“Coyote Ugly”: Media Barred From Photographing Romney With Cheney
Dick Cheney hosted a fundraiser for Mitt Romney last night at his home in Wyoming. Donors paid $1,000 to attend a reception, $10,000 for a picture with Romney and $30,000 to eat dinner with Romney and Cheney in the former vice president’s home. While reporters were on hand to cover some of the events, media were not allowed to take photos of Cheney and Romney together. The Los Angeles Times explains:
Because of the unpopularity of Bush and Cheney, Romney has kept his distance — never appearing publicly with either man during his 2012 campaign. Though both leaders are admired by many in the Republican Party base, any perception of closeness with Romney could be harmful as the unofficial Republican nominee seeks to draw in independent and moderate voters.
Indeed, it seems that Romney has been playing a double game this campaign season in an effort to draw away any attention to his neocon-inspired foreign policy. In public, he either chooses to ignore national security issues or he and his advisers don’t distinguish the presumptive GOP nominee’s foreign policy from President Obama’s too much.
Behind the scenes, however, it’s quite a different story. As Bush administration Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell noted recently, Romney’s foreign policy advisers “are quite far to the right.” Many of them advocated for the Iraq war and now want war with Iran.
And the ones who want war reportedly have Romney’s ear as one top Republican operative told Reuters recently that the moderate camp inside Romney’s foreign policy team “are very concerned about the fact that if Romney needs to call anyone, his instinct is to call the Cheney-ites.” Another Romney aide, Vin Weber — who has received scrutiny for lobbying for countries with poor human rights records — told the Washington Post that “it’s inevitable” that the Bush-Cheney alumni advising Romney on foreign policy are going to “have some influence.”
Cheney praised Romney last night as the “only” candidate to make what he thinks are the right foreign policy decisions as commander-in-chief. In fact, Romney shares Cheney’s views on a number of national security issues, as Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) observed in an article in Foreign Policy yesterday: “A Romney presidency promises to take us back to something all too familiar: a Bush-Cheney doctrine — equal parts naïve and cavalier — which eagerly embraces military force without fully considering the consequences.”
By: Ben Armbruster, Think Progress, July 13, 2012
“A Blatant Political Actor”: Justice Scalia Must Resign
Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.
He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem.
So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.
Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioning President Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.
“After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the secretary of homeland security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants,” Scalia said. “The president has said that the new program is ‘the right thing to do’ in light of Congress’s failure to pass the administration’s proposed revision of the immigration laws. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of federal immigration law that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.”
What boggles the mind is that Scalia thought it proper to jump into this political argument. And when he went on to a broader denunciation of federal policies, he sounded just like an Arizona Senate candidate.
“Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem,” the politician-justice proclaimed. “Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are simply unwilling to do so.
“Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty — not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it.” Cue the tea party rally applause.
As it happens, Obama has stepped up immigration enforcement. But if the 76-year-old justice wants to dispute this, he is perfectly free as a citizen to join the political fray and take on the president. But he cannot be a blatantly political actor and a justice at the same time.
Unaccountable power can lead to arrogance. That’s why justices typically feel bound by rules and conventions that Scalia seems to take joy in ignoring. Recall a 2004 incident. Three weeks after the Supreme Court announced it would hear a case over whether the White House needed to turn over documents from an energy task force that Dick Cheney had headed, Scalia went off on Air Force Two for a duck-hunting trip with the vice president.
Scalia scoffed at the idea that he should recuse himself. “My recusal is required if . . . my ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’ ” he wrote in a 21-page memo. Well, yes. But there was no cause for worry, Scalia explained, since he never hunted with Cheney “in the same blind or had other opportunity for private conversation.”
Don’t you feel better? And can you just imagine what the right wing would have said if Vice President Biden had a case before the court and went duck hunting with Justice Elena Kagan?
Then there was the speech Scalia gave at Switzerland’s University of Fribourg a few weeks before the court was to hear a case involving the rights of Guantanamo detainees.
“I am astounded at the world reaction to Guantanamo,” he declared in response to a question. “We are in a war. We are capturing these people on the battlefield. We never gave a trial in civil courts to people captured in a war. War is war and it has never been the case that when you capture a combatant, you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. It’s a crazy idea to me.”
It was a fine speech for a campaign gathering, the appropriate venue for a man so eager to brand the things he disagrees with as crazy or mind-boggling. Scalia should free himself to pursue his true vocation. We can then use his resignation as an occasion for a searching debate over just how political this Supreme Court has become.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 27, 2012
“A Cautionary Tale”: Remember When Breaking The Law Used To Mean Something?
The big piece today is in the Washington Post, where Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward share a byline for the first time in 36 years. It’s about President Nixon and Watergate 40 years after the fact, and how the whole situation was much worse than was thought back then:
Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.” Yet Watergate was far more than that. At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.
Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.
The article is full of great quotes from the Nixon tapes as he became increasingly paranoid and irrational, going on profanity-laced tirades against journalists, the antiwar movement, and “the Jews,” among others. But what is perhaps most notable about the article is the implicit frame it presents. The sense I get from it is that Woodward and Bernstein are presenting a cautionary tale, a kind of story to tell young politicians before you tuck them into bed. “Be careful, kids, or this is where you’ll end up.”
The trouble with this is that recent cases of elite lawbreaking, up to and including top officials, are still almost too common to count. Just for the most obvious example, consider the fact that George Bush has admitted to ordering the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. There’s a ginned up controversy about whether or not that was against the law, but don’t take my word for it, listen to the chief law enforcement officer of the United States:
In his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder declared that the interrogation practice known as waterboarding amounts to torture, departing from the interpretation of his Bush administration predecessors.
And finally, from the UN Convention Against Torture, Article II, signed by President Reagan:
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
Nixon was not the last of the presidential lawbreakers. Far from it.
By: Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 6, 2012
“Ultra Hawk”: John Bolton, Too Far Right Even For George W.Bush
If Mitt Romney plans to make even a slight move toward the middle in the general election, campaigning with John Bolton is not a great way to do it. Bolton, a key foreign-policy advisor to Romney, created a stir recently by appearing to rejoice in an op-ed in The Washington Times that talks between Iran and the U.S. and the “P5 plus one”–the U.N. Security Council members and Germany – had “produced no substantive agreement.” Bolton said any talks with Iran were merely “a well-oiled trap” and declared that President Obama had become “increasingly a bystander” in Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon (despite the disclosure that Obama has authorized aggressive cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities).
“Bolton has made it clear that he’s rooting for American diplomacy to fail and has repeatedly called for a rush to war with Iran,” said Michelle Flournoy, the Obama administration’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in a statement issued by the Obama campaign on Tuesday.
What is less understood about Bolton — and what is truly one of the great oddities in the career of any diplomat in U.S. history — is that for more than a decade the former undersecretary of State and U.N. ambassador has stood fast consistently against most diplomatic efforts, to the point of regularly belittling his former colleagues at the State Department. Both as a Yale-trained lawyer and a public official, Bolton has long campaigned against U.S. fealty to international agreements and multilateral treaties, and he was so extreme in these views that he proved to be too far right even for the George W. Bush administration, according to several former senior Bush officials. A favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, Bolton ran afoul of senior officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and failed in successive bids to be named her deputy and to replace Douglas Feith as No. 3 at the Pentagon. He was given the U.N. job as a consolation prize, at the urging of Cheney’s office, in part to keep him out of Washington, according to the former senior officials.
Even the British, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, found they could not work with Bolton diplomatically. On several occasions, Britain was irked by what U.S. and British sources said were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. In 2003, U.S.-British talks to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program succeeded only after British officials “at the highest level” persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team, my then-Newsweek colleague John Barry and I reported at the time. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Qaddafi’s demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House finally agreed to keep Bolton “out of the loop,” as one source put it. A deal was struck only after Qaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for “policy change”–surrendering his WMD.
Often misidentified as a neoconservative because of his ultra-hawkish views, Bolton told me in an interview in the early 2000s that he is actually a libertarian conservative, albeit not of the Ron Paul variety. Based on that interview and on his writings, in such essays as “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2000), Bolton has made plain that his career-long goal has been to unwind America’s deep ties to the international community, including the U.N. and multilateral treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he believes is based on an unsound legal concept. Bolton believes that international law in effect doesn’t exist and has no sway over U.S. sovereign prerogatives, especially whether to go to war.
At one point, Bolton even appeared to undermine the president’s own wishes in pursuing his personal agenda of undermining multilateral affiliations. In a landmark speech at the National Defense University in February 2004, Bush had called for a toughened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Bolton, who as undersecretary for arms control was supposed to be in charge of that project, “was absent without leave” when it came to implementing the agenda that the president laid out, failing to prepare for a five-year review conference of the NPT in 2005, a former Bush official who worked with Bolton told me at the time. “Everyone knew the conference was coming and that it would be contentious. But Bolton stopped all diplomacy on this six months ago,” another former official told me then. “The White House and the National Security Council started worrying, wondering what was going on. So a few months ago the NSC had to step in and get things going themselves. ” Bolton also held up a plutonium disposal project that required agreement with the Russians; it was completed after he left office.
Bolton is sometimes described as the author of the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative–a multilateral agreement to interdict suspected WMD shipments on the high seas. But the former senior Bush official who criticized Bolton’s performance on the NPT conference said that in fact Bolton’s successor, Robert Joseph, deserved most of the credit for the PSI. This official adds that it was Joseph, who was in charge of counterproliferation at the NSC, who had to pitch in when Bolton fumbled preparations for the NPT conference as well.
After he left the Bush administration, Bolton also became a vocal critic of its turn toward diplomacy, openly criticizing then-Secretary Rice’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea, which ultimately failed. “This is classic State Department zeal for the deal,” Bolton said on Fox News. He also declared, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that the Bush administration, having purged or sidelined most of its hardliners, was “in a state of total intellectual collapse.”
And now John Bolton is back.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, June 6, 2012
“He Who Must Not Be Named”: Republicans Dissatified The Word “Romney” Has Passed Barack Obama’s Lips
Go ahead, name him.
As I mentioned the other day, reporters are both repulsed by and attracted to negative campaigning, and I think that probably goes for most of us as well. On one hand, we want to say, “Tut, tut, you shouldn’t be doing that.” On the other hand, not only can’t we look away, but we desperately want our own favored candidate to go negative, so we can get the visceral satisfaction from watching our disfavored candidate get assaulted. It’s analogous to the way we feel when watching a movie or reading a story: if the bad guy doesn’t get killed in the end, we’re left feeling unsatisfied.
But we also have a series of campaign conventions regarding what kind of behavior is acceptable that have little or nothing to justify them. One that has always mystified me is the idea that it’s impolite to mention your opponent by name. Instead, you’re supposed to say “my opponent” and speak of “the other party,” as if to make clear whom you’re talking about is somehow rude. This is supposed to be doubly true for the president, for whom it is perfectly acceptable to criticize the guy running to take his job, but unseemly to do so by saying the man’s name. So today The New York Times dutifully rounds up a bunch of people expressing their displeasure that the word “Romney” has passed Barack Obama’s lips in such a vulgar fashion:
But some veterans of past campaigns, particularly Republicans, questioned whether it would take some of the sheen off Mr. Obama’s stature as president. Rather than appearing above the fray, Mr. Obama may look like just another officeseeker.
Sara Fagen, an adviser to President George W. Bush during his 2004 campaign against Senator John Kerry, and later the White House political director, said the campaign was conscious to avoid that. “He almost never mentioned him and certainly not this early,” she said. “President Bush understood it diminished the office by going after his opponent directly.”
That does not mean Mr. Bush’s campaign went soft on Mr. Kerry. But the president largely left it to others to be so direct until summer. Vice President Dick Cheney opened the debate with a sharp speech criticizing Mr. Kerry in March 2004 at the same time the campaign began airing its first negative advertisements. When Mr. Bush criticized Mr. Kerry, he generally used phrases like “my opponent.” Only in July did he start naming him regularly.
That was the case for previous presidents like Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1996.
Oh please. Here’s the thing: this is a democracy. If the president wants a second term, he has to campaign for it. And the idea that the “stature” of his office is intact if he says “My opponent is wrong,” but terribly damaged if he says, “Governor Romney is wrong” is just ridiculous. Nobody ever explains why one is supposed to be preferable to the other, and there is not a shred of evidence that voters react negatively to the president using his opponent’s name. No one out there in the country thinks it’s weird or beneath the office. The only people who ever say that are people from the other party pretending to disapprove. Voters may be stupid, but they aren’t that stupid.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 25, 2012
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