“The Buffoon Speaks Again”: John McCain Says Ignorant, Belligerent Things, Press Swoons
I’ll admit that I know next to nothing about Ukrainian politics. And when it comes to the current crisis there, I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how the United States could solve this problem, but that’s partly because the United States probably can’t solve this problem. My limited knowledge and lack of transformative ideas puts me on equal footing with John McCain. Yet for some reason, McCain is once again all over the news, now that the situation in Kiev is turning uglier by the hour. What does McCain have to say? Well, he believes that it’s all Barack Obama’s fault. “This is the most naive president in history,” he said, citing as evidence the fact that five years ago, the Obama administration said it wanted to “reset” relations with Russia. Got ’em there, John. Obviously, if a certain someone was president, and he’s not naming any names here, this whole thing could be wrapped up in an afternoon.
What does McCain actually think we should do about Ukraine? We’ll get to that in a moment. But if you had to sum up John McCain’s foreign policy beliefs in a single word, that word would probably be “Grrrr!” Whatever the situation is, McCain’s view is always that we should be tougher than whatever the White House is doing. This applies to both Republican and Democratic presidents. If we’re already bombing somebody, McCain’s answer to any challenge is that we should bomb harder. If we haven’t yet commenced action but are seriously thinking about it, he thinks we should start bombing. If we’re engaging in diplomacy, McCain thinks we should ditch all that talk, which is for pussies anyhow, and get “tough” with whoever it is that needs getting tough with.
That is, I promise you, the extent of the sophistication of McCain’s foreign policy thinking. Despite the fact that he is regularly lauded by the reporters who have worshipped him for so long as an “expert” in foreign policy with deep “knowledge” and “experience,” I have never heard him say a single thing that demonstrated any kind of understanding of any foreign country or foreign crisis beyond what you could have gleaned from watching a three-minute report on the Today show. And this one? Well, McCain’s got the solution: “This thing could easily spiral out of control into a major international crisis,” he says. “The first thing we need to do is impose sanctions on those people who are in leadership positions.” You mean, Senator, what the Obama administration already did? Or the ones they’re preparing with our EU allies?
Once somebody clues McCain in to that, you can bet he’ll come back and say that it isn’t tough enough, and we have to get tougher. And dozens of media outlets will run stories titled “McCain Calls for Tougher Stance Toward Ukraine,” as though he were some kind of wise and influential foreign policy voice, and not a buffoon.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 21, 2014
“A Means, Not An End”: Austerity As A Bridge To Nowhere
Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given Sunday’s election results in Europe. Perhaps I should also say good riddance.
Voters in France, Greece and even Germany — a hotbed of the austerity cult — told their political leaders, in no uncertain terms, that boosting economic growth is more important than cutting government spending. Here in the United States, I hope that Democrats, at least, were paying attention; I fear that the addled ideologues who control the Republican Party will never get the message.
On Sunday, French voters elected Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande as president, ousting center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in what amounted to a referendum on Sarkozy’s embrace of austerity.
Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed on a common policy of budget cuts and partial “reform” — a euphemism for “dismantling” — of the welfare state. This, they decided, was the way to return Europe to prosperity and save the European Union’s common currency, the euro, from collapse.
But on Sunday, even Merkel got a message from voters: Her party was punished in local elections in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where it appeared that a center-left, anti-austerity coalition would end up in control.
Also on Sunday, voters in Greece tried their best to say no to austerity. For them, sadly, it’s probably too late. The fiscal and debt crises there were so acute that the Greeks, from the start, have had only painful choices.
One obviously bad option would have been to withdraw from the euro, default on a mountain of debt and slowly climb back from a deep economic depression. Officials in Athens decided to go with a worse option — stay with the euro, impose draconian austerity, muzzle anyone who utters the word “default” — that also sent the country into a deep economic depression with no apparent way out.
Yes, one lesson from the Greek experience is that there are limits. There is a point at which deficits become too large, debt too crushing and social spending too generous. The lifestyle a nation enjoys must bear some relationship to what that nation produces.
But another clear lesson is that austerity has to be seen as a means, not an end. The goal is to recover from the massive blow inflicted by the global financial meltdown and return to prosperity. This may involve a measure of austerity — but definitely requires considerable economic growth, which should be policymakers’ first priority.
The reason is simple: If you can get the economy growing again, all other aspects of the crisis become more manageable. Debt and deficits shrink as a percentage of national output. Unemployment declines, as does the need for social spending.
But putting a chokehold on government spending at a time when economies are just sputtering back to life — as the austerity fetishists have tried to do in Europe, and as Republicans solemnly pledge to do in the United States — is monumentally self-defeating. Governments end up magnifying the constituent parts of the economic crisis, not minimizing them.
In Britain, the economy was growing when Prime Minister David Cameron took office two years ago. Adhering to the platform of his Conservative Party, Cameron took the austerity route with a host of gloom-and-doom budget cuts. Now unemployment is rising and the economy has slipped back into recession. Nice job, Tories.
That loud chorus of “Duh!” you just heard came from the many leading economists who have been screaming at political leaders for years now that we’ll never cut our way out of this economic slump and instead must grow our way out. It is obvious that deficits, debt loads and entitlement spending have to be brought under control — but equally obvious that the necessary adjustments should be made when the economy is going great guns, not when it’s gasping for air.
It should be noted that there are some economists who disagree. They argue that draconian cuts in government spending will somehow awaken the animal spirits of private-sector executives, entrepreneurs and financiers. They further argue that austerity is needed to combat the scourge of inflation, although the best term to describe inflation in today’s economy is “imaginary.”
Mitt Romney and the GOP subscribe to the pro-austerity view. They are, of course, entitled to their opinion, even if it happens to be wrong. I sincerely wish them all the electoral success their ideological allies are having across the Atlantic.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 7, 2012
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