“Staying True To Our Traditions”: President Obama Reminds Us Of Our Better Selves
Our airwaves have been filled lately with calls for war crimes from the likes of Donald Trump and hate-filed screeds against Muslims as Republican candidates for president try to one-up each other on how tough they can sound about dealing with terrorists. Following the shootings in San Bernardino, that has only escalated.
Meanwhile, the American public hasn’t been privy to much of a reasoned discussion of what we can (and can’t) do about ISIL and the threat of terrorism. That is why President Obama chose to give a speech on the topic last night. It was a reminder that yes, we are fighting ISIL by:
1. Launching airstrikes against ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers, infrastructure.
2. Training and providing equipment to tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting ISIL on the ground.
3. Gathering and sharing intelligence to stop ISIL operations.
4. Pursuing a political resolution to the Syrian civil war.
But perhaps even more importantly, President Obama articulated what we shouldn’t do when it comes to dealing with terrorism. First of all, “we should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want.” Not only that, it wouldn’t work – as we saw in Iraq.
But secondly, he took on the fear-mongering against Muslims directly.
We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want…
It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL…
Even in this political season, even as we properly debate what steps I and future Presidents must take to keep our country safe, let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear; that we have always met challenges – whether war or depression, natural disasters or terrorist attacks – by coming together around our common ideals as one nation, as one people. So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt America will prevail.
For those who were willing to listen, President Obama was basically cutting through all the noise to remind the American people of our better selves. In this season of campaign promises where candidates are expected to outline how THEY can do better, he might be the one person who is best positioned to do that.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 7, 2015
“No Clear Edge For GOP”: GOP Fearmongers Might Be Surprised To Learn That Americans Trust Hillary More On Terror
With a thousand points of darkness pointing toward a fear-of-terrorism-based Republican presidential election, it’s important to remember that the likely Democratic nominee has some national-security credentials of her own. An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week shows that when Americans are asked “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?” Hillary Clinton leads every named Republican rival.
The Post‘s Greg Sargent laid it out:
On the question of who is more trusted to handle terrorism, Clinton leads Trump among Americans by 50-42; she leads Ben Carson by 49-40; she leads Ted Cruz by 48-40; she leads Marco Rubio by 47-43; and she leads Jeb Bush by 46-43. In fairness, the last two of those are not statistically significant leads, and among registered voters, her lead “slims or disappears.” But this poll does suggest at a minimum that there is no clear edge for the GOP candidates over Clinton on the issue.
What’s striking here is that it comes even as Obama’s approval on terrorism is down to 40 percent. As Post polling guru Scott Clement notes, the poll shows a sizable bloc of voters who disapprove of Obama on terrorism but nonetheless say they trust Clinton over her GOP rivals on the issue.
This last finding, if it is accurate, complicates the Republicans’ challenge. They must focus specifically on HRC’s national-security record and agenda even as the party base insatiably craves a steady diet of Obama-bashing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 4, 2015
“The Problem Is Unfettered Access To Guns And Ammo”: In America, Dangerous People Find It Very Easy To Get Weapons
Gun sellers can expect a bountiful Christmas.
On Black Friday, the kickoff to the annual holiday shopping frenzy, more than 185,000 background checks were processed for firearms purchases — an all-time record.
This week’s shooting spree in San Bernardino, California — death toll so far: 14 — will be good for business as well. Background checks always spike after mass shootings. Given that the perpetrators appear to have been a married Muslim couple, the hysteria factor will only be magnified.
At this writing, the motives of San Bernardino murderers, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, are still being deciphered. But one aspect of their case fits a pattern: In America, dangerous people find it very easy to get weapons. They even do it legally, as is believed to be the case for two handguns and two assault-style rifles the couple used.
If you hope the San Bernardino deaths will move minds to limit access to guns by those who would cause such carnage, think again. That’s not how fear works in America. We freak out first. Wisdom comes later, if at all.
Congress certainly isn’t helping. A day after the San Bernardino attacks, GOP senators deep-sixed an amendment that would have allowed the attorney general to ban people on the federal terror watch and no-fly lists from purchasing weapons. Senators also nixed an attempt to expand background checks.
So expect that a number of Americans will rush to arm — or, rather, re-arm. According to the General Social Survey released in March, only 22 percent of Americans personally own a gun. What might account for growing arms sales is that those gun owners are increasing their arsenals. The sales volume at Walmart, the nation’s biggest gun and ammunition seller, isn’t being driven by new gun buyers.
Gun ownership statistics tend to undercut widely held preconceptions. If you listen to gun-rights chatter, you might assume that gun ownership rates were far higher. The NRA likes to create that impression. But even if you credit other surveys that find higher rates than the spring General Social Survey, one fact is inescapable: Far more Americas packed heat in the late 1970s and early 1980s than do now. At the high point, about half of Americans either owned or lived with someone who owned a gun.
That’s a sign of hope. Most Americans don’t buy the argument that they will be the “good guy with a gun” that gun advocates pitch as the antidote to mass shootings. Demographics are another factor. Minorities now make up a higher percentage of the population, and they have historically lower rates of gun ownership. And fewer people hunt.
Among gun owners, there’s reason to believe there’s a silent majority — a too silent majority — of safety-conscious people who recognize that their right to own a gun comes with great responsibility.
The voices of this crowd tend to be drowned out by those who can only scream about the Second Amendment and by those who ignore the complicated nature of enacting stronger protections.
The Republican reply to the rising toll of mass shootings has been to call attention to the failures of mental health services. Yes, they need reform; we need to address underfunding and lack of access to care. But that’s half a solution. At the very least, we must go the same distance to ensure that people who are dangerously mentally ill cannot possess a gun. There’s nothing anti-Second Amendment about that approach.
That would require comprehensive background checks, including as a prerequisite for private sales and sales at gun shows.
Certainly, we need databases for gun sales that respect and protect privacy, and that are also accurate and up to date. That’s a tall order to construct. But let’s be serious. Adam Lanza and his mother needed less privacy about his mental health and the arsenal they kept in their home.
The same can be said about the San Bernardino shooters. They had 12 pipe bombs and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition at their home, had more than 1,600 bullets with them when they were killed by police and had shot off at least 75 rounds at the Inland Regional Center.
Time will reveal the shooters’ motives, how they gathered their arsenal and how they planned their attack.
But our silence, our denial that we have a problem and our fecklessness to address it have cost 14 more lives.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; Featured Post, The National Memo, December 4, 2015
“Michael Gerson Is An Idiot”: Former Bush Speechwriter Attacks Obama As Vicious Peacemonger
Last week, at a press conference in Turkey, a reporter asked President Obama to respond to the charge that “your reluctance to enter another Middle East war, and your preference of diplomacy over using the military makes the United States weaker and emboldens our enemies.” Obama began with a specific defense of his policies, and eventually added a general defense of his reluctance to send in large numbers of ground troops. “But what we do not do, what I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough, or make me look tough,” insisted Obama, “And maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed, and I see a 25-year-old kid who’s paralyzed or has lost his limbs, and some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle. And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may.”
Washington Post columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson is scandalized at the president’s rhetoric. “It is almost beyond belief: A commander in chief, in a time of national testing, deploying limbless soldiers as a rhetorical trump card against his political opponents … ” he complained. “The United States has a president whose wartime leadership is apparently inspired not by Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt but by Rachel Maddow. His military strategy in Iraq and Syria may be questionable, but Obama is the Eisenhower of political polarization, the Napoleon of the partisan low blow.”
For the sake of argument, let us grant Gerson’s implicit premise that the president’s rhetoric, rather than his policies, is the primary subject — a premise that no doubt appeals to the wordsmith who wrote eloquent justification on behalf of the most disastrous foreign-policy regime in American history. Focus on Gerson’s premise that there is something especially — indeed, world-historically — gross about Obama citing injured soldiers as an argument against committing soldiers to battle. What are we to make of arguments like this one, by George W. Bush, in favor of war with Iraq?
Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security, and for the people of Iraq. …
On Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured.
Again, set aside the fact that Bush was utterly wrong in his case that neither human rights nor regional security could possibly get worse in the case of an invasion. What he believed (no doubt in earnest) was that his opponent’s policies would allow the continuation of the genuine horrors of Saddam-era Iraq. It’s beyond the pale to invoke the specter of a wheelchair-bound soldier to make the case against a ground invasion, but completely fair to saddle your opponents with decapitation, mass rape, and child torture?
By: Jonathan Chait, The Daily Intelligencer, November 20, 2015
“The Reality Of Refugee Admissions”: Yes, The Government Vets Them
The political panic over the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, has unleashed a wave of fear-mongering, bolstered by a notion being propagated by the right wing, that Americans couldn’t possibly know who is being let into our country. Thirty-one U.S. governors have said they won’t accept any Syrian refugees into their state, many of them claiming there’s a large inherent risk in doing so.
Of course, there’s a serious fallacy at work here: By the time any Syrian refugee actually arrives in the United States, we do know who that person is. Very well.
There is a clear difference between refugees in the United States and refugees in Europe, namely that refugees can’t simply walk or use small boats in order to get to the U.S. By contrast, Europe has a flood of humanity getting displaced into their borders, who may enter one of the countries without getting screened — thus creating the danger that even one ISIS terrorist can disguise himself among the people fleeing his cohorts, as French officials believe did occur with at least one attacker.
But the U.S. actually has the advantages of distance and time to pick and choose before anyone from such a faraway land can set foot over here.
That process involves a multitude of complex steps, starting with an initial screening by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which possibly leads to a referral to the United States and a gauntlet of security checks, personal interviews, medical screening, and matching with a sponsor agency in the U.S. itself. It is far from the mysterious influx of unknown people that the many governors and Republican presidential candidates are making it sound like.
As noted by defense policy researcher Josh Hampson in The Hill: “In fact, there have been no recorded terrorist attacks committed by refugees. The U.S. has admitted 1.5 million refugees from the Middle East since September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks that have occurred since 9/11 have been committed either by American natives or non-refugee immigrants.”
A State Department spokesperson told The National Memo in an emailed statement:
The United States remains deeply committed to safeguarding the American public from terrorists, just as we are committed to providing refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people. We do not believe these goals are mutually exclusive, or that either has to be pursued at the expense of the other. To that end the refugee security screening and vetting process has been significantly enhanced over the past few years. Today, all refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States, including the involvement of the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. All refugees, including Syrians, are admitted only after successful completion of this stringent security screening regime.
On a conference call Tuesday, an unnamed senior administration official confirmed to the press that the average time for processing a person through that entire gamut of interviews and background checks takes an average of 18 to 24 months. “As you know, we are trying to look at the process and see if we can make it more efficient without cutting corners on security.”
And yet at a congressional hearing Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch still had to explain to House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) — who had seized upon recent comments by FBI Director James Comey about the difficulties of the vetting process — that the Justice Department and others in the government do have a “significant and robust screening process in place,” which Europe has not been able to set up.
On Tuesday, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump posted a message to Instagram, with The Donald shouting to the camera with his typical bombast: “Refugees are pouring into our great country from Syria! We don’t even know who they are! They could be ISIS, they could be anybody! What’s our president doing — is he insane?”
And in the Louisiana gubernatorial race, Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter is running this ad — complete with clips of panic in the streets of Paris — ahead of the election this weekend: “One of the Paris ISIS terrorists entered France posing as a Syrian refugee. Now, Obama’s sending Syrian refugees to Louisiana.”
Newly-crowned House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is trying to be a bit more low-key, although catering to the same doubts, as he told reporters Tuesday: “This is a moment where it is better to be safe than sorry. So we think the prudent, the responsible thing is to take a pause in this particular aspect of this refugee program in order to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee population.”
One can perhaps “forgive” Trump for being utterly clueless, and simply expect that Vitter, in the homestretch phase of his campaign, would act like a demagogue. But shouldn’t the Speaker of the House act like he already knows the government has vigorous vetting procedures in place? And for that matter, what does a “pause” even mean when it comes to admitting in refugees who have taken up to two years to be screened?
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, November 17, 2015
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