“A Problem Already”: Trump Is A Problem For The GOP And The U.S. Regardless Of His Political Prospects
For months pundits, including myself, have been predicting that Donald Trump lacks a serious, sustained path to the presidency. I still doubt he can win the Republican nomination and am totally convinced that if he became the general election candidate, the November elections would be a bloodbath for the Republican Party.
Others argue that Trump’s anti-immigration, xenophobic, outsider message combined with his celebrity status will be enough to squeak through this crowded field of candidates and secure the nomination.
But this is not just a political parlor game anymore. It is not enough to argue, as Robert Schlesinger did here, that Trump too shall pass or, as Nate Silver does at FiveThirtyEight, that Trump’s support now constitutes only about 6-8 percent of the electorate and that in the last two elections in Iowa and New Hampshire close to half of Republicans made up their minds during the last week before the caucus and primary. Polls will change he says, voters will pay more attention as we approach February and Trump is likely to fade.
More important than Trump’s ultimate fate is his impact on the American psyche, and the world’s.
The real question is the influence that Trump is having on the electorate – with other Republican candidates doing their best to imitate his bluster and outrageousness. From his early criticism of Arizona Sen. John McCain for being a captured war hero, to his repeated demonizing of immigrants as rapists, to his totally false claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were cheering 9/11, Trump does not let up. He is clear about his desire to surveil and even close mosques, to create “watch lists” of Muslims, to bring back waterboarding and more.
The other candidates follow suit: Ben Carson rejects electing a Muslim as president, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush believe, as The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus writes, “Syrian Christians should be admitted in preference to Muslims.”
Imagine, if you will, a good portion of the over 1.6 billion Muslims (23.4 percent of the world’s population) watching television as this parade of Republican candidates bash them, treat them as pariahs, misrepresent their goals and aspirations and place in the world. And imagine, further, that this becomes their image of America, of what we stand for, of who we are. What are they to do, how do they respond, how are they to act towards us?
Our fear of the terrorists and outrageous ad hoc rhetoric does nothing but create more terrorists. Just as the misguided war in Iraq created more terrorists than it killed what we are facing today in this campaign for president is harming our goals of peace and stability.
It is important to take on the terrorists, to root them out, to build a large and meaningful world coalition against them. But the approach of Donald Trump and others undermines this goal and makes it much more difficult to win the hearts and minds as well as win the battlefield.
The sooner we put an end to the irresponsibility of Trump and the others in this Republican field the better. Then, we can get on with solving the problem of radical jihad in the world.
By: Peter Fenn, Political Strategist and Head of Fenn Communications; U. S. News and World Report, November 25, 2015
“It’s Not The Media–It’s Just The GOP Base”: Locked In An Increasingly Hostile Defensive Crouch Against Reality
Bill Schneider at Reuters wrote a piece this week that garnered some attention claiming that the GOP primary disaster is the fault of the media. His argument goes that modern television journalism has created a reality show environment where the most outrageous hucksters perform the best and where quality candidates and policy positions are lost in the undertow. It’s a sentiment shared by many political observers. Schneider writes:
In a contest controlled by the media, personality beats policy. Candidates with colorful and attention-grabbing personalities have the advantage. Even candidates with abrasive personalities, like Donald Trump. And goofy personalities, like Ben Carson.
The process also rewards candidates with well-honed debating skills like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Even though debating skill may not be an essential quality of a great president. Things like a solid record of achievement, practical ideas and endorsements by one’s peers get discounted in today’s media-driven process. Bush’s new slogan – “Jeb Can Fix It” — does not seem to be catapulting him into the lead.
With all due respect, this argument is more than a little bit of wishful thinking. People who make this claim have an idea in their heads of what they think politics should be: a series of competing resumes and white paper policy proposals soberly adjudicated by voters who furrow their brows at community forums. It’s a quirk of certain types of journalists, good government advocates and centrist think tank gurus to believe this about elections, and to favor uninspiring candidates.
But that’s frankly not how major elections work, nor how they have ever worked at least since the advent of television.
There’s nothing different in the press environment in 2015 than there was in 2011. This supposed media-driven reality TV campaign hasn’t seemed to turn the Democratic primary into a circus–rather, the Democratic primary has so far been conducted mostly with grace and the seriousness the issues deserve, in spite of a media that seems far more concerned with Clinton’s emails and the precise definition of socialism, than in the actual policy problems the country faces.
The difference this year isn’t the media. It’s the GOP base. Something has happened over the last 15 years in the American conservative psyche that most journalists and centrist political observers don’t want to admit. Conservatives are locked in an increasingly hostile defensive crouch against reality and demographic trends. Supply-side economics, once unquestioned in its Reagan ascendancy, has been shown to be a failure on multiple levels. President George W. Bush’s signature war in Iraq turned out to be a bungled disaster. Secularism is on the rise, gays can legally get married, and America is fast becoming a minority-majority nation. Climate change and wealth inequality are the two most obvious public policy problems, neither of which has even the pretense of a credible conservative solution. This, combined with the election of the first African-American president, has had a debilitating effect on the conservative psyche, which now sees itself under assault from all directions.
Conservatives have responded by creating their own alternative reality in which rejection of basic facts and decency in the service of ideology is a badge of merit and tribal loyalty. That has created an environment in which the most popular voices tend to be the most aggressive and outlandish.
In this context, the fact that Trump, Carson and Cruz have a stranglehold on the GOP presidential race has almost nothing to do with the media and everything to do with the state of the GOP base.
That the turn toward extremism seems so sudden is a mere accident of history. In 2004 George Bush rode to a narrow victory on the strength of a still-terrified American public. 2006 saw Republicans get shellacked across the board, and the financial crisis took the wind out of GOP sails and made a 2008 Democratic victory almost certain. Even then, the trend was apparent when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate to wild applause, and then she overshadowed him among conservatives and became the better-loved figure. Barack Obama’s election was followed by a grandiose temper tantrum over a Heritage Foundation, Mitt Romney-inspired healthcare law, leading to a Tea Party insurgency that provided huge gains to Republicans in 2010 and demonstrated where the true power in the Party lay.
That Mitt Romney became the nominee in 2012 was almost a fluke: for months the collection of anti-establishment candidates had more support then Romney, and toward the end Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum of all people combined for greater support than Romney achieved. Romney only won because the real GOP base split its vote. And the rest is recent history.
This is what the GOP base really is and what it has become. The media has little to do with it, except insofar as it has hidden and failed to report the Republican Party’s unilateral march toward reality-free extremism.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 22, 2015
“America Needs To Get A Grip”: Don’t Listen To This Garbage, Conservatives Are Explosively Soiling Themselves In Panic
The Paris attacks have brought back the dark shadow of America’s Bush-era anti-terror politics. Conservatives are demanding repression and violence, while many Democrats are running scared. They are enabled in this by mainstream journalists like The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, who breezily declares that barring refugees is “smart politics” because conservatives are worried about Islamic extremism; or Slate‘s William Saletan, who argues that our late period of libertarian isolationism (???) is simply going to have to end.
My fellow Americans: Don’t listen to this garbage. Let’s take a deep breath and get a grip.
First of all, Islamist terrorism is a fairly minor threat. Yes, the Paris attacks (like 9/11, Madrid, Mumbai, and countless atrocities in Iraq and Syria) were a terrible tragedy. But we need to be realistic about how strong ISIS really is. It’s true that decently organized young men with simple explosives and cheap automatic weapons can easily massacre hundreds of civilians and terrorize millions. But that is not even close to a “an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization,” as Jeb Bush ludicrously claimed. Compared to Nazi Germany, or the Soviets with their hundreds of long-range nukes, ISIS is pathetically weak.
Indeed, as Derek Davison argues, ISIS’s recent al Qaeda-like focus on international terrorism is very likely a result of months of defeats on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Only the day before the Paris attacks, Kurdish and Yazidi forces routed ISIS fighters in the city of Sinjar, cutting off a major supply route from Raqqa (ISIS’s major stronghold) to Ramadi. Unable to make progress towards their “caliphate” on the ground, they are lashing out at soft targets in an attempt to restore their old aura of invincibility and progress, and likely to try to reinforce the idea that Islam and the West are irreconcilable.
The truth is that while ISIS’s deranged brand of faux-Muslim extremism has proven durable enough to construct a wobbly little proto-state (and attract a smattering of bored idiot Europeans thirsty for adventure), it is completely doomed in the long run. Every single one of ISIS’s predecessors has died the exact same death: by enraging a powerful nation and getting pounded into smithereens. ISIS only survives today on the political chaos left behind by the bungled invasion of Iraq (half the leadership are former Baath Party) and the crumbling of the Assad dictatorship.
It may take some time for ISIS to completely die off, and the succession of state failures may not be over — Saudi Arabia is looking none too healthy these days — but sooner or later, things will settle down. The Thirty Years’ War can match anything happening in Syria for atrocities, and that was still getting started 12 years in.
Furthermore, sheltering refugees is an obvious way to attack ISIS’s ideological legitimacy. They are really sensitive about the refugee issue, because it puts the lie to their self-image as the holy land for all Islam. When about every Muslim who possibly can is running for their lives, it tends to draw attention to the fact that ISIS is full of mass-murdering child rapists who kill far more Muslims than they do any other religious group. Conversely, assisting desperate people fleeing persecution is a powerful statement that the West will live up to its values of openness and tolerance, and not turn away tens of thousands of innocent people because we might overlook a couple extremists in their midst.
It’s also, you know, the right thing to do. Would Jesus Christ send a 3-year-old orphan back to be butchered by evil fanatics? I think not.
Refugees are a very low risk for terrorism. It is excruciatingly difficult to get refugee status — especially since the process has recently become so Byzantine and paranoid that it’s next to impossible for anyone to actually make it through the application. But here’s the bottom line: Since 9/11, the U.S. has accepted some 784,000 refugees. None have committed any acts of terrorism in the U.S. — and only three have ever been arrested for terror-related crimes, two for sending money to al Qaeda in Iraq and one whose plot was totally preposterous. Similarly, all the Paris attackers firmly identified so far have been EU nationals, not Syrian refugees.
Does that mean it’s totally impossible for some ISIS killer to sneak in with the refugees? Of course not. But tourist, student, and business visas are far easier to get than refugee status, if you’ve got the cash. That’s how every single one of the 9/11 hijackers got into the country. If we were really concerned about ISIS infiltration, that would be the first route to worry about. (Even more important would be sorting out the outrageous disaster zone that is the American security apparatus, but that’s another story.)
The fact that conservatives who are explosively soiling themselves in panic immediately jumped to bar the door to refugees, while barely even mentioning the fact that half of Europe has a visa waiver agreement with the U.S., is stark evidence that it’s anti-Islamic bigotry, not sensible security precautions, driving this attitude. Many conservatives are basically open about this.
So chill, America. This is a great big powerful country, armed to the teeth, with strong institutions and a rich economy. If we can muster the courage to stand with our better angels, ISIS will eventually crumble.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, November 18, 2015
“A Crackpot, Deviant Sect”: An Apocalyptic Death Cult Has Its Limits
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire
Years before Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden, this column argued that al Qaeda was capable of “theatrical acts of mass murder,” but was not a military threat to the United States.
The phrase infuriated some readers. Back then tough guys talked about fighting “Islamofascism,” supposedly a totalitarian ideology linking bitter enemies such as Iran and al Qaeda (but never Saudi Arabia, where the oil and money are, and where almost all the 9/11 conspirators originated) in an alliance to destroy Western Civilization.
Nobody says that any more.
My point was simple. Fascism was a poor analogy. Pundits’ Churchillian fantasies aside, what made Nazism “uniquely dangerous wasn’t merely Hitler’s hypnotic ideology. It was German militarism and hyper-nationalism run amok. Islamic extremists control none of the world’s 60-odd Muslim-majority nations. They have no army, air force or navy. They pose no military threat to the integrity of the United States or any Western nation.”
Nor does ISIS, al Qaeda’s more flamboyant and equally murderous rival. Last week’s appalling atrocities in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt underscored that reality in the bloodiest possible way. Almost everybody anticipates similar attacks in the United States. We must pray that they fail. However, as President Obama has said, a terrorist willing to die can murder innocents in restaurants as easily as in Connecticut classrooms.
Yet for all the fury and despair these attacks have evoked—I think of a little Parisian girl named Charlotte and her family—ISIS cannot and will not prevail. It’s less a political movement than an apocalyptic death cult, and definitely not an existential threat to the United States, France, or Russia.
Sane leaders would know better than to antagonize three of the world’s most powerful military establishments at once.
ISIS’s self-anointed “Caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not that kind of leader. Think David Koresh or Jim Jones with a militia and a Koran instead of a Bible. Theologically, ISIS is to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity, by which I mean they’re a crackpot, deviant sect. But they’re even crazier than that.
Madness, however, has never prevented cult leaders from gaining an enraptured following. If anything, the converse appears true.
It’s a fact of life Orwell recognized in a 1940 review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them, ‘I offer you struggle, danger, and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”
Writing in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood explains ISIS’s hypnotic appeal to dispossessed and humiliated young men:
During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers…saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world…. For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.
It almost goes without saying that you can’t make treaties with such people. They can only be defeated.
The question is how? And at what cost?
Confronted with a newly belligerent press corps in Turkey recently, President Obama spoke mockingly about taking action that would “somehow in the abstract make America look tough or make me look tough.”
“When you listen to what [GOP candidates] actually have to say,” the president said, “what they’re proposing, most of the time when pressed they describe things that we’re already doing. Maybe they’re not aware that we’re already doing them. Some of them seem to think that if I were just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference, because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough.”
Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum went down the list of the GOP candidates’ suggestions, but found nothing new:
There’s a lot we can do to defeat ISIS, and most of it we’re already doing. Airstrikes? Check. Broad coalition? Check. Working with Arab allies? Check. Engage with Sunni tribal leaders? Check. Embed with the Iraqi military? Check. There’s more we could do, but often it’s contradictory. You want to arm the Kurds and create a partnership with the Iraqi government? Good luck. You want to defeat Assad and ISIS? You better pick one. You want to avoid a large American ground force and you want to win the war fast? Not gonna happen.
Yes, Obama’s “red line” in Syria was a strategic blunder; his “junior varsity” remark was cocky and ill-advised. Also, Vladimir Putin’s right: The Assad government’s bad, but ISIS is far worse.
However, ISIS has turned to terror because it’s gradually losing the ground war, and the Caliphate is shrinking.
La belle France is not.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 18, 2015
“Serving The Cause Of Terrorist Jihad”: Paris Terror; Why ISIS Needs The ‘Useful Idiots’ Who Demonize Muslims
When France’s prime minister Manuel Valls said after last Friday’s attacks in Paris, “nous sommes en guerre” – we are at war – there could be no doubt that the rest of the civilized world, including the United States and NATO, will stand beside our oldest ally in a common struggle to extirpate the barbaric ISIS.
But as this conflict deepens and national emotions surge, it is vital to keep minds clear and principles intact.
Sadly the Republican candidates for president, and too many in their party, will seek to use this crisis as a partisan weapon against President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential contender. They will charge the Obama administration with “weakness” even as American warplanes fly thousands of sorties against ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria. Such political attacks sound ridiculous to anyone familiar with the recent history of the Mideast. As a product of Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS rose directly from the ill-conceived invasion and occupation of that unfortunate country – and the fact that Clinton mistakenly voted to give George W. Bush the conditional authority to wage that war in no way makes her (or Obama) responsible for its botched execution.
The social chaos, religious strife, and massive bloodshed resulting from the US invasion created fertile ground for a new terrorist movement. And as Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick explains in Black Flags, his authoritative new history of the rise of ISIS, the Bush administration elevated its founder, a minor Jordanian gangster named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, into an international terrorist celebrity with its bogus claim that he represented a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
So when historians someday apportion blame, that process won’t flatter the Republicans and their neoconservative advisers, who assured us that “regime change” in Iraq would reshape the region at very little cost to us. Few national security predictions have ever been so confident and so wrong, with such enormous and enduring consequences. Influenced by those advisers, the Bush White House failed to address the terrorist threat before 9/11, and later used it to build a fraudulent justification for invading Iraq.
We might thus hesitate before continuing to follow the counsel of such figures – from William Kristol to Dick Cheney to Jeb Bush, one of the original members of the Project for the New American Century, a powerful lobbying outfit formed 15 years ago to promote war in Iraq, among other misguided ideas. These are the same characters who fought more recently to kill the Iran nuclear deal. Had they succeeded, we now would have no chance of even minimal cooperation with Tehran against ISIS, which is vital.
We would do better instead to reject their ill-conceived notions – and especially their mindless hostility toward Muslims and Islam.
Consider the latest instance: Along with Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Ben Carson and too many other Republicans, “moderate” Jeb Bush today articulates a response to ISIS that includes ominous anti-Muslim overtones. Specifically, he and Cruz urge the government to accept Christian but not Muslim refugees from Syria — and this is merely the most recent in a wave of remarks and statements offensive to Muslims from Republican elected officials and political hopefuls. Whenever a Republican candidate — or any other American — endorses bigotry against Islam and its billion-plus believers, he or she becomes a “useful idiot” serving the cause of terrorist jihad.
As George W. Bush said in his finest hour, our cause is not a war against Islam or the overwhelming majority of Muslims who live peacefully and loyally in the United States and in scores of other nations, from Europe to Malaysia. Indeed, the destruction of ISIS will require an unbreakable alliance with Islam’s true followers, not only in Syria and Iraq but in every place that jihadi terrorists may target. We cannot rely on military, police, and intelligence cooperation from people demonized and demeaned by political leaders and media outlets.
Every imbecile who threatens Muslims is an unwitting agent of ISIS; in fact, it would be unsurprising to learn that ISIS itself is covertly promoting such messages in order to intensify enmity between the peoples of the Quran and the rest of the world. Certainly that is among the primary objectives of attacks like last week’s atrocities in Paris.
What we need now is a diplomatic solution for Syria, which may at last be on the horizon if the Russians are serious about bringing down ISIS. We need a smart, careful, and focused military strategy that builds on recent advances by Kurdish and Shiite forces on the ground. And we need to assure Muslims everywhere – as President Obama has wisely insisted — that they have a place of security and honor in the world we hope to build.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 16, 2015
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