Rick Santorum Has the “Heart and Faith” Necessary For Imperialism
Despite sponsoring foreign-policy legislation while in the United States Senate and preparing to run for the presidency, Rick Santorum has embarrassed himself time and again during the GOP primary when making statements about the rest of the world. The most recent example is his cartoonishly simplistic understanding of the British Empire’s decline from its 20th-century peak.
Here’s what he told a crowd Monday in Iowa, as reported by The Huffington Post’sElise Foley:
“If you look at every European country that has had world domination, a world presence, from the French to the British — 100 years ago, the sun didn’t set on the British Empire,” Santorum said at an appearance in Sioux City, Iowa. “If you look at that empire today — why? Because they lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission, who they were and what values they wanted to spread around the world. Not just for the betterment of the world, but safety and security and the benefit of their country.” “We have taken up that cause,” Santorum added. But now, he said, “We have a president who doesn’t believe in America.”
This proved too much for Daniel Larison:
Yes, it couldn’t have had anything to do with two exhausting global conflicts that cost the lives of millions of British subjects, or the financial ruin of Britain that followed these conflicts. The British just “lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission.” Obviously, the only thing needed to maintain “world domination” is self-confidence and resolve.
The mockery is deserved, and piling on is necessary, for it’s getting wearisome to take seriously someone who claims to venerate America’s founding values, bristles at the notion that foreign occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan suggest an imperial mindset, and yet asserts that Great Britain failed the world when it stopped trying to rule a fifth of its inhabitants. One wonders how long he thinks the British should’ve asserted their will in India, Ireland, and its North African colonies, among other places, and why he thinks maintenance of these colonies always enhanced rather than detracted from the safety and prosperity of the home islands.
“Believing in America” should entail an embrace of the values on which it was founded: the idea that all humans are endowed with self-evident, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But in Santorum’s twisted formulation, belief in America requires an embrace of its military footprint in multiple foreign nations, something he apparently regards as our “cause.” In other words, the problem isn’t just that Santorum has a naive, simplistic and woefully inadequate understanding of how empires rise and fall, it’s that he regards global domination as this nation’s proper object — as if we’re called to be a hegemon on a hill rather than a city.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 3, 2012
The Hypocrisy And Stupidity Of The GOP’s Hatred Of The EPA
GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has taken advantage of his newfound popularity to get on board the Republican war against clean air and water.
According to Santorum, the new EPA rule that will finally place limits on how much mercury the nation’s coal and oil fired power plants can spew into the air —a regulation specifically created to protect young children and developing fetuses from the damage known to be caused by mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin—will shut down 60 power plants in the US and is “not based on any kind of science.”
Nonsense.
What Santorum is not telling you is that we have long had regulations on mercury emissions for other types of emission sources such as waste incinerators. Why? Because it is no secret that mercury is highly damaging to our health, particularly the health of children and developing fetuses. Yet, coat and oil fired power plants, the single-largest source of mercury emissions, were never included in the limits —until now.
Indeed, the only thing not based on any kind of science is Santorum’s determination that causing some private power plant operators to install the technology required to stay within the new emission limits is more important than the estimated 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma attacks that will be prevented each and every year as a result lowering the level of mercury in the air.
While it may not play well with the GOP base and Tea Party members committed to ending federal government regulations—even when they make sense—the new EPA rules are the result of a peer-reviewed study that has taken twenty years to complete.
But it’s not like one requires a degree in chemical engineering to appreciate that mercury in the air can’t be a good thing.
If you doubt this, just listen to the never-ending GOP complaints over the dangers of mercury escaping from the compact florescent light (CFL) bulbs the government will soon require us to use in place of the highly inefficient incandescent bulbs. While the supposed dangers of mercury from a broken CFL bulb falling to the carpet is enough to motivate conservatives to fill their basements with stockpiles of old-school style light bulbs as if they were preparing for electric-Armageddon, they don’t seem to have a problem with coal plants pouring this neurotoxin into the air where it can cause all sorts of serious health problems for the entire population.
How does that make any sense? You would think that these Republicans and their children breathe different air than the rest of us.
But then, maybe they do. You don’t find a lot of coal burning power plants in upper-class neighborhoods – only the people who own the plants and would prefer not to have to spend the money to upgrade their technology to meet the new standards to protect the rest of their fellow citizens.
While you may wish to argue that the amount of mercury exposure resulting from a busted CFL bulb in your house is, somehow, more dangerous than being exposed to mercury 24/7, you would be wrong. Despite the horror stories being pitched suggesting that people in hazmat gear will be required to clean up a busted light bulb, the truth is a broken CFL bulb will be swept up (not vacuumed) just as broken bulbs have always been swept up. A little more care is required in disposal just as more care is required when disposing of used batteries.
And yet, despite these obviously contradictory impulses, the GOP is ready to shut down the EPA because the agency dared to require power plants to reduce the amount of mercury it pumps into the air.
If this behavior fails to strike you as sufficiently odd, consider the hypocrisy of a man like Rick Santorum—as dedicated a pro-lifer as you will find—who argues, in defense of life, that a physician who performs an abortion should be treated as a criminal and thrown in jail but defends the practice of spreading the very neurotoxins through the air that damage the development of many unborn children along with the many already born children who will grow up to be sickly adults—or worse— due to the illnesses caused by mercury.
If you are going to protect life, then protect all life — not just the ones that will win you some votes. To do otherwise is the ultimate in hypocrisy.
We all understand that, from time to time, the government can get carried away and over regulate. If it can be shown that a regulation is causing far more harm than good, I have no problem doing away with that regulation.
However, when it comes to our health and the health of our children, is over-regulation even possible? Does it ever make sense to balance the need to drive profit against the desire to have healthy children?
The bottom line here is that the GOP has picked the wrong enemy in taking on the EPA. You simply can’t argue that you are pro-life and then be unwilling to protect that life because you believe it is bad for business.
With the exception of the die hard GOP base, it’s a losing pitch as voters just aren’t going to buy it.
And we all know what that means.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, January 3, 2012
Can Mitt Romney Ever Flip Back Again?
The deflating open secret of the Iowa caucuses is that they don’t matter. Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination by default. He was, and remains, wildly vulnerable to a conservative challenger. But the challenger needed to clear a modest threshold: having a national organization, enough money to engage in advertising wars, and the ability to recite standard party dogma in the form of complete sentences. Rick Perry had the first two but fell woefully short of the third. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum could pass the third but not the first two.
Remarkably, the many Republicans who could have beaten Romney all decided not to enter the race or, in the case of Tim Pawlenty, dropped out prematurely. The challengers to Romney devoted all their energies to attacking each other – not a single attack ad against Romney even aired in Iowa. None of his many, enormous vulnerabilities has been exploited. The profusely bleeding, one-armed man managed to swim through shark-infested waters because most of the sharks drowned or decided either to eat each other instead of him.
But what kind of president would Romney be?
George Packer, in a terrific column about the casual acceptance of hysterical charges in the GOP, argues that Romney has crossed a threshold of wingnuttery from which he can never return:
It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he’s elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn’t let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.
I agree with Packer’s conclusion but not his reasoning. There is actually a pretty close analogue to Romney: George H.W. Bush. The scion of a moderate, Establishment Republican, Bush abandoned his views on abortion and supply-side economics in order to curry favor with a party moving right, and was elected president by running a dishonest and viciously demagogic campaign. Once in office, Bush fulfilled the fears of his conservative critics by governing as a real moderate. The campaign did not shape the presidency.
The difference is that Bush faced a Democratic Congress. If faced with similar circumstances, we would probably see the old Massachusetts Romney reemerge. But, if elected, he is far more likely to enjoy a Republican Congress. An interesting theme in the conservative commentary today is that Republicans, while not thrilled about Romney, truly seem to believe that he will serve as a faithful vessel for the Party’s agenda. Here is Republican member of Congress Tom Cole:
“The real division in the GOP these days is not between moderates and conservatives. It is between pragmatists and ideologues. That same division plays itself out almost every day in the House and Senate GOP Conferences,” Cole continued. “The next GOP president will be forced to govern as a conservative to maintain the support of the GOP rank and file and its caucuses in both the House and Senate. Anyone who thinks we are going to nominate an Eisenhower, Nixon or Ford is out of touch with the GOP electorate. And any GOP politician who believes he can govern from the White House as anything other than a conservative is delusional.”
This is almost surely correct. A President Romney would have little leeway to push a GOP Congress to the center, and he has pledged himself to fulfill the agenda that the Party has already determined. Former Bush administration Minister of Propaganda Pete Wehner echoes, “This year, it seems to me, the party is the sun and the candidates are the planets … They are trying to prove to primary voters that they are reliable and trustworthy when it comes to the basic platform of the GOP.”
It is surely clear that Romney’s apparent victory was obtained by erasing every last vestige of his old and (I believe, though I can’t be sure) authentic self. At this moment hardly anybody believes that his conversion was actually authentic. The support for him, such as it is, is simply a combination of disqualifying rivals and the assumption that the Party will continue to own him in office.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 3, 2012
Newt Gingrich Calls Mitt Romney A Liar
Newt Gingrich is done with being the cuddly guy who just loves animals and blubbers openly at the mere mention of his mom. Nope, he’s taking off the gloves, no longer afraid to openly display his withering opinion of his political rivals and journalists. Oh, wait, actually, that last bit’s not new at all.
But what is new is his willingness to go negative on Mitt Romney: Until very lately, Gingrich mostly ran a non-negative campaign, at least officially. Like the natural-born neurotic he is, Newt even displayed some agita about his own positivity, publicly mulling over his failures. “I probably should have responded faster and more aggressively,” he said at a press conference this weekend, going so far as to compare himself to the swift-boated John Kerry himself.
And so this morning on the Early Show, rather than continue to criticize himself, Gingrich went into full attack mode when Norah O’Donnell asked him to clarify comments he’d made about Romney’s own negative ads (“Somebody who’ll lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president.”)
“Are you calling him a liar?” she asked, in tones of high drama. “Yes,” he said with an actual shrug, seeming bored to be asked. She asked again, so he clarified with an extra dollop of condescension: “Well, you seem shocked by it! Which part of what I just said to you is false?” Instead of coming back with the obvious (It’s not what you said that’s false, but the tan with which you said it, Mr. Gingrich!), O’Donnell kept grilling him. An utterly nonplussed Gingrich said he would have no problem voting for the horrible, terrible liar Mitt Romney for president if he gets the nomination, leading Bob Schieffer to snicker eagerly like he had just heard his first Santorum-Google joke.
In about six months, the Romney campaign will be using this Gingrich endorsement in an ad..”Newt Gingrich’s Gamble”: http://videos.nymag.com/decor/live/transparent.gif
By: Noreen Malone, Daily Intel, January 3, 2012
Why Mitt Romney’s Opportunity Tack Won’t Work
So Mitt Romney, writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, wants to make the election about entitlements vs. opportunity. He warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” This is the sort of thing that used to scare the bejesus out of Democrats and still does frighten some of them, but it needn’t. Romney’s error in this framing is one Republicans often make—assuming that they are the “real Americans,” and Democrats are in some way fake Americans, and therefore all of middle America must agree with them.
Romney’s approach is clever up to a point. It does successfully blend more traditional Republicanism with Tea Party resentment (reflecting, perhaps, the way in which this supposedly “new” Tea Party is really just the same old anger at poor people and nonwhite people, outfitted anew in culottes). He uses the lie Republicans have used for many, many elections, that liberals and Democrats insist not on equality of opportunity but equality of result. And he invokes “government dependency”—a well-turned locution I must confess, those being two pretty unappealing words to most people. If he becomes the nominee, and if he can get most Americans to see the election as a choice between the candidate who wants Big Daddy government to look after every aspect of your life and the candidate who insists on your freedom to pursue wealth and liberate yourself from any obligation to those below you, then he’ll be in pretty good shape.
But there exist mountains of evidence that most Americans don’t think the way Republicans want them to. As Edsall notes: “The American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to ‘welfare,’ decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas. Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment—the list is long.”
And that’s just spending on the poor. Spending on the middle class enjoys far greater support. “Welfare” as we once knew it being largely off the table as a divisive political issue, the Republicans really don’t have much material to work with here. In one sense, the entire GOP approach on these issues since Ronald Reagan’s time has been to hide the actual agenda because Republicans know most people don’t agree with them. A famous memo from Paul O’Neill’s Treasury Department in early 2001 to the Bush White House told the new president and others to be careful about juxtaposing tax cuts with spending because “the public prefers spending on things like health and education over cutting taxes.”
So Republicans know that Americans like much of the spending that government does. And yet, like the true believers that they are, they really end up spending more of their time persuading themselves that the public agrees with them. And they do this because they genuinely believe that on some basic level they are real and good and patriotic Americans while liberals and Democrats are fake and bad and weak Americans. This is a core conviction, and it has a corollary: that we (the Republicans) represent and speak to middle America, while the Democrats represent and speak to Cambridge and Berkeley, and surely what we have to say about these matters resonates deeply in flyover country.
It’s just not nearly as true as Republicans persuade themselves it is. Middle-of-the-road voters in Iowa aren’t any more right wing than they are left wing. A tautological sentence, perhaps, but one that nevertheless needs to be repeated and understood. Republicans always assume America is behind them: on removing the reprobate Bill Clinton from office, on wanting to dismantle Medicare and Social Security, on sharing various paranoid and absurd convictions about who Barack Obama is, Republicans enter the fray certain that Middle America will agree with them. But then Middle America does not. They really liked Clinton and recognized what was going in 1998 as a time-wasting witch hunt, they love their Social Security and Medicare, and they elected Obama over a genuine war hero by (for such an evenly divided country) a pretty massive margin.
So back we come to Romney. His chosen words are pretty good. But this isn’t the mid-1980s. Majorities of average Americans no longer think the Democratic Party is in essence stealing from them. And majorities of average Americans pretty much like Obama personally. If they didn’t, his approval rating would have dipped down into the 30s when unemployment was north of 10 percent. It never did. Most Americans are pulling for the guy. Another fact that drives wingers nuts, and that I chuckle about at least four or five times a week.
Romney has been drinking tea-infused water for months now, trying to appease those to his right. I’m sure he thinks that at the same time, he’s talking sense to the rest of America. But the rest of America isn’t as intoxicated by those hairy-chested nostrums about self-reliance as conservatives think they are.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 27, 2011
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