“Reactionary, Ill-informed And Ill-intentioned”: The G.O.P.’s Bachmann Problem
The current intramural squabbling on the right is just too delicious for words. At least for nice words.
Senator John McCain called the far-right darlings Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Justin Amash “wacko birds” earlier this month. (McCain later apologized for that burst of honesty and candor.)
Ann Coulter used her Conservative Political Action Conference speech to take a shot at New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, who was not invited to speak this year. Coulter quipped: “Even CPAC had to cut back on its speakers this year, by about 300 pounds.” What a lovely woman.
Also at CPAC, the half-term ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, took a whack at Karl Rove, challenging him to run for office himself. “Buck up or stay in the truck,” she said with her usual Shakespearean eloquence. Rove shot back that if he were to run and win, he’d at least finish his term. Ouch.
Donald Trump took to Twitter recently to call the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin a “dummy” who was “born stupid.” It’s hard to know whom to side with when two bullies battle.
But all this name-calling, as fun as it is to watch, is just a sideshow. The main show is the underlying agitation.
The Republican Party is experiencing an existential crisis, born of its own misguided incongruity with modern American culture and its insistence on choosing intransigence in a dynamic age of fundamental change. Instead of turning away from obsolescence, it is charging headlong into it, becoming more strident and pushing away more voters whom it could otherwise win.
Andrew Kohut, the founding director of the Pew Research Center, pointed out in The Washington Post on Friday that the party’s ratings “now stand at a 20-year low,” and that is in part because “the outside influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the G.O.P. what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.”
And too many of those hard-liners have a near-allergic reaction to the truth.
A prime example is Michele Bachmann, the person who convened the Tea Party Caucus in Congress and a Republican candidate for president last year.
She burst back on the scene with a string of lies and half-truths that could have drawn a tsk tsk from Tom Sawyer.
PolitiFact rated two of her claims during her CPAC speech last Saturday as “pants on fire” false. The first was that 70 cents of every dollar that’s supposed to go to the poor actually goes to salaries and pensions of bureaucrats. The second was that scientists could have a cure for Alzheimer’s in 10 years if it were not for “a cadre of overzealous regulators, excessive taxation and greedy litigators.”
She also said during that speech that President Obama was living “a lifestyle that is one of excess” in the White House, detailing how many chefs he had, and so on.
The Washington Post gave that claim four Pinocchios, and pointed out that “during last year’s G.O.P. presidential race, Bachmann racked up the highest ratio of Four-Pinocchio comments, so just about everything she says needs to be checked and double-checked before it is reported.”
And in a speech Thursday on the House floor, she said of the federal health care law:
“The American people, especially vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable senior citizens, now get to pay more and they get less. That’s why we’re here, because we’re saying let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”
Factcheck.org pointed out that her “facts” didn’t match her hyperbole.
Last year The Washington Post quoted Jim Drinkard, who oversees fact-checking at The Associated Press, as saying, “We had to have a self-imposed Michele Bachmann quota in some of those debates.”
It’s sad when you are so fact-challenged that you burn out the fact-checkers.
People like Bachmann represent everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. She and her colleagues are hyperbolic, reactionary, ill-informed and ill-intentioned, and they have become synonymous with the Republican brand. We don’t need all politicians to be Mensa-worthy, but we do expect them to be cogent and competent.
When all the dust settles from the current dustup within the party over who holds the mantle and which direction to take, Republicans will still be left with the problem of what to do with people like Bachmann.
And as long as the party has Bachmanns, it has a problem.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 22, 2013
“Promoting The Republican Brand”: The GOP Should Just Embrace Being A Party Of The Past
Scientists believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth until their extinction 65 million years ago. The religious right believes dinosaurs were with us until six thousand years ago. They’re both wrong. Anybody who watched the Conservative Political Action Committee conference last weekend or the Republican Party for the last few years knows the giant reptiles are still with us.
On Monday, the Republican National Committee released its own research on voter attitudes towards the GOP. The RNC study reports that Americans see the party as “narrow minded” and full of “stuffy old men.” These are the RNC’s words, not mine.
The RNC report also states that the party has to find better ways of getting its message across to the public. This will be much easier to do than changing Republican policies that the public finds so disturbing: things like killing Medicare, opposition to attempts to curb violence against women, and protecting federal tax freebies for big oil.
Here are my ideas for promoting the Republican brand.
The Major League baseball season starts on April 1 and I’ve come up with a great promotional tie between MLB and the GOP. The Republican Party can sponsor “Turn Back the Clock” nights with each of the major league teams to demonstrate the party’s commitment to the past. Wouldn’t it be great to see Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell wearing the throw back rainbow uniforms of the 1970’s Houston Astros or the brown and yellow uniforms made unpopular by the San Diego Padres?
A new brand needs a new slogan and I’ve come up with some ideas. Since the GOP is hell-bent on driving away the voters they need to win, I thought I’d help them along. It’s the least I can do to put the party out of its misery. This is what I came up with.
Vote GOP to Turn Back the Clock: Republicans do fine with seniors, but the party is woefully inept with the fast growing population of millennials, voters born since 1982. A good example of the GOP’s problems is the growing support for gay marriage. ABC News and The Washington Post released a new national survey Monday showing that support for gay marriage is at a record high (58 percent favor-36 percent oppose). Ten years ago, a large majority of Americans opposed gay marriage. An overwhelming number of millennials support gay marriage and support for the idea will grow as these young people become a larger proportion of the electorate.
Only Real Men Vote Republican: The GOP research report indicates that voters feel that the Republican Party is full of “stuffy old men.” If the GOP doesn’t change, the only people who’ll vote for the party will be stuffy old men. Maybe that’s why it is known as the GOP for Grand Old Party. Former First Lady Laura Bush told an audience that the Republican Party “frightens” many women. Republicans love to talk about rape and a majority of the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives voted recently against the Violence against Women Act.
If you have any ideas to rebrand the GOP, feel free to comment here and send them to RNC chair Reince Priebus. The new RNC autopsy states that Republicans were far behind Democrats technologically. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, didn’t use email and Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, Stuart Spencer, refused to use Twitter. I don’t know if the GOP has email or Twitter yet. So you might want to send your ideas to the RNC via snail mail at 310 1st St. SE, Washington, DC 2003.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, March 21, 2013
“Lasting Consequences”: The Folly Of Iraq Invasion Needs More Public Scrutiny
Ten years ago, on March 20, 2003, the administration of George W. Bush launched its disastrous invasion of Iraq. It’s a war most Americans — including many Republicans who enthusiastically supported it — are working assiduously to forget.
Not so fast. An examination of the lies, the hypocrisy and the power-mongering that led us into that act of grand folly may help us to avoid similar impulses in the coming decades. Besides, there are lasting consequences that cannot be shoved into history’s dustbin.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead. So are an estimated 100,000 Iraqis and more than 4,400 Americans. Countless other Americans are forever maimed, some of them suffering mental traumas from which they will never fully recover.
That’s the human toll. It doesn’t include the billions of dollars that were wasted. While the official calculations of the cost to the Treasury are in the $800 billion range, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has put the cost to the U.S. economy at $3 trillion. That’s why it’s quite laughable now to listen to the Fox News crew blast President Obama over the budget deficit. They all cheered for Bush’s dumb war, which he prosecuted while cutting taxes.
But the most disastrous long-term consequence of the war may be its effect on Iran. The United States gave Saddam nominal support for years because he served as a check on Iran, his bitter enemy. Now Shiites run Iraq, as they do Iran, and Tehran has great influence in Baghdad.
So how is it that so many cheered the invasion? Why did so few voice any dissent? Why was it that those who did argue against the war were vilified as traitors?
I vividly recall the months leading to the war because I was among those who insisted at the outset that the drive to oust Saddam was foolish. (At first, I assumed Bush was merely posturing. Even he, I thought, wouldn’t do something that stupid.) For my trouble, I was denounced as a fifth columnist, an appeaser, a liberal bed-wetter, etc.
Among those attacking my anti-invasion stance were comfortable, affluent professionals whose sons and daughters would never have considered volunteering for military service. I was dumbfounded by the nonchalance — and hypocrisy — with which they endorsed a war that would be fought by young men and women largely from the working classes.
I was also deeply disappointed — taken aback, actually — by the complicity of the major news media, whose supposedly intrepid journalists, instead of ferreting out official dishonesty, caved before it. The nation’s best newspapers ran numerous front-page stories trumpeting the Bush administration’s lies about Saddam, his alleged WMDs and his supposed collusion with Osama bin Laden. There were no similarly placed stories about the Project for the New American Century, the group of neo-cons pushing for Saddam’s ouster years before 9/11.
Andrew Bacevich, a well-respected foreign policy scholar and early opponent of the war, lists a misplaced faith in the U.S. military as among several reasons for the lack of critical questioning from the media or political leaders.
“It was taken for granted that we would win and we would win easily,” Bacevich, a Boston University professor and retired military officer, told me. “For anyone to question the effectiveness of the U.S. military in those days was tantamount to failing to support the troops, and no politician or person who cared about their public reputation dared do anything that would suggest failure to support the troops.”
Bacevich also points out that, unlike the war in Vietnam, which was also fueled by official dishonesty, few public figures who led the nation into Iraq have paid any price. Not only was Lyndon Johnson’s career cut short and legacy diminished, but his leading foreign policy strategists were also forced into public contrition.
Not so with Bush’s minions. Vice President Darth – ah – Dick Cheney remains adamant that Saddam was in league with anti-U.S. terrorists, even though all credible intelligence officials have said otherwise. John McCain, for his part, bludgeoned Chuck Hagel recently because Hagel came to oppose the war.
It’s much too early to forget the folly of Iraq. Too few of us have learned any lessons from it.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, March 18, 2013
“The Iraq War, Ten Years Later”: The Next Time Our Government Wants To Rush Us Into A War, Dissenters Need To Be Listened To
Ten years ago, as President George W. Bush took the final, fateful steps to launch the United States’ invasion of Iraq, Christopher Cerf and I were pulling all-nighters, feverishly putting the final touches on our anthology The Iraq War Reader. Having done a previous well-received anthology on the Gulf War, the campaign led by Bush Senior to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait back in 1991, we felt we had no choice but to offer a sequel. After all, we joked to ourselves, if Junior thought he had to “finish the job,” we did too.
Both of our books were designed to be comprehensive, readable guides to the history, documents and opinions that swirled around these events. We took care to provide a fair and balanced mix of points of view, to let readers make up their own minds about what they thought about the wisdom and justice of these wars.
But truth be told, both Chris and I were deeply skeptical of the proponents of war, having seen with our own research how often government and military officials lie. And so we made sure to include in our second book plenty of evidence from the first Gulf War of how we had been lied to about things as small as the supposed efficacy of the Patriot Missile (it mostly failed to shoot down Scuds) to the monstrous and false claim that Saddam’s troops had ripped babies out of Kuwaiti hospital incubators.
But 10 years ago, it was not a good time to be a war skeptic in America. It rarely is. The vast majority of “smart” and “serious” people had convinced themselves that in the face of Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, the prudent thing to do was to go to war to remove him from power.
Skeptics who tried to argue that it was better to let UN weapons inspectors continue monitoring his efforts while maintaining sanctions that hemmed in his regime were deemed foolish and naïve. Regional experts who warned of the danger that a post-Saddam Iraq would collapse into civil war, that Iran would be strengthened, or that any American occupation would be costly and futile, were dismissed as worrying about hypotheticals. Those were seen as abstractions compared to the “reality” that Iraq was on the verge of getting a nuclear bomb, presumably against us.
Later that spring, as we sent the book to all its contributors, I took some consolation as I inscribed each copy with words to the effect of: “To a full and vibrant debate. Let’s see in 10 years who was right.”
Looking back now, it’s easy to see who was wrong about the need to invade Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Judith Miller, Kenneth Pollack, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, George Will, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, Andrew Sullivan, William Safire, Fouad Ajami, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Gephardt, Tom DeLay, George Tenet, John McCain and of course Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush: You were all wrong about this.
Not only that, you were all wrong about the war’s likely aftermath. There were no “kites and boomboxes” greeting American troops in Baghdad and Basra, as Ajami predicted. Just sectarian riots and suicide bombers. (This disastrous prediction hasn’t stopped CNN from continuing to rely on Ajami as a regular expert commentator.)
A few prominent pundits, like Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman, at least admitted that while they favored going to war, they recognized the aftermath would be complicated and that it would not be a success if it didn’t produce a “liberated Iraq” (Friedman) that would be “better and safer” for Iraqis and Kurds (Hitchens). These hopes, obviously, were also wishful thinking. Bur remember, in the topsy-turvy times of 10 years ago, men of action were deemed prudent, while counsels of caution were considered crackpots.
A few Democratic centrists, like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, fell for the false intel about Iraq’s weapons programs, unfortunately helping to legitimize Bush’s casus belli. But at least they argued against pre-emptive and unilateral war, sought to buy time for more inspections and sanctions, and insisted that an occupation of Iraq would be terribly costly.
Who got Iraq right in our book? The honor role, in order of their appearance in our pages, includes Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, Patrick Buchanan, Arianna Huffington, Robert Byrd, John Mearshimer, Stephen Walt, John le Carre, Edward Said, Terry Jones, Jonathan Schell, James Fallows, Mohamed El Baradei (the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency), and the governments of Russia, France and Germany (who tried to block Bush’s rush to war in the Security Council).
Sadly, too many of the people who got Iraq wrong have never really admitted their mistakes and are still treated as respected voices of opinion. When you read them or see them on TV, there ought to be an asterisk next to their names reading: “Caution — Wrong about the Iraq War.” And too few of the war’s skeptics have been rewarded for being right.
But hopefully, the next time our government tries to rush us into a war, the dissenters will be treated with more respect, and the proponents with less. Many lives will depend on it.
By: Micah Sifry, The National Memo, March 15, 2013
“Once Again Senators”: Obama Prosecutes Terrorist Suspect And The “Little Generals” Complain Again
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and an al Qaeda spokesperson, appeared in a New York courtroom this morning, and pleaded not guilty to plotting to kill Americans. It was his first court appearance after having been captured on Feb. 28 and flown to New York last week.
Of course, there apparently has to be a political angle to the proceedings, and as Adam Serwer noted, several congressional Republicans are “furious” at the Obama administration for “prosecuting an alleged terrorist.” And why might that be? Because the GOP officials disapprove of the use of the federal court system.
Several Senate Republicans are slamming the administration’s to move its latest terror suspect through the federal court system, bypassing the military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. […]
“Military detention for enemy combatants has been the rule, not the exception. By processing terrorists like [Ghaith] through civilian courts, the administration risks missing important opportunities to gather intelligence to prevent future attacks and save lives,” according to a joint statement by Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Lindsey Graham (R.S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Do we really have to explain this to Congress again?
Look, we have a very capable system of federal courts, which have tried and convicted plenty of terrorists. We have also have a terrific system of federal penitentiaries, which have a record of never, ever allowing a convicted terrorist to escape.
On the other hand, we also have a system of military commissions, which tend to be an ineffective setting for trying suspected terrorists. It’s why every modern presidential administration has relied on civilian courts for these kinds of trials. It’s why the Pentagon, Justice Department, and intelligence agencies are unanimous in their support for trying accused terrorists in civilian courts. It’s why folks like David Petraeus and Colin Powell — retired generals McCain, Graham, and Ayotte tend to take seriously — agree with the Obama administration and endorse Article III trials.
So why must Republicans rely on stale, misleading talking points?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 8, 2013
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