“Sarah Palin All Over Again”: Ben Carson’s Fall Is A Damning Indictment Of Conservative Politics
Ben Carson’s popularity among conservatives has been marked by their imperviousness to questions about his honesty and fitness. Carson has made dozens of statements about federal policy that have transcended garden-variety conservative over-promising and reached the realm of Chauncey Gardner-esque absurdity. He has also faced serious questions about the veracity of stories he tells about his youth and young manhood. Through it all, conservatives have not only stuck by his side, but actually become more taken with him. They’ve brushed off scrutiny with glib mockery, accusing white liberals of “othering” a black man for having the temerity to leave the “thought plantation.”
That all likely changes now that Carson has confessed to fabricating a seminal story about having declined admission to West Point in his youth. When you’ve lost Breitbart, it stands to reason that you will also lose talk-radio fawning, viral email forwards, and all the other mysterious sources of conservative cult status.
But there is room for genuine doubt here: Could Carson’s supporters prove so uninterested in his genuine merits and demerits that they might look past this transgression? The very fact that this doubt exists incriminates both the conservative-entertainment complex and the nature of the Republican electorate.
Carson has been famous for years, and a political celebrity since February 2013, when he issued a meandering indictment of President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast while Obama sat next to him, silent and captive. The whole time, Carson has boasted of rejecting a “full scholarship” to West Point, an academy that actually pays people for their attendance. He thrust his deception into the public eye over and over and over again, and nobody questioned it until he became a poll leader in the Republican presidential primary.
This is not a great reflection on the media, I suppose—but it’s a worse reflection on the people who vaulted Carson to the summa of the conservative movement without bothering to investigate him. The price of entry into this realm of politics is so low that many, many successful people (Carson, but also Herman Cain and others) believe that the way they are perceived will protect them from their skeletons.
In this way, Carson’s rise is reminiscent of the McCain campaign’s decision to elevate Sarah Palin to vice presidential nominee after the most cursory vetting. Carson and Palin both paired reactionary politics with identities more closely associated with liberalism. Palin’s value was in her potential to undermine the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy. Carson’s is in his willingness to validate and absolve conservative racial politics. Republicans have pointed to Carson’s popularity as evidence of conservative enlightenment on racial issues, taking the superficial argumentative power of “some of my best friends are black” and applying it to a national ideological movement.
These phenonema were driven, to a large extent, by the idea that branding can eclipse structural political realities. What’s amazing and distressing is that, for millions of American conservatives, it absolutely can.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic; November 9, 2015
“He’s Got Himself A Regular Tent Revival Going”: Is Cruz Winning The Christian Right Sub-Primary?
While Donald Trump has had us all mesmerized, and we’ve also watched former co-front-runners Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio lose some altitude, and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina get their fifteen minutes of fame before voters and the media get a closer look at them, it could be that Ted Cruz has been making a move on a key constituency group with a lot of choices. On Friday night in Des Moines, Cruz put on quite the extravaganza for Christian Right activists who simultaneously want to show their wrathful power to the ungodly by smiting Planned Parenthood and whine and cower at their alleged persecution by The Homosexual Agenda. Here’s Matthew Patane’s take for the Des Moines Register:
In his opening remarks during the “Rally for Religious Liberty,” Cruz referenced a number of Supreme Court cases regarding religious issues that came down to a 5-4 decision.
“You want to know what this election is about? We are one justice away from the Supreme Court saying ‘every image of God shall be torn down,’” said Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas said.
The Cruz campaign invited multiple individuals that it said were “victimized by government persecution” for standing by their religious beliefs.
Oh yes. Cruz brought on stage the Bakers of Conscience, the homophobic Atlanta fire chief, all the mythic figures in the ongoing martyrdom of conservative evangelicals who will nonetheless Take Back Their Country next year.
But there’s an even bigger sign of Cruz’s ascendancy with this constituency, per WaPo’s Katie Zezima and Tom Hamburger:
Sen. Ted Cruz, who has assiduously courted evangelicals throughout his presidential run, will take a lead role in the launch this week of an ambitious 50-state campaign to end taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood — a move that is likely to give the GOP candidate a major primary-season boost in the fierce battle for social-conservative and evangelical voters.
More than 100,000 pastors received e-mail invitations over the weekend to participate in conference calls with Cruz on Tuesday in which they will learn details of the plan to mobilize churchgoers in every congressional district beginning Aug. 30. The requests were sent on the heels of the Texas Republican’s “Rally for Religious Liberty,” which drew 2,500 people to a Des Moines ballroom Friday.
“The recent exposure of Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices has brought about a pressing need to end taxpayer support of this institution,” Cruz said in the e-mail call to action distributed by the American Renewal Project, an organization of conservative pastors.
Ah yes: The American Renewal Project, David Lane’s little effort in practical theocracy designed to get conservative evangelical ministers heavily and unambiguously engaged in partisan politics. Lane has long been closely associated with the American Family Association, the gold standard of homophobia.
Now Cruz’s central role in this lobbying campaign may largely flow from his position in the
Senate, where he has zero inhibitions about defying Mitch McConnell’s vows against government shutdown tactics. But you do have to wonder if Cruz is emerging as the Christian Right favorite, especially in Iowa, a bit ahead of schedule.
After all, Rick Perry missed the first Fox News Debate (as did two other aspirants to Christian Right support, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal) and is having financial issues. Mike Huckabee has his own habitual money troubles, and seems to have lost a step since 2008. And while the quieter and less overtly political breed of conservative evangelical, exemplified by the Southern Baptist Convention spokesman Russell Moore may prefer candidates like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, or even Jeb Bush, the old-school activists certainly seem to still be in the saddle in the early states. If Cruz can indeed put himself at the front of a crusade to destroy the godless baby-killers of Planned Parenthood, he’ll bask in positive Christian Right publicity right up to the brink of the Iowa Caucuses. Add in the regular presence on the campaign trail of Ted’s deranged father the Rev. Rafael Cruz and the junior senator from Texas has got himself a regular tent revival going.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 24, 2015
“The Mainstream Media’s Bernie Sanders Trap: Deranged Clinton Hate Turns Them Into America’s Socialist Vanguard
If only the great Michael Harrington had lived to see this. So many brave Americans fought in vain to spread socialism in the United States, but it’s advancing in the summer of 2015 thanks to an unlikely vanguard: lazy and apolitical political reporters who love horse races and hate the Clintons.
Yes, the MSM is making sure that socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is taken seriously in his uphill run against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. He’s surging in Iowa and New Hampshire, polls tell us, and attracting 10,000 people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wednesday night.
This lifelong lefty who attended Madison is thrilled to see it – and yet a little cynical, too.
I mean really, folks: If Sanders had a chance to become president, Mark Halperin would be the first in line to red-bait him, rather than shaming Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Clinton supporter, into doing it on Morning Joe.
But the rise of Sanders, alongside that of the GOP’s surging star, blustering racist Donald Trump, also shows the media the difference between the ideological moorings of the folks who make up the Democratic and Republican base. The Democrats have a lot of lefties, FDR Democrats, folks who want single payer health insurance, people who think we can learn from Western Europe not stigmatize it — and yes, Sanders excites them. On the GOP side, there is a loud, large, angry segment of the GOP base that’s frankly xenophobic, nativist, even racist. Trump speaks to them.
Sanders and Trump thus offer different kinds of challenges to their party rivals. So far only George Pataki has tried to galvanize a Trump backlash, while Sen.Ted Cruz has defended him. Jeb Bush has said nothing, so far, which is a little weird, given that his wife is Mexican and his kids are of Mexican descent. But Trump is a stand-in for that portion of the GOP base — and these guys haven’t been terribly courageous in rebuking the nativist, racist element in their base. So they apparently think they have to be careful in the way they treat Trump, too. Of course, whoever gets the nomination may regret cozying up to Trump and his extremism, if they do so, when they get to a general election.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton can afford to welcome Sanders’ candidacy, and even endorse a lot of his platform. As Jim Newell points out here, she’s enormously popular even among Sanders supporters in Iowa. And Sanders isn’t the polarizing figure that Trump is. He’s good for the Democratic Party — and for socialism too. He explains it in simple terms. He points to the strong, social democratic economies of Western Europe, not the USSR. And his rising popularity shows that millennials and other voters too young to remember the Cold War aren’t going to be red-scared away from Sanders because of the socialist label.
Meanwhile, as Republicans compete to see who can abolish Obamacare most cruelly, Democrats will be debating whether the system should move to a single payer approach. This is all great.
Now, if Clinton endorses too much of what Sanders supports, you can bet that media figures hailing the Vermont senator’s campaign today will be red-baiting him, and Clinton, when the fall of 2016 comes around. That’s how they roll. So progressives should be a little wary of the media’s Bernie-mentum. The Clinton-hate that inspires admiring Sanders takes today will turn him into Clinton’s problem once she defeats him for the nomination, as she almost certainly will. Still, it’s fun to see the MSM so excited about socialism. Michael Harrington would be smiling.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 2, 2015
“The Swaggering Idiot Returns”: George W. Bush Emerges From Artistic Exile To Rehab His Disastrous Legacy
Arguably the best thing George W. Bush ever did for his party was to keep quiet in the years following his presidency. Winning elections in a political environment shaped by Bush’s legacy – a bloody and unpopular conflict in Iraq and a cratering economy – was difficult enough. The last thing Republicans needed was W. out in the public eye smirking and drawling about staying the course. So he exiled himself to the ranch in Crawford and took up painting.
But Bush’s political hermit act couldn’t last forever. His brother’s likely entrance into the 2016 presidential race guaranteed that we’d hear from him sooner rather than later, and it’s only natural that after years of self-imposed silence, Bush would feel the urge to get out there and talk politics again. And so this past weekend, Bush spoke to a Republican donor conference in Las Vegas about the Middle East and served up some harsh critiques of his successor’s foreign policy. It was classic Bush, in that he seemingly refused to consider for even a moment that much of what we’re dealing with in the Middle East are the unintended consequences of his own epic policy failures.
According to a transcript of Bush’s remarks provided to Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin, Bush came down hard on Barack Obama for ruining all the good work he and his administration had done in Iraq:
Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama’s policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. On Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011, he quoted Senator Lindsey Graham calling it a “strategic blunder.” Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.
It was a “strategic blunder,” according to Bush, because he’d made everything right in Iraq with the surge, which he offered up as a great example of commander-in-chiefing: “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq,” Bush said, “we changed.”
That’s a sanitized retelling of how the surge came about. The “plan” in Iraq had not been working for years, as evidenced by the ever-rising death tolls of American troops and Iraqi civilians. But Bush, as you might recall, was something of a stubborn man, and he stuck with the “plan,” insisting all along that it was working, even as the country fell apart before our eyes. Also, anyone who questioned the “plan” was immediately slimed by Bush, Karl Rove, and/or Dick Cheney as a traitorous, terrorist-appeasing, cut-and-run coward. The surge happened in 2007, four years after the war had begun and shortly after the political damage wrought by “staying the course” had cost the Republicans control of Congress in 2006.
And the surge itself failed to accomplish its primary goal of enabling political reconciliation amongst the factions within the Iraqi government. The regime the Bush administration left in Iraq was hopelessly corrupt and presided over by a wannabe authoritarian strongman who repressed Iraqi Sunnis to consolidate his own power. But according to Bush, forcing the Iraqis to agree to a residual force of a couple of thousand U.S. troops would have kept the sectarian government in line and kept a lid on the violence – a fanciful notion that was contradicted by the entire history of the Iraq war up to that point.
Bush also had a few words on the bad hombres of the Islamic State:
Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaeda’s “second act” and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration’s handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch: “Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo, and now they’re doing it on TV.”
The Islamic State and Al Qaeda are actually two distinct entities who don’t like each other all that much, but if we must go by this dodgy framework, then the Islamic State is actually Al Qaeda’s third act. The first act was just plain old Al Qaeda. The second act was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn’t exist until George W. Bush invaded Iraq and gave regular Al Qaeda the chance to set up a new franchise. The Islamic State grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the group’s sophistication owes much to the fact that the Bush administration disbanded Saddam Hussein’s army and made freelancers out of Hussein’s intelligence officers, who took their talents to the various jihadist movements.
Anyway, one could go on and on in this vein. It’s silly to think that Bush would ever cop to the enduring failures of his disastrous Iraq adventure, but he at least had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. Now he’s out there defending the Bush record and letting it be known that he’s very concerned about how all the catastrophes he helped author are playing out.
By: Simon Maloy, Salon, April 27, 2015
“McCain And Graham As Obama’s “Lapdogs”: Rand Paul’s Media-Bait Of The Highest Order
If Lindsey Graham is indeed entering the 2016 presidential race to make sure the military-industrial complex’s concerns about Rand Paul are fully and loudly and at every moment placed within sight and sound of media and voters alike, he’s getting a rise out of Paul, all right. Dig this rhetoric from the Kentuckian (per Nick Gass at Politico):
Lindsey Graham and John McCain are “lapdogs” for President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Rand Paul said Tuesday, at once firing back at recent remarks from the hawkish Republicans and seeking to distinguish his defense credentials.
“This comes from a group of people wrong about every policy issue over the last two decades,” the Kentucky Republican said in an interview with Fox News, touting his credentials as the “one standing up to President Obama….”
“They supported Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya; they supported President Obama’s bombing of Assad; they also support President Obama’s foreign aid to countries that hate us. So if there is anyone who is most opposed to President Obama’s foreign policy, it’s me. People who call loudest to criticize me are great proponents of President Obama’s foreign policy — they just want to do it ten times over,” he said.
Putting aside any analysis of the truth or error of what Paul is saying here about Obama, Graham/McCain, or himself, what’s interesting here is that he’s showing every sign of wanting a big debate within the GOP on foreign policy and national security; the “lapdog” line is media-bait of the highest order. I had figured up until now that his strategy would be to get close enough to the rest of the field on international issues so as to take them off the table as “differentiators”–or in other words neutralize them–and then change the subject to topics where his views are more congenial to Republican primary voters. But maybe that’s not it at all.
Whether or not you think it’s fair to call the views Paul articulated above as “isolationist,” they are definitely within the universe of views most Republicans have called “isolationist” since the Eisenhower administration. And Paul is talking this way at a time when the GOP rank-and-file’s support for lashing out at Muslims via military interventions–partly out of genuine if irrational fear of IS and of Iran as well–appears to be back to mid-2000s levels or even higher.
We’ll see if Paul keeps this up. Maybe he’d do better to conjure up a little of the old Cold War spirit by calling his opponents Obama’s “running dogs.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 21, 2015
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