deportations, to the consternation of immigrant rights and humanitarian groups. But unless Congress changes the trafficking law, the only way to do so is to make the legal system work faster by paying for more lawyers and judges.
Republicans are considering all sorts of roadblocks to the emergency funding bill. Some want any spending to be offset with cuts elsewhere. Others are insisting that Congress amend or repeal the trafficking law before they authorize any funding, a move that would deny children due process and, even if it were ultimately blocked by Democrats in the Senate, would at the very least hold up resources that are badly needed in the shelters where the children are housed.
Republicans, Perry included, are paying lip service to the idea that the crisis is a humanitarian one, but they don’t want to provide any humanitarian relief. As Jackie Calmes and Ashley Parker suggest in The New York Times, that’s because approving such funding “would help get [Obama] out of a situation that they believe is of his own making.” According to Perry, it’s more important for Obama to visit the border than it is for Congress to do something to address the situation. For Republicans, it’s more palatable to perpetuate the crisis and blame it on the president than to do anything that could be considered a “win” for the Democrats. Certainly it won’t be kids who win if Congress does agree to fund a smoother pathway to mass deportation.
It’s ironic that the same people who are apoplectic about Obama’s use of executive authority are now claiming that he’s the one not doing enough to fix the border crisis. Even House Speaker John Boehner, who is suing the president over his unilateral moves, had the gumption to attack the White House for not acting on its own in this instance. “He’s been president for five years! When is he going to take responsibility for something?” Boehner reportedly shouted at a press conference on Thursday morning. “We’re not giving the president a blank check.”
Republicans complain that Obama is cutting them out of the legislative process. As the border crisis demonstrates, however, it’s hard to detect real will on the part of the GOP to legislate.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, July 10, 2014
“And Get Off My Lawn!”: John McCain And The Case Of Mistaken Identity
If you’ve ever watched a congressional hearing featuring Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in a bad mood, you know the Arizona Republican can get pretty quarrelsome with witnesses who annoy him in some way.
Take today, for example.
During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the ongoing border crisis, McCain was outraged by a recent memo saying visitors to detention facilities had to check cell phones with cameras. The senator, outraged, demanded that Thomas Winkowski, a Deputy Assistant Secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explain himself (thanks to my colleague Nazanin Rafsanjani for the heads-up).
McCAIN: Mr. Winkowski, I’ve been representing the state of Arizona for many years and I’ve never seen anything like your instructions to signed by your name, ‘interim protocol for visitations and tours to CBP detention facilities.’ Are you telling me, when I visit a detention facility that I can’t bring a cellphone with me? Are you saying that? A United States Senator visiting a facility. These are the instructions that you have signed. Is that what you’re saying?
WINKOWSKI: That the visitors can’t bring cell…?
McCAIN: Visiting congressional deleg, uh, member of Congress.
WINKOWSKI: I don’t recall saying that. What I recall….
McCAIN: Let me provide you with a copy. It says see distribution. R. Gil Kerlikowske, Commissioner interim, protocol for visitations and tours to CBP detention facilities. You didn’t see your own memo?
You might have noticed the problem. R. Gil Kerlikowske wrote the memo. McCain was yelling at Thomas Winkowski.
For the record, R. Gil Kerlikowske and Thomas Winkowski are not the same person. Their names may rhyme, but I’m afraid that doesn’t much matter. Senators in high dudgeon should probably get these details right before upbraiding a witness publicly.
In any case, R. Gil Kerlikowske was sitting next to Thomas Winkowski, and so McCain’s bellicose line of questioning continued after the identity question was straightened out.
McCAIN: Am I allowed to bring a cell phone with me when I go onto a facility in Nogales Arizona?
KERLIKOWSKE: Not to take photographs senator.
McCAIN: I am not allowed to take photographs? Why not? Why not? Why am I not allowed to do that?
KERLIKOWSKE: That children have a right to privacy and that’s why we’re not having their faces shown…
McCAIN: I may want to take a photo of something else!
Kerlikowske, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, stayed admirably calm in the face of McCain’s angry questions, patiently trying to explain the rationale for the current policy. Officials are trying to look out for the children’s privacy, so they’re not allowing people to bring cameras into facilities.
If McCain wants to take pictures of something else, Customs and Border Protection officials will arrange to let him take pictures of whatever he wants. If McCain wants to talk to people at the facilities, Customs and Border Protection officials will arrange conversations with whomever McCain wishes to meet.
That, apparently, wasn’t quite good enough for McCain, who demanded a new memo.
The moral of the story, apparently, is that the senior senator from Arizona really loves his cell phone.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 9, 2014
“Enough With The Katrina Analogies”: The Ethical Merits And Demerits Don’t Quite Match Up
It’s more obvious every day that a certain element of the conservative movement is focused on achieving revenge for the humiliation suffered by George W. Bush during his second term, and wants Barack Obama to be understood as walking the same downward path to ignominy. And so any time the president has a public relations setback or a policy problem, it’s his “Iraq” or “Katrina.” The latter has unsurprisingly become the preferred label for the sudden surge in border crossings at the Rio Grande attributable to events in Central America, and now for the president’s refusal to do photo ops at the border.
Before the practice gets too far out of hand, TNR’s Alec MacGillis offers a brisk refutation of the meme:
[T]here is the failure to consider even the most basic differences in context between the crisis in New Orleans and the Gulf coast in 2005 and what has been unfolding on the border. In the former instance, we were presented with an administration that willfully downplayed both the immediate threat of the approaching storm and the broader threat that, if the climatologists are to be believed, was represented by the storm.
In the latter instance, we are presented with an administration struggling to contain one particularly dramatic manifestation of a problem—a broken immigration policy—that the administration itself has been trying to fix, has indeed made its chief priority for the remainder of the president’s term, but has been stymied in comprehensively addressing by the identity crisis-driven obstructionism and indifference of the party that controls the House of Representatives. Other than that, yes, this is just like Hurricane Katrina. And the women and children lingering on the border, and the overwhelmed Border Patrol personnel trying their best to manage their presence, will be awaiting the magic word of whether the president’s caravan will be arriving on the horizon, which will surely solve everything.
I’d say there’s one more pretty big difference between Bush’s handling of Katrina and Obama’s handling of the “border crisis.” Bush was criticized by liberals for failing to take quick compassionate action to save lives threatened by flooding. Obama’s being criticized by conservatives for failing to immediately ship children back across the border in cattle cars; some seem to think they should simply be shot on sight. The ethical merits and demerits don’t quite match up.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 9, 2014
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