“Oh Please!”: Huckabee Peers Up At Cruz In The Polls, Attacks Him For Lack Of Hysteria On Marriage Equality
In one of the more, er, interesting Invisible Primary diversions of the holiday season, on Wednesday Politico‘s Mike Allen tried to win the morning with a breathless report that Texas senator Ted Cruz told a private “moderate” fund-raising audience in sinful New York that rolling back marriage equality would not be a “top-three” priority. Allen found out about this shocking indiscretion via a “secret tape” sent to him by a shocked witness.
Truth is that in the same breath Cruz folded the fight against marriage equality into his “top priority,” which he describes as “defending the Constitution.” He also reminded listeners that he has long favored letting the states set marriage policies, as they generally do subject to constitutional conditions.
Not to put too fine a gloss on it, Mike Allen manufactured a “controversy” out of this nothing-burger of a quote, presumably because it could get the recently high-flying Cruz in trouble both with Christian Right activists ever alert to their issues sliding down the priority list, and with Republican voters concerned with “authenticity.” Cruz, you see, has always raised suspicions that he’s a sort of an Elmer Gantry figure, a slick Ivy Leaguer pulling the wool over the eyes of the Folks.
Personally, I think such charges have it backwards; if anyone’s getting zoomed by Ted Cruz, it’s the sophisticates who think he would be a regular old-school Republican if elected president. But that’s probably because I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the apocalyptic ravings of his favorite warm-up act and father, the Reverend Ted Cruz.
So far the only fallout from the Cruz/Allen “scandal” is the understandable reaction of Mike Huckabee, who is peering up at Ted Cruz in the poll rankings and wondering how he lost his long-established conservative evangelical base in Iowa to a Cuban-American. According to (naturally) Politico, Huck rose to the occasion:
“Conservatives are being asked to ‘coalesce’ around yet another corporately-funded candidate that says something very different at a big donor fundraiser in Manhattan than at a church in Marshalltown,” Huckabee said in a statement released by his campaign Wednesday afternoon. “Shouldn’t a candidate be expected to have authenticity and consistency, instead of having to look at a map to decide what to believe and what to say?”
Cruz’s answer to the “top-three” question may have struck a chord with Huckabee because the former Arkansas governor has issued his own “top-three” statement, allowing as how he’ll fold his presidential campaign if he doesn’t get one of those legendary three tickets out of Iowa. That will only happen over Ted Cruz’s dead (political) body, so no wonder Huck’s trying to take him down.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 24, 2015
“The Disagreement Was Between Christians”: What Did The Puritans Have Against Christmas?
Another Christmas, another string of outrages about the supposed “War on Christmas.”
In November there was the social media furor about Starbucks’ red cups, as Ed Simon relates here in RD.
Then this month, 36 Republican U.S. House members introduced a resolution “that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected for use by those who celebrate Christmas.”
And in the most recent CNN-sponsored debate among Republican presidential candidates, Wolf Blitzer’s closing Merry Christmas wish prompted two Fox News hosts to declare victory, claiming that their side had won the War on Christmas: http://youtu.be/hgUaXo9URCM
Whatever the recent skirmishes, this kind of controversy is not new. American disagreements about the celebration of Christmas reach back to the nation’s colonial beginnings—where ironically, it was a Christian group, Puritans, that offered the discouraging words.
When the Church of England broke away from Roman Catholicism in the 1500s, Calvinist reformers (those Puritans) felt that the new English church did not go far enough in removing Catholic elements. One practice the Puritans opposed was the annual December celebration of Christmas, which they saw as a Catholic innovation not justified by scripture. They claimed that the earliest Christians had no such observance (which was true, because it took more than two hundred years after Jesus’ lifetime before Christians began an annual observance about the nativity of the Christ child).
Puritans also disapproved of the wild partying that seemed widespread on Christmas Day in England. Thus, during the Puritan Revolution in England in the 1600s, Puritans banned special church services on December 25 and mandated that businesses remain open.
In the American colonies the result was more complicated. Puritan New England actively discouraged Christmas: for a few years the Massachusetts General Court threatened fines for anyone found feasting, or absent from work, on Christmas Day. The long term result was that English-speaking dissenters from the Church of England, in the colonial era and in the early years of the new nation, tended to either actively oppose or at least ignore Christmas—that included Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers.
However, other colonists came from parts of Europe not affected by Puritan opposition, and they brought their Christmas celebrations with them, unhindered: Germans, Scandinavians, and the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam (later New York). So Lutherans, Catholics, and the Dutch Reformed celebrated Christmas, along with the Church of England that continued restrained Christmas observances.
As a result of this mixture, in the American colonies and then in the new nation, there was no national consensus supporting Christmas, and the disagreement was between Christians.
American Christmas wouldn’t come roaring back, becoming nearly universal, until the mid-1800s, but it was not because of any campaign by churches. Most credit for the return and advance of Christmas goes to major cultural influences like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the morphing of St. Nicholas into Santa Claus. Dickens’ famous story did not reflect the Christmas of his time but instead was an attempt to resurrect and reinvent Christmas, and it was incredibly successful. A Christmas Carol contains very little direct reference to religion and says nothing about a baby in a manger—but it does promote a spirit of giving and care for others that can be embraced by almost anyone.
The point here is that the Puritan suppression of Christmas created a vacuum, and when Christmas re-emerged and flourished in the 1800s its new form had less of a religious emphasis and was centered more on family and generosity. Christians could embrace those themes gladly, as very consistent with their values and beliefs, but others could also embrace that kind of a Christmas spirit without being especially religious.
In a sense, what emerged were two kinds of Christmas: a Christian Christmas and a cultural Christmas. In modern-day expression of Christianity, some are able to combine the two seamlessly, but others strongly emphasize one or the other. What has been called the secularization of Christmas might also be described as an emphasis on the cultural Christmas, with less interest in the religious version. The outworking of this two-fold Christmas continues to this day, and it is part of what enlivens the ‘War on Christmas’ debates.
But it was the Puritans who started it.
By: Bruce David Forbes, Religion Dispatches, December 22, 2015
“Now Isn’t That Special!”: Russia’s Putin Offers Unexpected Praise For Trump
Some American leaders find it easier than others to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin. George W. Bush, for example, once told the world that he’d looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” The Republican not only vouched for the former KGB official’s character, he also bragged about calling him “Vladimir” because the two were so close.
It’s safe to say the relationship between Putin and President Obama is quite a bit cooler.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, meanwhile, believes he can restore a sense of chumminess with the Russian autocrat. “I believe we will have a very good relationship with Russia,” Trump told CBS in September. “I believe that I will have a very good relationship with Putin.”
Evidently, the feelings are mutual.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a glowing review of one of the most controversial candidates for the U.S. presidency, telling Russian media that Donald Trump was an absolute leader in the race.
Putin made the comments Thursday to Russian news agency Interfax after taking reporter questions for three hours as part of his annual press conference in Moscow.
I should note that some of the translations vary a bit. BuzzFeed, for example, citing the Interfax news wire, quoted Putin as saying about Trump, “He’s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt. It’s not our job to judge his qualities, that’s a job for American voters, but he’s the absolute leader in the presidential race.” I’ve seen other reports with slightly different phrasing.
Putin reportedly added, “He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia; how can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that.”
It might be tempting to think this would be an unwelcome development for Trump’s GOP campaign. After all, Putin isn’t especially popular with the American mainstream, so who would want to be the Russian autocrat’s favorite U.S. presidential candidate?
But the politics are a bit more complicated than that, in large part because American Republicans have repeatedly praised Putin in recent years, singling him out as the kind of world leader they respect and admire. It’s created an odd form of partisan cognitive dissonance: Republicans often seem impressed by those who vow to stand up to Putin, even while pointing to the Russian president as a model of strength.
As for the Putin-Trump parallels, is anyone really surprised that the two would admire each other from afar? Consider the similarities: Self-aggrandizing boasts? Check. Delusions of grandeur? Checkity check. An over-reliance on authoritarian tendencies? Big ol’ check.
Put it this way: of all the 2016 presidential candidates, who seems the most likely to eagerly wrestle a bear for the cameras?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 17, 2015
“Forget The Geneva Conventions And The Bill Of Rights”: Cruz And Trump’s ISIS Plans Sound A Lot Like War Crimes
Carpet-bombing with no regard for civilian casualties. Murdering the possibly-innocent families of terrorists just to make a point. The line between official U.S. policy and action movie fantasy was unfortunately blurred during the Republican debate on Tuesday night, when Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the frontrunners for the nomination—Trump with 33 percent in the polls, Cruz with 16—tried to out-macho one another on foreign policy.
The result was both candidates doubling down on strategies that involve war crimes.
Cruz has often said that he wants to “carpet-bomb ISIS into oblivion,” joking that we’ll find out if “sand can glow in the dark” in the process.
Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Does that mean leveling the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria, where there are hundreds of thousands of civilians?”
Cruz replied, “What it means is using overwhelming airpower to utterly and completely destroy ISIS.”
By way of example, he pointed to the first Gulf War, when “we carpet-bombed them for 37 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half, mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.”
The architects of that Gulf War effort, which featured the first major use of precision-guided bombs, would probably disagree that it was was “saturation” or “carpet” bombing. And according to the International Criminal Court, war crimes include “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.” Cruz said the objective would be to kill members of ISIS, not civilians, but there’s no such thing as a precise, narrowly-targeted carpet-bombing campaign. The tactic, which began in the Spanish Civil War and flowered fully in World War II, is to drop thousands of munitions on a single area—and flatten in. It is the opposite of precise.
Not long after Cruz’s exchange, Trump was asked a question by Josh Jacob, an earnest, yellow sweater vest-wearing student from Georgia Tech. He wanted to know how Trump justified his assertion that the U.S. should kill the families of terrorists, when that “violates the principle of distinction between combatants and family members.”
He asked, “How would intentionally killing innocent civilians set us apart from ISIS?”
Trump puffed up like a blowfish. “We have to be much tougher and stronger than we’ve been,” he said. He pointed to the San Bernardino attack, arguing that people who knew the terrorist husband and wife no doubt were aware that they were up to no good. “They knew exactly what was going on,” he said.
“When you had the World Trade center go, people were put into planes that were friends, family, girlfriends, and they were put into planes and they were sent back, for the most part, to Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “They knew what was going on. They went home and wanted to watch their boyfriends on television.”
To Trump, there is no possibility that the families, friends or loved ones of terrorists could be disconnected from terrorism, and so, “I would be very, very firm with families. And, frankly, that will make people think—because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”
Earlier this month, Trump was even bolder. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he said on Fox & Friends. “You have to take out their families.”
Inconveniently enough for Trump, murder is also classified as a war crime.
But that may not matter to the audience at the debate.
Advocating for breaking international humanitarian laws almost looked reasonable next to Trump’s North Korea-influenced proposal to “close” parts of the Internet frequented by terrorists. (As if the U.S. doesn’t gather all sorts of intelligence from those corners of the digital world.)
And applause predictably broke out when Hillary et al. were criticized for failing to decry “Islamic terror.”
Other ideas, like Rand Paul’s meek suggestion that America might perhaps consider the Bill of Rights from time to time, hardly received any notice.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, December 16, 2015
“Eradicate The Inequality And Anger”: If You Want To Beat Donald Trump, You Have To Do More Than Call Him A Fascist
The American political establishment, from the Democratic Party elite to their Republican counterparts, have discovered something alarming. There is now wide agreement that Donald Trump is a gigantic bigot and at least a quasi-fascist. He has been described as such by many ideologically diverse politicians and commentators, from the liberal Martin O’Malley to the conservative Max Boot.
And it hasn’t dented his support at all. On the contrary, Trump has surged ever higher in the polls.
As Matt Yglesias argues, Trumpism is the natural result of conservative political strategy. Republicans refuse to accept immigration reform — even though it could potentially help them make inroads among Latinos. They have also long refused to promulgate any economic policy that isn’t preposterously slanted towards the rich. Their only political road left is turning out lower-class whites — a not insignificant number of whom are outright racists — with rank race- and Muslim-baiting. As Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote, race hustling — “profiting from their most backward impulses…stoking and then leeching off of their hate” — has a long history in American politics. As Greg Sargent points out, the rest of the GOP field, and particularly Ted Cruz, is only slightly behind Trump in anti-Islam fear-mongering.
Trump is obliterating the GOP brand among Latinos. Other minority groups who might have a natural affinity for conservative policy — ironically, including American Muslims, who are generally well-off and broke for Bush in 2000 — will be repelled by the perception that the GOP is the party of racists. Any such damage to the Republican image will be extremely hard to undo, so there will be continual temptation to go all in on the politics of racism.
Demonstrating the bigotry of Trumpism is a worthy and necessary task. Condemning Trump as the rebirth of Mussolini (as I have done), or attacking his supporters as unpatriotic, is worthwhile. But it’s not enough.
It’s time for liberals to start thinking about what to do against a political opponent that openly subscribes to bigotry. It’s time to start building anti-fascist political institutions. I fear that calling Trump a fascist will make no dent at all in the Trump phenomenon. Left-leaning Americans need to start thinking about building the brute political muscle to beat him.
What does that mean? Namely, that only a broad-based political movement, aimed at providing jobs and economic security for every American of every race, can permanently defeat what Trump represents.
That means politically activating the people who are the recipients of Democratic policy but do not vote (particularly the poor). One of the most devastating lines I’ve heard in American politics comes from a Republican political advisor in Kentucky: “People on Medicaid don’t vote.” That is part of why Matt Bevin was able to cruise to easy victory in that state after having promised to snatch health insurance from hundreds of thousands of people.
Unions should take the lead. Organizing is flaring up in food and service industries, contributing to small policy successes such as a $15 minimum wage at the city level. A small fraction of VW workers at a Chattanooga plant recently got union representation — the first United Auto Workers victory at any foreign-operated firm. Further organizing is desperately needed, and Democrats who know what’s good for them should immediately pass pro-union legislation such as card check or a repeal of Taft-Hartley the second they get a chance.
Churches also play an underrated role in left-leaning politics. Though regular church attendance is generally correlated with more conservative politics, fully 40 percent of people who attend church weekly still voted Democratic in 2004 (and 49 percent of white Catholics). As Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig points out, the teachings of Jesus Christ are highly amenable to a left-leaning interpretation.
Other parties could also be built up, particularly in insanely corrupt blue states like Illinois or New Jersey. The sad truth is that the Democrats — the party of Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, and Rahm Emanuel — are not a particularly great vehicle for the sort of policy that would actually benefit unions or the poor. The Working Families Party has had limited success shifting the balance of power in New York politics; more could be done.
Other experiments, such as Jacobin‘s reading group network, or perhaps a revitalization of tired online organizational models from the Bush years, ought to be tried or expanded.
Inequality in America is enormous. For the first time since the ’60s, at least a majority of Americans are not in the middle class. This is another way of saying that society has largely ceased to function for great swathes of the population. That, I believe, is a big root cause behind the rise of Trumpism. Anger and hatred — powerful political motivators indeed — fester under such conditions. To beat Trump, we can’t just call him a fascist. We have to build the movement and institutions that will eradicate the inequality and anger in which fascism thrives.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, December 11, 2015
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