“Obama Reflects On A Sacred Rule”: We Don’t Leave Our Men Or Women In Uniform Behind
The political discourse over the last few days has been rather surreal. It seemed hard to imagine that the release of an American prisoner of war would spark a fierce partisan backlash, but the announcement that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been freed from his Taliban captors in Afghanistan seems to have done exactly that, with much of the right condemning the move.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned his allies, “Attacking the actions that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is a surefire way to lose in 2014,” but so far, conservatives have ignored the suggestion.
President Obama, in Europe this week, spoke to reporters while in Poland this morning and responded to the burgeoning controversy.
“The United States has always had a pretty sacred rule and that is we don’t leave our men or women in uniform behind,” he said. “We have consulted with Congress for quite some time about the possibility that we might need to execute a prisoner exchange to recover Sgt. Bergdahl.” […]
“I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought it was detrimental to our national security,” he said. “We will be in a position to go after them if they are engaging in activity that threatens our defenses.”
There have been multiple reports that Bergdahl may have been a deserter at the time of his capture. And though we don’t yet have all of the details about what transpired, the president made clear that some of those details aren’t quite relevant to the underlying principle.
“Let me just make a simple point here: regardless of the circumstances, whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period. Full stop. We don’t condition that,” Obama said.
I’m not sure why so many on the right find this hard to understand.
The United States prioritizes the return of American POWs. It’s just what we do. What if the troops were captured due to their own negligence? It doesn’t matter. What if they were taken prisoner as a result of incompetence? It doesn’t matter. What if they gave up their post? It doesn’t matter.
Even by the standards of our contemporary discourse, the past few days have been hard to believe. U.S. officials secured the release of an American prisoner of war and for much of the right, the first instinct was to condemn the president. The second instinct was to condemn the prisoner. And as yesterday unfolded, the third instinct was to go after the prisoner’s dad.
I don’t expect much from the far-right, but this is surprising.
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, said in a joint statement that the prisoner swap that led to Bergdahl’s release “may have” adverse consequences and could put U.S. forces “at even greater risk.”
It’s difficult to say with certainty whether their warnings have merit. But Glenn Thrush asked a good question on Twitter overnight: what endangered the U.S. homeland more: a prisoner swap or invading Muslim country based on fake intelligence resulting in tens of thousands of deaths?
Predicting what U.S. foreign policies “may have” adverse consequences and/or could put U.S. forces “at even greater risk” is tricky, but if we’re making a list, I can think of a few things that would come above “prisoner swaps.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 3, 2014
“One Twisted Sister”: Wingnuts’ War On The Troops, The Ugly Lesson Of Bowe Bergdahl And Sarah Palin
After nearly five years, Bowe Bergdahl, a 28-year-old Idahoan and the last remaining American POW in Afghanistan, is finally coming home. The Obama administration made the announcement during the weekend, framing the deal that swapped Bergdahl for five Taliban-affiliated Guantánamo Bay prisoners as an example of two U.S. promises: to leave no man behind and to finally, mercifully, and after nearly 13 long years, begin to end the war in Afghanistan. For Bergdahl and his family, the move is a blessing. For those who doubt the administration’s commitment to ending the war, it is a reassurance. And for the loudest members of the far right, it is a mistake, a capitulation, a disgrace.
Their argument, in brief: By agreeing to trade prisoners of war with the Taliban, Obama made the U.S. look — what else? — weak. “You blew it again, Barack Obama, by negotiating away any leverage against the bad guys,” wrote the perpetually enraged Sarah Palin on her Facebook page. The deal, argued Palin, had “destroyed troop morale” while causing “Osama Bin Laden’s partners in evil crime” to “joyfully celebrate.” What really infuriated the half-term governor and former vice presidential candidate, though, wasn’t so much Obama’s actions as Bergdahl’s. The price the administration paid for liberating him, Palin intimated, was simply too high. He didn’t deserve it. How come? Because he expressed “horrid anti-American beliefs” and deserted his fellow soldiers prior to his capture.
As you might expect from any Palin story, there are some issues. For one, whether Bergdahl found himself under Taliban control because of bad luck, as the administration claims, or because he decided to abandon his post is up for debate. (And keep in mind that, even if he had deserted, that hardly makes it ethical for the government to abandon him to his captors.) For another, Palin’s note about the deal lacks some crucial information — like the fact that the men released from Guantánamo will have to spend at least a year in Qatar, or that the U.S.’s impending cessation of the war in Afghanistan would necessitate the release of the Gitmo detainees anyway. But for all it lacked in terms of responding to this relatively simple news story in an informed, accurate and insightful way, Palin’s angry Facebook missive was great in one respect: It was a perfect example of what happens when soldiers refuse to live up to the far right’s fantasies.
We’re all familiar with how conservatives — but especially extreme ones like Palin — deify, romanticize and claim ownership of the men and women in the armed forces. We all remember the 2004 Republican National Convention, when President Bush all but dusted off that iconic green “Mission Impossible” flight suit in order to portray himself and his party as the sole guardians and stewards of the military. We all remember the countless times during the Bush years when a Republican or a conservative would ask an antiwar Democrat or liberal why they so hate the troops. We expect to see right-wingers genuflect before the Platonic ideal of an American warrior. We expect to hear more stories about Marine Todd.
“McConnell’s Obamacare Policy”: Repeal It, Then Immediately Reinstate The Whole Damn Thing
I think there’s one way, and only one way, to interpret Mitch McConnell’s position on the Medicaid expansion in Kentucky, and last night the Washington Post’s fact checker confirmed it. McConnell wants to repeal the Medicaid expansion (along with the rest of Obamacare) and then let the people who run the state of Kentucky (i.e. people other than him) decide whether to reinstate it, and pay for it out of state coffers.
That’s a difficult position to support, which explains why his campaign obscures it behind a bunch of rambling designed to convince people (including very politically savvy people) that McConnell has come around to supporting the Medicaid expansion.
But it’s actually identical to his position on Kynect—the state’s health insurance exchange—and perhaps he’ll apply it to other integral parts of Obamacare as well. As a general matter it amounts to arguing that Obamacare should be repealed, and then reinstated in full at the state level. But that’s a total fantasy.
When Obamacare is repealed, the funding Kynect relies upon, as well as the health plans and rules that make it a popular and widely used portal, will disappear as well. No biggie, says McConnell. Once they’re gone, the state can decide whether it wants to reinstitute those things on its own.
But of course, as with Medicaid expansion, it’s almost impossible to imagine states riding to the rescue of those harmed by Obamacare’s repeal. Running the exchange is fairly expensive on its own, but its costs would dwarfed by the resources required to recreate the actual market Obamacare has created in Kentucky. Remember, Kentucky flirted with creating Obamacare’s coverage guarantee without creating any incentives for everyone to purchase insurance. No mandate, no subsidies. And the system predictably collapsed. But it’s unlikely that Kentucky could afford to reinstate ACA-style subsidies on its own. And without them, the plans will be too expensive to justify a mandate. And so under McConnell’s policy, Kentucky’s newly insured would be left with nothing.
The idea that ACA politics are gruesome for Democrats is so deeply ingrained in the national media’s belief system that it won’t be shaken loose by McConnell’s dissembling alone. But if it were true, why would Republicans across the country be hiding their true views about Obamacare behind the word “fix”? Why would any Republicans, let alone the Senate GOP leader, be saying they want to get rid of everything Obamacare does except the things it does in their own states?
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, May 30, 2014
“Gimmicks Tend To Backfire”: What A Party Circling The Drain Looks Like
The same is true of TV shows, consumer products and politics: when you have to rely on gimmicks to make your sale, you’re on the path to failure.
Despite a consistent and unyieldingly belligerent posture, the GOP has been increasingly substituting flash-in-the-pan gimmicks for actual policy positions or even coherent ideological talking points. Meanwhile, they’ve been quietly but surely on a path of retreat on substantive grounds.
The Benghazi carnival continues to go nowhere, damaging neither the Democratic Party generally nor even Hillary Clinton in a significant way. Republicans who once thought they could ride an anti-Obamacare wave all the way to November are facing the annoying reality that even in red states the actual specifics of the program are pretty popular, and they’re going to look very bad trying to take away health insurance from millions of people. The seniors who bought into the lie that the ACA is stealing money from Medicare are still with the GOP, but they’re not a big enough voting block to sweep conservatives into a Senate majority, much less the sort of tidal wave they would need to overcome Democratic filibusters.
In the meantime, polls show voters moving away from the GOP on most issues. Fox News’ ratings are tanking. And early numbers are indicating that while liberal and centrist voters aren’t excited about voting in the June primary, conservative voter enthusiasm seems to be greatly diminished as well.
Some of these trends are new, but they were also predictable. Pundits left, right and center have been cautioning for years that the GOP would be placed in a political squeeze by its hardline stance on the ACA. Gay marriage used to be a wedge issue driving Karl Rove’s voters to the polls; now it’s a thorn in the elephant’s side and a major public image problem. The shrill cries of Benghazi barely even excite their own base anymore. And the national Republican party hasn’t even given its own voters a positive agenda it would enact if it held the White House. After all, cutting Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and unemployment benefits isn’t a terribly attractive policy platform for a party utterly dependent on older, less educated suburban and rural white voters. What else are Republicans actually offering the public as a credible policy platform? What are they even offering to their own base?
Without steak to sell, all the GOP has left is culture war sizzle. Enter Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame, whose bright light of media controversy over his remarks on gay marriage attracted a swarm of Republican political moths desperate to cling to his popularity with the conservative base. Now they’re stuck with him as he goes to public events telling Republican leadership that they can solve their problems with the electorate by “getting right with God”. His prescriptions for divine governance, unsurprisingly, are non-starters with the majority of American voters.
Gimmicks tend to backfire. Unfortunately for them, the Republican Party doesn’t seem to have much else left in its arsenal.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 31, 2014
“Content-Free Carping”: From VA To Obamacare To Medicare
At the moment most Republicans are looking at the VA scandal that broke out in Phoenix as a sheer political bonanza without any long-term significance: a federal agency responsible for an especially valued constituency (veterans) has screwed up fatally on Barack Obama’s “watch.” That’s enough to powerfully reinforce a number of important conservative memes about Obama (and indirectly, Democrats): he and his people are incompetent, they don’t have the normal patriotic impulse to take care of veterans, and when held accountable they stonewall and lie.
But a few voices are beginning to figure out how to link the VA mess not only to the overriding issues of Obamacare, but to the “socialized medicine” treatment of Obamacare that would be applied to Medicare, too, if the political climate was right.
Here’s the Cleveland Plan Dealer‘s Kevin O’Brien spelling it all out:
Putting a government bureaucracy in charge of one’s health is a gamble likely to end badly.
And yet, if Obamacare stands, that is precisely the gamble each and every American eventually will take.
There is no better predictor of the course of a single-payer medical system in the United States than the VA system, because it is a single-payer system….
Americans who watch this story play out and fail to make the clear and obvious connection to Obamacare will be guilty of willful ignorance. The systemic flaw is identical. It’s just magnified on a massive scale. Rather than making a false promise to treat all of the ills of a relatively few sick and injured military veterans, Obamacare has put the federal government on the path to taking responsibility for the medical needs — and the attendant costs — of the entire U.S. population.
Like most conservative attacks on “bureaucracy,” O’Brien’s ignores the powerful bureaucracies that operate in the private sector with even less accountability. As TNR’s Jonathan Cohn puts it:
It’s worth remembering that some of the problems veterans are having right now have very little to do with the VA and a whole lot to do with American health care. As Phil Longman, author of Best Care Anywhere, noted in his own congressional testimony last week, long waits for services are actually pretty common in the U.S.—even for people with serious medical conditions—because the demand for services exceeds the supply of physicians. (“It took me two-and-a-half years to find a primary care physician in Northwest Washington who was still taking patients,” he noted.) The difference is that the VA actually set guidelines for waiting times and monitors compliance, however poorly. That doesn’t happen in the private sector. The victims of those waits suffer, too. They just don’t get the same attention.
But nonetheless, the longer the VA scandal stays in the public eye, the more we will hear arguments the VA should be broken up and its services privatized with federal regulations and subsidies replacing federal bureaucracies–creating a system much like the one contemplated by Obamacare, as it happens. But at the same time, we’ll be told Obamacare itself is a failure because it involves the government in guarteeing heath care. And where conservatives speak to each other quietly, it will be understood that Medicare is subject to the same complaints and deserves the same fate.
No wonder most GOP pols confine themselves to content-free carping about Obama being responsible for the VA scandal.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal. May 22, 2014
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