“Snowden And The Right”: The Republican Thermogenic Desire To See Barack Obama Have A Bad Day At The Office, Whatever It Takes
Here’s something I’ll certainly be keeping one eye fixed on as the Edward Snowden story advances: the degree to which the American right takes him up as a cause célèbre. They’re up a tree either way. If they do, then they’re obviously guilty of the rankest hypocrisy imaginable, because we all know that if Snowden had come forward during George W. Bush’s presidency, the right-wing media would by now have sniffed out every unsavory fact about his life (and a hefty mountain of fiction) in an effort to tar him. If they don’t, then they’ve lost an opportunity to sully Barack Obama. Since they like smearing Obama a lot more than they care about hypocrisy, my guess is that they will lionize him, as some already are. But in the long run, doing that will only expose how deep the rifts are between the national-security right and the libertarian right, and this issue will only extend and intensify those disagreements.
First out of the gate Sunday was Glenn Beck, who tweeted in the late afternoon, not too long after The Guardian posted the interview with Snowden: “I think I have just read about the man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero.” Shortly thereafter, another: “Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.” And two hours after that: “The NSA patriot leaker is just yet another chance for America to regain her moral compass and set things right. No red or blue JUST TRUTH.”
Beck, I will concede, has a degree of credibility on the red/blue issue. He criticizes Republicans sometimes. Even so, it amounts to a speck of dust when set against his near-daily sermons (for years now) about liberal and Democratic fascism. So I wonder about the degree to which Beck would have hopped up to throw rose petals at young Snowden’s feet if he’d come forward in this way under the Bush administration.
About Beck, we can wonder. About the others, I think there is no reason to wonder at all. If Snowden’s parents had got about the business of conceiving him five or six years before they did, and the progeny had taken up this line of work in 2007 or 2008, it’s obvious that The Daily Caller and Breitbart.com, two right-wing outfits that Sunday evening were triumphantly bannering Snowden’s comments and the National Security Agency’s announced investigation into the matter, would have been savaging the guy. By close of business today, the rumors about his sexuality would be rampant.
They just want any cudgel they can find to beat Obama over the head, so Snowden suits their purposes for now. But let’s see where they go on this one over the long haul. On Sunday morning, Sen. Rand Paul called for a Supreme Court–level challenge to the NSA, in the form of a class-action suit, to end this data-mining. How’s that going to sit with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Reince Priebus, and the moneymen behind the Republican Party? Not very well.
Yes, the subject of the national-security state gives liberals and Democrats fits. We’re not “supposed” to do or support this sort of thing, because we believe in and hew to certain civil-libertarian principles. Conservatives, on the other hand, burdened with no such principles, can let it rip. No one expects ethical behavior of them in these arenas in the first place. It thus amuses me to watch conservatives attack liberals on the grounds of “hypocrisy” (if, say, they defend the Obama administration on this story) when everyone knows that (most) conservatives think civil liberties are some conspiracy against America.
But the bigger an issue conservatives try to make of this now, the more controversial the question of citizen-monitoring will become, and when that happens, the blowback is going to be much fiercer on the right than on the left, especially as we head toward 2016. On the left, Democrats will speak of the need for “balance” but not force a major debate on the issue, particularly if the nomination is essentially Hillary Clinton’s for the asking.
But on the right, the issue threatens to be much more disruptive. What used to be the Ron Paul–crank-libertarian faction, easily outnumbered by the neocons, is growing, and his son—a senator rather than just a congressman, young rather than curmudgeonly old, able to appeal to groups his father could not—is a much stronger standard-bearer for the anti-war-machine, pro-civil-libertarian message. Paul, it seems, is definitely running for president, and given the field, he’ll probably be in the first tier of contenders. He’ll have the ability to force a debate about these issues in a way his father never could.
The war caucus still dominates inside the GOP. But what really dominates the Republican Party mindset, what conquers everything, is the thermogenic desire to see Barack Obama have a bad day at the office, whatever it takes. So to the extent that Snowden proves useful to them in the coming days and weeks, they will use him. And liberals should say: let them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 10, 2013
“Obama Hatred And The IRS”: Republicans Rage At The Continued Existence Of Barack Obama
So now we know a little more officially than we did before that the Republican Party higher-ups know or at least suspect that there’s likely no actual political scandal in the IRS matter, and that they’re letting Darrell Issa have his fun and make a fool of himself just for the sake of doing whatever random damage to Barack Obama they can in his remaining time in office. An article by Shane Goldmacher in National Journal yesterday, when read properly between the lines, says as much. And if they can’t get him while he’s in office, by ginning up some flimsy reason to open impeachment hearings, they’ll hound him on his way out the door and afterward, trying to add words like “corrupt” and “tarnished” to the first paragraphs of historical summations of his tenure. That’s all this is really about—their base’s rage at the continued existence of Barack Obama, and their own twisted craving to acknowledge and stoke it.
The Goldmacher piece makes the commonsensical and nonideological observation that you might think that Issa, who has been out there throwing unproven allegations against the wall like Oscar Madison did Felix Unger’s linguine, would be reined in a bit by his party. This is especially so after calling Jay Carney a “paid liar” and backing it up with nothing specific. In fairness, a couple of Republicans—interestingly, Lindsey Graham and John McCain chief among them—did urge a holding of the horses after that one.
But by and large, Republicans are perfectly happy for Issa to keep stirring the pot. Eric Cantor—this happened after the “paid liar” remark—singled Issa out for praise at a closed-door meeting of the House GOP on Tuesday. At a press conference the same day, Cantor twice refused to criticize Issa even mildly.
I would love to know what someone like Cantor really thinks about this IRS thing. My guess about him and most top Republicans: they’d love for some unexpected nugget of political gold to turn up, of course, but they surely know very well that this scandal is almost certainly a bureaucratic one. With luck, they might land proof that someone in the Obama reelection campaign knew about the IG probe into the matter, but then the question will be how much detail this person or persons knew. The likelihood would be simply that they knew of the existence of the probe but nothing about the details.
On the other hand, there may be even less to all this than that. Issa once promised that he would release all the transcripts of his closed-door proceedings. He has not done so, and I gather he is stonewalling reporters on the question. Could it be that there’s something in the full transcripts that would more or less end this whole thing? I’m sure we can trust him, though, because Republican staffers never doctor docum—oops, never mind.
Whatever. Nothing would stop the GOP from trying to turn this thing into another Watergate. Their base will demand it, because to them, Obama is capable of all manner of evil. Ted Cruz’s recent McCarthy-esque comparison of Obama to Nixon (because the IRS matter somehow proves that Obama has an “enemies list”) is, to the base, soft-pedaling the situation if anything, and undoubtedly insulting to Nixon to boot.
Over the years since Obama arrived on scene, right-wingers have believed and circulated and peddled the following about him (and this is just a very partial list from Snopes.com, putting aside the ones you already know about the birth certificate and his “Muslim” heritage): that he refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; that his campaign was funded by Hugo Chávez; that he wanted to replace “The Star Spangled Banner” with the less martial “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”; that he must have used a non-U.S. passport to travel to Pakistan in 1981; that he plans to ban recreational fishing in the United States; that he had to surrender his law license; has banned the National Day of Prayer; stopped wearing his wedding ring in observance of Ramadan; and once kissed David Cameron, smack on the lips.
All that is to say nothing of the racist invective that is the constant background music of this presidency. We in the media never discuss this (go Google “chat board Obama n—-r,” except use the actual word, and just see what you get), but it is a daily diet in this country—yes, daily—and nothing said about any president in history that I can think of comes close to matching its relentless and savage sickness.
This is the rage the Republicans are feeding—and conservative intellectuals are doing their best to ignore. And no, it’s not this way when the situation is reversed. The Democrats specifically did not embark on these political fishing expeditions, and while much of the base wanted them to, a lot of liberal commentators did not. (I was against pursuing impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney, which you can read about here; I did urge Democrats to hold war-profiteering hearings, on which they vexingly ignored me.) The liberal base hated George Bush all right, but the hate wasn’t quite as existential, wasn’t quite as drenched in the same kind of suppurated derangement one finds in quarters of the right.
Besides which, Bush discredited himself through his uniform incompetence. Obama, clearly competent, has not done that and is unlikely to do it. So the Republicans have to do it to him. Tarnishing Obama is the only way they can emerge from these eight years not completely humiliated by him, so we’re just going to have to endure it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 6, 2013
“Republican Rebranding”: Recent History Tells Us That Victory Isn’t Born Of Subtle Ideological Repositioning
The Republican “rebranding” effort may be on temporary hiatus as all the party’s factions come together in the vain hope that they may finally have something to impeach Barack Obama over, but as soon as these various non-scandals, faux-scandals, and mini-scandals fade, the GOP will surely get back to bickering over how it can pull itself out of its electoral doldrums. In wondering where they might go, The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball does the logical thing and seeks out some veterans of a prior party rebranding, the Democratic effort of the late 1980s and early 1990s, centered around the Democratic Leadership Council. Their take isn’t too surprising—they think what the GOP needs now is to do what they did then. But I think there’s an important point missing from this discussion and the way we talk about this history. The story everyone tells is that there are two paths to take, one of which leads to failure and one to success, and the argument is over which is which. Should the party be more true to its philosophy and sell that philosophy better, or should it reorient itself to respond to changing times? Here’s how Ball’s article closes:
Watching the GOP’s struggles, former DLCers say they recognize all the old symptoms—the alibis, the search for a procedural panacea, the party committee dominated by diehards. But on the question of whether the Republican Party has just been through its version of 1988, they’re not so sure. As Will Marshall put it: “They know they have a political problem—that’s obvious. But I don’t think they’ve come to grips with the fundamental issue, which is their governing philosophy. I think they’re going to have to lose one more.”
Sounds reasonable enough. But I think the degree to which political success comes from the public agreeing with you on issues is being dramatically overstated. If you look at the ups and downs of the parties over the last 20 years, a couple of other factors—timing, and what your opponents do—matter a whole lot more.
Let’s quickly run over this history, starting with the Democrats’ first revival, with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Was it important that Clinton was a centrist Democrat who sought to neutralize the party’s electoral problems on being seen by white voters as too solicitous of black people and too soft on crime?1 Sure. But had the country not been in a recession in 1992, that wouldn’t have been enough. And if that was a Democratic revival that went beyond one guy getting elected, it didn’t last very long; two years later, Republicans took over both houses of Congress.
That brings us to the opposition factor. After the Gingrich Revolution, voters got to see the new version of the Republican party, and they were completely turned off. In 1996, Clinton ran one ad after another featuring pictures of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich together to taint Dole with the stain of the unpopular House Speaker. But what got him re-elected, more than anything else, was the humming economy. We could argue about how much credit he deserved for it, but the importance it had was undeniable, and it wasn’t a judgment voters were making about his New Democrat philosophy that got him a second term.
Then four years later, despite all that New Democrat repositioning, George W. Bush gets elected and the Democratic Party is back in the toilet. And what brought them back? Was it yet another repositioning? Nope. It was George W. Bush. The abysmal failure of his presidency was what allowed Democrats to win back both houses of Congress in 2006. Then in 2008, Barack Obama got elected because of both a continued rejection of Bush and the economic meltdown.
My point is, all of this back-and-forth happened despite any ideological movement that was going on within each party. Right now the Republicans are indeed grossly out of step with the public on issues. But they were just as out of step in 2010, when they won a huge victory in the midterm elections. It isn’t that issues don’t matter, but a lot of the ideological judgments voters make are relative. The Democratic party is benefiting from the fact that Republicans look like (and are!) a bunch of reckless, irresponsible extremists. Could they benefit from becoming more sane? Sure. But given the right circumstances, they can win even if they get no less crazy than they are right now. If you’re in the opposition and the president’s policies fail, you’ll be rewarded; if they succeed, you’ll be in trouble (which, of course, is why Republicans have worked so hard to make sure Obama’s policies fail). Nobody is going to be hailed as a brilliant party strategist for saying, “We just need to wait for things to turn in our favor, and everything will be OK.” But that’s probably the truth.
1If you’re too young to remember the 1992 campaign, Google “Ricky Ray Rector” and “Sister Souljah” to see what I’m talking about.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 24, 2013
“Can The President Create A ‘Culture’?”: What Matters Isn’t About Culture, It’s People And Politics
As you may have noticed, the biggest problem with the IRS scandal (from the perspective of Republicans) is that it remains stubbornly removed from the President himself. It’s all well and good to get a couple of scalps from mid-level managers, but for it to be a real presidential scandal you need to implicate the guy in the Oval Office in the wrongdoing. Confronted with Obama’s non-involvement, conservatives have turned to vague and airy accusations about the “culture” Obama has created. Mitch McConnell, for instance, is warning darkly that Obama may be not too far removed from Tony Soprano: “I think what we know for sure is that there is a culture of intimidation across this administration—the president demonizing his enemies, attempting to shut people up. There is certainly a culture of intimidation.”
The idea that Barack Obama—whom Republicans regularly accuse of being a foreign-born anti-American socialist communist marxist who is slowly carrying out a plan to destroy America—is the one “demonizing” his opponents is pretty laughable. But the nice thing about the “culture” argument is that to make it, you don’t have to point to any particular thing any particular person has done. It’s just a culture, out there in the ether.
Conservatives are also alleging that the IRS employees who gave extra scrutiny to 501(c)(4) applications of Tea Party groups were in fact acting on Obama’s instructions. It was just that the instructions came in the form of him going out on the campaign trail and lamenting the Citizens United decision and the way it opened the door for all kinds of “dark money” to be injected into campaigns. Once again, it’s a way of ascribing guilt without having any evidence of guilt, but the problem is, it fails from both ends. Lots of people, even many Republicans, joined Obama in lamenting the rise of the new super PACs and 501(c)(4)s. It was an issue when Republicans were using them against each other in the 2012 presidential primaries. And if the IRS employees were trying to help Obama, they were going about it all wrong. As Ed Kilgore says, “The ultimate howler here is that we are supposed to believe that IRS bureaucrats, in obedience to the “dog whistle” of the president’s demonization of conservative groups’ involvement in the 2012 presidential campaign, chose to ignore the groups that were involved in the campaign in a significant way, and instead go after small fry Tea Party organizations.”
But can a president create a “culture” within the government that has consequences for the behavior of bureaucrats down the line, even to the point of sanctioning wrongdoing? The easy answer is, well, sure. Every boss creates an atmosphere that can affect the behavior of the people who work for her. But when you get beyond the people who work in the president’s immediate orbit, what matters isn’t culture, it’s people and policies. For instance, the Bush administration didn’t torture prisoners because Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and said that to fight terrorism we’d have to go to “the dark side, if you will,” and then folks just got the message and started waterboarding prisoners. It happened because the administration made torture its official policy, and had in place the personnel who were eager to do it.
The United States government is a gigantic entity; even excluding uniformed military, there are 2.7 million federal employees spread around the country. No one, not even the president, can with a few words on the campaign trail create a “culture” that allows misbehavior to happen. I realize that many conservatives believe that Obama and anyone who would ever consider working for him are so corrupt that their immorality must naturally spread through the government like the hantavirus. But that’s not how it works.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 22, 2013
“The Media Has Cast Its Traditional Role Aside”: Washington Circus Steals The Spotlight From Where It Belongs
Can President Barack Obama put out the brush fires that are sucking the air out of his second-term agenda? Can he stop the spread of mini-scandals that are consuming Washington?
No, he cannot. The president could (unconstitutionally) shutter every Internal Revenue Service office and fire every staffer, from top-ranking executives to lowly administrative aides, and it would hardly matter. Republicans would simply change the terms of the debate and impeach him for destroying the 16th Amendment.
Official Washington is now all spectacle, all circus, all manufactured outrage abetted by a press corps addicted to controversy. Actual policies are slighted while political posturing takes the stage; simmering problems are ignored while canned contretemps and stale theater consume all the attention. That has been true for years now, but it just keeps getting worse.
There are serious failings at the heart of each of the sideshows currently consuming officialdom. The most egregious concerns the IRS, where bureaucrats singled out conservative groups for a vetting that veered into political harassment. That not only violates deep-rooted ideals of fairness and justice, but it also contravenes federal law. It raises the specter of the sort of political harassment carried out by Richard Nixon, who wielded the IRS as a bludgeon against his political adversaries, and by J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered tax audits of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
While IRS-gate reflects poorly on Obama’s leadership, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he had anything to do with it. Further, the president has responded with aplomb: He has forced the resignation of the acting head of the agency as the FBI launches a criminal investigation. (That’s about all the administration can do since federal rules insulate IRS bureaucrats from elected officials, all in an effort to prevent scandals such as those mentioned above.)
If Republicans doubt the president’s ability to impartially oversee an investigation of his own administration, they might appoint a special prosecutor. Instead, they have promised more hearings on Capitol Hill — more partisan spectacle, more canned outrage, more useless theater.
Though the national press corps sticks to its unwritten rule of blaming Democrats and Republicans equally for the mess our national politics have become, the facts show that responsibility cannot be equally apportioned. Democrats don’t eschew partisan mudslinging, but they are not very good at it. The GOP, by contrast, has raised it to an art form.
Take a look at the last two presidential administrations. Though Bill Clinton reigned over an era of peace, prosperity and a balanced budget, the GOP impeached him on charges that grew out of an adulterous affair. George W. Bush took the country to war on the wings of a lie, tortured detainees and wrecked the budget. Democrats pointed fingers and conducted investigations, but they did not impeach him.
The news media, meanwhile, breathlessly report every email, every accusation, every pointed finger. They parse political winners and losers. Will the Benghazi hearings damage Hillary Clinton’s chances for the presidency in 2016? Will the IRS controversy hurt immigration reform? Will the controversies heal Republicans’ internal divisions?
As much as it troubles me to say so, Washington journalists have cast aside their traditional roles as trumpets of a substantive truth. They rarely uncover genuine abuses of power, cast a skeptical eye on untoward developments (such as the warmongering that led to the invasion of Iraq) or even explain the nuances of policy. Heck, they barely bother to inform the public when yesterday’s huge scandal becomes suddenly less, well, scandalous.
Take the budget deficits. Wasn’t it just two months ago that Republicans were insisting that the Obama administration was sending the entire nation to the poorhouse? What happened to those deficits?
As it turns out, they are shrinking, just as many mainstream economists had predicted. As the economy recovers, the federal government pays out less in assistance and takes in more in taxes.
You haven’t heard a lot of chatter about that or about the people hurt by the continuing cuts that were supposedly made necessary by that looming deficit. Many struggling Americans are finding their childcare options limited, their community clinics closed, their assistance for housing and meals shrinking — with little notice from official Washington. That’s the real scandal.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, May 18, 2013
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