“I Voted To Send People To War”: Paul Ryan’s Big Foreign Policy Credential Is On The Wrong Side Of History
Defending himself against the perception that he has no significant foreign policy experience, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has drawn fresh attention to one of the most controversial acts of the past decade: the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq before UN weapons inspections were completed. Ryan now points to his vote for war as a token of his readiness to serve in the White House, but he is on the wrong side of both history and public opinion.
The Wisconsin Congressman may come to regret his flippant response to Carl Cameron last Saturday, when the Fox News reporter asked how he would respond to critics who question his weak national security resume. “I’ve been in a Congress for a number of years,” he said. “That’s more experience than Barack Obama had when he came into office.” Perhaps he should have stopped there, but instead blundered on: “I voted to send people to war.”
Does Ryan believe that voting for war constitutes foreign policy experience? If so, it is a kind of experience that reflects very poorly on him. Even he must realize that the underlying premise of the war, Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, quickly proved to be nothing more than a Bush administration hoax, along with the secondary claim that Saddam’s regime had some connection with the 9/11 attacks. After casting his party-line vote for a ruinous war because he accepted a faked argument, Ryan never spoke up against its continuation. He ratified every troop escalation and every supplemental appropriation.
Unlike the American people, who turned decisively against the war years ago, and have condemned it by large majorities as a waste of blood and treasure, he apparently still believes it was a swell idea. Concerned as he supposedly is about excessive federal spending, Ryan believes that the Iraq misadventure was worth three trillion dollars it has cost so far (and presumably the lost and destroyed lives of Americans and Iraqis, all the dead, wounded, orphaned, and traumatized, as well).
Except among the neoconservative advisers cocooned in the Romney campaign, such enthusiasm for the war is a very peculiar and distinctly minority perspective. Over the past few years, polls have shown between one-third and one-fifth of voters agreeing that the war was “worth the cost.” Roughly two-thirds to three-fourths of the electorate rejects that assessment and supports President Obama’s withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. That lopsided margin is fair warning for any politician who stakes his reputation on the Iraq war.
What Ryan cites as his chief qualification to serve as commander-in-chief is a series of votes that represent the most fateful, expensive, inexcusable error in recent American history. For him to cite that vote to draw a contrast with President Obama, who got the Iraq issue right, is startling. It reveals something that Americans need to know before he gets any closer to executive power.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 20, 2012
“Erasing W”: Republications Want To Obliterate Any Trace Of The Administration That Created This Mess
As Bill Clinton is resurrected by the Democrats, George W. Bush is being erased by the GOP — as if an entire eight years of American history hadn’t happened.
While Bill Clinton stumps for Obama, Romney has gone out of his way not to mention the name of the president who came after Clinton and before Obama.
Clinton will have a starring role at the Democratic National Convention. George W. Bush won’t even be at the Republican one – the first time a national party has not given the stage at its convention to its most recent occupant of the Oval Office who successfully ran for reelection.
The GOP is counting on America’s notoriously short-term memory to blot out the last time the nation put a Republican into the Oval Office, on the reasonable assumption that such a memory might cause voters to avoid making the same mistake twice. As whoever-it-was once said, “fool me once …” (and then mangled the rest).
Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.
Besides, the resemblances between George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are too close for comfort. Both were born into wealth, sons of prominent politicians who themselves ran for president; both are closely tied to the nation’s corporate and financial elites, and eager to do their bidding; both are socially awkward and, as candidates, tightly scripted for fear of saying something they shouldn’t; and both presented themselves to the nation devoid of any consistent policies or principles that might give some clue as to what they actually believe.
They are both, in other words, unusually shallow, uncurious, two-dimensional men who ran or are running for the presidency for no clear reason other than to surpass their fathers or achieve the aims and ambitions of their wealthy patrons.
Small wonder the Republican Party wants us to forget our last Republican president and his administration. By contrast, the Democrats have every reason for America to recall and celebrate the Clinton years.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, August 10, 2012
“A Mix Of Paranoia And Arrogance”: Mitt Romney’s 20th-Century Worldview
Like a caveman frozen in a glacier, Mitt Romney is a man trapped in time — from his archaic stance on women’s rights to his belief in Herbert Hoover economics.
And now it appears his foreign policy is stuck in the past, as well.
This week, Romney is on a six-day, three-nation tour. The trip comes days after he promised in a speech on international affairs to usher in another “American century.”
What does Romney’s American century look like? His speech and his itinerary tell us volumes.
Romney’s world is one of special relationships, particularly with Britain, Israel and Poland — the three nations he’s visiting. It’s also a world of special enmities — against Iran — and unending suspicions — about China and Russia. For Romney, there are three types of countries: countries that are with us; countries that are against us; and countries that will be against us, sooner or later.
If this seems like foreign policy out of a 20th-century history book — or the George W. Bush neocon playbook — that’s because it is. A President Romney wouldn’t bring about “another American century.” Rather, he would return us to some of the worst policies of the last century.
His worldview recalls the early Reagan years, before the Gipper and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev found common ground on nuclear disarmament — and long before Secretary of State James Baker steered President George H.W. Bush and the country away from a special relationship with Israel that required the United States to take on all of Israel’s enemies. It was in those reckless first years in which Reagan’s policies brought the world close to a nuclear confrontation and led U.S. forces into the deadly trap of confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Romney’s foreign policy smacks of the same recklessness — a belief that being strong means throwing your weight around. Will his embrace of the special relationship with Israel and Reagan-era bravado lead to equally dangerous developments?
Romney’s world also reminds us of the early Bush 43 years, with its mix of paranoia, arrogance and belief in U.S. power that gave us the “axis of evil” and the Iraq war. Remember, it was America’s special friends, Britain and Poland, that headed the list of Bush’s “coalition of the willing” and gave a veneer of international support for that catastrophe. For Romney, the villain is Iran. Will we once again be neo-conned into a disastrous war in the Persian Gulf?
Romney may accuse President Obama of carrying out defeatist policies and accepting American decline. But it is the GOP nominee-to-be and his advisers whose perspective and policies are much too small — and far too backwards — for a 21st-century United States.
Romney’s speech and his trip reveal, in fact, that he has no answers to the critical foreign-policy questions — the questions that will shape the world order, and America’s place in it, in the coming decade:
How to prevent a country like Syria from plunging into an even bloodier sectarian war while keeping the hope of democracy and economic development alive?
How can the United States work with the current world powers — and the rising ones such as Russia, China, Brazil and India — to establish a form of international governance that balances respect for human dignity with respect for international order?
How can the United States engage these countries in dealing with the transnational threats — from mass unemployment to global climate change — that are likely to define the next decade?
And how can the president bring together leading nations to stop the slide toward a new Great Depression?
It is not even clear that Romney knows what these questions are.
Obama, for better or worse, does understand these key questions. To be sure, he has made some patently wrong decisions, such as the escalation of drone warfare, his secret counterterrorism programs and his embrace of growing state secrecy. But the fact that the president has ended one war — Iraq — and started to end another — Afghanistan — is an opportunity to move to a new foreign-policy stance, a new internationalism.
This means rejecting the tendency to measure our nation’s strength by our capacity to destroy — in bullets and body counts and payloads. The real test of our nation’s standing lies in our capacity to build — not just schools and hospitals and bridges but also relationships across rivers and among countries. Indeed, a new internationalism calls not for military adventures, bombs and bases but for international, collective efforts on the issues that truly matter today — eliminating nuclear weapons, rolling back climate change and advancing the health, education, prosperity and human rights of all people.
It has taken four years to wind down the costly wars of occupation of the Bush era. It would be a tragedy to let Romney and his neocon advisers take us back to the failed policies of the past.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 31, 2012
“Doom And Gloom”: A History Of Paul Ryan’s Attempts To Dismantle Social Security
That House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) supports the privatization of Social Security is well known. Ryan proposed $1.2 trillion in cuts and the partial privatization of Social Security upon taking control of the Budget Committee in 2011, and he has constantly warned about the supposed doom facing the program if major reforms aren’t enacted immediately.
But Ryan’s attempts to gut the most popular entitlement program in America go back quite a few years, as Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of the conservative hero makes clear. Ryan’s fight against Social Security has been ongoing since he pushed President George W. Bush to privatize the program in 2005:
Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear. […]
Two weeks after Bush’s Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.
Bush ultimately went with a slightly less radical proposal that still failed in the Senate and caused Republicans massive losses in the 2006 mid-term elections. But Ryan, undeterred, told Lizza that the failure of privatization was simply due to marketing, not that the plan was unpopular:
What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem. “The Administration did a bad job of selling it,” he told me. Bush had campaigned on national-security issues, only to pitch Social Security reform after reëlection. “And . . . thud,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these things. You can’t just spring it on them after you win.” The lesson: “Don’t let the engineers run the marketing department.”
Aided by the mainstream media’s spreading of the lie that Social Security is “going bankrupt,” Ryan has been able to thrust Social Security “reform” back onto the table, and it was embraced during the primary by virtually every Republican candidate.
What Ryan and his Republican colleagues continue to ignore, however, is how easy fixing Social Security would be if they weren’t so insistent on protecting the wealthiest Americans from a single tax increase. By lifting the payroll tax cap that currently limits Social Security contributions to the first $110,100 in income, Congress could ensure the program’s solvency for the next 75 years — longer than the program has been in existence to this point.
That wouldn’t fit Ryan’s belief that the government doesn’t have a role in helping protect the financial security of the American people. But it would prevent millions of Americans from losing the much of their retirement savings, as they would have during the 2008 financial crisis had Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security become law.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, July 30, 2012
“Generic Dubya”: Mitt Romney’s Innovative Economic Plan
When pressed for details on his economic plan, the former governor has only GOP boilerplate.
I’ll be honest: There are a few things about Mitt Romney that I find annoying. One of the biggest has to be that there is probably no sentence he has repeated more often in this campaign than “I know how the economy works,” but he never actually explains what he knows that nobody else does, or how that hard-won knowledge translates into a unique set of policy moves that only he could bring about and that would pull America from its economic doldrums.
There are really two sets of questions that absolutely must be asked of Romney in the area of economics, given the rationale he offers for his candidacy. The first is, “What specifically did you learn as a businessman that policymakers haven’t known up until now?” As far as I know, he has only been asked this question once, and the result wasn’t encouraging. (After repeating over and over that he “understands how the economy works,” Romney finally allowed that businesses spend money on energy, so if energy were cheaper, they’d have more money. Brilliant, I know.) The second question that Romney needs to be asked is, “What are you proposing to do, and how is that different than what we’ve done before?”
The natural way to ask this is the way Brian Williams asked it in an interview with Romney yesterday: “The major planks of your job plan, lower taxes, both corporate and marginal rates, and reduce regulation. Explain how that would be different from what George W. Bush tried to push through?” Republicans might say this is a “gotcha” question, since it brings up George W. Bush, whom today’s Republicans like to pretend was not actually president for eight years. But it’s a reasonable way to ask, since Bush’s presidency was pretty recent, and he did in fact implement the entire Republican economic agenda, with the exception of drastic cuts in the size of government, though that’s something Republicans are committed to in rhetoric only. So how did Romney respond?
Well, let me describe—actually, there are five things that I believe are necessary to get this economy going. One, take advantage of our energy resources, particularly natural gas, but also coal, oil, nuclear, renewables. That’s number one. A huge opportunity for us, and doing so is gonna bring manufacturing back, because low-cost, plentiful energy is key to manufacturing, in many industries.
Number two, trade. I want tre– to dramatically increase trade and particularly with—with Latin America. Number three, take action to get America on track to have a balanced budget. Now those three things, by the way, are things which we have not been doing over the last few years, which I think are essential to getting this economy going again.
Number four, we’ve got to show better training and education opportunities for our current re– workers and for coming workers. And then finally what I call restoring economic freedom. That means keep our taxes as low as possible, have regulations modern and up to date, get health care costs down. These things will restore economic freedom.
So my policies are very different than anything you’ve seen in the past. They’re really designed for an America which has some new resources, energy being one of them, trade with Latin America being another, and the need for a balanced budget now more urgent than ever before.
To review: The way Mitt Romney’s economic plan differs from what George W. Bush did is that Romney favors exploiting energy resources, free trade, having a good education system, balancing the budget (something every candidate in both parties says they’ll do, but only Bill Clinton actually did), tax cuts, and less regulation. In short, Romney’s program is exactly the same as what George W. Bush did. Yet Romney says, “My policies are very different than anything you’ve seen in the past.” Right.
It isn’t necessary that every presidential candidate come up with a set of policies that are absolutely new and unique. After all, politicians are largely creatures of their parties, and those parties have relatively consistent agendas, so no party nominee is going to offer an agenda that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. But Romney is presenting a case for his candidacy that is an unusual synthesis of the personal and the policy. Other candidates have centered their candidacies on a personal argument—Bush was a “different kind of Republican” who would deliver us from the bitter partisanship of the 1990s, Obama was the embodiment of hope and change—but Romney’s two-fold claim is that the election is all about the practical problem of improving the economy and that because of who he is, but not because of what he wants to do, only he can solve that practical problem. When he’s forced to get specific, his solution to the practical problem is the standard Republican agenda.
It’s entirely possible that this argument, hollow though it is, could work. Polls seem to indicate that Romney has an advantage on which candidate voters believe would do a better job managing the economy, which is not the same as them thinking all we need to do is cut taxes for the wealthy and remove regulatory constraints on corporations. Indeed, the appropriate follow-up to the question Williams asked is, “George W. Bush did just about everything you’re proposing to do. If it didn’t work then, why is it going to work now?” But nobody has asked Romney that either, so the most advantageous thing for him to do is to keep repeating “I understand how the economy works” and hope he doesn’t have to answer too many questions about what he actually wants to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 26, 2012
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