“Brian Williams’ Tangled Web”: If I Were Williams, I’d Get Out The Resume Or Check My Retirement Portfolio
None of us is without sin, but still, you have to wonder how this sort of thing happens (per Stars & Stripes‘ Travis Tritten):
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.
Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.
The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.
“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”
I guess the “conflated” account of Williams being under fire became part of his official “bio,” and couldn’t be de-conflated until someone finally blew the whistle. I can’t even begin to assess what the punishment should be for this deception, but if I were Williams, I’d get out the resume or check my retirement portfolio.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 6, 2015
“No Sense Of History”: John McCain; ‘Everything I’ve Predicted … Has Come True’
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has reason to be pleased with his recent promotion. In the wake of the 2014 midterm elections, his party is not only in control of the Senate, but the Arizona Republican is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a post he’s reportedly wanted for quite a while.
But when the senator looks around the world, he isn’t pleased at all.
“We are probably in the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime,” said the 78-year-old Republican from Arizona, whose control of the committee is the culmination of decades of tenacious advocacy for a muscular foreign policy. “Everything I’ve predicted, unfortunately, has come true, whether it be in Iraq or whether it be Syria.”
The notion that all of John McCain’s predictions have “come true” isn’t just a bizarre boast, it’s also laughably and demonstrably untrue. As Rachel put it on the show awhile back, “Let the record show, John McCain was wrong about Iraq and the war in Iraq in almost every way that a person can be wrong about something like that.”
But it’s this argument, which McCain has made before, that we’re seeing “the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime” that seems especially odd.
As we discussed the last time the senator made this assessment, McCain’s lifetime includes the entirety of World War II, Vietnam, and the Cold War. To suggest turmoil is greater or more “serious” now may be politically convenient – one assumes McCain is both eager to blame President Obama for unrest and anxious to make the case for more wars – but it’s also completely at odds with reality when considered in a historical context.
Dylan Matthews noted last week, “If anything, the world is safer than it’s ever been. The threat of nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union has lifted. Great power wars of the kind that plagued Europe until 1945 are a thing of the past. Peoples’ odds of dying from violence, including warfare, have never been lower.”
I’m also reminded a good piece from Fareed Zakaria along the same lines, noting conditions in 1973, the year McCain was released from a Vietnamese prison. That year, Zakaria noted, several hundred thousand people died as a result of the war in Vietnam, tens of thousands died in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC imposed an oil embargo, and Cold War tensions pushed the United States literally to DEFCON 3.
Today’s world is unpredictable, but it doesn’t compare with the kinds of geopolitical dangers that existed for decades during the Cold War, not to mention before that period. […]
For all the problems, let’s keep in mind that we live today in a world with considerably fewer dangers. Nuclear war is unimaginable. The Russian-American nuclear arsenals are down to one-fifth their size in 1973 and at a much lower level of readiness. In 1973, Freedom House published its first annual account of political rights around the world. At the time, countries listed as “not free” outnumbered “free” countries. Today that is inverted, with the number of “free” countries having doubled. Open markets, trade and travel have boomed, allowing hundreds of millions to escape poverty and live better lives.
Of course there are crises, problems and tensions around the world. But no one with any sense of history would want to go back in time in search of less turmoil.
Around the same time, President Obama delivered remarks to White House interns and stressed the same point: “[D]espite how hard sometimes the world seems to be, and all you see on television is war and conflict and poverty and violence, the truth is that if you had to choose when to be born, not knowing where or who you would be, in all of human history, now would be the time. Because the world is less violent, it is healthier, it is wealthier, it is more tolerant and it offers more opportunity than any time in human history for more people than any time in human history.”
This isn’t to say that peace and stability reign around the globe. That’s never been the case, and it probably never will be. But to see alarming developments, here and abroad, as evidence of a world unraveling is to focus far too much on the trees and not enough on the forest.
McCain has been around for real periods of international turmoil. It’s easy, and perhaps ideologically satisfying, to insist conditions are worse now, but by literally no measure is that assessment accurate.
It’s likely that the senator has a political goal in mind: if Americans believe the world is coming apart, and that instability is scary, maybe the public will blame the president and reward McCain and his allies. Perhaps McCain will even persuade people that a few more wars will ease global tensions and paradoxically reduce violence.
But reality suggests no one should take his rhetoric seriously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 23, 2015
“He Must Not Merely Lose, He Must Be Humiliated”: If Mitt Romney Insists On Running For President, Then He Needs To Be Trounced
The main reason democracy works is not the ballot box. It is accountability.
Humans are weak and prone to corruption, and one problem with authoritarian regimes is that there is no mechanism for holding people accountable when corruption inevitably occurs. In a democracy, there is. It’s far from perfect, but in the long run accountability leads to democratic countries being more prosperous, peaceful, and powerful. Just look at the rampant corruption and pollution in China, or Russia’s slide into fascism.
The ballot box is just a mechanism for accountability. I suspect that the U.S. would more or less achieve the same results if it had a computer that replaced one clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates with another clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates every time GDP growth and unemployment hit a certain number — this is essentially what the ballot box does.
Accountability is a different phenomenon. If you have the ballot box without a culture of accountability, you get Iraq’s chaos or Hugo Chavez’s bread lines. Only culture generates and sustains accountability — the rules of the game are the product of a culture that is willing to enforce them. Such a culture creates secular saints like John Profumo, who, after resigning from the British government over a sex scandal, didn’t join a private equity firm, but instead spent years mopping toilets at a charity.
All of which brings us to Willard Mitt Romney.
In the political realm, you want a culture that says you can only be a major party’s presidential nominee once (unless you win the presidency, of course). Why? Because. Because it allows new blood to emerge. Because otherwise you risk becoming a place like France, where the same politicians have been playing musical chairs for decades. Both Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand ran for president twice on a major party ticket before being elected to the top job, and the country would have been better off if their parties had held them accountable instead. Party machines run like feudal systems, doing everything to protect the Boss, including tolerating a culture of corruption. Healthy political parties realize that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men and rotate their troops.
This means that if Mitt Romney is to run for president, which it increasingly looks like he will do, he must not merely lose — he must be humiliated. This is not only because he would be a terrible standard bearer for the GOP (although that’s certainly true), but also because an example must be made of him. He must suffer a defeat so stinging that it will deter anyone else who might try that trick in the future.
Romney’s candidacy is clearly an exercise in self-delusion. For the GOP to nominate a painfully wooden private-equity baron — at a time when its biggest problem is its image as the party of rich white men — was excusable the first time; a second time, it would be a joke. No American would take the party seriously. And if Romney thinks talking about poverty — an issue on which no mainstream journalist would give him the benefit of the doubt — will change his public perception, he clearly has departed from reality. Even without the accountability aspect, a Romney candidacy would be a disaster.
I personally find it impossible not to have sympathy for Mitt Romney, the man. But there seems to be two Romneys. There’s “Mitt,” the fair-dealing businessman, the talented technocratic governor, the Christian man deeply involved in his church, the devoted husband and father. And then there is “Candidate Romney,” a man who seems to be so consumed by his self-regard, his unshakeable faith in his own world-historical significance, that he is willing to say anything, and do anything, to reach the highest office in the land. The question was always which one would end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if elected. But now it is moot.
What was most endearing about Mitt Romney was what seemed like a genuine, basic human decency. But this selfsame decency should have told him that, no matter how great a president he thinks he would be, he could not run again, for the good of his party and country. Since he seemingly does not understand this, the country must make him understand.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, January 15, 2015
“Cynical Pandering To Wingnuts”: Of Course Obama Is To Blame For Everything Bad In The Whole Wide World!
Because we are used to Sen. Lindsey Graham saying irresponsible things about world affairs all the time, there’s a temptation just to ignore him. But he’s so ubiquitous a media presence that this is difficult, and his poorly-earned reputation as a “moderate” means that he creates a lot of room for extremism with his utterances. So this sort of crap (per Mediaite’s Andrew Desiderio is worth noting:
While discussing the ramifications of Wednesday’s terrorist attack at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s office in Paris, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said President Barack Obama‘s policies and campaign promises are “getting a lot of people killed” because he refuses to acknowledge that the France attacks and others are motivated by religion.
“The people who are attacking us and attacking France are motivated by religious teachings that say there’s no place on the planet for anybody that disagrees with them,” Graham said on Fox News Thursday morning, adding that Obama is “undercutting” other foreign leaders by not acknowledging that it is a religious war.
Now the reality is that Obama prefers to describe violent jihadists as ideologues who are pursuing a perversion of Islam, in order to express solidarity with the vast majority of Muslims who don’t agree with terrorists in any way, shape or form. It is unclear to me what is gained by insisting on calling murderers authentically religious, unless, of course, you want to imply their co-religionists are culpable or suspect, as an awful lot of conservative Americans most definitely want to do. So it’s kind of a no brainer, I guess, for Graham, who has offended said conservatives with his positions on immigration and a few other topics, to pander to them in this respect, involving as it does the ever-popular “Blame Obama” meme.
But Graham does have another ax to grind on this topic:
When he left Iraq, he did so on a campaign promise. He’s trying to close Gitmo based on a campaign promise. His campaign promises are getting a lot of people killed. Our intelligence-gathering abilities have been compromised. The only way you can stop these attacks is to find out about them before they occur. We’re reducing our military spending at a time when we need it the most. These policies driven by President Obama of being soft and weak and indecisive are coming home to haunt us.
Graham really, really wants to see people tortured, and really, really wants to pretend that “strength” is identical to stuffing the Pentagon with more money than it needs or has even asked for. So cynical pandering to wingnuts aside, there’s a decent chance he really believes what he’s saying here, which is worse.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 9, 2015
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