Like all Republican presidential candidates, Jeb Bush is opposed to the world powers nuclear agreement with Iran, and has denounced it in withering terms as a “bad,” “horrific” deal. Late last week, he offered some valuable perspective on what counts in his mind as a “good deal” in global affairs, when, speaking at a foreign policy forum in Iowa, he argued, “I’ll tell you, taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.”
Because almost nobody in America thinks the Iraq War was a particularly good deal, the political media is holding his comment up as a gaffe. But against the backdrop of GOP opposition to the Iran agreement, it’s much more revelatory than that. It crystallizes the increasingly open secret in the world of foreign affairs that the “pretty good deal” we got in Iraq and the “better deal” Iran foes allude to so frequently are actually the same deal. Not in every particular—nobody of any prominence on the right is currently arguing for a wholesale invasion and occupation of Iran. But forced regime change was what we got in Iraq, and it’s what the supporters of the war there ultimately want in Iran.
There’s a danger whenever Bush is asked to comment about national security or Middle East policy that his comments will stem less from any considered position than from the poisoned soils of family loyalty and legacy redemption. For precisely that reason, it took him a week this past spring to make the easy migration from outright support for the Iraq invasion to conditional opposition (“knowing what we know now”).
But Bush has now rolled out, and adhered to, a tangle of views that could be mistaken for his brother’s—void the Iran agreement and possibly attack Iran, rescind President Barack Obama’s 2009 executive order banning torture, and possibly send thousands of U.S. troops back into Iraq—and none of them is even remotely controversial among his co-partisans.
Republicans of a neoconservative bent grow prickly when accused of promising a “better deal” in bad faith, or of harboring ulterior motives, and they became especially prickly when Obama points it out, as he did in a resolute speech at American University earlier this month. What makes their thin skin so odd is that these motives aren’t even really ulterior. They’re articulated unabashedly by many, many conservatives all the time. Republican presidential candidates, including Bush, have expressed interest in military strikes to set back Iran’s nuclear activities. Conservative writer Norman Podhoretz has been arguing for them for years.
That this view is widely shared on the right emerges as well from the cold logic of the multilateral negotiations themselves, and from the growing consensus among Republicans that the next U.S. president should walk away from the agreement as a first order of business.
This matrix is slightly oversimplified, but only slightly. Thanks to the agreement, there’s a decent chance that Iran won’t produce a nuclear weapon for many years. If the agreement collapses, the diplomatic channel will essentially be closed, Iran will probably manufacture a weapon, and the drumbeat for airstrikes will intensify. That’s a cardinal truth, no matter who violates the agreement. The ancillary benefit for hawkish Iran foes is that if Iran breaches the deal, it will provide U.S. policymakers with a robust rhetorical foundation for demanding the reimposition of sanctions, and coordinated airstrikes. Republicans are effectively saying that this isn’t good enough, and that we should void the deal ourselves—sacrifice all of that good will—to precipitate the crisis more rapidly.
That’s what Jeb Bush meant, in his foreign policy address last week, when he said, “If the Congress does not reject this deal, then the damage must be undone by the next president—and it will be my intention to begin that process immediately.” Ripping up the global powers agreement is the predicate for the “pretty good deal” Republicans have in mind. It’s the whole show.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 17, 2015
August 19, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Iran Nuclear Agreement, Iraq War, Jeb Bush | Congress, Conservatives, Foreign Policy, George W. Bush, Middle East, National Security, Republicans, Saddam Hussein, Torture |
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Donald Trump figured something out about the Republican Party. Maybe it was a flash of insight, or maybe he stumbled into it and doesn’t even realize what he found. But here it is: Even in this most ideological of parties, ideology has its limits.
This is a party, after all, that has spent the last few years on its own miniature version of the Cultural Revolution, a tireless search for ideological heretics who can be exposed, shamed, and banished. It has made compromise into something beneath contempt, and required all who would wear the name “Republican” to demonstrate that the hatred of Barack Obama and all he touches vibrates within every cell of their beings. When the party confronts a policy development it doesn’t like, it demands not just that the idea be opposed, but that it be opposed again and again and again, no matter how fruitless the blows battered against it (the number of votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act is well past 50, all failed).
Yet the party’s effort to find a leader is now led — by a wide margin — by a man who at best is a piecemeal conservative, taking a harshly right-wing stance here and an oddly liberal one there. This seems to be a result of the fact that Trump has never thought much about policy, and doesn’t really care.
If you want to understand Trump’s appeal in the primaries — both its power and its limits — there are two articles that came out in the last few days that you should read. The first, from The Washington Post‘s David Weigel, explains how Trump’s talk about foreign countries stealing American jobs is resonating with economically troubled voters, particularly in places where manufacturing has declined. Instead of talking about job retraining or anything else realistically modest, Trump all but promises that he’ll go to China and punch the commies in the face until they give us our jobs back.
The second, from Bloomberg‘s Melinda Henneberger, describes how Republican voters, besotted with Trump’s style, barely notice that his positions on issues are a hodgepodge of conservative and liberal ideas. “After he finished talking in New Hampshire on Friday night, I asked half a dozen Republicans who said they liked him what they had heard in his long, stream-of-consciousness oration that struck them as conservative,” she writes, “and none of them could point to anything in particular.” But it didn’t matter.
The approach Republican politicians have taken toward their voters in recent years is a combination of policy and posture. The policies are a version of what they’ve always offered, just a little bit more conservative and a lot more pure. The posture is one of opposition to Barack Obama — unyielding, inflexible, even petulant or downright angry. The easiest way to assure Republican voters you’re one of them is to show them how much you hate the guy in the White House.
Which may be understandable, since the president is the axis around which elite politics revolves. When your party is out of power, you’re inevitably going to define yourself in relation to him. But then along comes Trump, who has an entirely different posture.
Though it may be odd coming from a guy who waged a campaign to prove that Obama isn’t actually an American citizen (and apparently still believes it), Trump seems to barely have time to talk about this administration, except as the most recent example of larger problems he’s promising to fix with a sweep of his hand. His message isn’t, I’ll reverse everything that happened in the Obama years, it’s, Everyone else is a bunch of losers, and I’m a winner. That applies to Democrats, Republicans, everyone. The force of his persona is such that when he displays some lack of fealty to conservative ideals — like saying that single-payer health care “works well in Canada” — ideological conservatives may be horrified, but he just rolls right past it. And that tells us that ideological purity isn’t all that important to Republican voters, at least not all of them.
If it was, Trump would be pulling 5 percent in the primary polls, not 25 percent. His flirtation with a third-party run would also be bringing him down, but it isn’t, which suggests that there are lots of Republicans for whom party loyalty isn’t all that important.
Of course, 25 percent isn’t a majority, and it’s probably necessary to demonstrate both ideological fealty and a fundamental commitment to the GOP in order to get the nomination. But Trump has shown that there are other impulses within the Republican electorate, like resentment, dissatisfaction with targets bigger than Obama, and the desire for a confident leader who will promise the moon.
Even in a party now defined by its ideological extremism, it isn’t always about ideology. Whether any of the party creatures who make up the rest of the field can capture and exploit those impulses is something we’ll have to wait and see.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 18, 2015
August 19, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, GOP Presidential Candidates, GOP Voters, Ideology | China, Conservatives, Foreign Policy, GOP Base, Jobs, Republicans, Single Payer |
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Another year, another controversy over Planned Parenthood. Selectively edited videos filmed by an anti-abortion activist have given partisans another excuse to attack women’s reproductive services, starting with those provided by a well-established non-profit dedicated to women’s health care. Never mind that abortions represent a tiny percentage of Planned Parenthood’s work.
Some Republicans have gone so far as to threaten to shut down the government unless all federal funding for Planned Parenthood is eliminated. (By law, none of that money supports abortion services.) Even as prominent Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell try to tamp down that impulse, others — firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) among them — continue to insist that the entire government should be brought to its knees when Congress returns to work after Labor Day.
This is really just another opportunity to try to limit women’s reproductive choices, another chance to grandstand and exaggerate. If this outrage reflected genuine concern about lives ended while still in the womb, wouldn’t more conservatives be worried about what happens to poor babies once they are born?
For decades now, I’ve listened to anti-abortion activists rail against a “culture of death,” a callous disregard for the unborn, the “murder” of babies still in the womb. I’ve witnessed protests outside abortion clinics, listened to “pro-life” state legislators mischaracterize rape, and covered misleading campaigns that suggest abortions lead to breast cancer and mental illness. I’ve watched as hostility toward Roe v. Wade has become a litmus test inside the Republican Party.
But here’s the disconnect: Over those years, I’ve also seen anti-abortion crusaders become increasingly hostile to programs and policies that would aid poor kids once they’ve come into the world. Conservative lawmakers have disparaged welfare, criticized federal housing subsidies and even campaigned against food assistance. How does that affect those children for whom they claim so much concern?
In Alabama, where anti-abortion sentiment is as commonplace as summer heat waves, the state legislature is contemplating cutting millions from Medicaid, the program that provides health care for the poorest citizens, including children. Meanwhile, the state’s two U.S. senators, Republicans Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, are among those demanding that Planned Parenthood receive no more federal funds because of the controversy over the sale of fetal tissue.
To be fair, there are those among abortion critics who show a principled concern for poor children, whose opposition to abortion is paired with a passion for social justice. Take Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is among the rare GOP governors to support the Medicaid expansion offered by the Affordable Care Act. “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You’d better have a good answer,” he said in June.
Then there are the Catholic Health Association and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, led by nuns. They’ve also adopted assistance to the poor as a core mission.
Their compassion stands in contrast to the U.S. Conference of Bishops, which is largely known for its conservative stances on abortion and same-sex marriage. (That may change with Pope Francis, who has made social justice his hallmark.) Last year, I attended a Catholic high school commencement where the headmaster, a priest, bragged about the number of his students who had attended anti-abortion protests. He said nothing about protests over cuts in assistance to the poor.
It’s easy enough to inflame with the Planned Parenthood videos; without context (again, selective editing), leaders of the organization are heard discussing money for the donation of fetal tissue. That’s not a conversation that’s easy to hear.
But Planned Parenthood is doing nothing illegal, and fetal tissue research has been vital to improving the quality of life for an aging America. Many of those who are angered by the videos would be surprised to know that they may have benefited from fetal tissue research.
Still, I’d take their criticism more seriously if they’d spend as much time trying to help poor children once they are born. Since they don’t, they’re just engaging in a war on women — especially women who don’t have any money.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; Featured Post, The National Memo, August 15, 2015.
August 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Planned Parenthood, Reproductive Choice, Women's Health | Conservatives, Fetal Tissue Research, Government Shutdown, Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Poor and Low Income, Richard Shelby, U. S. Conferance of Bishops |
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Hillary Clinton fielded some questions from campaign reporters yesterday, and not surprisingly, she was asked about Donald Trump. But the Democratic frontrunner clearly had a different group of Republicans on her mind.
“I think if we focus on [Trump’s antics], we’re making a mistake,” she said. “What a lot of the men on that stage in that debate said was offensive.” Highlighting Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) recent comments on prohibiting all abortions, regardless of circumstances, Clinton added, “[T]he language [Trump uses] may be more colorful and more offensive, but the thinking, the attitude toward women, is very much the same.”
She went on to say. ‘What Marco Rubio said has as much of an impact in terms of where the Republican Party is today as anybody else on that stage.”
It’s an important point. Rubio has now argued, more than once, that if a woman is impregnated by a rapist, the government has the authority to force her to take the pregnancy to term, regardless of her wishes. For Clinton, this matters every bit as much – if not more – than Trump’s ugly remarks about Fox’s Megyn Kelly.
For his part, Rubio seems to think he has a winner on his hands. Yesterday, the far-right Floridian, using social media and his campaign website, even launched a new initiative, alongside a big picture of a cat:
“Watch this video and sign this petition if you know that a human life won’t become a donkey or a cat.”
Yes, Marco Rubio, who last week seemed to adopt the posture of some kind of wonk, is now pushing a bold, new campaign message: fertilized human eggs don’t develop into cats.
As for the video Rubio is eager for the public to see, Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has the backstory:
When Rubio appeared on CNN after Thursday night’s Republican debate, he kept insisting that this vague entity called “science” has declared that human life begins at conception. (Actual biologists, for what it’s worth, argue that life is continuous and that a fertilized egg is no more or less alive than a sperm or an unfertilized egg.) CNN host Chris Cuomo vainly tried to point out that “science” says no such thing, and Rubio got a little excited.
“Let me interrupt you. Science has – absolutely it has. Science has decided… Science has concluded that – absolutely it has. What else can it be?” he asked. Then Rubio reared up for what he clearly intended as his wowza line: “It cannot turn into an animal. It can’t turn into a donkey. The only thing that that can become is a human being.”
Rubio, clearly pleased with himself, added, “[If scientists] can’t say it will be human life, what does it become, then? Could it become a cat?”
When Rubio’s website says “watch this video,” it shows the interview in its entirety.
Just so we’re clear, not even the most ardent pro-choice advocates believe fertilized human eggs could become a cat. They do believe, however, that there’s a difference between people and fertilized human eggs that might someday become people – in much the same way we differentiate between acorns and trees. What something is and what something may become under the right conditions are not identical.
Nevertheless, the far-right Floridian seems quite excited about his argument. He’ll have to hope it’s persuasive to a broad audience – Rubio’s no-abortions/no-exceptions position is further to the right than any Republican presidential nominee in the modern era.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 11, 2015
August 14, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Marco Rubio, Reproductive Choice, Women's Health | Conservatives, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Rape and Incest, Republicans, War on Women |
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Okay, so as I write these words, someone could be about to release a post-debate poll showing exactly what establishment Washington, which now apparently includes even Fox News (!), yearns to see a poll show—that Donald Trump has tumbled, and that the new leaders in the GOP field are the comparatively sober Jeb Bush and John Kasich, along with maybe Carly Fiorina, since everybody seems to be swooning over her now. Maybe it’ll happen.
But what in fact did happen is that we got this NBC News-Survey Monkey poll showing Trump still ahead and Ted Cruz and Ben Carson vaulting into second and third place, respectively. It’s an online poll, and I know we’re supposed to question its methodology (which the pollsters explain here, if you’re interested). So I’m not going to sit here and swear by it. But on Monday, two other post-debate polls came along showing that Trump is still going strong. So the results are interesting enough, and they track closely enough with other anecdotal evidence that’s made its way to my inbox, that it’s certainly worth asking: What if Trump is still clobbering the rest of the GOP field?
If he is, we’re at a very interesting politico-cultural moment: The moment when, to a sizeable portion of the GOP electorate, Fox News stopped being their warrior and instead became just another arm of the lamestream media. If that’s true, everything we’ve known and assumed about our political divide is now moot, and we’re flying totally blind. The Republican Party has unleashed furies it can no longer remotely control.
First, here are the numbers, if you haven’t seen them. Post-poll, Trump went to 23 percent, according to NBC. That’s actually a gain of one statistically insignificant point, but reflect on this: He gained that point even though poll respondents said by a huge margin that he lost the debate (29 percent called him the loser; next closest was Rand Paul at 14 percent). Ted Cruz gained seven points, going from 6 to 13 percent. Ben Carson gained three points, moving from 8 to 11 percent. Marco Rubio stayed flat at 8 percent, and Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, the other “first-tier” candidates, finished in the cellar, losing three points each.
So add it up. The Tasmanian Devil candidate who’s obviously tapping into deep right-wing anti-establishment anger and the two other most extreme candidates combine for 47 percent. The two who in my view you can reasonably call quasi- or comparatively moderate, Kasich and Bush, combine to hit 9 percent.
All right, though, enough on the polls. Maybe enough time hasn’t elapsed for Trump’s Megyn Kelly comments to truly sink in with the Republican electorate. But here’s the anecdotal materials that suggests he’s still on the rise. First, which candidates were most heavily Googled during the debate? Huh. What a coincidence. It was Trump, Carson, and Cruz. The biggest single Google moment by a mile came during Cruz’s first remarks (“If you’re looking for someone to go to Washington, to go along to get along, to get—to agree with the career politicians in both parties who get in bed with the lobbyists and special interests, then I ain’t your guy.”) Carson scored well while talking terrorism and during his close, and Trump throughout.
Here’s a little more. I was on Fox on Sunday, on Howard Kurtz’s show. Every time I finish that show, I have 30 or so tweets in my feed. Usually, the tweeters are angry at me, for the obvious reasons. But Sunday, they were mostly mad at The Blaze’s Amy Holmes for her robust defenses of Megyn Kelly and attacks on Trump. This tweet, while more polite than most, is representative of the argument. Trump isn’t perfect, but lay off him already. Fox screwed up. And most of all: Don’t tell us what to think!
We’re used to this kind of rhetoric when conservatives volley it in the direction of The New York Times and CNN. But what are we to make of it when the target is Fox?
Two things. First, if I’m right about this and other polls back all this up, this process is officially beyond anyone’s ability to predict. Ignore all “surely this will finally start Trump’s downfall” stories, and all positive Jeb! stories. And is Cruz soon-to-be first tier? I admit that I sure missed that. I didn’t think he registered a heartbeat in the debate. It’s hardly remarkable that I was wrong about something, but most commentators pretty much dismissed Cruz, too.
And Carson! It’s not like he comes out of nowhere. They’ve been selling his first book by the truckful in Christian bookstores for years, and for gosh sakes, Cuba Gooding Jr. played him in a movie. But normally that would translate into a respectable sixth or seventh place. If he’s really doing better than that, something important has changed. And don’t ignore what an extremist he is: In his more recent book, which I actually read, he sincerely questioned whether citizens who pay no net income tax should have the right to vote—“Serious problems arise when a person who pays nothing has the right to vote and determine what other people are paying.”
The second thing we’re to make of this is that Fox and the Republican Party have created this new reality. When you spend years nodding and winking and yuk-yuking about the President’s birth certificate, how can you be surprised when the guy who has repeatedly demanded to see it turns out to be really popular with your base? You promote a politics that attacks women not merely for having abortions but for wanting to use contraception, and then you’re shocked when your hard-shell voting base turns out not to be overly offended by remarks like Trump’s?
Indeed Roger Ailes recognized all this when he decided to make nice with Trump on Monday. In the first instance Ailes did it because Trump has leverage, and The Donald’s threat not to go on his air meant a heavy hit in the ratings department. Ailes was also certainly feeling the blowback from his core audience–the kinds of tweets I alluded to above. And beyond all that, somewhere deeper down, Ailes knows that Fox made Trump, politically, and that the two are made for each other.
The Republican Party and Fox permitted and encouraged Trumpian vitriol for years. All that talk over the years about birth certificates and Kenya and terrorist fist-jabs (remember that one?!) and the moocher class and the scary brown people and all the rest of it…all of it created a need for a Trump, and for other Trump-like candidates, to flourish. Now it threatens to overtake them. If they’re wondering who created Trumpism, I have someplace they can look. The mirror.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 12, 2015
August 13, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP Primary Debates | Ben Carson, Conservatives, Jeb Bush, media, Republicans, Right Wing, Roger Ailes, Ted Cruz |
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mykeystrokes.com 