“We Should Just Go Ahead And Start Bombing”: The Insane Logic Underlying Republican Opposition To The Iran Deal
Republicans are, naturally, united in their opposition to the preliminary deal the Obama administration struck with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. And now, the presidential candidates in particular are going to compete with each other to see who can make their opposition more categorical. They’re all criticizing it, of course, and Scott Walker has already said that on the day of his inauguration, he’ll pull out of the deal. I’m guessing the rest of them will follow suit and pledge something similar. The question is: OK, so on January 20, 2017, you announce that we’re out of the deal (since we’re in the Republican fantasy world for the moment, let’s put aside the involvement of Europe and the UN). What happens next?
Well for starters, the Iranians would no longer be constrained by the things they agreed to. They could kick out all the inspectors and institute a crash program to create a nuclear weapon if they wanted. Are Republicans saying that Iran would never do that? I don’t think so. Yet in practice, the Republican position seems to be: 1) We can never trust the Iranians to adhere to the terms of any nuclear deal we sign with them because of their insatiable thirst for nuclear weapons, so 2) If there’s no agreement at all—no limits on nuclear research, no limits on the quantity and purity of uranium they can enrich, no inspections—then everything will be OK.
To be clear, I’m not saying this deal is perfect, though a lot of people who know a lot about this issue are arguing that it’s far stronger than what they expected (see here, for instance). But Republicans aren’t saying we need to reopen negotiations and push for something better. They’re just saying we should scrap the agreement, and then … well, they actually don’t say what happens then.
In effect, the Republican argument is, We’ve put this dangerous criminal in prison, but I don’t think this prison is secure enough. He might escape! So the answer is to tear down the prison and let him go. Then we’ll be safe from him.
So they ought to be asked: Are you proposing a re-negotiation of this deal? Or are you just saying that if we scrap it and reimpose sanctions on Iran, then they’ll capitulate to all our demands? And if that’s what you’re saying, is there any reason at all to think that might happen? After all, Iran has been under sanctions from the U.S., the EU, and many other countries for years, yet their nuclear program has continued. What will be different without an agreement?
We should hear conservatives out on all their specific complaints about this deal. They might have a case to make about particular weaknesses. But in every case, we have to ask: What’s your alternative? I haven’t yet heard an answer from any of them, other than the few honest enough to say what so many of them are thinking, that no deal will ever work and we should just go ahead and start bombing.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 3, 2015
“Hey, GOP: Give Peace With Iran A Chance”: There’s No Reason To Listen To The Warmongers Who Always Get This Stuff Wrong
I’m not an expert on these things, so I don’t know what I think of the Iran deal yet. Some people I know who are certainly pro-deal and know something about all this found the agreed-upon framework to be more detailed than they expected, so that’s good. But there are many more details to be worked out and many rivers to cross.
But you know who else I bet isn’t an expert on these matters? Scott Walker. And I’d invite the Wisconsin governor to join me in withholding judgment until we’ve had the chance to study the fine print and ask experts what it all might mean, but I suspect that would be pretty futile. Greg Sargent on Thursday afternoon picked up on a revealing comment Walker made to, who else, a right-wing talk radio host. The host, Charlie Sykes, actually asked Walker a skeptical question. They get so discombobulated when someone who’s supposed to be on the team asks a real question. And look at what Walker said:
SYKES: You have said that you would cancel any Iranian deal the Obama administration makes. Now would you cancel that even if our trading partners did not want to reimpose the sanctions?
WALKER: Absolutely. If I ultimately choose to run, and if I’m honored to be elected by the people of this country, I will pull back on that on January 20, 2017, because the last thing—not just for the region but for this world—we need is a nuclear-armed Iran.
By “our trading partners,” Sykes means chiefly England, France, and Germany—the other countries (along with Russia and China) involved in the Switzerland negotiations. This is a major point of disagreement between liberals and conservatives, because conservatives say that we should have walked away from the Lausanne table and regrouped with our trading partners and imposed even tougher sanctions to bring Iran more quickly to its knees. Liberals contend, as President Obama did during his Rose Garden announcement of the deal, that these partners don’t want to maintain sanctions, and that if we’d walked away, it would have been the sanctions regime that that would have cracked, not Iran.
So Sykes was saying here to Walker: If the sanctions collapse, which will leave Iran on stronger economic footing and take out of our hands the one club over them we have—even at the risk of that happening, you’d cancel a deal? And Walker said yes. Not “depends on the deal.” Just “absolutely.”
The man is not in the realm of evidence here. He is in the realm of dogma, and dogma is all we’re going to get from these people. As I’m writing these words, we have yet to see the statements from most of the GOP presidential contenders, but gaming out what they’re going to say is hardly history’s greatest guessing game. Marco Rubio did come out of the gate pretty fast with a statement whose money line referred to “this attempt to spin diplomatic failure as a success.” You remember him: the same Rubio who doesn’t know that Iran and ISIS are enemies.
I once thought there would be a chance that Rand Paul might say something more interesting. He’s “dark,” his press office says, until after Easter, so we’re apparently not getting anything out of him now. But no matter. Whatever his past interesting heterodoxies on foreign policy, he now knows he just has to bash Obama and say what the rest of them are saying, and so in all likelihood he will.
Thus, one interesting question for the coming weeks: Will there be one Republican, just one, either among the candidates or in the Congress, who will actually step forward to say something like, “You know, now that I’ve read this and talked to experts, I’ve concluded that it’s worth giving this a shot?” One? You probably laughed at the naiveté of the question. I admit it does sound naive, but this shouldn’t allow us to lose sight of the fact that it’s tragic that things have come to this point, that we simply accept in such a ho-hum way that the Republicans are going to oppose anything with Obama’s name on it, not just when it comes to tax policy and such, but matters of war and peace.
This seems a most apt time to remember some aspects of the neoconservative track record that they’d rather the rest of us forget. North Korea is one, remember that one? The Hermit Kingdom started working on a nuclear program in earnest in the 1980s. In 1993, the North Koreans threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty. Diplomacy then commenced under Bill Clinton, leading to the 1994 Agreed Framework. The Framework had a checkered history—mostly because (cough cough) hardliners in Congress repeatedly refused to let the United States live up to its side of the agreement—but the long and short of it was that in the 1990s, North Korea didn’t aggressively pursue a nuclearization program.
Then came the neocons, and Dubya, and the axis of evil business, and soon enough North Korea was enriching uranium like there was no tomorrow. Remember the test bombs it was launching about a decade ago out toward Japan? All that started because Pyongyang took Bush at his belligerent word. Today it’s estimated that North Korea has enough separated plutonium for six to eight bombs. We rattle our saber, it makes smaller countries want to go nuclear. It’s really not very complicated.
Far from weakening North Korea, the neocon posture strengthened it. And speaking of strengthening, what about Iran? It’s the neocons’ war in Iraq that gave Iraq to Iran. They strengthened Iran. And if they get their way they’re going to do it again, if and when they manage to kill this deal and then Iran says OK, the hell with you, we’re building the bomb as fast as we can.
I’m not all yippee, Nobel Peace Prize for Kerry about this deal. I expressed my reservations the other day, and they remain. The administration deserves credit on one level just for getting this far—negotiations like these are amazingly hard. But we’re still only across midfield here.
Even so, if it’s hard to decide what precisely to be for, it’s laughably easy to figure out what to be against: reflexive and dogmatic opposition undertaken for the purposes of making sure you get your anti-Obama ticket stamped that will hasten the day either that a) Iran gets the bomb or b) we start a war to prevent that. Maybe it’s a little cliched to say give peace a chance, but thanks to the neoconservatives, we’ve given war plenty of chance, and all it’s done is strengthened Tehran and given us ISIS. Will these people ever look in the mirror?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 3, 2015
“Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’ Presidential Candidates”: A General Conservative Nostalgia For A Time That’s Passed
There was a time not too long ago when Republicans knew that when an election got tight, they could trot out “God, guns, and gays” to drive a cultural wedge between Democrats and the electorate, since the GOP was the party that, like most Americans, loved the first two and hated the third. It’s more complicated now, both within the parties and between them, but there’s no doubt that 2016 will feature plenty of culture-war sniping. For better or worse, Democrats and Republicans really do represent two different Americas.
I thought of that this weekend reading this article in the Washington Post about the personal relationships the potential Republican candidates have with guns. That they are all opposed to any limits on gun ownership is a given, but more interesting is the role guns play in their own lives. With a couple of important exceptions, the potential Republican candidates fall into one of two categories when it comes to guns: those who grew up with them, and those who embraced them once their political ambitions matured.
Some of them have been building their collections since childhood. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) is up to 12 now, including an AR-15 assault weapon that he has talked about using if law and order ever breaks down in his neighborhood. Former Texas governor Rick Perry is so well-armed, he has a gun for jogging.
Others were city kids who didn’t own guns until later in life. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) bought a .357 magnum revolver in 2010, the year he ran for Senate, saying the gun was for protection… [Ted Cruz] grew up in the suburbs of Houston and got his first exposure to guns at summer camp. But, as an adult, Cruz bought two guns: a .357 magnum revolver and a Beretta Silver Pigeon II shotgun, according to a spokeswoman… In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker also didn’t grow up hunting. But he got his first guns in his mid-30s: a shotgun he won in a raffle and a rifle he got as a gift, said a spokeswoman for his political committee. Now he hunts deer, pheasants and ducks with his motorcycle-riding buddies… Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal purchased a snubnosed, laser-sighted Smith & Wesson .38 revolver after Hurricane Katrina. He still keeps it for home defense, although his home is now the heavily guarded Governor’s Mansion.
Far be it from me to question the sincerity of any politician’s enthusiasm for firearms, but buying a gun does seem an awful lot like the kind of thing a Republican politician does just because that’s what Republican politicians are expected to do. But there’s gun rights, and then there’s contemporary gun culture. The two are not at all the same, and it’s the latter some Republicans seem so eager to embrace.
There’s an important context here, which is that gun ownership has been steadily declining for about four decades now. Yet even as fewer and fewer people own guns, gun sales are increasing, which means that the people who do own them are buying more and more. Ask a certain kind of gun-owner how many he owns, and he’ll say, “More than I need, but not as many as I want.”
And it’s that culture that many Republican politicians feel the need to make their own. You could see it as part of a general conservative nostalgia for a time that’s passed, when the law was a distant force and a man might have to protect his homestead from rustlers and thieves. The trouble is that for many gun-owners today, guns are less tools with everyday uses than fetish objects. It’s the very fact that they serve no practical purpose in most gun-owners’ lives that makes them so emotionally powerful. When a guy like Lindsey Graham says that he needs his AR-15 in case “there was a law-and-order breakdown in my community,” he’s living in a land of fantasy, where a middle-aged guy who wears a suit every day is actually an agent of heroic violence, the very embodiment of physical capability and potency.
But the bare fact is this: There are places in America where gun ownership is common and expected, and places where it isn’t. And more Americans live in the latter. So when Republicans proclaim themselves representatives of the first type of place—in both ideas and habits—they put themselves at an immediate disadvantage.
But not all of them do. Jeb Bush, for instance, has the appropriate Republican policy stance when it comes to guns (along with an A-plus rating from the NRA), but he does not himself own a gun. (The only other potential candidate who doesn’t is Chris Christie.) Which makes perfect sense if we think about gun ownership being so much a function of geography. Unlike some of his opponents—the emphatically Texan Rick Perry, the extremely Midwestern Scott Walker—Jeb isn’t really from any particular place. As a member of the Bush clan, he grew up traveling a kind of elevated platform of wealth and power that traverses the country. Connecticut, Texas, Florida—wherever it was, it was essentially the same. That isn’t really his fault; when your grandfather is a senator and your father becomes president, and you go to Andover and summer at Kennebunkport, that’s the world you’re from. And it isn’t a world where people view guns as a vital cultural totem. If Jeb walked out on a stage holding a rifle over his head, he’d look even dumber than Mitch McConnell did.
We don’t think about Hillary Clinton representing any particular place either. She grew up in Illinois but left it behind, spent almost two decades in Arkansas then left for Washington, and now lives in New York, but doesn’t embody any of those places (or even try to). That’s fine with liberals, whose demands for cultural affinity are served well enough by someone who moved around a lot. The president she’s trying to succeed most definitely represented a particular place, though it was less Chicago specifically than American cities in general, the dense and diverse places liberals either live or want to live.
And that’s where all the Republicans have a problem. They continue to romanticize rural and small-town life, but the number of Americans who actually live in those places is small and getting smaller. Even if plenty of suburban Republicans still imagine themselves out on the range, that isn’t the American reality. Planting your flag there may seem necessary to win the Republican nomination, but it won’t do you much good the day after.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 30, 2015
“Notably Absent From This Debate”: Why Won’t Rand Paul And Chris Christie Take A Position On Indiana’s “Religious Freedom” Law?
Nearly a week since Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), igniting a nationwide debate about whether the controversial law invites discrimination based on sexual orientation, most potential Republican presidential candidates have taken the opportunity to bolster their conservative credentials.
“Governor Pence has done the right thing,” said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on Monday.
“I want to commend Governor Mike Pence for his support of religious freedom, especially in the face of fierce opposition,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in a written statement. “Governor Pence is holding the line to protect religious liberty in the Hoosier State. Indiana is giving voice to millions of courageous conservatives across this country who are deeply concerned about the ongoing attacks upon our personal liberties. I’m proud to stand with Mike, and I urge Americans to do the same.”
Ben Carson, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and former Texas Governor Rick Perry all expressed their support for Pence and Indiana’s RFRA law. (Meanwhile, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have come out against it.)
But two likely 2016 candidates have been notably absent from this debate: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. What do they think about the law, and why have they been so quiet on the issue?
Samantha Smith, the communications director for Christie’s Leadership Matters for America PAC, did not return a request for comment on Wednesday morning. (I’ll update this if I hear back.) Christie’s past statements offer little light on where he will fall on the issue, but he has been shifting to the right on social issues in advance of the Republican primary. On Tuesday, he announced his support for a 20-week abortion ban. Given Christie’s shaky position within the party, and the fact that the rest of the field supports Indiana’s law, it would be very surprising if he joined with liberals in opposing it.
As for Paul, Sergio Gor, the communications director of RandPAC, wrote in an email, “The Senator is out of pocket with family this week and has not weighed in at this time.”
It makes sense that Paul is unplugging with his family this week: He’s expected to announce his presidential bid on April 7, the beginning of a long, grueling journey—and a victory would mean that these are his last moments of real privacy for a very long time. Could anyone blame him if he wanted to spend a few quiet days with his family? I couldn’t.
But it also seems a bit convenient that Paul is entirely unreachable while the controversy swirls. If his campaign launch is just six days away, surely Paul and his staff are in close communication. How long does it take to send a tweet or tell your staff to craft a statement?
It will be interesting to see how Paul reacts to the law—as he’ll be forced to do, probably no later than April 7—in light of his libertarian credentials. If he stuck true to them, not only would he support the law but also support the right of Indiana’s businesses to discriminate against LGBT people, something that the rest of the Republican field opposes. (They just disagree with liberals about whether Indiana’s law would allow discrimination.)
But if recent history is any guide, don’t expect Paul to stick true to his libertarian roots. Almost whenever he has faced a choice between traditional libertarian positions and mainstream Republican positions, he has chosen the latter in hope of winning the GOP nomination. Just recently, for instance, he called for more defense spending after saying for years that the military was bloated and needed further cuts.
In fact, Paul has already reversed himself on whether private businesses should be allowed to exclude people from their establishments for any reason. “I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2010. “But, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.” He continued, “In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people, we publicly criticize that, and don’t belong to those groups, or don’t associate with those people.” Just a few years later, as that position became controversial, Paul (dishonestly) said that he never held the libertarian position to begin with.
So while it is taking a while for Paul to give his position, it isn’t hard to deduce where he’ll eventually fall. Maybe he’s just waiting until the spotlight on Indiana dies down a bit, so that his libertarian supporters are less aware when he adopts the party line. But if that’s his plan, it’s not very presidential.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, April 1, 2015
“Fundamentally Dishonest”: The Self-Contradictory Argument All Republicans Are Making On The Indiana Discrimination Law
Now that it’s becoming a national story, all the Republican candidates are going to have to take a position on the new Indiana law that for all intents and purposes legalizes discrimination against gay people. (If you’re in the market for a lengthy explanation of what the law does and doesn’t do and what the implications are, I wrote one yesterday.) And they all look to be coming down in the same place—one that’s fundamentally dishonest about the law and its implications. They’re essentially trying to have it both ways, supporting the establishment of a right of discrimination for religious business owners, but claiming that they are supporting no such thing. Here’s Jeb Bush talking to Hugh Hewitt yesterday:
Bush: I think if you, if they actually got briefed on the law that they wouldn’t be blasting this law. I think Governor Pence has done the right thing. Florida has a law like this. Bill Clinton signed a law like this at the federal level. This is simply allowing people of faith space to be able to express their beliefs, to have, to be able to be people of conscience. I just think once the facts are established, people aren’t going to see this as discriminatory at all.
Hewitt: You know, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed in 1993. It’s been the law in the District of Columbia for 22 years. I do not know of a single incidence of the sort that Tim Cook was warning about occurring in the District in the last 22 years.
Bush: But there are incidents of people who, for example, the florist in Washington State who had a business that based on her conscience, she couldn’t be participating in a gay wedding, organizing it, even though the person, one of the people was a friend of hers. And she was taken to court, and is still in court, or the photographer in New Mexico. There are many cases where people acting on their conscience have been castigated by the government. And this law simply says the government has to have a level of burden to be able to establish that there’s been some kind of discrimination. We’re going to need this. This is really an important value for our country to, in a diverse country, where you can respect and be tolerant of people’s lifestyles, but allow for people of faith to be able to exercise theirs.
Just to be clear, the Indiana law is not like the federal RFRA, in both the context in which it was passed and its particular provision. The Indiana law specifically applies to disputes between individuals, whereas the federal law discusses only personal conduct the government is trying to regulate. (The federal law came about because of a case where two Native Americans were denied unemployment benefits because they had used peyote in a religious ceremony.) But in any case, Republicans like Jeb are trying to pretend that we can satisfy everyone, and that the Indiana law does so. But we can’t, and it doesn’t. We have to make a choice.
What Bush is doing here (and what Indiana Governor Mike Pence and the rest of the Republicans defending this law are doing as well) is a misleading little two-step. Their argument is: 1) We must allow religious people to discriminate; and 2) This has nothing to do with discrimination. But both those things can’t simultaneously be true. You can call it “simply allowing people of faith space to be able to express their beliefs” or “people acting on their conscience,” but the whole issue is that the act of conscience that they want to undertake is also an act of discrimination. That’s because the particular acts of conscience we’re talking about are those that are not in the realm of speech or worship but in the realm of commerce, and they involve another person.
The cases in question are essentially zero-sum conflicts of claimed rights. Janet wants to have an anniversary dinner in a restaurant; Mike, the restaurant owner, doesn’t want to serve gay couples. There are only two possible outcomes: Janet and her partner get served, in which case Mike has to give; or Mike gets to refuse that service, in which case Janet has to give. You can dress up Mike’s motivations any way you want—”sincere religious beliefs,” “act of conscience,” whatever—but that doesn’t change the fact that one person is going to win and the other is going to lose.
The liberals who object to the Indiana law are making their choice clear: Janet’s right to be treated equally trumps Mike’s desire to discriminate, even though that desire is based on religious beliefs. The conservatives who support the law are taking the opposite position: If it’s based on a religious belief, Mike’s right to discriminate trumps Janet’s right to be treated equally. I happen to disagree with the conservative position, but I would respect it a lot more if they’d just come out and admit what their position really is. Instead, they’re trying to claim that there’s no conflict between Janet and Mike and they aren’t taking a side.
But they are. These kinds of conflicts are the whole point of this law, the reason why Republicans wanted to pass it and would like to see others like it. Of course, nobody wants to say they support “discrimination.” But if that florist in Washington or that photographer in New Mexico whom Bush is defending have a policy that says, “We will accept the business of straight couples but not gay couples,” then they’re discriminating. Republicans want to make sure that business owners have a legal right to discriminate against potential customers in that fashion. They ought to just admit it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 31, 2015
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