mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

Conservatives Run Away From Gingrich’s Conservatism

This morning, Jonathan Adler, a contributing editor to The National Review Online, asks:

Why is it that hardly anyone — not the media nor the other candidates — directly challenge Gingrich’s claim to have a conservative record?

I’m going to gently suggest to Mr. Adler that the blame lies with his fellow conservatives, who until recently were loath to question Gingrich’s party bona fides.

Here’s Rich Lowry, the Review’s editor(!), crowning Gingrich “the party’s most important intellectual table-setter.”

And here’s a Gallup survey from 2009, confirming that Lowry’s opinion was widely shared; After Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, Republican voters chose Gingrich as the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today.”

I have no dog in this fight — I think Gingrich and Romney are equally, dangerously conservative — but It seems a little odd to question the credentials of the guy who wielded so much power within the party. Maybe conservatives are just embarrassed to have backed a loose cannon for so long?

 

By: Elon Green, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 29, 2012

January 30, 2012 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Iraq War Is Over… Lesson For Progressives: “Yes We Can”

Sometime in the next 15 days, the last American troops will leave Iraq — and the War that began almost nine years ago will finally come to an end.

Today, President Obama addresses some of those returning troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  The big difference between those troops and many others who have returned from the War in Iraq, is that none of them will be deployed on yet another tour to Mosul or Kirkuk or Baghdad — or any of the other Iraqi cities that became so familiar to Americans over the last decade.

The end of the War in Iraq is a major event in American history, since in many ways, that War was the defining historic event for an entire generation of Americans.

There are those who would minimize the importance of the final withdrawal of our troops from Iraq by pointing to the unfinished business of the War in Afghanistan, or the use of civilian contractors.  Those are important issues, but they should not diminish the extraordinary significance of the fact that the Iraq War has come to an end.

Most importantly, Progressives — and all of those who fought for a decade to prevent and then to end the Iraq War — should take a moment to celebrate the fact that they have won a critical, historic battle.

There is a lot of cynicism in America — a sense that it doesn’t matter what you do — that ordinary people can’t really have an impact on the big decisions and big institutions of our society.  The end of the War in Iraq shows that the cynics are wrong.

What began in 2002 as an effort to avert the war in Iraq, grew to a chorus of millions who changed the political landscape and who kept fighting until all of our troops came home.  That movement elected a president who promised to end the war — a president who this week has kept that promise.

In September 2002 — a year after 9/11 — President George Bush began what he and his aides called a “marketing program” to convince Americans that our country should invade Iraq.  That campaign ultimately included some of the most egregious lies ever told by an American president.

Bush told Americans that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  His Secretary of State warned that we could not wait for a “smoking gun” to prove these allegations, because it might prove to be a “mushroom cloud.”

Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, argued that Iraq was the central front in the “War on Terror” — even though there was never one shred of evidence that Iraq supported the 9/11 terrorists or had anything whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda. Bush and Cheney actually said — with a straight face — that “If we weren’t fighting them in Iraq, we could be fighting them in the United States.”

Much of the nation — newly traumatized by the 9/11 attacks — supported the president.  And of course, who could imagine that a president would simply fabricate the rationale for a war?

Just a month after Bush launched his campaign to get support for war with Iraq, State Senator Barack Obama was invited to speak to a rally in Chicago’s Federal Building Plaza.  There he stated firmly and unequivocally his opposition to the invasion of Iraq.  At the time, that position was unpopular — particularly for a politician with ambitions for higher office.   But the organizers of the rally did not have to coax Obama to take his tough stand.  Obama was eager to be part of the nascent movement that opposed the potential War in Iraq.

When he ran for United States Senate two years later, Obama continued his strong opposition to the Iraq War.  And there can be little doubt that he became the Democratic nominee for President in 2008 in large measure because of his consistent, principled opposition to the War.

In his campaign for president, Barack Obama promised to end the War in Iraq.  Now he has kept that promise.

When he took office there were nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.  Within the next two weeks there will be none.

The Republicans that started the War — Neo-cons like Dick Cheney, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — as well as the major Republican Presidential candidates — have all spoken out against the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.  They have made clear that they would never have signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government that set up a time-table for withdrawal, had they not intended to change it. Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain, has been particularly outspoken in his opposition. McCain, after all, once said that he had no objection to American troops remaining in Iraq for a hundred years.

It is virtually certain that had John McCain become president, our War in Iraq would have continued for years to come.  After all, one of the major Neo-Con goals for the war was a permanent base of operations in Iraq.

But President Obama and the movement against the Iraq War have decisively won the battle for public opinion. Last month’s ABC/Washington Post poll found that 78% of Americans support Obama’s decision to leave Iraq at the end of the year.

In the end, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz believes the War will have cost America over $3 trillion — including the cost of rehabilitation and care for the tens of thousands of soldiers who were wounded in Iraq.

Whatever the final figure, most Americans have a profound belief that it is time to use the funds we save by ending the Iraq War to rebuild America and the American economy.

Every dollar that went to fight the Iraq War was a dollar that did not go to repair a highway, build a mass transit system, educate a child or invest in new sources of energy.

Everyday Americans, and economists of every stripe, understand clearly that one of the principal forces that converted the budget surpluses of the Clinton Administration into the largest deficit in American history was Bush’s decision to launch extravagantly expensive wars at the same time he cut taxes for the wealthy.

And everyday people understand that the end of the War in Iraq — and ultimately the end of our engagement in Afghanistan — will, contrary to Republican doctrine, strengthen America.

The War in Iraq was used by terrorists worldwide to stoke hatred for our country and to recruit young people to their ranks.  It sapped our country of trillions of dollars, stretched our military to the breaking point, caused popular support for America to plummet around the globe and dealt a powerful blow to America’s moral authority.

Most Americans realize that the decision to launch the War in Iraq was one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in modern American history.

But there is also a deep well of respect and support for the million men and women — both military and civilian — whose sacrifice allowed a hopeful outcome to be salvaged from a disastrous series of decisions by the Bush Administration.

Progressives must be resolute in preventing Republicans from using cuts in the benefits or care for returning warriors to pay for their tax breaks for millionaires.

And Progressives should do something else as well. While we recognize there is much to be done — let’s take a moment to celebrate an historic success.  The end of the Iraq War demonstrates that “Yes We Can!” is more than a campaign slogan.  It reminds us once again that everyday people can successfully organize to change history.

 

By: Robert Creamer, Published in The Huffingto Post, December 14, 2011

December 14, 2011 Posted by | Foreign Policy | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Dick Cheney Urges “A Quick Airstrike” Against Iran

Once again, CNN philanthropist journalist Erin Burnett has used her show to give voice to the voiceless, to seek out the powerless to offer opinion on the day’s news. She debuted her show “OutFront” in early October by mocking Occupy Wall Street and defending the industry that destroyed the economy.

On Monday night Burnett gave a platform to a man almost as loathed as his Wall Street buddies, former Vice President Dick Cheney. And Cheney, predictably but contemptibly, took the opportunity to bash President Obama for not authorizing “a quick airstrike” to retrieve a predator drone that was recently downed in Iran.

Cheney told Burnett:

The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. […]

They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.

The former vice president has been insulting Obama  since Inauguration Day, insisting his policies will make the country “less safe.” Two months into his administration, Cheney charged that the new president “is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.” He’s accused Obama of “half measures” and “dithering” on foreign policy. And more than once he’s criticized the president for not taking a tougher stance on Iran.

Even after Obama authorized the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden, who Bush and Cheney essentially let run free thanks to their discretionary war with Iraq, Cheney wasn’t happy. “I still am concerned about the fact that I think a lot of the techniques that we had used to keep the country safe for more than seven years are no longer available. That they’ve been sort of taken off the table, if you will.”

So Cheney’s carping is nothing new. But suggesting that the president launch “a quick airstrike” to retrieve the downed drone is ridiculous, even for Cheney. There’s no such thing. Cheney has to know that any new U.S. incursion, following on the drone discovery, would sharply escalate tension with Iran, and to do that to recover a drone isn’t at all worth the risk.

It was left to CBS Early Show co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis this morning to ask the follow-up question Burnett did not: “Would not, though, an airstrike on Iran have potentially led us into a war with them?”  Cheney replied:

Well, if you look at what Iran has done over the years, they’ve been the prime backers of Hezbollah, of Hamas, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that cost us 241 American lives. These were Iranian-supported ventures. It’s not as though they haven’t already committed acts that some people would say come close to being acts of war.

For us to go in and take out the drone that crashed would have been, I think, a fairly simple operation, and it would have denied them the value of the intelligence they can collect by having that aircraft,” he said. “But the administrative basically limited itself to saying, ‘Please give it back,’ and the Iranians said no.

ThinkProgress made a good catch: When a U.S. spy plane ventured into Chinese airspace in April 2001 and crashed with a Chinese fighter jet, the Bush-Cheney administration wound up apologizing in order to get 11 soldiers released from Chinese custody.  They didn’t send in “a quick airstrike.”

For the record, Cheney sounded bullish on Newt Gingrich in 2012, though he hasn’t endorsed anyone formally. “I wouldn’t underestimate him,” Cheney said, praising Gingrich’s political skills. “The thing I remember about Newt, we came to Congress together at the same time, ’78, and when Newt showed up, he said, ‘We can become the majority. We can take back the House of Representatives. We hadn’t had the House since the 1940s. And initially, none of us believed it, but he was persistent. And he was tenacious. He kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. And finally by ’94, he’s the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives with a Republican majority.”

Cheney declined to describe the way Gingrich crashed and burned in the years that followed. You’ve got to count that among the nicest things anyone who’s worked with Gingrich has said about him during the whole campaign. Stay tuned.

 

By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon.com, December 13, 2011

December 14, 2011 Posted by | Iran | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Has Grover Norquist Made Himself Unnecessary?

Republicans don’t need to be threatened into supporting tax cuts for the wealthy.

You should read Tim Dickinson’s long article in Rolling Stone about how the GOP became the party of the one percent. Essentially, the story is that while there was once a real substance to the idea of “fiscal conservatism”—that Republicans really did care about balancing the books and being good stewards of the public’s tax dollars—the last 20 years have brought the Republican Party to a much different place. While they once saw taxes as simply the way to pay for the things government does — they shouldn’t be too high, since conservatives want limited government, but they shouldn’t be so low that we run up deficits — they now see them as an outright evil that really has nothing much at all to do with deficits. Deficits are a handy tool to use when there’s a Democrat in the White House to force spending cuts, but not much more. Dickinson puts Dick Cheney at the center of this story, which one could quibble about, but there’s something here that I think calls for some discussion:

In retrospect, the true victor of the midterm elections last year was not the Tea Party, or even Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was Grover Norquist.

“What has happened over the last two years is that Grover now has soldiers in the field,” says [Bruce] Bartlett, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts. “These Tea Party people, in effect, take their orders from him.” Indeed, a record 98 percent of House Republicans have now signed Norquist’s anti-tax pledge – which includes a second, little-known provision that played a key role in the debt-ceiling debacle. In addition to vowing not to raise taxes, politicians who sign the pledge promise to use any revenue generated by ending a tax subsidy to immediately finance – that’s right – more tax cuts.

We often use this kind of language when talking about special interests, that members of Congress are “taking orders” from one group or another, but it can be misleading. It’s true that part of the genius of Norquist’s pledge is that it imposes a potential cost on any Republican who either refuses to sign it or votes for a tax increase after they have signed it. That cost is the risk of a well-funded primary campaign from the right, and many Republicans certainly fear it. But more important is that today’s Republicans, particularly the younger ones, believe it. You don’t have to threaten them to get them to keep working to cut rich people’s taxes, because they want nothing more. They came up through the party at a time when tax cuts for the wealthy was moving closer and closer to the center of conservative ideology. Today, there is nothing—not a belligerent foreign policy, not opposition to legal abortion, not support for large military budgets, not support for gun rights—that goes deeper to the core of conservative identity. The Republican Party will tolerate some small measure of dissent on almost anything else (there are still a few pro-choice Republicans hanging around, for instance), but not on tax cuts. If you don’t think the rich should pay less than they do, then you can’t call yourself a conservative in 2011.

Grover Norquist played a very important role in pushing along the evolution in the party that led them there. But at this point, his pledge is almost unnecessary. He acknowledges that himself: “‘It’s a different Republican Party now,’ he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan’s day—those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy—to segregationists. The ‘modern Republican Party,’ he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the ‘modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace.'”

And it’s likely to stay that way for some time. If you’re a young Republican rising through the ranks — let’s say you’ve got your eye on a state rep seat, and you hope to run for Congress in 10 years—you’re marinating in a conservative world where tax cuts for the wealthy are the highest good. You don’t need to be threatened or cajoled into believing it. You’ve been convinced.

By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, November 17, 2011

November 21, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives | , , , , | Leave a comment

A Great Day: Obama Ends The War In Iraq

This afternoon President Obama announced that at the end of this year, America will withdraw all  U.S. forces from Iraq.

Obama began his campaign for president by forcefully, clearly promising to end that war.  This afternoon he delivered on that promise.

The timing of his announcement could not have been more symbolically powerful. It comes just a day after the successful conclusion of the operation in Libya — an operation that stands in stark contrast to the disastrous War in Iraq.

The War in Iraq was the product of “bull in the china closet” Neo-Con unilateralism.  The war cost a trillion dollars.  Nobel prize-winning economist George Stieglitz estimates that after all of the indirect costs to our economy are in — including the care of the over 33,000 wounded and disabled — its ultimate cost to the American economy will be three times that.

It has cost 4,600 American lives, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  It created millions of refugees — both inside Iraq and those who fled to other countries.

The war decimated America’s reputation in the world and legitimated al Qaeda’s narrative that the West was involved in a new Crusade to take over Muslim lands.  Images of Abu Ghraib created a powerful recruiting poster for terrorists around the world.

The War stretched America’s military power and weakened our ability to respond to potential threats.  It diverted resources from the War in Afghanistan. It empowered Iran.

The War in Iraq not only destroyed America’s reputation, but also American credibility.  Who can forget the embarrassing image of General Colin Powell testifying before the United Nations Security Council that the U.S. had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?

Contrast that to yesterday’s conclusion of the successful operation in Libya. That operation is emblematic of an entirely different approach.

Since he took office, Obama has fundamentally reshaped American foreign policy.  In place of “bull in the china closet” unilateralism he has initiated a cooperative, multilateral approach to the rest of the world.   The fruits of that approach are obvious in the Libyan operation where:

  • The Libyans themselves overthrew a dictator;
  • America spent a billion dollars — not a trillion dollars, as we have in Iraq;
  • America did not lose one soldier in Libya;
  • We accomplished our mission after eight months, not eight years;
  • Most importantly, America worked cooperatively with our European allies, the Arab League and the Libyan people to achieve a more democratic Middle East.

Obama’s policy toward the Middle East is aimed at helping to empower everyday people in the Muslim world — it is a policy built on respect, not Neo-Con fantasies of imperial power.  And it works.

Last month, I spent several weeks in Europe and met with a number of people from our State Department and other foreign policy experts from Europe, the Middle East and the United States.   Everyone tells the same story.  Since President Obama took office, support for the United States and its policies has massively increased throughout Europe and much of the world.

The BBC conducts a major poll of world public opinion.  In March of this year it released its latest report.

Views of the U.S. continued their overall improvement in 2011, according to the annual BBC World Service Country Rating Poll of 27 countries around the world.

Of the countries surveyed, 18 hold predominantly positive views of the U.S., seven hold negative views and two are divided. On average, 49 percent of people have positive views of U.S. influence in the world — up four points from 2010 — and 31 per cent hold negative views. The poll, conducted by GlobeScan/PIPA, asked a total of 28,619 people to rate the influence in the world of 16 major nations, plus the European Union.

In 2007 a slight majority (54%) had a negative view of the United States and only close to three in ten (28%) had a positive view….

In other words, positive opinion of the U.S. had increased by 21% since 2007 – it has almost doubled.

Obama understands that in an increasingly democratic world, the opinions of our fellow human beings matter.  They affect America’s ability to achieve America’s goals.

And Obama understands that it matters that young people in the Middle East, who are struggling to create meaningful lives, think of America as a leader they respect, rather than as a power with imperial designs on their land and their lives.

But, at the same time, there is no question that President Obama is not afraid to act — to take risks to advance American interests.  The operation that got Bin Laden was a bold move.  It was very well planned — but not without risks.

Obama is a leader who makes cold, hard calculations about how to achieve his goals.  He plans carefully and then doesn’t hesitate to act decisively.  And as it turns out, he usually succeeds. Ask Bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Gaddafi.

Obama received a good deal of criticism from the Republicans for his operation in Libya.  But by taking action, he first prevented Benghazi from becoming another Rwanda — and then supported a movement that ended the reign of a tyrant who had dominated the Libyan people for 42 years and had personally ordered the destruction of an American airliner.

For the vast number of Americas who ultimately opposed the War in Iraq, today should be at day of celebration.  And it is a day of vindication for the courageous public officials who opposed the war from the start.  That includes the 60% of House Democrats who voted against the resolution to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

It is also a day when someone ought to have the decency to tell the Republican chorus of Obama foreign policy critics that it’s time to stop embarrassing themselves.

From the first day of the Obama Presidency, former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused President Obama of “dithering” — “afraid to make a decision” — of “endangering American security.”

Even after the death of Muammar Gaddafi, Senator Lindsey Graham criticized the president for “leading from behind.”

You’d think that a guy who two years ago traveled to Libya to meet and make nice with Gaddafi would want to keep a low profile, now that the revolution Obama supported there has been successful at toppling this dictator who ordered the downing of American airliner.

Well, as least Graham isn’t saddled with having tweeted fawningly like his fellow traveler, John McCain, who upon visiting Gaddafi wrote: “Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his “ranch” in Libya — interesting meeting with an interesting man.”

Let’s face it, with the death of Gaddafi, the knee-jerk Republican critics of his Libya policy basically look like fools.

Mitt Romney in the early months of the effort: “It is apparent that our military is engaged in much more than enforcing a no-fly zone. What we are watching in real time is another example of mission creep and mission muddle.”

Republican Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann: “President Obama’s policy of leading from behind is an outrage and people should be outraged at the foolishness of the President’s decision” and also asking “what in the world are we doing in Libya if we don’t know what our military goal is?”

Of course, the very idea that Dick Cheney is given any credibility at all by the media is really outrageous.

Here is a guy who made some of the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in American history. He has the gall to criticize Obama’s clear foreign policy successes? Those successes allowed America to recover much stature and power in the world that were squandered by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Someone needs to ask, what is anyone thinking who takes this guy the least bit seriously?

Someone needs to remind him and his Neo-con friends that:

  • The worst attack on American soil took place on their watch;
  • They failed to stop Osama bin Laden;
  • They began two massive land wars in the Middle East that have drained massive sums from our economy, killed thousands of Americans and wounded tens of thousands of others;
  • They underfunded an effort in Afghanistan so they could begin their War in Iraq that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist threat from Al Qaeda;
  • They brought U.S. credibility in the world to a new low by lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, violating our core human rights principles and acting unilaterally without any concern for the opinions or needs of other nations;
  • Through their War in Iraq they legitimated Al Qaeda’s narrative that the United States was waging a crusade to take over Muslim lands – and with their policies at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, they created recruiting posters for Al Qaeda that did enormous harm to American security;
  • Through their recklessness and incompetence they stretched American military resources and weakened our ability to respond to crises;
  • When they left office, American credibility and our support in the world had fallen to new lows.

Republicans in Congress supported all of this like robots.

With a record like this, you’d think they would want to slink off into a closet and hope that people just forget.

But Americans won’t forget.  History won’t forget.

And generations from now, Americans will thank Barack Obama for restoring American leadership — for once again making our country a leader in the struggle to create a world where war is a relic of the past and everyone on our small planet can aspire to a future full of possibility and hope.

By: Robert Creamer, Huffington Post, October 21, 2011

October 21, 2011 Posted by | Congress, Conservatives, Elections, GOP, Human Rights, Ideologues, Lindsey Graham, Media, Military Intervention, Public Opinion, Right Wing, Teaparty, Terrorism | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »