“Bad Heritage”: One Wonders If Jim DeMint Is Quite The Person To Lead The Way Toward The Think Tank’s Redemption
When Jim DeMint left the Senate to assume command of the Heritage Foundation, some people questioned the wisdom of the move. Not from DeMint’s perspective—after all, instead of being a staunchly conservative member of the minority party with a staff of a few dozen whose job was to throw rhetorical bombs at the majority and say mean things about Barack Obama, now he’d have a staff of a few hundred and rule one of the right’s most important institutions, not to mention probably quadrupling his salary. No, the puzzle was why a think tank like Heritage would want someone like DeMint, not known for putting much stock in thinking, as its leader.
And before you know it, Heritage is taking a huge hit to its reputation. It was always known for producing tendentious analyses of issues, but the report it released this week on immigration, claiming that reform would cost the country trillions of dollars, was a masterpiece of glaring omissions and questionable assumptions; included among the latter was that immigrants and their children will never move up the economic ladder.
Then we got a little more insight into where that belief might have come from. It turns out that one of the report’s co-authors, the spectacularly named Jason Richwine, wrote a dissertation at Harvard claiming that there are immutable differences in intelligence between races, and that should govern our immigration policy. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, he wrote, “but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” Then we discovered that this wasn’t the first time Richwine had opined on the alleged intellectual inferiority of certain races. With the heat growing, today Richwine resigned from Heritage.
But there may be an upside for Heritage in all this. For some time to come, their quantitative work will be subject to extra scrutiny, with observers on the lookout for both statistical shenanigans and the authors’ repellent views whenever a new Heritage report comes out. The organization will surely know this, which could lead them to be unusually careful and restrained in the arguments they make. If so, they could end up producing better work and eventually overcome the damage this episode has done. But one wonders if Jim DeMint is quite the person to lead the way toward redemption.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 10, 2013
“What Benghazi Means”: Lost Is The Concept Of Content And Facts
Hillary Clinton was pissed. A Republican senator was accusing her of misleading the world about a raid on a diplomatic compound in Libya that killed four Americans.
“With all due respect,” the then-secretary of state snapped at Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, “The fact is, we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans?”
“What difference at this point does it make?”
In the overheated echo chamber of Washington, if not elsewhere, it made a difference during that January hearing. This was, after all, a mano-a-mano, nationally televised confrontation between partisan Republicans and a famously divisive Democrat concluding a celebrated tour as loyal aide to President Obama, the man who vanquished her for the 2008 presidential nomination.
And it makes perhaps even more of a difference after a Capitol Hill melodrama last week in which the deadly terrorist attack was recounted with fresh, even chilling, details that begged the ultimate question:
What does the tragic Sept. 11, 2012 death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others amount to, if anything, for either Obama or for Clinton if she runs for President in 2016?
What Republicans believed was a two-legged smoking gun came in the form of Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 diplomat at our embassy in Tripoli. Appearing before a House oversight panel, he was introduced with fanfare by Republican Darrell Issa of California, whose self-image as a national security expert may partly stem from parlaying a car alarm business into the largest personal fortune in Congress.
Hicks recounted a conversation with the leader of a Special Operations team in Tripoli, furious when ordered not to fly to Benghazi after the attack. He said he was rebuked by superiors for talking to a GOP congressman who visited Libya later.
Finally, he said, he was berated by Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff and famously loyal former President Bill Clinton aide, for excluding a State Department lawyer from a meeting because the lawyer didn’t have the correct security clearance.
The capper was when Susan Rice, the UN ambassador, suggested on Sunday talk shows shortly after the attack that it was a result of protests over an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube.
“My jaw dropped and I was embarrassed,” said Hicks, who claimed that he has been essentially demoted since (which the State Department flatly denies).
Hicks was preaching to what amounted to a Republican choir which sees calculated deceit in the Rice appearance. They can’t fathom the possibility that it was something else, namely a ham-handed mix of confusion, ineptitude and political spin.
That’s all seemingly lost in the fog of a Washington political war. Among the casualties are context and some facts:
History. American government facilities are a sadly regular target for terrorists. There have been many dozens of attacks on U.S. embassies, consulates, military compounds and personnel since the 1979 takeover of our embassy in Tehran. The most deadly one resulted in the deaths of 241 servicemen after the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut.
But it is also true that since gaining a House majority in 2010, Republicans have sharply cut State Department budget requests for more embassy security funding. For fiscal 2012, they shaved the request by $331 million.
Self-criticism. State initiated an independent review of Benghazi led by Thomas Pickering, a revered former diplomat, and Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It eviscerated the department for “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” that prompted “a security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”
“Cover-up.” This is a constant GOP refrain, even belittling the Pickering-Mullen review as letting Clinton herself off the hook. A recent joint report by Republican leaders asserted that “the leadership failure in relation to security and policy in Benghazi extended to the highest levels of the State Department, including Secretary Clinton,” who left at the end of January.
The evidence is ambiguous at best and includes the mistake-filled fencing over whether Obama refused to call Benghazi a “terrorist” attack. Forgotten by many is that he used the term in his first public statement on Sept. 12. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” he said in the Rose Garden.
Inexplicably, several key administration officials, including Vice President Biden and Rice, seem to have then dropped the term from their lexicons. Garrulous Biden improbably did not directly rebut Rep. Paul Ryan’s assertion in their vice-presidential debate that it “took the President two weeks to acknowledge that this was a terrorist attack.”
Talking points. The capital chattering class has spent much time parsing the confounding intricacies of the talking points given Rice for the Sunday TV interviews in which she said, “What this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what happened, transpired in Cairo,” where protesters at the U.S. embassy were outraged over the crude anti-Muslim video.
Jonathan Karl of ABC News sent Obama critics into a tizzy Friday with a report about State Department and White House memos intended to revise the talking points prior to the Rice appearances. His disclosures were quickly embraced by Obama-Clinton critics as further proof of skullduggery.
But, when asked later by Politico, Karl conceded, “There’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton was aware of what was going on, or in any way tried to direct what was in these talking points.”
Despite the clear impression of confusion, imprecision and bureaucratic fumbling – which are hallmarks of every administration since, well, Washington – some conservatives are unconvinced. Every rhetorical inconsistency is now viewed in the most suspicious light, much as Democrats would do if the shoe were on the other foot with a Republican White House.
Thus, Peter Feaver, a national security aide to President George W. Bush who now teachers public policy at Duke, contends that the slew of debatable internal memos point “pretty convincingly to the conclusion that there was willful misleading going on in the earliest days.”
Really? Might it not simply be what Feaver admits can be “tolerable spin and understandable fog-of-war confusion in the face of conflicting reports”?
In the end, so much of the critics’ ire is directed at Clinton, a catalytic figure once again presumed to be the frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination if she wants it.
That’s no surprise to journalist-historian David Maraniss, biographer of both Bill Clinton and Obama and a longtime Hillary observer.
Assessing her Benghazi performance, and the whole Washington scene, he finds “the same old murky convergence of Clintonian defensiveness, especially via Cheryl Mills, and GOP overreaction via Rep. Issa et al.”
Bingo, a sense of history and context.
Such a perspective explains why the whole contretemps is notable not just for the noise it generates in the Washington echo chamber but also for some conspicuous silence.
Andrew Kohut, founding director of the Pew Research Center, says Pew is in the field right now doing polling on the issue. But he suspects it is flying below the radar screen of most Americans.
Then there’s one of the most sober and thoughtful Republicans on foreign policy, former Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, long a stalwart on the foreign relations committee.
Though Stevens was an admired former Lugar staffer, Lugar has neither condoned nor condemned U.S. actions in response to the Benghazi attack. And a former Republican staffer on that committee underscored his own bottom line:
“This is not Iran-Contra,” he said, alluding to the bonafide Reagan era scandal in which secret arms sales to Iran were used to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.
“These were people here in a dangerous position trying to do the best they could,” said the former staffer. “There were probably real communications issues. Rice knew when going on air this all didn’t add up. In retrospect she should have simply said, ‘It simply wasn’t clear what was happening.’ That would have taken care of it.”
Team Obama fumbled. And Republicans saw an opportunity to diminish Obama and Clinton. It was a twofer, with Benghazi serving as a potential real-time version of the nastily effective “Swift Boat” attacks on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.
But it’s not having that same impact, and thus it’s folly to think this hurts Clinton’s chances if she chooses to run. Tom Bowen, a shrewd Democratic consultant in Chicago, says, “The idea that one of the most popular secretaries of state to serve this country will be damaged by revisions of ‘talking points’ is foolhardy.”
Yes, four Americans killed in a terrorist attack is nothing to be flip about. But voters by and large understand that the world is a dangerous place — and there are plenty of narratives that fall far short of being deemed Nixonian.
There is a desperate lack of perspective in Washington and, quite improbably, the Benghazi episode suggests it’s actually getting worse.
By: James Warren, New York Daily News, May 12, 2013
“From Poor Regulation To Terrorism”: Texas’ Wild West Approach To Protecting Public Health And Safety
You might think the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, that leveled the town and killed 14 people would have given pause to those conservative policymakers and boosters in the Lone Star State who proudly boast of a “Texas Way” in which job-creators aren’t hassled by pointy-headed bureaucrats and regulators or income taxes or any of those other new-fangled socialist devices. But no: under the leadership of Gov. Rick Perry, we learn from a New York Times story today, Texas government and business officials are going out of their way to reiterate that this is a place where the Bidnessman walks tall, and poor living standards and high workplace risks are just the price of keeping job creators fat and happy.
Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.
But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs….
“The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,” said Thomas O. McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an expert on regulation.
So I’d bet today’s news that Texas law enforcement officials have launched a criminal investigation based on reports that federal agents found bomb-making materials in the possession of a paramedic who was on the scene in West is going to generate a lot of excitement in the state’s conservative circles. True, the suspect who was arrested by the ATF isn’t an Arab or even a Chechen, and no one knows at this point if he had anything to do with the explosion, and if so, what his motives might have been.
But Lord a-mercy, wouldn’t it be nice if it was a terrorist and not an industry or lawmakers or regulators we ought to be looking at in connection with this tragedy? The very possibility must be worth toasting in certain circles during today’s Texas happy hours.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2013
“Notes On A Pseudo-Scandal”: With No Credibility On Issues, Republicans Demand For Scandal Is Intense And Unflagging
OK folks, if you have the patience for some meta-blogging on the subject of Benghazi, let me share with you some of the thoughts that have been running around my head as I struggle with how to talk about this story. Whenever a topic like this comes up, you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do I have something worthwhile to contribute to this discussion? Is there something that needs to be said but hasn’t been yet? Is this thing even worth talking about? Much as I’d like to be immune to the consideration of whether I’m doing a favor for those pushing the story for their own partisan ends by keeping the discussion going, it’s hard to avoid that question popping into your head from time to time.
There’s an objective reality out there, hard though it may sometimes be to discern—either there was or was not actual wrongdoing, and the whole matter is either trivial or momentous—but everyone’s perception of that reality is formed within the context of a partisan competition. Irrespective of any facts, Democrats would like this story to just go away, and Republicans would like it to become The Worst Scandal In History. I’ll be honest and say it’s hard to avoid thinking about that when you’re writing about it. Even doing something like refuting the latest crazy thing someone on the right is alleging does, to at least a small degree, help maintain the story’s momentum.
To step back to the big picture, a “scandal” can proceed regardless of whether any wrongdoing is ever found. If you have your own media system, you can keep talking about it (combined with, always always always, accusations that the mainstream media are ignoring it not because of a reasonable news judgment but because of their liberal bias) until the mainstream media start doing their own reporting on it, pushing the story ahead. This is a routine conservative media are practiced at, and they seem to be having some success yet again. If you have control of one house of Congress, furthermore, you can start investigations and hold hearings, which may not uncover anything incriminating, but it creates news events and produces information, which can be spun to be something nefarious even if it’s utterly mundane.
For instance, conservatives continue to froth at the mouth over whether a set of talking points the administration produced contained the words “terrorism” or “Islamic extremists” or “extremists,” as though one answer means everything was above-board and another answer means there was a cover-up so sinister that impeaching the president is the obvious response. You may be shocked to learn that talking points on national security matters are routinely edited by representatives of different agencies! Or maybe you’re not shocked, but just in case, Republicans are going to act as though it’s shocking. If you’re an Obama partisan, the fact that your opponents think that the key to the President’s undoing will be found in some Microsoft Word “track changes” should make you feel pretty secure, since those opponents are plainly a bunch of buffoons.
Trouble is, that may not stop the “scandal” from continuing to generate momentum. Brendan Nyhan just put out a paper in which he posits a theory of scandals, arguing that they are a “co-production” of the media and the opposition party. Specifically, the less popular a president is with the opposing party, the more likely a scandal is to emerge.Other factors have an impact as well, including competing news stories, the time a president has been in office, and the time since the last scandal. This is essentially what Jamelle noted yesterday, that while there may not be much of a supply of actual Obama administration wrongdoing, the demand for scandal on the right is intense and unflagging. That demand is met by the conservative media, whose coverage pushes Republican lawmakers to get involved, which generates more coverage, which generates more demand in the Republican rank and file, and on and on.
I hesitate to even use the word “scandal” to describe Benghazi, because so far we haven’t learned of anything scandalous anyone did. Conservatives themselves don’t seem to be able to say exactly what the Obama administration is supposed to have done wrong, particularly since lethal attacks on American diplomatic mission are a frequent occurrence, even under Republican administrations. “Talking points were edited to make the attack sound less terrorist-y” isn’t exactly a high crime. “Some different decisions in those first chaotic hours might have made a difference” isn’t much of an indictment either; that’s always true of any tragedy. Yes, there are some people on the right who will speculate that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton actually said, “Go ahead and let those people in Benghazi die, because even though we could save their lives, doing so might harm our re-election, so screw ’em.” But those people are obviously nuts, and everybody knows it.
It may well be that, as it was during the Clinton years, even many of the people pushing the alleged scandal realize there’s not much to it, but they find political utility in keeping the president under siege. If he’s worried about this, he’ll have less time to devote to his other priorities. Spend tens of millions investigating a failed land deal, and even if you don’t find that he did anything wrong there, maybe along the way you’ll discover that he got a blow job from an intern.
As reluctant as I am to feed that beast, in the end I suspect they’ll be punished for their obsession with Benghazi, assuming that they fail, just as they have so far, to uncover any actual wrongdoing. And that’ll happen whether people like me write about it or not.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 10, 2013
“The Hearing To End All Hearings”: The Hunt For The GOP’s White Whale Will Never End
It was tempting to think the Republican obsession with the politics of last fall’s Benghazi attack had run its course this week. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had lined up one last spectacle, suggesting it would be the hearing to end all hearings, and it was a dud. After multiple reports and hearings, the story had run its course.
Except, it hasn’t.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is asking the White House and State Department to hand over emails related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, which House committees were able to see, but not keep or share, during their investigation into the response to the attack. […]
Boehner is asking for two sets of emails, both of which are related to whether the White House tried to change the initial characterization of the attack…. The emails, according to Boehner, show a senior State Department official telling her superiors that the Libyan ambassador said the attack “was conducted by Islamic terrorists.”
But we know what the email says, and we know it’s different from Boehner’s claim — it said “extremists,” not “terrorists.” As the New York Times reported, “The distinction is important, administration officials said, because while the White House did not initially characterize the attack as terrorism, senior officials, including Ambassador Susan E. Rice, acknowledged the possibility that extremists had been involved in the assault.”
So why is Boehner pursuing this at all? Perhaps because he’s dealing with pressure from his own members to create another special committee to investigate the attack, on top of the other congressional committees that have already investigated the attack, which complemented an independent panel that also already investigated the attack.
Meanwhile, it’s also becoming increasingly obvious that the GOP’s preoccupation with Hillary Clinton is once again reaching unhealthy levels.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Fox News yesterday to argue the former Secretary of State needs to testify to answer congressional questions on Benghazi, and she “should be subpoenaed if necessary.” This is of interest because Clinton has already testified — was Cheney not paying attention? — and because when Cheney was vice president, he believed congressional requests for testimony should be ignored.
Of course, that didn’t stop Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) from quickly endorsing Cheney’s line.
As Jonathan Bernstein explained yesterday, this isn’t what congressional oversight is supposed to look like.
With Obama, there’s no need for these scandals to make sense; the conservative press will run with them either way. And there might even be an advantage to incoherence. After all, if the accusations are gibberish, the neutral reporters will tend to ignore them — and then conservatives can go on conservative talk radio and Fox News and charge the rest of the press of ignoring these extremely important charges.
All of which means that Republican politicians have little incentive, and perhaps even some real disincentives, for doing the hard work of government oversight — or even the hard work of first-rate scandal-mongering. No wonder they get lazy!
Unfortunately, that leaves us with hyped-up accusations, but no real government oversight — no one really probing for real mistakes, or even real malfeasance, from the Obama Administration. There’s just no reason to bother. And that leaves everyone worse off — except perhaps those reaping profits in the conservative marketplace.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 10, 2013
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