“Are Our Memories Really So Short?”: It’s Impossible To Reconcile Members Of The Bush/Cheney Team Pretending To Have Credibility
Politico published a piece over the weekend about President Obama’s challenges in Iraq, which was otherwise unremarkable except for a quote about midway through the article.
“This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people [and] to the American national interest,” said Doug Feith, a top Pentagon official during the George W. Bush administration.
“They were pretty blase,” Feith said of the Obama team. “The president didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.”
The piece added that Feith would, true to form, like to see the White House deploying a “residual force” to Iraq.
That Feith disagrees with the Obama administration hardly comes as a surprise, but what was striking about all of this is the context of his criticisms: Politico presents Feith’s condemnations as if they have value. Indeed, Feith is presented to readers as a credible voice whose assessments of U.S. policy in Iraq have merit.
The article never mentions, even in passing, that Feith was a national laughingstock during his tenure in the Bush/Cheney administration, getting practically everything about U.S. policy in Iraq backwards. General Tommy Franks, the former Commander of the U.S. Central Command, once famously referred to Feith as “the dumbest f***ing guy on the planet.”
And yet, there Feith is in Politico, taking shots at Obama, without so much as a hint that news consumers may – just may – want to take his perspective with a healthy dose of skepticism, given his humiliating track record.
Of course, my point is not to pick on Politico alone. It’s not the only major news organization that’s stumbled into familiar mistakes. Take the major Sunday shows, for example.
Bill Kristol, for example, was on “This Week” yesterday, sharing his criticisms of Obama’s handling of Iraq – and no one laughed in his face. On “Meet the Press,” viewers saw Paul Wolfowitz. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made not one, but two Sunday show appearances, popping up on “Face the Nation” and “State of the Union.”
When most media professionals reflect on the period preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there’s a general consensus that it was not American journalism’s finest hour. News organizations needed to be skeptical, but weren’t. Reporters needed to push back against dubious sources, but didn’t. Nearly everyone in the business realized that we’d all have to be better next time.
Over the weekend, then, it was hard not to wonder: are our memories really so short?
More broadly, it’s nearly impossible to reconcile members of the Bush/Cheney team pretending to have credibility. Feith is an easy target, but he’s hardly the only one: Dick Cheney is offering guidance to congressional Republicans on, of all things, foreign policy; Donald Rumsfeld still shows in face in public and is sought after in GOP circles; and Condoleezza Rice presents herself as a successful former official.
The political world never fully came to terms with the scope and the breadth of the Bush/Cheney failures. In more ways than one, we’re still dealing with the consequences.
Update: Regina Schrambling reminds me that Paul Bremer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s another piece of a twisted mosaic.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 16, 2014
“An Incongruous Spectacle”: Dave Brat’s Win Over Eric Cantor Exposed The Unholy Tea Party-Wall Street Alliance
The Tea Party wave that built around the country in 2009 and 2010 was fueled by many things—resentment over foolhardy homeowners getting mortgage relief, backlash against the Affordable Care Act, and anxiety over federal spending. But if its rhetoric was to be believed, the movement was also driven by a healthy dose of old-fashioned anti-Wall Street populism—anger over the TARP bailouts, the AIG bonuses, the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute any of the bankers who’d brought us close to ruin.
Something funny happened, though, as the pitchforks made their way to confront the money changers at the temple: Wall Street and big business co-opted them. It turned out that some elements of the Tea Party movement were much more opposed to Obama than they were to self-dealing CEOs and bankers, and perfectly willing to join with the latter to fight the former. This quickly produced the confounding spectacle of a purportedly populist uprising that was working hand in hand, and in many cases funded by, the business elite. And the nexus for this alliance was the Republican leadership in Congress. When Republicans were trying to block the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, they took Frank Luntz’s devious advice to label the bill a “bailout” for the banks—deploying Tea Party rhetoric to attack a bill that was in fact bitterly opposed by the bailed-out banks. In recognition of this effort, Wall Street in 2010 swung its campaign spending sharply toward GOP candidates, including many running under the Tea Party banner.
And when the Tea Party wave reached Washington, after the Republican rout in the midterm elections, who put himself forward as the new arrivals’ standard bearer within the House leadership? None other than Eric Cantor—the top recipient of financial industry money in Congress, the longtime protector of one of the most notorious Wall Street favors of all, the tax loophole for the carried-interest income of private-equity and hedge-fund managers. It was an incongruous spectacle, but so muddled had the right’s populism become by that point that the opportunistic Cantor was able to brazen his way through it. It was he who goaded the insurgent congressmen to make the raising of the debt-ceiling limit in June of 2011 their big stand against Obama: “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” Cantor told the rank-and-file in a closed-door meeting in Baltimore in January 2011. It was he who undermined Speaker John Boehner’s effort to reach a grand bargain with Obama to pull the nation back from the brink, by riling up rank-and-file conservatives against the deal. It was a brilliant display: in one fell swoop, Cantor was able to protect the financiers’ carried-interest loophole (which Obama sought to close as part of the deal) at the same very time as he was serving as the champion of the Tea Party insurgents.
Now, Cantor’s game is up. Many, such as my colleague John Judis and the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, have already noted the right-wing populism in the rhetoric of Dave Brat, the economics professor who upset Cantor in Tuesday’s primary. But what is particularly significant about Brat’s victory is that he deployed this populism against the very man who had perfected the art of faking it. “All the investment banks in New York and D.C.—those guys should have gone to jail,” Brat said at one Tea Party rally last month. “Instead of going to jail, they went on Eric’s Rolodex, and they are sending him big checks.” Liberals have for some time now been decrying Cantor’s hypocrisy in posing as the tribune of the common man, but here was a fellow Republican calling it out (without, it should be noted, the assistance of any of the self-appointed Tea Party organizations that have been so willing to make common cause with their anti-Obama allies on Wall Street). Yes, some conservatives have for the past few years been making noise about “crony capitalism,” but somehow their examples of this scourge most often tended to be Democratic-inflected rackets, such as the failed solar energy company Solyndra, rather than Republican-tinted ones such as, say, the private lenders who were making a killing acting as taxpayer-subsidized middle-men in the student loan market.
This is why we should be grateful for Dave Brat, beyond the schadenfreude of seeing a widely disliked congressional leader brought low. Yes, Brat’s win will add new kindling to the Tea Party cause just as some were declaring it burned out, thus further reducing the odds of legislative progress in areas such as immigration reform. But his win has, at least momentarily, also brought some clarity and integrity to the insurgency. Here was anti-Wall Street populism in its pure form: aimed, for once, at the right target.
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, June 12, 2014
“President Obama Is No Bush”: Obama Has Accomplished Far Too Much In The Face Of Far Too Much Adversity
If anyone had said five years ago that President Obama’s popularity rating would nosedive to the dreadful level of George W. Bush’s ratings the last years of his presidency, they’d be fitted for a strait-jacket. Obama’s popularity ratings at that point had soared past 70 percent and there was the firm consensus that his numbers would stay comfortably high and that no matter how rocky things got during his tenure, they could never bottom out to Bush’s abysmal numbers.
The recent CNN/ORC International poll seems to show that the worst has happened and that Obama’s popularity rating now is virtually identical with Bush’s low rating. The added insult is that Bush seems to be getting more popular with his numbers on the uptick. There are two ways to look at this. One is that Bush had sunk so low in popularity ratings by the time he left office that he had nowhere to go but up and that it’s easy for the public to wax nostalgically about and to even find a few good things to say and think about an ex-president years removed from office than a president who sits in the office. This is made even easier by the constant barrage from the GOP’s inveterate Obama bashers playing up Bush’s alleged accomplishments while relentlessly pile driving Obama’s supposed failures.
That’s the other way to look at Obama’s drop. In the backwash of now defrocked former House Majority leader Eric Cantor’s ouster from Congress, it’s worth remembering Cantor was a prime ringleader of the now infamous dinner meeting the night of Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009. Their sole goal was to figure out everything they could do to dither, delay and flat out obstruct any and every initiative and piece of legislation, as well as key nominees, that Obama pushed, while savagely harassing and defaming his key appointees, most notably Attorney General Eric Holder and former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius.
This was the front door assault plan. The GOP’s backdoor strategy was to wink and nod at the dirty smear campaign from the coterie of right wing talk show hosts, bloggers and web sites that lambasted Obama with an avalanche of subtle and outright racist digs, barbs, taunts and harangues. The dual strategy had one aim and that was to make him a failed one term president, and failing that, a failed presidency. The added key to making that work was to play up to the hilt any and every real or perceived stumble. The NSA spy debacle, the lingering anger over Benghazi, the AP leaks, the worry over the Affordable Health Care Act website glitches, and the Bergdahl-Taliban prisoner swap, and now the militant Islamist insurgency in Iraq are prime examples.
The GOP gloat that Obama is now no better than Bush in the public’s eye still falls appalling flat. Bush’s miserable record on the two greatest issues that matter the most to Americans are glaring proof of that. They are the economy and war. Bush hit the skids the second go round because of public souring on a failed, flawed and financially and human-draining war, and a financial collapse that had much to do with his disastrous two tax cuts that gave away the company store to corporations and the rich and sent the budget deficit skyrocketing. In glaring contrast, Obama’s fiscal and budgetary record shows steady joblessness drops, a deficit drop, and an unprecedented surge in the markets that ironically has made more millions for many of the corporate rich that pile onto the assault against Obama.
His wind down of the Iraq and Afghan war has been a special sore point for GOP hawks who never tire of telling all who’ll listen that this supposedly puts Americans at horrible risk from terrorism and war. It’s bunk. Obama simply fulfilled commitments that were already in place to disengage the American military in both countries — commitments that are supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Bush can lay claim to none of these achievements.
But laying aside for a moment the silly notion that Obama is as bad as Bush, the brutal political reality is that past presidents have certainly had their share of second term woes. This was the case with Eisenhower, Nixon, of course, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton. This shouldn’t surprise. They were in office for a relatively long time. They run a big sprawling government with thousands of appointees and personnel. It is simply beyond the pale of one person to control every facet and decision their appointees and personnel make. Just as time can work for a second term president, it can also work against him, too. The longer he’s in office, it’s almost assured that some issue, event or catastrophe will happen that can mar a president’s image, and that he may or may not have any real control over.
Obama has accomplished far too much in the face of far too much adversity. To spin his plunging popularity numbers as if he’s a complete failure is to horribly mangle the comparison with the president who clearly was a failure.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Huffington Post Blog, June 14, 2014
“The Larger Answers Must Come From Within”: The VA Reform Legislation Is A “Trojan Horse” For Privatization
In the aftermath of the Veterans Affairs scandal, Democrats and Republicans are moving swiftly to pass legislation to fix the problems at the department. In their haste, though, policymakers have crafted a bill that would do more harm than good—and it comes with a hefty price tag.
On Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, the House and Senate each passed a bill to reform the VA. The bills, would both create a two-year pilot program to allow veterans who do not live within 40 miles of a VA facility, or face a long wait time, to seek care at a non-VA facility. The Senate bill also includes funding for the VA to lease 26 new facilities and hire more medical staff. Now, the two houses will head to conference over the bills to try to agree on a final version.
The bills have not received much attention this week, but that could change: the Congressional Budget Office reported that allowing certain veterans to seek care at non-VA facilities would cost $35 billion over the two-year program, as The New Republic’s Brian Beutler predicted. If made permanent, CBO estimates it could cost $50 billion a year. For comparison, the VA currently spends $44 billion a year on its health care system. CBO notes that its estimate is preliminary, but it still is much higher than the expected cost. And this is only for the partial privatization part of the bill.
While the potential for a new $50 billion a year program is worrisome, the bill would not even address the underlying problems at the VA.
The fundamental problem with the VA scandal is not about long wait times or a shortage of physicians. Those problems exist in the private sector as well. Often, they are even worse there. It’s also not about quality of care either. Veterans routinely rate their VA experience above average. That advantage may have diminished in recent years, but it still exists. At its heart, the scandal revolves around poor financial incentives and fraudulent behavior by VA employees. These problems are systemic and reforms are needed. But many of the problems veterans face are not isolated to VA hospitals. They are larger problems of the American health care system.
The reason that clinics and hospitals—at both VA and non-VA facilities—have such long wait-times is a shortage of primary care doctors. This shortage has happened for a number of reasons: Medical students face financial incentives to choose a specialty field instead of becoming a primary care doctor. State occupational licensing laws prevent nurse practitioners from performing many straightforward medical tasks. Medical schools receive billions in federal funding with little oversight for how may primary care doctors they produce. The bills’ partial privatization scheme does nothing to ease these problems.
It’s a common misconception that the VA does not contract with private sector providers. As recently as 2012 the VA was fending off attacks that they outsourced care too much. And veterans who have been waiting for a long time for care, or those who are dealing with life-threatening situations, certainly deserve the ability to seek care at non-VA facilities. In fact, President Barack Obama has already ordered the VA to do so.
Republicans have long wanted to privatize the VA, but have never had the political power to do so, owing to veterans groups’ opposition. This recent scandal, though, has changed that: Veterans groups support the bills. While the partial privatization is only a two-year pilot program, Republicans will likely push to make it permanent in 2016, potentially undermining the entire VA health care system and leading to the total privatization that Republicans covet.
“You’re already in the situation where we’re having to close really excellent VA hospitals for a lack of patients,” Phillip Longman, a senior editor at the Washington Monthly and author of a book on the VA, said. “And now you’re going to say, ‘OK, anybody who lives 40 miles from a hospital can get free health care wherever they want.’ Now, you’re going to take revenue out of those hospitals and patients out of those hospitals. If they can’t maintain a certain volume, they can’t be safe. You wouldn’t want to be treated by a heart surgeon who only performs three operations a year.
“[The partial privatization plan] really is a Trojan horse,” Longman added. “It’s a really dangerous provision.”
Even if the legislation doesn’t cause VA hospitals to close, it could undermine the quality of care the VA provides. The VA is specifically designed to treat veterans and has vast experience doing so. Since most of its medical visits and procedures happen at its own hospitals and clinics, it coordinates care better than private sector providers do.
“The VA can treat the whole patient as opposed to one body part at a time,” Longman writes at the Washington Monthly. “And due to its near lifelong relationship with its patients, which often extends to long-term nursing home care at the end of life, the VA also has incentives for investing in prevention and patient wellness that are largely absent elsewhere in U.S. medicine.”
Beyond that, the legislation includes very little to address the management issues within the VA. That’s not Congress’s fault, per se, because those fixes must come from within the department. But government officials have the chance to use this renewed focus on the VA to improve the care it provides. By passing a bill that does not address the underlying problems, Congress might waste this opportunity.
“The access issue, which is where everyone has focused, is one important, but ultimately narrow slice of the bigger problem,” Ashish K. Jha, a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health and practicing internist at the VA, said. “What I worry about is because it has gotten all the attention, if we work on fixing this we’re not going to use this opportunity to have the broader conversation is that veterans don’t just want access to care, they want access to good care.”
In an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Jha writes with Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, the undersecretary for health during the Clinton administration, that the VA must change its performance management, reassess the VA’s use of technology to provide even better caregiver-patient connectivity, and increase its transparency so the public can evaluate its performance. The VA has already eliminated the 14-day average-wait rule that led to the rampant fraud, acknowledging that the incentive backfired, but much work remains.
What happened at VA facilities across the country was a tragedy. Former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki deserved to be fired. So do other senior VA officials. Policymakers naturally want to pass a big piece of legislation in response to the scandal. But like the American health care system, the VA system has no simple solutions. Congress can help on the margins, but the larger answers must come from within.
By: By: Dany Vinik, The New Republic, June 13, 2014
“Paralyzed By A Crazed Gun Lobby”: Gun Advocacy Has Now Become Parody
When I was growing up in the Cold War era, teachers instructed their pupils in the fine art of ducking under the desk as a shield against a strike from an atom bomb. That was a futile exercise, of course: A desktop provides no protection from the powerful destructive capacity of a nuclear weapon.
But it allowed teachers and their charges to pretend to have a defense against a frightening communist enemy whose might nearly equaled our own. It created a psychological barrier against helplessness.
These days, teachers train to protect their students from armed madmen who shoot up schools. They are taught to recognize not just the sound of gunfire in the hallway but also to hear the bone-chilling thump of an empty clip hitting the floor. They learn to hide their students; they memorize escape routes; they practice throwing ordinary classroom tools, like staplers, at an armed assailant.
As schools search for solutions, a manufacturer’s spokesman said sales of a product called the “Bodyguard Blanket,” a bulletproof covering that might offer a bit of protection from a school shooter, have been surprisingly strong. Why wouldn’t it sell quickly? Since the December 2012 Newtown massacre, there has been, on average, a similar incident every five weeks, according to CNN.
However, there’s a huge difference between the dangerous enemy we confronted in my youth and the current menace: Average citizens could defeat the lunacy now threatening our children. We are not helpless. Instead, for reasons that I simply cannot fathom, we are paralyzed by a crazed gun lobby.
It’s difficult to adequately describe our sense of defeatism in the face of the firearms fanatics. We don’t fight back when they insist on laws allowing guns in schools, in bars, in churches. We throw up our hands when they resist background checks. We shrug when another child is gunned down at school.
Oh, polls show our support for common-sense measures that would curb the death rate. After Newtown — when 20 small children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School — 91 percent of Americans supported background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and private sales. Yet the Senate could not manage to pass a bill that closed the “gun show loophole.”
It’s unlikely that any of the senators who voted against the measure will be called to account in the only way that matters — with defeat. While 41 Republicans (and five Democrats) voted against the bill, the GOP is expected to gain seats in November’s elections. What kind of message does that send to the gun fanatics?
Meanwhile, the gun lobby’s favorite arguments for its positions have been, well, gunned down. Gun advocates claim that widespread firearms ownership by responsible law-abiding citizens would help to stop the carnage. They insist that a would-be school shooter, for example, would be killed before he could hurt anyone if only teachers were armed.
Experience shows it rarely works that way. Earlier this month, anti-government extremists, husband-and-wife team Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers in Las Vegas, ambushing the officers as they ate lunch. The couple then went to a nearby Walmart, where they encountered an armed citizen, Joseph Wilcox, who spotted Jerad and tried to stop him. Wilcox, too, was shot dead.
Facts, however, don’t faze the National Rifle Association and its allies, who have long since descended into a lunacy that rivals parody. Consider this: Recently, gun fetishists in Texas have begun demonstrating their support for “open carry” laws by carrying their heavy-duty weapons into restaurants. They’ve posted pictures of themselves with their assault-style weapons — civilian versions of rifles such as the AK-47 — strapped to their backs as stunned diners look on.
The NRA posted an opinion piece on its website discouraging those antics: “It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates,” the writer said. Guess what? Within a few days, a backlash ensued from the gun cult, and the NRA disowned the commentary.
This is Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole madness. What does it say about the rest of us that we allow it to rule?
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 14, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 