“Enter Oliver North”: The GOP’s Bergdahl Backlash Has Slipped Into Farce
If you were to think of the person least qualified to criticize the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, it would have to be someone who oversaw an even more controversial prisoner exchange. Throw in an illegal weapons sale, multiple felony charges, and bingo, you’ve got a guy with basically zero credibility to throw stones on this issue.
Enter Oliver North.
Yes, the former Reagan aide best known for his role in the Iran-Contra affair is miffed about the Bergdahl deal. North exhibited a complete absence of self-awareness Tuesday by baldly insisting, without evidence, that the Obama administration or one of its allies paid a hefty price to grease the deal.
“Someone paid a ransom,” he told Newsmax, estimating that it was probably around $5 million or $6 million.
“And if a ransom was paid, either at our behest or with American tax dollars,” he later told Fox News’ Sean Hannity, “it means this government is causing to be funded a criminal enterprise that kills Americans.”
North even had the gall to boast that he was uniquely qualified to discuss the brouhaha because he knows “a lot about hostage negotiations.”
Indeed, he does. North and other Reagan officials orchestrated illegal arms sales to Iran to rescue American prisoners, and then used the proceeds to finance a secret war in Central America. North was convicted of multiple felonies, though an appeals court later reversed the rulings.
So yes, it’s safe to say North knows a thing or two about hostage negotiations.
North’s foray into the debate would be merely laughable if it weren’t part of the GOP’s larger pattern of gleeful political opportunism on the issue.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — himself a former POW freed in a mass prisoner exchange — called the swap a “mistake.” Months earlier, he said he was “inclined to support” such a deal. Other Republican lawmakers who’d previously called for Bergdahl’s release have suddenly changed their tune as well. Some even deleted from digital media their praise for the administration’s handling of the situation.
Meanwhile, a GOP strategist raced to line up critics of Bergdahl who served with him, an act that smacked of swiftboating. And the National Republican Campaign Committee, perhaps predictably, has already begun using the scuttlebutt to fundraise for the party.
To be sure, there are several legitimate questions that can be asked about the swap. Perhaps most significantly is the concern raised by many lawmakers, including some Democrats, that the administration did not properly keep Congress abreast of the negotiations.
But we’ve seen the GOP go down this path too many times before, seizing on every scandal, manufactured or not, to paint the administration as untrustworthy, lawless, and basically evil. It is the latest #Benghazi for the GOP to flog mindlessly and endlessly in hopes of somehow alchemizing campaign gold from their outrage.
Rather than focusing on whether Bergdahl deserted his troops, or whether the Taliban prisoners handed over were too dangerous to set free, the GOP has instead focused the bulk of its energy on re-upping the exaggerated portrait of Obama as a reckless, incompetent “emperor” who needs to be impeached.
Trotting out Oliver North of all people to tsk-tsk the administration moved the backlash from over-the-top whinging to outright farce, and revealed for the umpteenth time that there’s no bottom the GOP won’t scrape.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, June6, 2014
“The Wars Not Fought”: The Doors Into Hell Are Many, The Exits However Are Fewer
We owe Mother Jones, the magazine, a public service nod for a graphic tour last year of all the countries that John McCain has wanted to attack. Spanning the globe, the fist-first senator has called for violent regime change in more than half a dozen nations, ranging from all-out ground invasions to airstrikes to arming sides in endless sectarian conflicts.
The map of McCain’s wars is worth considering as a what-if had the would-be vice president Sarah Palin and her running mate in 2008 prevailed. McCain continues to play quick-draw commander in chief to this day. He said he’d send troops into Nigeria “in a New York minute,” to rescue the girls kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, even without permission of the sovereign country. And just after President Obama’s speech Wednesday at West Point, McCain lamented that America’s young men and women were not still in the Iraqi city of Falluja.
Yes, Falluja — where tribal militias loyal to one warped religious tenet or another continue to slaughter each other with abandon. It’s a hard truth for a country as prideful as the United States to accept, but most Americans have now concluded that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake. Obama, at least, has tried to learn something from it.
Al Qaeda was never in Falluja before the American invasion. They have a stronghold in Falluja now, for which McCain blames the withdrawal of United States troops. Think about that: it’s not our fault because we opened the doors to the factions of hell; it’s our fault because we withdrew from hell.
As Obama tries to pivot from foreign policy by bumper sticker, McCain and an intellectually bankrupt clutch of neocons are trying to present themselves as the alternative. Dick Cheney, the warrior with five draft deferments, is in this diminishing camp, calling Obama “certainly the weakest” president in his lifetime. But both McCain and Cheney are outliers, blustery relics with little backing in either party. Only seven percent of Americans expressed support for even considering a military option after Russia forced Crimea into its fold. That’s a sea change in sentiment from 2001, or even 2008.
The nation’s future military leaders embody this shift. The biggest response from the cadets at West Point came when Obama said, “you are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.” They cheered.
But all of that is not to let Obama off the hook. His big foreign policy speech was flat and passionless, with no central vision. The fault may lie with this particular moment in world history. The Cold War was easy to frame. The War on Terror was as well, at least at first. Now, things are more muddled. How do we help the newly elected government of Ukraine? If we aggressively arm one side in Syria, what happens if they turn out to be religious extremists who want to put women back in the 9th century?
Obama didn’t specifically say so, but the guiding principle for this era of nuance and shadows may be no more complex than this: Stay out of wars of unintended consequence.
“Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint,” said Obama, “but from our willingness to rush into military adventure — without thinking through the consequences; without building international support and legitimacy for our action, or leveling with the American people about the sacrifice required. Tough talk draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.”
Is that weakness, or wisdom? Well, neither. But it’s a realistic reaction to the hard fact that the last 50 years have produced the three longest wars in American history. And it’s a pitch-perfect reflection of where most Americans are today.
Afghanistan was supposed to be a swift move to crush a regime that allowed terrorists to flourish — not 13 years, and counting, of nation-building. Vietnam was billed as a blow for freedom against global communism — not a 10-year military muddle in a civil war posing no threat to the United States. Iraq was going to be clean and quick — we’ll be greeted as liberators! — not eight years in one of the most ghastly places on earth, at a cost of more than $2 trillion and a loss of at least 190,000 lives on all sides.
Obama’s foreign policy is a lot like his economic policy. Give him credit for preventing something awful from happening. The financial collapse could have been truly catastrophic, save for the action the president and the Federal Reserve took in the first year following the meltdown. For that, history will be kind. The wars not fought by Obama are the alternative to John McCain’s map. For that, the verdict of the ages is less certain. After 50 years, what a war-weary nation does know is this: the doors into hell are many; the exits, fewer.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, May 29, 2014
“This Is Exactly How Karl Rove Works”: Doing The Same Things He’s Done Before
If you consumed any political news at all Tuesday, you likely know that Karl Rove, former political guru for George W. Bush, reportedly suggested during a conference last week that Hillary Clinton suffered a “traumatic brain injury” recently.
Rove quickly denied the charge, and told The Washington Post later in the day that “of course she doesn’t have brain damage.”
But the idea that the former first lady and possible future presidential candidate is brain damaged is already all over the media. Elsewhere in the Post, one can find over a thousand words from the ever-credulous Chris Cillizza on the subject of Clinton’s health, pivoting off Rove’s remarks. (Cillizza isn’t entirely sure if Rove’s bizarre charge is wrong: he actually begins a sentence “Putting aside the ‘brain damage’ debate, which seems like a bit of a red herring….”)
You could believe Rove’s denial—but you would have to ignore virtually his entire political career. For decades Rove has been circulating nasty, personal rumors about political opponents and placing them in the public conversation, all while obscuring his fingerprints, making the rumors become the opponent’s problem, not his. It’s page one of his playbook.
Take for example the tale of Mark Kennedy, a Democratic candidate for Alabama Supreme Court in 1994, as recounted in James Moore and Wayne Slater’s book on Rove, The Architect. Rove was working for Harold See, Republican and law school professor backed by the Business Council of Alabama.
Kennedy was “not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man,” Moore and Slater noted. A central feature of Kennedy’s campaign ads was the private nonprofit he founded for abused and neglected children.
That seems like an entirely benign, harmless résumé point to offer—but as Moore and Slater note, Kennedy “had never been in an election against Karl Rove.” This is what began to happen:
“[W]ord began to spread along the loose network of University of Alabama Law School faculty and students that Kennedy was a pedophile. The whisper campaign moved with a kind of ruthless efficiency from the hallways of the law school to folks back home, to big cities and small Alabama communities, everywhere students lived. [Kennedy’s campaign manager] said he heard about the whisper campaign directly from friends inside the law school, and as he studied polling data, he saw that it was working. But what to do about it?”
Kennedy couldn’t exactly call a press conference and announce he wasn’t a pedophile, as the authors note. He managed to win the election, but narrowly, and did not seek re-election.*
Rove is a master at forcing his adversaries to address vicious personal rumors that were never true in the first place. I could go on and on, but a brief highlight reel:
During the 2000 presidential contest, when Rove was working for Bush, the campaign “featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office.”
When Bush was running against Ann Richards for governor of Texas in 1994, a persistent rumor circulated that Richards was a lesbian, helped in no small part by a push poll asking voters if they would be “more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians.” In fact, a regional Bush campaign chairman was quoted criticizing Richards for “appointing avowed homosexual activists” to state jobs.
Sometimes Rove doesn’t even restrict this tactic to political campaigns—he uses it for himself. Josh Green in The Atlantic in 2004: “In 1986 [John] Weaver and Rove both worked on Bill Clements’s successful campaign for governor, after which Weaver was named executive director of the state Republican Party. Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver’s star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove’s top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won’t reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain’s 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether.”
Many of these techniques actually come from Lee Atwater, who tutored Rove. “A supposed slip of the tongue that in fact gets some truly nasty tidbit on the record—that tactic is straight from the Atwater manual,” The New York Times noted in 2008. And the strategy has been reworked and refined by Rove in the ensuing years. (Note the echoes between his ageist attack on McCain’s mental health, and Tuesday’s broadside on Clinton’s brain.)
It’s only a matter of time until some reporter asks Clinton if she’s really suffered brain damage, and her response will revive the story once again, leaving legions of voters wondering if there really is something to all this brain damage talk. Rove knew exactly what he was doing by invoking that specter and then walking away innocently, twiddling his thumbs. It’s the same thing he’s always done.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, May 13, 2014
“Benghazi Conspiracy Theorists Come Unglued”: It’s No Longer About Substantiation, It’s More Of A “Feeling”
Ordinarily on Capitol Hill, when lawmakers organize a hearing and call a notable witness, the purpose is to advance a specific cause. But if lawmakers haven’t done their homework, this usually straightforward exercise can go quite badly.
A month ago, for example, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee held another Benghazi hearing because they hoped former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell might tell Republicans what they wanted to hear. He didn’t – Morell further debunked every right-wing conspiracy theory to which GOP lawmakers desperately cling.
Yesterday, something similar happened.
The Republican head of the House’s Armed Services Committee issued a statement sharply criticizing the testimony of his own party’s star witness in the latest hearing on Benghazi only minutes after the session concluded, going against his colleagues’ enthusiasm to hear just what the Obama administration did wrong the night of the attack.
It quickly became an example of the right hand not knowing what the further-right hand was doing. Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) House Oversight Committee called retired Brig. Gen. Robert Lovell to testify on Benghazi, insisting Lovell had key insights into the developments. But the retired general refuted key elements of the GOP line, and soon after, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, insisted Lovell does not have key insights into the developments.
At the same time, the Republican Armed Services Committee chairman directly contradicted claims from the Republican Oversight Committee chairman about accusations related to Hillary Clinton.
When Casey Stengel asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” in 1962, he wasn’t talking about Republicans obsessed with a misguided conspiracy theory, but he might as well have been.
Indeed, yesterday was rough for the right, but the GOP’s newly invigorated, completely unhinged interest in Benghazi has had a rough week.
The conservative outrage machine apparently went to 11 this week when Republicans learned that a White House official repeated the CIA’s line on Benghazi soon after the attacks. Why is that scandalous? I haven’t the foggiest idea – the “revelation” simply reinforces what we already knew – but GOP officials and their media allies were certain this is a “smoking gun.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is now once again convinced there was a “cover-up” – he’s used that phrase before, though he’s struggled with its meaning – and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) added that he believes White House officials are “scumbags.”
Remember, according to the Beltway’s conventional wisdom, these are the kind of leading, reasonable Republican lawmakers with whom President Obama is supposed to work and strike deals.
Let me just repeat the point from earlier in the week: it’s clear at this point that no amount of evidence, no number of investigations, no hours of hearings, no volumes of comprehensive reports will ever be enough for those who want the Benghazi conspiracy theories to have merit. It’s no longer about substantiation; it’s more of a feeling. It’s as if Stephen Colbert’ persona were real and a large group of people proudly declared, “It doesn’t matter if the evidence says we’re wrong because our guts say we’re right.”
It’s no way to win an argument, but for Benghazi conspiracy theorists, they’ve already won the argument by convincing themselves that their version of reality is superior to everyone else’s.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 2, 2014
“Protest Too Much, Methinks”: Obama Doesn’t Have A Manhood Problem — But Conservatives Certainly Do
It seems beneath my manly dignity to give David Brooks a hard time for his comments decrying Obama’s “manhood problem in the Middle East.” He made them on a Sunday talk show, after all, and we know that no one watches them. And anyway, people accidentally say stupid things on television all the time.
And yet, I suspect that Brooks actually meant it. Because even though he’s distanced himself from the conservative movement in all kinds of ways over the past six years (basically, since George W. Bush’s presidency went down in flames), one thing that’s remained consistent with him since his days writing paeans to American “national greatness” for William Kristol’s Weekly Standard is his tendency to swoon (in only the most manly of ways, of course) at dramatic displays of militaristic swagger and toughness.
When that kind of man’s man looks at Barack Obama’s policy in the Middle East — with its gratuitous displays of not bombing countries, not overthrowing their governments, and not invading and occupying them — he sees something less than virile, a little bit limp, and just a tiny bit flaccid (emphasis on the “tiny”).
He sees a girly man.
This certainly doesn’t place Brooks out of the mainstream on the Right. On the contrary, Brooks’ comments on Meet the Press might be the most mainstream conservative thing he’s said in years. There is a long, deep, and highly repetitive tradition of testosterone-fueled bellicosity on the Right that consistently justifies itself in terms of manliness and sees itself as the necessary antidote to the creeping, potentially fatal feminization of the nation.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first to valorize manliness (and decry feminization) in American public life. In the 95 years since his death, he’s been venerated by a broad swath of conservatives, and especially by the second-generation neocons and their onetime hero John “Battlefield: Earth” McCain. Hell, this faction’s leading political philosopher — Harvard’s Harvey C. Mansfield — even wrote a book titled Manliness, in part to defend men against all the mean and hurtful things that scary feminists like to say about them.
If all of this sounds a little personal to me, that’s because it is.
Back in 2002 when I worked as an editor at First Things — a journal that’s aptly been dubbed the New York Review of Books of the religious right — I wrote a column for the magazine that got me into a bit of trouble. My son had just been born, and I wanted to make a case for the modern, egalitarian family in which fathers play an active role in the day-to-day drudgery and delights of raising small children. This was in contrast, of course, to the more traditional family structures usually defended in our pages.
Conservatives have a point, I argued, when they focus on negative consequences of women working outside the home; children often end up being raised by strangers in day-care centers, and women feel torn between their maternal instincts and their desire for careers. But the answer to such problems, I suggested, was not an (unjust, undesirable, and impossible) return to some earlier paradigm of stay-at-home mothering. It was rather an increase in fatherly involvement in the family — and perhaps even the advent of Scandinavian-style government-sponsored paternity leave to allow men to more fully share domestic burdens and rewards.
That didn’t go over well with our readers. At all. Not that I expected it to. But I did expect that the controversy would be about ideas. Instead it was about testicles. Mine, to be specific — and in particular about how my wife had quite obviously stolen them just before bullying me into denying the self-evident fact that mothers are forbidden to work outside the home, fathers are precluded from changing diapers, and God wants to keep it that way.
And then there was the special treat of a letter from Gilbert Meilaender — distinguished moral theologian, longtime friend of the magazine’s editor-in-chief (Richard John Neuhaus), and member of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics. As far as Meilaender was concerned, my ideas clearly flowed from a deep-seated longing to lactate.
As I wrote in my published response to the letters, this charge had about as much intellectual substance behind it as a playground taunt of “f–got.”
Another day at First Things, another reason to break from the Right.
The important point is that when they pronounce on the subject of manliness, none of these people — not Teddy Roosevelt, not John McCain, not Bill Kristol, not David Brooks, not Harvey Mansfield, not Gil Meilaender — can be taken seriously on an intellectual level.
What they’re doing is some kind of ideological shtick, whether or not they recognize it as such. They’re either cynically flattering gullible men and attempting to whip them into a froth of indignation in the way that Fox News and talk radio hosts do every day — or else they’re inadvertently confessing their own gendered status anxieties. Either way, it’s both inaccurate and insulting to treat their grunts as more than irritable mental gestures.
Obama’s policy in the Middle East is wise or foolish, smart or misguided, moral or immoral. His “manhood” has nothing at all to do with it.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 23, 2014
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