“While In The Neighborhood, Why Not Iran Too”: Republicans Hankering For Ground War Against ISIS. What Could Go Wrong?
It’s been an entire 12 years since we started a war, and apparently the American people are getting a little antsy. A new Quinnipiac poll finds that 62 percent of Americans, including 72 percent of Republicans, favors the use of ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. We should be careful about over-interpreting that, because the question was preceded by another question talking about limited, but not long-term operations for ground troops. But there’s no doubt that the public’s interest in getting some boots back on the ground is gaining momentum; in Pew polls, support for ground troops went up from 39 percent in October to 47 percent in February; in the same poll, 67 percent of Republicans said they supported ground troops.
The reason I focus on the number of Republicans is that I suspect with this increase in support from their constituents, we’re going to hear more and more Republican politicians coming out for what we might call a re-invasion of Iraq, and not just Iraq but Syria, as well. And as long as we’re in the neighborhood, how about some military action against Iran?
Iran is, of course, a separate story. But it isn’t unrelated; once people start advocating a third Iraq war with more vigor than they have been up until now, the idea of bombing Iran won’t seem so outlandish. Back in 2002, when the Bush administration was in the midst of its campaign to convince the public that invading Iraq was necessary lest we all be obliterated by Saddam Hussein’s fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, a British official described the sentiment among the Bush administration and its allies this way: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
It wasn’t long ago that the idea of sending ground troops back to the Middle East was widely considered just short of insane. After all, we’d finally gotten out of Iraq, after spending $2 trillion, losing 4,000 American lives, and sending the region into chaos. Why would we want to do it all over again? But now, the idea of doing it all over again seems to be gaining traction.
Just after the end of the first Iraq war, George H. W. Bush closed a celebratory speech by saying: “It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” That syndrome was the reluctance of the public (and military leaders) to countenance enormous military adventures in far-off lands in service of vaguely defined goals. So it may now be time to say that the “Iraq syndrome” is dead, if ever it existed.
At the moment, when the Republicans running for president are asked about whether they’d like to send troops to any of these countries, they inevitably reply that “all options should be on the table.” It’s essentially a dodge, though not a completely unreasonable one. They want to signal to conservatives that they’re ready to use force, but signal to everyone else that they’re not eager to do so. But try to imagine what would happen if a Republican wins the presidency next year.
If ISIS isn’t completely defeated, he’ll be under pressure from his supporters to go in there and get the job done, and not in a wimpy way like Obama. Then think about Iran. With Bibi Netanyahu writing their talking points, Republicans will now insist that any nuclear agreement negotiated by this president is by definition weak and dangerous. The very fact of an agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear activities can be the justification for military action. If the talks break down, on the other hand, well that just makes starting a bombing campaign all the more urgent. And of course, they’ll assure us that once we take out the Iranian nuclear program, the people will rise up and overthrow their oppressive government.
It’s all going to sound quite familiar. War will once again be presented as the only way to prevent a bigger, worse war that they insist is coming no matter what. Don’t forget that the Iraq War was offered up by the Bush administration as a pre-emptive strike to prevent the inevitable and not-too-distant moment when Saddam Hussein would launch his war against the United States. While they never said whether the Iraq invasion would come by land, sea, or air, the attack was coming one way or another. In Dick Cheney’s immortal words: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
Netanyahu says that the Iranian regime is just a bunch of homicidal lunatics who are determined to re-enact the Holocaust. There’s no use negotiating with them, because they’re mad. War is the only way to solve the problem. Anyone who saw the way Republicans were like tweens at a One Direction concert at Netanyahu’s speech on Tuesday know that if he says it, they’ll believe it.
So here’s what I think is going to happen. First, the idea that we need to put troops in to fight ISIS—not on the table, but on the ground—is very quickly going to become something that all Republicans agree on (and if you’re going to do it, do it big—no half-assed mobilization of a few thousand, but a massive deployment). Then they’ll start talking seriously about military action against Iran, sooner rather than later, and that too is going to move rapidly from being a fringe idea, to something that many of them admit should be “on the table,” to something they all agree ought to be done. And by God, we’ll have kicked that Iraq syndrome once and for all.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 6, 2015
“Pretty Much How Things Go”: Every Clinton Scandal Is Exactly The Same
We don’t yet know whether there will actually turn out to be something nefarious in the emails that Hillary Clinton somewhat belatedly passed on to the State Department, but I feel confident in predicting that this Clinton scandal will likely play out just like every other Clinton scandal. For those of you who don’t remember the 1990s, here’s how it works:
- Bill and/or Hillary Clinton does something that on first glance looks a little sketchy.
- The news media explode with the story, usually including insinuations that something illegal or corrupt took place.
- Republicans quiver with joy, believing that this scandal will finally be the one to reveal the true depths of the Clintons’ villainy.
- Clintonworld adopts a bunker mentality, insisting that they did nothing wrong yet trying to limit the amount of information that gets out, thereby antagonizing reporters.
- As the eight zillion journalists assigned to the story learn more information, the story grows increasingly complex, yet no actual illegality or corruption is found.
- The story drags on for months or even years, with Republicans never wavering in their certainty that the only reason we haven’t learned the awful truth is the Clintons’ stonewalling.
- The more committed conservatives begin to lose their minds, eventually coming to believe spectacularly outlandish theories about what actually happened.
- The whole thing peters out, and reasonable people conclude that while Bill and/or Hillary might have shown better judgment, they didn’t actually break the law, violate their oaths, betray their country, or anything else their opponents imagined.
There are variations, of course, but that’s pretty much how things go. And even though it’s possible there’s an email somewhere in which Clinton instructs her paramour Ayman al-Zawahiri to launch the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, it’s probably how things are going to go with this one, too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 6, 2015
“No Is A Poor Answer”: Any Regrets Over The Terri Schiavo Fight?’
At last week’s CPAC event, Fox’s Sean Hannity asked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), “Any regrets over the Terri Schiavo fight?” The likely presidential candidate responded that he has no regrets at all.
“[I]n this case, here was a woman who was vulnerable, and the court, because of our laws, didn’t allow her – they were going to allow her to be starved to death,” Bush said. “So we passed a law, Terri’s Law that was a year later ruled unconstitutional. I stayed within the law, but I acted on my core belief that the most vulnerable in our society should be in the front of the line. They should receive our love and protection. And that’s exactly what I did.”
The far-right audience applauded the answer, though Bloomberg Politics reports today that some social conservatives in Iowa are still bothered Bush didn’t defy the judiciary and ignore court orders.
Michael Schiavo, however, has a very different perspective.
Michael Schiavo was the husband of Terri Schiavo, the brain-dead woman from the Tampa Bay area who ended up at the center of one of the most contentious, drawn-out conflicts in the history of America’s culture wars. The fight over her death lasted almost a decade. It started as a private legal back-and-forth between her husband and her parents. Before it ended, it moved from circuit courts to district courts to state courts to federal courts, to the U.S. Supreme Court, from the state legislature in Tallahassee to Congress in Washington. The president got involved. So did the pope.
But it never would have become what it became if not for the dogged intervention of the governor of Florida at the time, the second son of the 41st president, the younger brother of the 43rd, the man who sits near the top of the extended early list of likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates…. Longtime watchers of John Ellis Bush say what he did throughout the Terri Schiavo case demonstrates how he would operate in the Oval Office. They say it’s the Jebbest thing Jeb’s ever done.
“It was a living hell,” Michael Schiavo told Politico, “and I blame him.”
Folks should read the whole report to get a complete picture, but there’s one angle to this story that often goes overlooked, and which Jeb will probably have to comment on sooner or later. Those who followed the story at the time probably remember the gist of the heartbreaking controversy: Terri Schiavo spent a decade in a vegetative state. Michael Schiavo eventually decided it was time to remove his wife from the feeding tubes that were keeping her alive, and he went to court to get approval to allow Terri to die naturally.
Jeb Bush intervened and a political circus ensued.
What I’d forgotten about was that Terri Schiavo’s death did not end the controversy. In the summer of 2005, a few months after Schiavo passed, Jeb Bush asked a prosecutor to investigate whether Michael Schiavo called 911 too slowly 15 years earlier.
In other words, based on nothing, Florida’s then-governor kept pushing the Terri Schiavo controversy, even after she was gone, suggesting foul play may have been a factor in her case. Is it any wonder Michael Schiavo blames Bush for turning his life into “a living hell”?
It fell to Florida’s state attorney to tell Bush there was simply no evidence to substantiate the allegations.
“Any regrets over the Terri Schiavo fight?” is a good question. “No” is a poor answer.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 6, 2015
“Be Very Afraid Of ‘King v. Burwell'”: It’s Whether Or Not The United States Has Essentially Become A Banana Republic
There was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.
–Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
The real question before the Supreme Court in the ballyhooed case of King v. Burwell isn’t merely the continuance of the mandated health insurance subsidies of “Obamacare.” It’s whether or not the United States has essentially become a banana republic — an oligarchy whose legal institutions exist to provide ceremonial cover for backroom political power plays.
Almost regardless of what you think of the Affordable Care Act, legalistic chicanery of the kind on display shouldn’t be rewarded. That King v. Burwell has reached the high court is bad enough. Should the Roberts Court hand down a 5-4 decision based upon a tendentious misreading of the statute, several things will happen: An estimated 8.2 million Americans will lose health insurance coverage, the U.S. health care system will be thrown into economic chaos, and a few thousand citizens will no doubt die.
To a certain kind of person styling himself “conservative,” this would be perfectly all right. In an op-ed titled “End Obamacare, and People Could Die. That’s Okay,” one Michael R. Strain argues that higher death rates are “an acceptable price to pay for certain goals,” including “less government coercion and more individual liberty.”
Acceptable to Strain and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, that is, a plutocrat-funded Washington think tank whose resident “scholars” are handsomely paid to mimic the values of 19th-century Russian aristocrats.
Along with the human casualties, the U.S. Supreme Court’s prestige as a fair arbiter would also be irrevocably damaged. As New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse argues, “The Court has permitted itself to be recruited into the front lines of a partisan war. Not only the Affordable Care Act but the Court itself is in peril as a result.”
And that would damage what’s left of American democracy.
During his 2005 confirmation hearings, Chief Justice Roberts likened himself to an umpire. His job would be to call balls and strikes, not to reinvent the rules of baseball. It was a very shrewd formulation, as most Americans prefer a non-partisan judiciary. “It is a very serious threat to the independence and integrity of the courts to politicize them,” Roberts has said repeatedly.
With the signal exception of Citizens United, a 5-4 decision invalidating campaign finance laws and pushing the nation in the direction of plutocracy, some observers do credit the Chief Justice with making an effort to move the Court away from overt partisanship. Almost two-thirds of recent Supreme Court rulings have been unanimous.
However, Roberts’ deciding vote legitimizing Obamacare’s insurance mandate infuriated many Republicans. They see in King v. Burwell an opportunity for the Chief Justice to redeem himself. All he needs to do is persuade a majority of the Justices, presumably including himself, that because the Affordable Care Act speaks of subsidies being available through a health insurance “exchange established by a state,” it means only, exactly, and literally that.
If your state—say, New York—set up and ran its own marketplace, then you’re eligible for Obamacare.
If not, you’re not.
No more health insurance subsidies for residents of Texas, Oklahoma and 32 other states that let the feds set up exchanges for them.
Never mind that the law specifically requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to “establish and operate such exchange[s] within the states.” Never mind that nobody anywhere understood the Affordable Care Act to have such a restrictive meaning when it was being debated, enacted and put into operation. Such an interpretation certainly never came up during the difficult period when the HealthCare.gov website labored to get up to speed.
Never mind too that time-worn Supreme Court precedents direct judges interpreting laws to consider not isolated snippets of language, but “the specific context in which that language is used, and the broader context of the statute as a whole.” (The wording is from a 1997 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas.)
For that matter, if anybody in Congress on either side thought the law meant what the plaintiff’s lawyers in King v. Burwell claim, why have we been having the political battle of the century about it? Why vote 56 times to repeal a law that only applies in 16 of the 50 states?
It’s an odd form of legalistic fundamentalism the justices must consider, the constitutional equivalent of a guy trying to beat a ticket for driving 95 mph in a school zone because a typo reads “ozone.”
The wonder is that the Court elected to hear the case at all after a three-judge appeals court in Richmond rejected it unanimously.
And the scary question is why?
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 4, 2015
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