“Reaganites Called Him A Terrorist And A Phony”: All The Terrible Things Republicans Used To Say About Nelson Mandela
Before Congressional Republicans in the U.S. lionized Nelson Mandela, they despised him. And they opposed not just the great freedom fighter himself but the entire anti-apartheid movement. Even worse, they took actions that damaged the cause of equality in South Africa. Not for nothing did Bishop Desmond Tutu call Ronald Reagan’s policy towards the country “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” Conservative Americans’ pro-apartheid actions are not just shameful history—they are similar, in some ways, to their actions to rid the world of political Islam.
The Kennedy administration had opposed the Afrikaner government, instituting an arms embargo on the country. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, conversely, muted criticism of the regime and opened channels of communications, in order to defeat the Soviets in the Third World. As part of his human rights-focused foreign policy, Jimmy Carter reversed course, imposed restrictions and sanctions on the apartheid government, which Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, requested.
Reagan not only removed the restrictions; he embraced the South African Apartheid regime. He instituted a policy euphemized as “constructive engagement.” Reagan said that the United States lacked the power to change the internal workings of the Afrikaner government. Not only was the claim false, it contradicted his position on the far more powerful Soviet Union, which was designed precisely to change the evil empire’s internal behavior. Reagan put Mandela on the U.S. terrorist list, a placement that wasn’t removed until 2008, incredibly. This was at a time when the South African civil war was at its peak of violence, with the conflict becoming a global cause.
In 1985, after the South African government committed some of its worst atrocities against blacks, Congress voted to impose sanctions against the country. This was a time when America accounted for about one-fifth of direct foreign investment in South Africa. Reagan vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act, calling it “immoral” and “repugnant.”
When Reagan met with Tutu, it was among the tensest meetings in his entire presidency. Reagan had the gall to tell the bishop that there had been “sizable progress in South Africa because of U.S. policy.” Tutu responded that the victims of Apartheid didn’t quite see that progress. Reagan called the ANC “notorious terrorists,” and, as late as 1988, called apartheid “a tribal policy more than … a racial policy.”
It wasn’t just Reagan. Moral Majority leader Jerry Fallwell called Tutu a “phony” who didn’t speak for South Africans blacks. He even urged Americans to support the Pretoria government. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms filibustered the sanctions bill. Strom Thurmond and Phil Gramm likewise opposed it. And future vice-president Dick Cheney called Mandela a terrorist, saying in 2000 that he didn’t regret his position. Pat Buchanan called Mandela a “train-bomber.” The Heritage Foundation said America should stop calling for Mandela’s release from prison. Pat Robertson, Grover Norquist, future Tea Party leaders, and current Republican Senators—all were on the books supporting the Apartheid government. When 35 House Republicans broke with the Reagan administration, the National Review called them “uppity,” and Human Events called them a “lynch mob.”
Most of the opposition was justified on foreign-policy grounds. The Reaganites feared that the Soviet Union would gain from the Afrikaner regime if they alienated it. As Conservative Caucus Foundation Chair Howard Phillips put it, “It’s not just a black-white issue. It’s red versus red, white, and blue.” The man who, outside of Reagan, did more than any other to shape the administration’s pro-apartheid policy was Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, who fashioned the Constructive Engagement policy. Wrote Crocker: “The real choice we will face in southern Africa in the 1980s concerns our readiness to compete with our global adversary in the politics of a changing region who future depends on those who participate in shaping it.” The State Department now says frankly that “Defenders of the Apartheid regime” in the West “had promoted it as a bulwark against communism.”
There were two flaws in this line of thinking. First was the notion that South Africa was an important theatre in the Cold War. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even of secondary importance, as Indochina was. Western Europe and Japan were what always mattered. Then there was the view that any means were justified in defeating the Soviet Union. Apartheid was as hideous a societal construct as existed, but many conservatives praised it just because it was anticommunist.
Both misjudgments are being replicated today. Instead of lasering in on anti-American terrorists, hawks maintain that Islamists anywhere are a threat to America everywhere. The result, if put into practice, would be a foreign policy that enmeshed the United States in unnecessary, damaging wars, sullied the country’s moral character, and caused great harm.
Similarly, with the entire globe being up for grabs in the conflict against radical Islam, all actions are deemed justified. Preventive wars against Iraq and perhaps Iran, torture, endless domestic and international surveillance—all are simply part of the toolkit needed to fight a limitless threat.
Some conservatives now concede they were wrong about Mandela. Perhaps after the threat to America from terrorists recedes, they will admit they were similarly mistaken—and damaging—in their inflation of threats from political Islam across the globe.
By: Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, December 6, 2013
“An Undead Policy Idea”: Rand Paul Pulls Out His Dog-Eared Playbook
Sen. Rand Paul decamped in Detroit today to open a new GOP office (good luck with that), and while he was at it, pulled out his thin, dog-eared playbook of conservative urban policy ideas, as reported by Slate‘s Emma Roller:
Paul’s real mission in Detroit is his new plan to stimulate the bankrupt city’s economy. In a call with reporters Thursday, Paul announced a bill that he insists is not a stimulus. The gist: radically lower taxes for areas that have 1.5 times the national unemployment rate, or roughly 11 percent. As of August, unemployment in Wayne County was at 11.1 percent, and 17.7 percent in Detroit proper.
Yes, it’s “enterprise zones,” the crown jewel of 1980s-style Republican expressions of concern for urban areas, associated especially with HUD secretary and conservative warhorse Jack Kemp. As Roller notes, it hasn’t been a particularly successful idea:
Would insanely low corporate taxes convince Jeff Bezos to build Amazon’s next warehouse in some long-abandoned Detroit building? Would they even convince business owners in adjacent Macomb County—which has an only 9.5 percent unemployment rate—to venture into the city? Critics (as they are wont to be) are skeptical:
“Enterprise zones are not especially effective at increasing overall economic activity or raising incomes for the poor,” said Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a former Clinton administration official. “They just seem to move the locus of activity across the zone’s boundary — reducing activity outside the zone and increasing it inside.”
Burman might well know, because probably the most extensive application of the enterprise zone concept was actually as a small element of the Clinton administration’s “empowerment zone” initiative, which packaged federal grants with tax concessions in urban areas agreeing to undertake a comprehensive strategy for self-improvement. This was not one of my favorite Clinton policies (as I expressed once in a magazine op-ed that enraged the initiative’s majordomo, a guy named Andrew Cuomo), but it was a lot better than the original GOP model.
But here it is again, a truly undead policy idea.
Once when I was involved in rural development efforts in Georgia I wrote (for the private amusement of my colleagues at the state agency where I worked) a savage parody of enterprise zones by “proposing” that we offer poor counties the opportunity to legalize every kind of income-producing vice: prostitution, gambling, drugs, you name it. They’d be called “erogenous zones.” A quarter century later, enterprise zones haven’t become any less worthy of ridicule.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 5, 2013
“Why Republicans Can’t Address Rising Inequality”: Even In The Face Of Reality, They Cannot Confess That They Aren’t Troubled At All
So far, the Republican response to President Obama’s historic address on economic inequality has not veered from the predictable clichés of Tea Party rhetoric. It was appropriately summarized in a tweet from House Speaker John Boehner, complaining that the Democrat in the White House wants “more government rather than more freedom” – and ignoring his challenge to Republicans to present solutions of their own.
But for Republicans to promote real remedies – the kind that would require more than 140 characters of text – they first would have to believe that inequality is a real problem. And there is no evidence that they do, despite fitful attempts by GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to display their “empathy” for the struggling, shrinking middle class.
Back when Occupy Wall Street briefly shook up the national conversation, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan both professed concern over the nation’s growing disparities of wealth and income. But their promises of proof that they care – and more important, of policy proposals to address what Cantor admits are “big challenges” – simply never materialized.
Meanwhile, working Americans learned what rich Republicans say in private about these sensitive topics when the “47 percent” video surfaced the following summer, in the final months of the 2012 presidential campaign. In Mitt Romney’s unguarded remarks to an audience of super-rich Florida financiers, the contempt for anyone who has benefited from public programs (other than banking bailouts) was palpable. Whether that sorry episode turned the election is arguable, but the Republican brand has never recovered – and the perception that Republicans like Romney and Ryan are hostile to the interests of working people remains indelible.
Of course, the House Republicans have done nothing to diminish that impression and everything to reinforce it. They have set about cutting food stamps, killing extended unemployment benefits, rejecting Medicaid expansion, as if competing in demonstrations of callous indifference. They complain about the lack of jobs – so long as they can blame Obama – but undermine every program designed to relieve the suffering of the jobless.
Callous or not, they are certainly indifferent to the injuries of inequality. In a party consumed by right-wing ideology and market idolatry, the further enrichment of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Whenever they bray about “getting government out of the way,” that means removing the last defenses against that process.
With Pope Francis and President Obama — a pair of the world’s most powerful voices — warning against the dangers of social exclusion and excessive greed, we can expect to hear expressions of remorse as well as rage from all the usual right-wing suspects. But what we shouldn’t expect is honesty. Republicans know that worsening inequality disturbs the great majority of Americans, so they cannot confess that they aren’t troubled at all.
Congress could begin to address the income gap, which conservative policies have exacerbated for three decades. Raising the minimum wage significantly would be a first step toward restoring fairness. Rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and school systems, rather than letting them continuously decay, would raise employment substantially and improve incomes. Removing obstacles to unionization would begin to level the gross disparities in economic power between the 1 percent and the rest of us.
Now the president has vowed to fight inequality for the rest of his days in office. He is taking that fight directly to the Republicans who have frustrated so many of his initiatives. He will have to cast aside the last illusions of bipartisanship.
No matter what he does or says, he may not be able to win a higher minimum wage or a serious jobs program or universal pre-school with the other party controlling Congress. But if he consistently challenges us — and his adversaries — to restore an American dream that includes everyone, he may yet fashion a legacy worthy of his transformative ambitions.
By: Joe Conason, Featured Post, The National Memo, December 5, 2013
“Voters Wil Not Forget”: Opposition To Obamacare Will Come Back To Haunt Conservatives
It is truly amazing to me to read through the blogs, the press releases from the Republican anti-Obamacare war room, the phalanx of Koch-brothers’ sponsored think tanks and web sites – one message: FAILURE.
Let’s leave aside that their cagey rhetoric has shifted from “repeal” to “a fix,” but that their policy position remains the same: kill it. Republicans will continue their onslaught against the Affordable Care Act because they believe it is a political attack that will work for them and unite their party, at least in the short run.
They complain about the problems with the website, yet they love that it didn’t work well. They are euphoric when it fails. Do they want it to succeed? Heck no.
They offer up people who have had problems switching their health care plans, with big smiles on their faces. Another Congressional hearing is called for to condemn the ACA, according to the Republicans.
Peter Roff, one of my esteemed colleagues on this blog, publishes a list from the Heritage Foundation on why the ACA will fail (never mind that much of what Heritage called for is in the law, like the individual mandate).
But forget all that. I would cite much of this list as precisely why Obamacare will work (see Roff’s Heritage list here):
- The new plans available under the law will provide better coverage for a better price. This is not a broken promise by the president but the end result. Think about the benefits: no pre existing conditions; no canceling of your plan when you get sick; no caps on coverage; no huge costs for women over what men pay; keeping children on the plan until they are 26.
- There will be more options for consumers to choose from, not less. They won’t be forced into inferior plans.
- The new approach to Medicaid will allow people to shop for and purchase their plans, not arrive in emergency rooms often too late for help and with exorbitant costs. This will be a vast improvement on where we are now. Sadly, many Republican governors want to keep these people from getting insurance by rejecting federal funds to help with the Medicaid expansion.
- The ACA will lead to more stable families with better health care, not penalize people for success or getting married, as Heritage asserts.
- There will be better care for women, more coverage, and it won’t destroy our religious liberties. Pardon the sexism, but that is a “straw man.”
- Probably the most absurd claim from Heritage is that the ACA is a job killer. If we are providing health care to an additional 30-40 million Americans, it will create jobs in the health care field, not kill them. More doctors, more nurses, more ways to care for patients. Businesses will have more productive workers, fewer who are sick and out of work, and costs will decrease as more people are covered.
I do have one prediction for my friend Peter Roff and those Republicans who are staking the political future of their party on killing the ACA: When this succeeds, voters will not forget, and they will remember the horror stories of the old system. The more the focus is on patient care, better treatment through R&D, keeping people healthy, access for millions, the more that Democrats will benefit from the contrast. Republicans should be very careful not to argue too strongly for failure, it will come back to haunt them.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, December 5, 2013
“Treading Carefully”: Paul Ryan’s Big, Tricky Budget Moment Is Here
Congress has been historically inactive this year. But with the clock winding down on 2013, there is still a glimmer of hope that bicameral negotiations could produce a modest budget deal that would replace some of the sequester cuts.
For Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the House GOP budget guru and potential presidential aspirant, that presents both an opportunity and a challenge. A bipartisan deal could serve as a rare (for him) legislative achievement that pads his credentials and charts the GOP’s course heading into the next election cycle. Yet at the same time, Ryan would risk spurning the GOP base — and its vocal Ted Cruz types — if he’s perceived as bending too far to Democratic demands.
Ryan and his Senate counterpart Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are believed to be close to a very small deal that would eliminate some of the automatic budget cuts scheduled to go into effect over the next two years. Though nothing is finalized, the deal would reportedly nix about one-third of the sequester-mandated cuts, splitting the reinstated funds between defense and non-defense spending.
Since Republicans won’t go for tax increases, and Democrats won’t tackle entitlement reform without also touching revenue, Murray and Ryan have been reduced to “pulling together odds and ends to make a deal, including non-tax revenue like auctioning broadband spectrum and airport security fees, as well as increasing employee contributions to federal workers’ retirement programs,” wrote MSNBC’s Suzy Khimm.
In short: The negotiators are looking at a tiny deal, far less than the sweeping budget overhaul Ryan has famously proposed before in his spending blueprints.
Still, a deal would be a success for a Congress so dysfunctional it triggered a two-week government shutdown and flirted with debt default. Republicans would love to roll back some of the cuts to defense spending. And Democrats are eager for a deal that would wipe out some of the cuts to cherished domestic programs like Head Start.
Such a deal, if passed, would also be a significant accomplishment for Ryan to add to his otherwise unimpressive legislative record.
Though a noted policy wonk, none of Ryan’s radical budget bills have gone anywhere in Congress. In fact, only two Ryan-drafted bills, neither of which were anything truly groundbreaking, have become law in the congressman’s entire House career. One bill named a post office; the other amended a tax on arrows.
A deal would thus “burnish an image of someone willing to find — and tout — common ground in a historically divided Washington,” wrote Politico’s Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan. “It’s a credential that could serve him well as he looks to grab the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee or run for his party’s nomination before the 2016 presidential contest.”
Still, an agreement almost assuredly wouldn’t do anything about long-term GOP priorities Ryan has championed before, like cutting entitlement spending.
And there’s the rub for Ryan: A small deal could turn off both conservative lawmakers and voters.
Conservative House members dug in on their impossible demands during the shutdown even as it obliterated the party’s approval rating. Those same members could balk at a proposed deal that doesn’t cut deeper. And though a deal could still pass with the help of Democratic votes, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) would risk further splitting his fragile caucus by cobbling together a Democratic-heavy coalition.
A mini-deal could also be problematic for Ryan’s perceived presidential ambitions if it causes the party’s right flank, which plays a disproportionately large role in the primary nominating process, to sour on him.
“If the Tea Party turns up the rhetorical heat, would Ryan risk a presidential bid to rescue the country from another government shutdown?” wrote Salon’s Joan Walsh. “I’ve never seen him stand up to that kind of ideological pressure from the right, but there could be a first time.”
If he’s keen on keeping his conservative hero status and pursuing a 2016 run, Ryan really ought to tread carefully.
By: John Terbush, The Week, December 4, 2013
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