“Taking Exception To American Exceptionalism”: No One’s Patriotism Should Be Impugned, Certainly Not By The Likes Of Dick Cheney
I didn’t really think it possible for Dick Cheney to lower my opinion of him. But then this happened (per Politico‘s Kendall Breitman):
Dick Cheney says it’s “outrageous” that President Barack Obama mentioned the summer’s unrest in Ferguson, Mo., while speaking about ISIL during a speech at the United Nations.
“I was stunned,” the former vice president said on Wednesday during an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity….”
“In one case, you’ve got a police officer involved in a shooting, there may be questions about it to be sorted out by the legal process, but there’s no comparison to that with what ISIS is doing to thousands of people throughout the Middle East through bloody beheadings of anybody they come in contact with,” Cheney said. “To compare the two as though there’s moral equivalence there, I think, is outrageous.”
Obama, of course, in NO WAY “compared” the two phenomena (sorry to “shout,” but it’s hard to overstate how little support there is for what Cheney is saying). The reference to Ferguson was in the midst of a long litany about America’s view of how it serves as a leader in a global collective security arrangement, and he immediately touted the domestic debate over Ferguson as a sign of our strength and virtue.
Cheney’s assertion is perhaps the most willfully stupid thing I’ve heard in years.
Having said that, I think the real objection on the Right to Obama’s speech is that he treated collective security as something other than an extension of America’s Sovereign and Imperial Will. The secular religion of American Exceptionalism–and I call it a religion because it sweeps aside all the universalism associated with crucial cultural influences from Christianity to the Enlightenment–is so powerful a force among conservatives these days that anything Obama said that wasn’t an arrogant insult to the rest of the world would not have satisfied them.
Sometimes I chafe at Obama’s efforts to propitiate the idol of American Exceptionalism rhetorically, even as he is explicitly treating America as subject to the same standards as any other people. Sometimes I wish my fellow-citizens in the country I love would wake up and acknowledge that the only “freedom” we enjoy that is denied to our global peers is the right to easily acquire lethal weapons. America largely invented the system of collective security that Obama is so avid to vindicate in his actions–wise or foolish–in the Middle East. His patriotism should not be impugned for taking it, and America’s claim to represent values beyond self-interest, seriously. And certainly not by the likes of Dick Cheney.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 25, 2014
“Who Knew?”: Obamacare Is Such A Disaster That Even More Insurers Want To Be Part Of It
There are still plenty of days when Obamacare looks bad. Tuesday wasn’t one of them.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced that more insurers were joining the Affordable Care Act’s new marketplaces—you know, the places where people can buy coverage on their own and, depending on their incomes, qualify for subsidies. How many more insurers are participating? Quite a few, it turns out. According to HHS, the net increase is more than 25 percent. That should translate to more options for people buying coverage. The increased competition should also help keep premiums relatively low.
The data is preliminary, based on 44 states for which HHS had information. And of course the sheer number of insurers offering coverage is just one sign of how the law is doing. If you’re actually buying insurance, you don’t simply want choices. You want good choices. You want to know that the insurance will give you access to doctors and hospitals when you need them. You want to know that the coverage pays your bills adequately. And so on.
Still, Obamacare critics hadn’t predicted the markets would evolve this way. On the contrary, they expected that young and healthy people would stay far away from the new marketplaces, because the new coverage would be pricier than what they were paying before. Without enough business, the argument went, insurers would get skittish and withdraw. At best, the marketplaces would all become oligopolies and monopolies, with just a handful of insurers continuing to sell policies. At worst, the whole scheme would fall apart. That quite obviously isn’t happening.
Trouble could still arise. By design, Obamacare includes a series of provisions designed to insulate insurers from major losses in the first three years. I usually describe them as “shock absorbers.” Many other policy wonks refer to them as the three Rs, for reinsurance, risk corridors, and risk adjustment. Two of the three, risk corridors and reinsurance, are temporary measures set to expire in 2016. More knowledgeable critics of the law, like Bob Laszewski and Megan McArdle, have warned that more insurers could abandon the market or at least jack up their premiums once those measures expire.
I can’t tell you with certainty whether they are right or wrong. Always in motion is the future, as a famous prophet once said. But keep in mind that gloomy, even dire, predictions about Obamacare’s marketplaces are nothing new. One of my favorites was an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal at the end of last year. The author was John Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago. The headline was “What to Do When Obamacare Unravels”—not “if,” mind you, but “when.”
At the time, with unexpected plan cancellations and the website problems very much on people’s minds, betting against the program working probably seemed like a good idea. Who wants to make that kind of bet now?
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, September 24, 2014
“Feed The Base’s Worst Fears”: When In Doubt, Run Against The Kenyan Muslim Socialist
Yesterday, Senator Pat Roberts — who has emerged as one of the most closely watched incumbents in the country, now that independent Greg Orman’s challenge to him could dictate who controls the Senate — raised a lot of eyebrows when he said this:
“We have to change course because our country is heading for national socialism. That’s not right. It’s changing our culture. It’s changing what we’re all about.”
National socialism? Philip Rucker, in a great piece on the Kansas race, asks Senator Roberts what he meant, and gets this:
When a reporter asked whether he truly thinks the president is a socialist, Roberts replied, “I believe that the direction he is heading the country is more like a European socialistic state, yes. You can’t tell me anything that he has not tried to nationalize.”
Interestingly, the Orman campaign is criticizing Roberts’ rhetoric. In a statement, the campaign said:
“This is exactly the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that dominates the partisan debate in Washington and that Kansans are tired of. Washington is broken because politicians like Senator Roberts are too busy using scare tactics and calling each other names instead of getting things done. Kansans know we’ve got to do things differently, and that’s why they’re supporting businessman Greg Orman’s independent campaign for Senate.”
This is noteworthy, given that you’d think calling Obama a socialist could not possibly be problematic in any way in deep red Kansas.
By the way, the claim that Obama is moving the country towards socialism has long been echoed by many leading Republicans. It’s a way to feed the base’s worst fears about Obama while not quite coming out and calling him a socialist, which sounds crazy. In accusing Obama of wanting to “nationalize,” well, the entire private sector, Senator Roberts has dispensed with such restraint.
This gets to something interesting about this race. Roberts and his allies in the national GOP, panicked about the Orman challenge and its implications for Senate control, are quickly gearing up an All-About-Obummer campaign. Roberts is up with an ad ripping Orman for donating to Obama and national Democrats, and for saying repeal of Obamacare is unrealistic. A GOP Super PAC is airing a similarly themed spot. (Republicans are also tarring Orman as a shady businessman, but tying him to Obama and national Democrats will figure heavily.)
But, judging by the Orman statement above, his camp is gambling that this approach won’t work and could even end up reinforcing the frame for the race they prefer. The premise of the Orman campaign is that voters are sick of both parties and of Washington, allowing them to cast any efforts to tie him to Obama and national Democrats as more of the same old partisan food fighting, all designed to distract from Roberts’ failure to produce concrete achievements despite all his time in the Capitol.
The backdrop for all of this is the abject failure of the experiment in conservative governance undertaken by Kansas governor Sam Brownback, which has alienated many moderate Republicans. But it seems unlikely that Orman will directly engage on that front. I’d expect him to seek to capitalize on the generalized unpopularity of the GOP that has resulted, to campaign against both parties — and against Roberts’ lack of accomplishments — in making the case for trying something new in the form of an independent businessman.
Even Republicans are worried about this prospect, as one Republican rather colorfully put it to Rucker:
“He’s basically furniture in the Senate, and the people in Kansas know that,” said national GOP strategist John Weaver, a former McCain adviser. “You could give the average Kansan 24 hours to come up with something Pat Roberts has done in the Senate, and after 24 hours, even the crickets would be standing there befuddled.”
Well, okay, that does sound pretty problematic, but there’s still a way out: Run against the Kenyan Muslim Socialist!
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, September 24, 2014
“The Fear Component”: Why The GOP’s Latest National Security Attacks Probably Won’t Work
With the American air campaign against ISIS now expanding into Syria, President Obama updated the nation this morning:
“We were joined in this action by our friends and partners: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. America is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these nations on behalf of our common security. The strength of this coalition makes it clear to the world that this is not America’s fight alone. Above all, the people and governments of the Middle East are rejecting ISIL and standing up for the peace and security that the people of the region and the world deserve.
“Meanwhile, we will move forward with our plan supported by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to ramp up our effort to train and equip the Syrian opposition, who are the best counterweight to ISIL and the Assad regime…
“I’ve spoken to leaders in Congress and I am pleased there is bipartisan support for the action we’re taking. America’s stronger when we stand united and that unity sends a powerful message to the world that we will do what’s necessary to defend our country.”
Obama obviously wants to spread the responsibility around, not only to other countries — which is crucial to having people in the Middle East and the rest of the world see this as a legitimate common enterprise and not simply America imposing its will on the region yet again — but also to his domestic opponents. However, he won’t be getting too many pledges of bipartisanship in return. In fact, it’ll be just the opposite.
Yes, Republicans voted to support part of Obama’s plan for combating ISIL. But even if they make some positive statements about today’s operation (which some have) or future ones like it, for the most part, we’re going to see a repeat of what we saw in the early 2000s: Democrats saying, “Hey, we’re all fighting this battle together,” while Republicans say, “Terrorists are coming to kill us all, and when they do it’ll be those weak Democrats’ fault!”
This morning, Greg noted a new ad from New Hampshire Senate candidate Scott Brown, saying that terrorists are “threatening to cause the collapse of our country,” and it just might happen because Obama and Brown’s opponent, Jeanne Shaheen, are “confused about the nature of the threat.” And if you want an attack with even less subtlety, check out this ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee: http://youtu.be/o1_6gjdqGRQ
Despite the surface similarity between political attacks like those and the ones we saw when George W. Bush was president, there’s a crucial difference. Back then, there was a Republican president taking actions against America’s enemies, while Democrats supposedly didn’t want to protect the country (even if, in reality, elected Democrats gave ample support to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other elements of the “War on Terror”).
Today, however, it’s a Democratic president who is taking action against terrorists. Even if you believe that action is inadequate, it still creates a fundamentally different impression with the public when they see Tomahawks launching and jets taking off from aircraft carriers on Barack Obama’s orders.
What the public is primarily witnessing right now is a war being waged by the head of the Democratic Party. Twelve years ago, Republicans successfully argued that they were the ones favoring action, while Democrats were a bunch of wimps who wanted to stand on the sidelines. And the Democratic party was deeply divided over Bush’s wars, its own internal arguments only lending credence to the GOP claim that only Republicans would stand up and protect America.
In contrast, no matter how hawkish some Republicans sound right now, they’re in the role of commenting on what the Obama administration is doing, while televisions play images of American military power — again, launched on Obama’s orders — on an endless loop.
So what Republicans are left with is the fear component: Terrorists are coming to kill your children, so vote GOP. That’s not nothing — fear can be effective, and research has shown that reminding people of terrorism and their own mortality can be enough to push some to support more conservative candidates. But it won’t have nearly the power it did in the days after September 11, when Democrats lived in desperate fear that Karl Rove might call them weak.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 23, 2013
“Page One Of His Playbook”: Karl Rove Has A Democratic Candidate For Governor ‘Arrested’
Karl Rove has committed felonies—uh, not felonies, I mean smears. To avoid any confusion, I’ll repeat: Karl Rove has not been convicted of committing felonies. But he has committed smears (not unlike the one I just committed on him). And, virtually unnoticed by the media, he has smeared again, yesterday on Fox News Sunday.
It was recently revealed that Paul Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor of Kansas, had a most awkward moment sixteen years ago. Police raided a strip club near Coffeyville for drugs and found Davis, then 26 and unmarried, getting a lap dance. He wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, no charges were brought against him, and even in Kansas, lap-dancing isn’t illegal.
Still, the lap-dance story is fair game for supporters of Sam Brownback, the embattled Republican governor who’s running for re-election. On Meet the Press yesterday, Grover Norquist, for example, interrupted his anti-tax talk to relate the lap-dance incident (“with the naked lady”), which Thomas Frank later shot down as ancient small fry.
But over at Fox, Rove dramatically raised the stakes for Davis, saying that Kansas’s possible future governor had been “arrested”:
The governor’s race in Kansas is close. However, late last week, it was revealed that the Democratic candidate for governor had been arrested—or not arrested, he’d been detained briefly a number of years ago when he was an attorney for a strip joint and the police found him getting a lap dance.
Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace let it slide, presumably because Rove corrected himself. But the “correction” allowed Rove to repeat the word “arrested,” a word that, even when used in the negative, Fox viewers can now associate with Davis and repeat until it seems true. No small thing when many diehard Republicans in Kansas are so disgusted with the devastation wreaked by Brownback’s tax cuts, that they’re actually considering a vote for Davis.
Of course, Rove may have simply made an honest slip of the tongue. But “Bush’s Brain” has a long list of such ambiguous slips.
Most recently, he suggested that Hillary Clinton had suffered a “traumatic brain injury.” Several months after her December 2012 fall, which caused a blood clot, Rove said, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.” She was hospitalized for three days, not thirty, and later that day Rove tried to deny (while simultaneously reinforcing) his innuendo, saying, “Of course she doesn’t have brain damage.”
“You could believe Rove’s denial—but you would have to ignore virtually his entire political career,” as George Zornick wrote in The Nation. “For decades Rove has been circulating nasty, personal rumors about political opponents and placing them in the public conversation, all while obscuring his fingerprints, making the rumors become the opponent’s problem, not his. It’s page one of his playbook.”
A protégé of the late Lee Atwater, the GOP dirty trickster who once boasted that “states’ rights” and “tax cuts” could be used as code words for “nigger,” Rove has been associated with whisper campaigns suggesting that his clients’ opponents were homosexual (Texas governor Ann Richards in 1994), pedophiles (a Democratic candidate for Alabama Supreme Court, also in ’94), or mentally impaired (John McCain in 2000). “Other rumors tied to the Rove-led campaign” in 2000, writes Think Progress, “included allegations that McCain’s wife had a drug problem and that his adopted Bangladesh-born daughter was an ‘illegitimate black child.’”
Rove is sparing Davis the “mental” and “homo” tags, but having him “arrested” just might do the dirty trick. (And it might help obscure reports, cited by Davis, that the FBI is investigating the fund-raising and lobbying practices of Brownback associates. Brownback has denied any wrongdoing.)As for Davis, a Kansas state representative, he released a statement to Politico on Saturday. “When I was 26 years old, I was taken to a club by my boss—the club owner was one of our legal clients,” he said in the statement. “While we were in the building, the police showed up. I was never accused of having done anything wrong, but rather I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
On Fox, Rove was, once again, in the right place at the right time to say the wrong thing.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, September 22, 2014
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