“Obama Has A Response For The ‘Not Tough Enough’ Crowd”: The Greatest Terrorist Hunter In The History Of The Presidency
The latest report from the Pew Research Center offered generally good news for President Obama – Democrats’ favorability is improving, while Republicans’ favorability is sinking – but there was one trouble area for the White House that stood out.
Just over half of Americans (53%) continue to say that Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy and national security is “not tough enough”; 37% say he handles these matters about right, while just 4% say he is too tough. These attitudes are virtually unchanged since November 2013.
Republicans are far more critical of Obama’s approach to foreign policy than Democrats or independents.
Indeed, the partisan split matters. A 53% majority believes the president’s approach to national security isn’t “tough enough,” but that’s exaggerated a bit because a whopping 80% of Republicans have convinced themselves this is true. The numbers of Democrats and Independents who agree is significantly smaller.
Still, it’s a deeply odd thing for a majority of Americans to believe. Consider something Obama said this week during his address to the VFW National Convention:
“I’ve shown I will not hesitate to use force to protect our nation, including from the threat of terrorism. Thanks to the skill of our military and counterintelligence professionals, we’ve struck major blows against those who threaten us. Osama bin Laden is gone. Anwar Awlaki, a leader of the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen – gone. Many of al Qaeda’s deputies and their replacements – gone. Ahmed Abdi Godane – the leader of the al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia – gone. Abu Anas al-Libi, accused of bombing our embassies in Africa – captured. Ahmed Abu Khattalah, accused in the attack in Benghazi – captured. The list goes on. If you target Americans, you will have no safe haven. We will defend our nation.”
As of yesterday, Abu Khalil al-Sudani, the al Qaeda operative “in charge of suicide bombings and operations involving explosives” was killed by U.S. forces, which means he can be added to Obama’s “gone” list.
I’m reminded of Jeffrey Goldberg’s point from last year: “Obama has become the greatest terrorist hunter in the history of the presidency.”
So, what’s with the “not tough enough” concerns?
As we talked about a while ago, I suspect Republican rhetoric is a key factor in Republican perceptions. The more Obama orders strikes on terrorists, the more GOP officials feel the need to pretend the president is indifferent to matters of national security, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Note, for example, just how many Republican leaders, candidates, and officials have said the president is doing “nothing” about ISIS, even as the president orders literally thousands of airstrikes on ISIS targets in the Middle East.
What’s more, Republicans have gone to extraordinary lengths to move the goal-posts – what really matters, the GOP argues, isn’t whether the Obama administration kills terrorists, but rather, whether the Obama administration uses words and phrases Republicans find ideologically satisfying.
Sure, killing bin Laden is nice, but for many on the right, if the president doesn’t explicitly use the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” preferably every day, a successful counter-terrorism strategy doesn’t really count.
There is, of course, an entirely different side of the debate, including questions from the White House’s progressive critics. Do U.S. strikes deter or prevent future terrorist threats? Is the U.S. policy entirely consistent with the law? What are the implications of a policy reliant on drones? Should Americans expect the current national-security policy to remain in place indefinitely? What happens when one terrorist leader is killed, but he’s replaced by someone worse?
The answers to these questions matter, and shouldn’t be overlooked by chest-thumping.
But there’s still the matter of mistaken public perceptions, which appear increasingly divorced from reality. If a president with Obama’s record isn’t “tough enough,” who is?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 24, 2015
“This Whole Debate Is A Charade”: Let’s Stop Pretending Republicans Have A Serious Critique Of The Iran Deal
Secretary of State John Kerry went to Capitol Hill today to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. As expected he absorbed a lot of insults and invective from Republicans who are critical of the deal. Along with Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, Kerry tried to rebut the criticisms as best he could.
But you could see in Kerry’s occasionally exasperated expression something that we all ought to be willing to acknowledge: This whole debate is a charade.
There’s a reason no Republican has managed to answer President Obama’s challenge to articulate an alternative that would be preferable to what the six-party negotiations produced, and it isn’t because this deal is perfect or couldn’t have been better. It’s that from where Republicans sit, any deal negotiated with Iran is a bad one by definition.
That’s partly because it was negotiated by the Obama administration, of course, and the GOP has gotten itself to a position where opposition to pretty much anything Barack Obama does is not just reflexive but mandatory for any elected Republican who wants to keep his job. It’s also because the sustained critique of Obama’s foreign policy that Republicans have pushed for the last six and a half years is that everything Obama does is “weak.” The word comes up again and again in Republican statements about foreign policy; ask them what they’d do differently, and in every situation their answer always revolves around being stronger. The content of this strength is rarely detailed, but when it is it usually involves more aggressive use of the military.
And it assumes that when dealing with adversaries like Iran, negotiation is weak, again by definition. Negotiation means talking to those we hate, and even offering them concessions. Successful negotiation ends with an outcome that our adversaries actually praise, when what we really want is for them to fall to their knees and surrender to our might. This is what elected Republicans believe, and more importantly, it’s what they’ve been telling their constituents for years, so it’s what those constituents demand.
So there was literally no deal this administration could have negotiated with Iran that Republicans would have agreed to. None. From their perspective, the substance of the deal never mattered. No one who has been remotely attentive to our politics in recent years could honestly deny that.
And there’s something important to understand about whether Republicans have an alternative. Yes, it’s a reasonable rhetorical point to demand that they explain what other kind of deal they’d support. But right now, they are actually proposing an alternative: that the U.S. pull out of this deal. And we need to explore what that means.
You can argue that this deal should have been different, but when it comes time to vote on whether it should go forward, members of Congress will be choosing between two options, neither of them hypothetical. A yes vote means all the parties — not only Iran and the United States, but also the United Nations, China, Russia, and the European Union — implement this deal. A no vote, in contrast, doesn’t mean that some fantasy deal will fall from the sky. It means that the U.S. walks away from this deal, and it collapses.
That also could mean that the existing sanctions regime collapses. We can keep our sanctions on Iran, but the reason sanctions have been so devastating to the country’s economy is that they haven’t just come from the U.S., but also from the United Nations, the European Union, and elsewhere. If those other sanctions were to disappear, Iran would get most of what it wanted without having to fulfill any obligations at all. And if they want to pursue a nuclear weapon, they could then go right ahead.
So now that the deal is on the table and congressional votes are on their way, what Republicans really need to explain is not what sort of deal they might have preferred. We know their answer to that question — they’ll say they would have rather had a deal where Iran gives us everything we want, and we give up nothing. But that’s irrelevant at this point. What they need to explain now is why the U.S. pulling out of this deal — and what happens afterward — will be preferable to implementing it, imperfections and all. Do they think the Iranians will come crawling back and make further concessions? Do they think the rest of the world’s powers, which support the deal they helped negotiate, will just follow us and impose new sanctions in the hope that eventually that might lead to more negotiations (which, like these, would take years) and ultimately the fantasy deal where Iran capitulates? What precisely is the chain of events Republicans think will occur if we pull out?
If they’ve given that question even a moment’s consideration, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. But it’s what they ought to be asked now.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014
“The GOP Finally Finds The Courage To Attack Donald Trump”: You Can’t Shame Someone When They Had No Shame To Begin With
The GOP may finally have found the means to rid itself of that meddlesome real estate tycoon. And it’s fitting—and really, should have been predictable—that what is uniting Republicans against Donald Trump is his own big mouth. It’s one thing to call Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers—that caused some agita, but not enough to rid Trump’s GOP opponents of their visceral fear of alienating his supporters. But insulting John McCain’s war record? That’s something everyone can agree on, and thus gives the other candidates just the excuse they’ve been waiting for to bring out the knives for Trump.
On the off chance you haven’t heard, on Saturday, Trump said some interesting things about McCain, with whom he has had a little East Coast/Southwest beef of late. The setting was the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, where the candidates go to assure the evangelical voters who dominate the state’s Republican caucuses that they are loyal members of Team Jesus. At a presentation in which he was interviewed by pollster Frank Luntz, Trump essentially said that McCain is sort of a war hero, but maybe not really. “He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
That’s the part you’ve heard about. But the fuller picture shows that as silly as Trump’s assertion was, the really asinine thing in that exchange was the question. Trump and McCain have been arguing about a number of things, but most particularly, McCain said that Trump was succeeding because he “fired up the crazies,” and Trump responded by tweeting that McCain “should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis—dummy!” (the details of all this are explained here, if you care). Luntz said to Trump, “Referring to John McCain, a war hero, five and a half years as a POW, you call him a dummy. Is that appropriate in running for president?”
If you watch the video, you’ll see Trump give a rambling explanation of why he doesn’t like John McCain, saying nothing about his war record, and after a minute or so Luntz can’t take it anymore and blurts out, “He’s a war hero!” It’s only then that Trump says the part about McCain being captured. But what exactly was Luntz arguing here? That no one is allowed to say anything mean to John McCain because of what he went through almost half a century ago? McCain’s captivity was surely horrible, and he showed great courage in enduring it. But the guy has been a politician for more than 30 years. I’m pretty sure it ought to be okay to insult him.
The truth is that there are a whole lot of people in politics, both Democrats and Republicans, who share Donald Trump’s opinion that John McCain is a jerk. But if Frank Luntz was hoping to bait Trump into denying McCain’s heroism and create the moment that would bring Republicans together against him, he couldn’t have planned it any better. This particular comment, far more than all the other stupid or offensive things Trump has said just in the past couple of months, offered the perfect vehicle for them to attack—and without any of the risk that might come from sounding like you don’t hate immigrants. The reaction from everyone in the GOP was unanimous, and Rick Perry summed it up well: “His attack on veterans makes him unfit to be commander in chief of the forces and he should immediately withdraw from the race for president.” Don’t you wish.
The Republicans are getting ample help from the news media, whose adoring relationship with John McCain goes back two decades. McCain’s Vietnam experience is one of the foundations of that relationship—reporters have unlimited admiration for it, and express that admiration not only in endless retellings of McCain’s suffering, but in the comically false assertion, also endlessly repeated, that McCain is so noble and modest that he would never bring up Vietnam himself. (The truth is that McCain constantly brings up Vietnam to use to his political advantage, and always has, from his very first run for office. Which is his right to do, of course, but the rest of us should at least be honest about it.) So it isn’t only politicians rushing to McCain’s side of this spat; the news media are, too.
If there’s one thing Republicans know how to do, it’s bludgeon someone for showing insufficient respect for “the troops”; it just so happens that this is the rare case when it might be somewhat justified, even if their outrage is utterly opportunistic. Up until now, all the candidates knew they had to get rid of this guy, because he was making their party look both hateful and ridiculous. But they were too worried that if they attacked him, they’d alienate the voters drawn to his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Now they’ve got their chance to beat him down without much risk to themselves, and they aren’t going to pass it up.
If you’re an ordinary Republican primary voter today, you’re seeing every politician you respect condemning Donald Trump, and one might think that would inevitably have an impact on his standing in the primaries. But that may not necessarily be the case. Trump’s support, substantial though it may be, is limited—right now he’s leading the field, but five out of six primary voters are still supporting someone else. And all the evidence suggests that the people who are supporting him, conservative though they may be, are as angry at the party’s establishment as they are at immigrants and Barack Obama.
So it’s entirely possible that once the campaign moves on from the next micro-controversy in a few days, Trump’s standing won’t be too different from what it is now. One thing’s for sure: He won’t be pushed out of the race by the rest of the party. You can’t shame someone into submission when they had no shame to begin with.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, July 19, 2015
“A Major Issue In The 2016 Elections”: Walker Dismisses Minimum Wage As ‘Lame’
Just a few weeks before his re-election bid, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was asked whether minimum-wage laws should even exist. The Republican governor replied, “Well, I’m not going to repeal it but I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it serves a purpose.”
Seven months later, shortly after kicking off his GOP presidential campaign, Walker went just a little further. The Washington Post reported:
Scott Walker appeared to take aim at the national minimum wage on Monday evening, referring to it as one of many “lame ideas” pushed by Democrats.
Walker’s comment came in a lengthy interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity immediately following a speech formally announcing his entrance into the 2016 presidential race. Walker said the next president needs to speak the language of the industrial Midwest and connect with the working class.
According to the video, eagerly disseminated by Democratic officials, Walker told the Fox News host, “The left claims that they’re for American workers and they’ve just got just really lame ideas – things like the minimum wage.”
In context, there was nothing to suggest the governor was talking about his opposition to a minimum-wage increase, so much as the existence of the minimum wage itself. To hear Walker tell it, the law is a “lame” benefit for American workers.
It’s a pretty provocative move for a national candidate – increasing the minimum wage is one of the more popular ideas in the country right now, enjoying broad support for a wide range of voters. Just a month ago, a CBS News poll found 71% of Americans want to see the minimum wage go from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour – and that included a majority of self-identified Republican voters.
The Wisconsin governor, meanwhile, appears to support lowering the minimum wage to $0.
What’s just as interesting is how common this position has become in GOP circles. For decades, the debate was largely limited to those who wanted to raise the minimum wage and those who wanted to leave it unchanged. There were a few folks on the margins opposed to the law itself, but this was a fringe position that few took seriously.
This year, however, a growing number of presidential candidates are practically boasting about their hostility forwards the minimum wage. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), for example, has suggested getting rid of the minimum altogether, arguing it’s not “the government’s business” to interfere with wages. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said, plainly, “I don’t think a minimum wage law works.”
Earlier this year, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), whom some see as a moderate, went so far as to say, “We need to leave it to the private sector. I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn’t be doing this.”
Walker clearly wants to be part of the same club. Expect this to be a major issue in the 2016 elections.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, July 14, 2015
“The Facts Are Staring Us In The Face”: GOP Lawmakers Vote To Increase Unplanned Pregnancy Rate
In early July, Colorado’s success with free long-acting contraceptives was trumpeted by news media. The New York Times called the results “startling” and “stunning.” “Colorado’s free birth control experiment could change the world,” ravedSFGate, a news website.
But the news was not so surprising.
After health authorities provided free contraceptives such as intrauterine devices to low-income girls and women over six years, from 2009 to 2013, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among teenagers dropped by 40 percent. The abortion rate among that group declined by 42 percent, said the Times, using figures from Colorado officials. And they reported similar declines among unmarried women younger than 25 and without high-school diplomas — a group likely to be mired in poverty if they started motherhood too soon.
Aren’t those results exactly what you’d expect when young women are given easy access to a reliable and simple-to-use method of birth control? Isn’t that what advocates of women’s reproductive health have been preaching for decades?
Here’s the surprise: The Colorado state legislature has refused to provide $5 million to renew the program, despite its dramatic results. Apparently, its members were cowed by opposition from the usual coalition of right-wing religious groups, such as Colorado Family Action. (The initial funding was provided by an anonymous donor.)
“We believe that offering contraceptives to teens, especially long-acting reversible contraceptives, while it may prevent pregnancy, does not help them understand the risks that come with sexual activities. We should not remove parents from the equation,” Colorado Family Action said in a statement.
Allow me to interpret the statement from CFA: If teenage girls have sex, we want them to get pregnant and suffer for it. This sort of political falderal makes me want to bang my head on my desk. If we want to reduce unintended pregnancies — which leads, of course, to a reduction in abortion rates — we know how to do it: Provide free contraception, preferably long-acting and reversible methods such as IUDs. Yet, the very right-wingers who denounce abortion rights refuse to support widespread contraceptive use.
While the figures from Colorado are dramatic, rates of teen pregnancy have been falling for decades. The teen pregnancy rate in the United States reached its peak in 1990 and has been dropping since then.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit that works to advance reproductive health, the decline, at least since 2003, has “little or nothing to do with teens’ delaying sex. … Instead, the decline in teen pregnancy in recent years can be linked to improvements in teens’ contraceptive use.”
In the late 1990s, reproductive experts started to notice that unintended pregnancies had dropped, especially among teenagers, as they began using long-acting birth control methods such as Norplant, which was implanted under the skin, and Depo-Provera, administered through injection. The advantage lies in ease of use: Women don’t have to remember to take a daily pill.
Still, even with the successes of recent decades, the United States has a higher rate of unintended pregnancies — more than half are unplanned — than virtually any other industrialized country. And 40 percent of those end in abortion, according to Guttmacher researchers.
Cultural and religious conservatives insist that teaching teens to abstain from sexual activity is the answer. But the states most likely to insist on that approach — my home state of Alabama is one — have the highest rates of teen pregnancy. Alabama has the 15th-highest rate of teen pregnancy, according to federal statistics. Mississippi, equally conservative and even poorer, has the second.
If you still don’t believe it, take a look at Bristol Palin, daughter of Tea Party darling Sarah Palin. Once a spokesperson for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, she pledged after her first child not to have sex again until she married. She is now pregnant with her second child as a single mother.
The facts are staring us in the face: We know how to prevent unplanned pregnancies and the poverty they so often drag in their wake. We know how to dramatically reduce the rate of abortions. It’s simply crazy that we refuse to do what works.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary, 2007; The National Memo, July 11, 2015
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