There was a time not too long ago when Republicans knew that when an election got tight, they could trot out “God, guns, and gays” to drive a cultural wedge between Democrats and the electorate, since the GOP was the party that, like most Americans, loved the first two and hated the third. It’s more complicated now, both within the parties and between them, but there’s no doubt that 2016 will feature plenty of culture-war sniping. For better or worse, Democrats and Republicans really do represent two different Americas.
I thought of that this weekend reading this article in the Washington Post about the personal relationships the potential Republican candidates have with guns. That they are all opposed to any limits on gun ownership is a given, but more interesting is the role guns play in their own lives. With a couple of important exceptions, the potential Republican candidates fall into one of two categories when it comes to guns: those who grew up with them, and those who embraced them once their political ambitions matured.
Some of them have been building their collections since childhood. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) is up to 12 now, including an AR-15 assault weapon that he has talked about using if law and order ever breaks down in his neighborhood. Former Texas governor Rick Perry is so well-armed, he has a gun for jogging.
Others were city kids who didn’t own guns until later in life. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) bought a .357 magnum revolver in 2010, the year he ran for Senate, saying the gun was for protection… [Ted Cruz] grew up in the suburbs of Houston and got his first exposure to guns at summer camp. But, as an adult, Cruz bought two guns: a .357 magnum revolver and a Beretta Silver Pigeon II shotgun, according to a spokeswoman… In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker also didn’t grow up hunting. But he got his first guns in his mid-30s: a shotgun he won in a raffle and a rifle he got as a gift, said a spokeswoman for his political committee. Now he hunts deer, pheasants and ducks with his motorcycle-riding buddies… Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal purchased a snubnosed, laser-sighted Smith & Wesson .38 revolver after Hurricane Katrina. He still keeps it for home defense, although his home is now the heavily guarded Governor’s Mansion.
Far be it from me to question the sincerity of any politician’s enthusiasm for firearms, but buying a gun does seem an awful lot like the kind of thing a Republican politician does just because that’s what Republican politicians are expected to do. But there’s gun rights, and then there’s contemporary gun culture. The two are not at all the same, and it’s the latter some Republicans seem so eager to embrace.
There’s an important context here, which is that gun ownership has been steadily declining for about four decades now. Yet even as fewer and fewer people own guns, gun sales are increasing, which means that the people who do own them are buying more and more. Ask a certain kind of gun-owner how many he owns, and he’ll say, “More than I need, but not as many as I want.”
And it’s that culture that many Republican politicians feel the need to make their own. You could see it as part of a general conservative nostalgia for a time that’s passed, when the law was a distant force and a man might have to protect his homestead from rustlers and thieves. The trouble is that for many gun-owners today, guns are less tools with everyday uses than fetish objects. It’s the very fact that they serve no practical purpose in most gun-owners’ lives that makes them so emotionally powerful. When a guy like Lindsey Graham says that he needs his AR-15 in case “there was a law-and-order breakdown in my community,” he’s living in a land of fantasy, where a middle-aged guy who wears a suit every day is actually an agent of heroic violence, the very embodiment of physical capability and potency.
But the bare fact is this: There are places in America where gun ownership is common and expected, and places where it isn’t. And more Americans live in the latter. So when Republicans proclaim themselves representatives of the first type of place—in both ideas and habits—they put themselves at an immediate disadvantage.
But not all of them do. Jeb Bush, for instance, has the appropriate Republican policy stance when it comes to guns (along with an A-plus rating from the NRA), but he does not himself own a gun. (The only other potential candidate who doesn’t is Chris Christie.) Which makes perfect sense if we think about gun ownership being so much a function of geography. Unlike some of his opponents—the emphatically Texan Rick Perry, the extremely Midwestern Scott Walker—Jeb isn’t really from any particular place. As a member of the Bush clan, he grew up traveling a kind of elevated platform of wealth and power that traverses the country. Connecticut, Texas, Florida—wherever it was, it was essentially the same. That isn’t really his fault; when your grandfather is a senator and your father becomes president, and you go to Andover and summer at Kennebunkport, that’s the world you’re from. And it isn’t a world where people view guns as a vital cultural totem. If Jeb walked out on a stage holding a rifle over his head, he’d look even dumber than Mitch McConnell did.
We don’t think about Hillary Clinton representing any particular place either. She grew up in Illinois but left it behind, spent almost two decades in Arkansas then left for Washington, and now lives in New York, but doesn’t embody any of those places (or even try to). That’s fine with liberals, whose demands for cultural affinity are served well enough by someone who moved around a lot. The president she’s trying to succeed most definitely represented a particular place, though it was less Chicago specifically than American cities in general, the dense and diverse places liberals either live or want to live.
And that’s where all the Republicans have a problem. They continue to romanticize rural and small-town life, but the number of Americans who actually live in those places is small and getting smaller. Even if plenty of suburban Republicans still imagine themselves out on the range, that isn’t the American reality. Planting your flag there may seem necessary to win the Republican nomination, but it won’t do you much good the day after.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 30, 2015
April 2, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP Presidential Candidates, Gun Ownership, Guns | Conservatives, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, NRA, Republicans, Rick Perry |
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So now Lindsey Graham has called Bibi Netanyahu to congratulate him on his great victory and to reassure him that Congress will be passing its gimlet eye closely over any deal the Obama administration strikes with Iran. This news comes hard on the heels of John Boehner’s announcement that he suddenly feels moved to go visit Israel.
I can’t begin to conceive what these people are thinking. What does Netanyahu think he’s accomplishing by making Israel a right-wing cause? Does he really think this is how he saves Israel? Does he forget that this is a country in which 70 or 80 percent of Jews vote Democratic? Did he not see the recent poll that had his approval rating among Democrats at 17 percent? I see here that last November in a J Street poll, his approval rating among U.S. Jews was 53 percent. I bet after this past month, they’re down in the low 40s or high 30s.
Netanyahu knows this country. He lived here—high school in Philadelphia, college in Boston, and a stint in New York (when he was Israel’s UN ambassador, during the Reagan years). He knows our political culture. He understands what a radical-right party the GOP is becoming, and thus he presumably understands that the vast majority of U.S. Jews are never going to be able to vote Republican, whatever the two parties’ Israel lines. He knows full well that the perfervid support for Israel in evangelical-right precincts has far less to do with love of Jews than with hatred of Arabs, or, for many, the belief that Armageddon in the Middle East means Jesus is coming.
He knows all this as well as most senators and congressmen. So why does he persist in making Israel a Republicans-first issue, and for that matter why do Republicans do it too?
Well, it’s not hard to figure why Republicans are doing it. It’s partly about Barack Obama, and the visceral loathing of him among their base; the Muslim Other-ing of Obama and all that. But they clearly must think this is going to get them more Jewish votes at the presidential level. They think back to Ronald Reagan’s time. In 1980, Reagan got 39 percent of the Jewish vote, against Jimmy Carter’s 45 percent (independent candidate John Anderson got the rest). That’s as close as a GOP presidential candidate has ever come to winning the Jewish vote since Israel became a state. (Amusing side note: In 1948, the year of Israel’s creation, the Republican candidate, Tom Dewey, did worse among Jews at 10 percent than left-wing third-party candidate Henry Wallace, who polled 15 percent; Harry Truman got 75 percent.)
But there’s no remotely Reaganesque figure on the horizon. And anyway, by 1984, things were back to normal—Walter Mondale, even as he was getting pasted by Reagan overall, won 67 percent of the Jewish vote. And more to the point, as I noted above, this Republican Party is not the Republican Party of Reagan’s time. That was a conservative party that still had a large number of old-line moderates, like senators Charles Percy and John Heinz. Today’s party is far more right wing than that one was. Very few Jews are going to vote for a party like that—especially against a Clinton, if Hillary is the Democratic nominee, but in fact against pretty much anyone.
So that’s what they’re thinking, farkakte as it is. But this doesn’t explain Netanyahu. He truly believes that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat, fine. But that doesn’t explain this behavior. If he truly believes that about Iran, then the logical, self-interested thing for him to do, especially knowing that most Jews are loyal Democrats, is to get as many Democrats in Congress as possible to choose his point of view over Obama’s. Given AIPAC’s muscle and the traditional pro-Israel posture of most Democrats in Congress over the years, that should not be a heavy lift.
But instead he does the opposite. Recall that about a month ago, he pointedly refused to meet with Senate Democrats. Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein, who invited him, were obviously tossing him a lifeline, saying to him: However bad your relationship with Obama, come square things with us, and we’ll still have your back. But no. He said he feared it would look partisan, you see, because his speech to Congress, well, that was bipartisan! Once you’ve entered the Hall of Mirrors, it can be hard to find your way out, I guess.
It’s one thing to alienate Obama (and Obama, to be fair, has done his part to sour the relationship as well). But it’s quite another to alienate rank-and-file American Jews, and still another to alienate Democrats in Congress. Not an easy trifecta to hit, but he is managing it.
If he can’t see the consequences for his country, he’s just a madman. Let’s just say hypothetically that the Obama administration follows through substantively on spokesman Josh Earnest’s astonishing comments last week about the potential policy implications of Netanyahu’s pre-election comportment. Let’s say, for example, that the United States decides to stop blocking a vote at the United Nations on recognition of a Palestinian state. Right now, about 135 nations recognize Palestine. Very few Western European countries are among that number. Many of them withhold their support simply or mainly for the sake of not crossing the United States.
Once we signal that we won’t block a vote, the map of nations that recognize Palestine will presumably expand across Europe rapidly. The British and French have worked on the proper resolution language. As it happens, the Arab League is meeting this weekend in Sharm-el-Shiekh, and you can be sure that its officials are alive to this reality. And so Netanyahu might lose Western Europe, and then he’ll come crying to Washington, and it might be too late.
Strange way to save a country.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 22, 2015
March 25, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress, Foreign Policy | AIPAC, GOP, Iran, Israel, Jewish Americans, John Boehner, Lindsey Graham, Palestinian State |
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One of the more important consequences of the Republican takeover of both chambers of Congress has been the GOP’s inability to paper over internal differences of opinion–or more to the point, to blame the inability to get stuff done on Harry Reid. We may be about to see this dynamic playing out in spectacular fashion when Congress takes up a FY 2016 budget resolution, which Republicans pretty much have to attempt after years of attacking Reid for Democratic Senate refusals to pass budget resolutions (a largely symbolic exercise absent enforcement mechanisms, and unnecessary for a while given the Obama-GOP spending agreements adopted outside “regular order”). As the New York Times‘ Jonathan Weisman describes the state of play right now, there’s a “chasm” between Republicans whose prime objective is to eliminate the sequestration system that has capped defense spending, and Republicans who are still spouting 2009-10 rhetoric about debt and deficits.
“This is a war within the Republican Party,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has vowed to oppose a final budget that does not ensure more military spending. “You can shade it any way you want, but this is war.”
The divisions will be laid bare Tuesday when congressional leaders unveil blueprints that hew to spending limits imposed by the budget battles of 2011.
Unlike legislation, the spending plan Republicans will be creating this week requires only a majority vote in both the House and Senate, cannot be blocked by a filibuster and is not subject to presidential approval or veto.
The intra-party tension this year has been ratcheted up by three external factors, of course: the general war-lust of Republicans, which is currently reaching early-2000s levels; shrinking short-term federal budget deficits; and an impending presidential election that makes the most likely way out of the GOP’s budget dilemma–Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts–rather perilous.
But it’s important not to think of this problem too narrowly as a current phenomenon. In reality, Republicans have been struggling with this same dynamic for 35 years, since the first Reagan Budget. Given four ideological goals in budgeting–lowering top-end tax rates; boosting defense spending; going after New Deal/Great Society spending; and reducing budget deficits–the one that always gets the short end of the straw is deficit reduction, even if supply-side magic asterisks allow GOPers to pretend, temporarily, that deficits will take care of themselves, as long as they are the ones running them up. And speaking of magic asterisks:
Senator Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, and Mr. Enzi are pressing for a place holder in the budget — a “deficit-neutral reserve fund” — that they say would allow Congress to come back in the coming months with legislation to lift the spending caps.
The idea is to pass a budget this month that sticks to the spending caps, but then negotiate a budget law this summer that ends sequestration. The $540 billion in cuts still to come under the Budget Control Act would be replaced by savings from entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security as well as new revenue from closing some tax loopholes.
To translate, this means an unenforceable promise to come back later and pay for a defense spending boost via “entitlement reform,” which Democrats and the White House have no intention of allowing. By summer, I guess, Republicans will come up with some way to delay the inevitable, and/or to disguise an implicit deal with Democrats to suspend sequestration long enough to give both the Pentagon and domestic programs a fresh drink of water.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 16, 2015
March 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Defense Spending, Deficits, Federal Budget | Congress, Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham, Medicaid, Medicare, Neocons, Republicans, Sequestration, Social Security |
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The letter written by Sen. Tom Cotton to the leaders of Iran and signed by 47 Republicans is not simply outrageous because it presents a dangerous challenge to the Constitutional framework under which the United States conducts foreign policy. It is important that we remember the context in which it came about. Here are a few recent events we need to keep in mind.
Judge Roy Moore:
In a dramatic show of defiance toward the federal judiciary, Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court on Sunday night ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on Monday, the day same-sex marriages were expected to begin here…
“I think I’ve done what I can do: advise the state court probate judges that they’re not bound by any ruling of the Federal District Court,” he said…
His argument has deep resonance in a place where a governor, George Wallace, stood in a doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 in an unsuccessful bid to block its federally ordered integration.
Although much has changed from Wallace’s era, Chief Justice Moore had used a series of strongly worded letters and memorandums to insist that Judge Granade, an appointee of President George W. Bush who joined the federal bench in 2002, had instigated a grave breach of law.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on EPA regulations:
So what are governors and state officials who value the well-being of the middle class to do? Here’s my advice:
Don’t be complicit in the administration’s attack on the middle class. Think twice before submitting a state plan — which could lock you in to federal enforcement and expose you to lawsuits…
So for now, hold back on the costly process of complying.
Senator Lindsay Graham:
And here’s the first thing I would do if I were president of the United States. I wouldn’t let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We’re not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts. We are not leaving town until we restore the intel cuts.
(Note: apparently Sen. Graham’s spokesperson suggested that when he said “literally,” he didn’t mean “literally.”)
Those aren’t the rantings of right wing radio hosts or tea party rabble rousers. They are the words of Republican leaders suggesting and/or recommending illegal actions. In other words, they are the rumblings of insurgency.
I don’t say that to fear-monger or join some bandwagon of hysteria. I’m simply quoting facts that we need to acknowledge and name accordingly.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 15, 2015
March 17, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Democracy, Insurgency, U. S. Constitution | 47 Traitors, EPA, George Wallace, Lindsey Graham, Marriage Equality, Mitch McConnell, Roy Moore, Senate Republicans, Tom Cotton |
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Conservatives are deeply troubled by President Obama’s reluctance to use the words “Islam” and “Islamic” often enough when talking about terrorism. We saw this when many conservatives reacted with condemnation to the White House’s Summit to Counter Violent Extremism, which wrapped up yesterday.
But the importance many on the right are now placing on repeating terms like “Islamic extremists” as much as possible raises a possibility that ought to trouble the GOP: There’s a strain of anti-Muslim sentiment within their party that is growing stronger; what we don’t know yet is whether there’s anyone in the party with the guts to arrest its progress.
Obama doesn’t dismiss such language choices as irrelevant; he has made clear his position that if he uses terms like “Islamic extremism” or “Islamic terrorism” he would be implying not just that groups like ISIS are motivated by their religious beliefs, but that there’s something inherently Islamic about this particular brand of violence. He worries that we would be doing ISIS’ work for them, validating their claim that there is a clash of civilizations going on, with Islam on one side and the west on the other.
I haven’t seen conservatives address this argument directly enough. Do they really think that using the word “Islamic” more to talk about threats to the United States would make those threats easier to defeat? Who knows? What’s apparent, though, is that they want Obama to admit and proclaim exactly what ISIS is trying to convince every Muslim of: that this is indeed a clash of civilizations.
Let’s look at what we’ve been hearing lately. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is now calling on American clergy to preach “holy war” against the Muslims who threaten our way of life. “President Obama is flat-out wrong in not describing the terrorist threat accurately,” he says. “Muslim fanatics want to kill us. And there are millions of them.” He offered this under a headline reading, “Judeo-Christian Values vs. the Jihad.”
“When I hear the president of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me,” says Lindsey Graham.
And the war isn’t just about what’s happening in Syria and Iraq, it’s about whether there are too many Muslims here in America as well. Last month, Bobby Jindal went to England to lecture the British about the utterly fictional “no-go zones” that he imagines are blanketing Europe, where sharia law is in force and non-Muslims are not permitted. No matter how many people tell Jindal that the “no-go zones” he’s heard about don’t actually exist, he’s sticking to the story, and warning that they’re on their way to America.
It’s a message that many Republican voters are apparently eager to hear. As Byron York reported, to Republicans in Iowa, “Jindal was warning about the danger of enclaves of unassimilated Muslim populations in an age of Islamic radicalism, a problem they fear could be in store for the United States.” Jindal returned from his trip to hold a prayer rally, explicitly advertised as an event to celebrate Christianity (“There will only be one name lifted up that day — Jesus!” Jindal wrote in a letter inviting other governors to come). At the rally, Jindal triumphantly declared, “Our god wins!”
But as Peter Beinart reminds us, Jindal isn’t even the most nakedly anti-Muslim candidate in the group of possible GOP contenders; that would be Mike Huckabee. Here are some colorful comments he made in 2013:
“Can someone explain to me why it is that we tiptoe around a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called ‘holiest days’? You know, if you’ve kept up with the Middle East, you know that the most likely time to have an uprising of rock throwing and rioting comes on the day of prayer on Friday. So the Muslims will go to the mosque, and they will have their day of prayer, and they come out of there like uncorked animals — throwing rocks and burning cars.”
Not a lot of ambiguity there. And even people who wouldn’t say that kind of thing are clear about what they do want everyone to say: that terrorism is Islamic. “They won’t even call the threat what it is. How can you talk about defeating an enemy you cannot name?” said Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, in response to the White House Summit.
This is a common refrain: we can’t defeat Islamic terror if we don’t call it “Islamic” at every opportunity. But I wonder what McCaul and the many Republicans who share his opinion think would happen if President Obama jumped up and down and shouted, “Islamic Islamic Islamic!” Would there be some difference in our military or diplomatic strategy? Would we get more help from Muslim countries? What would change?
It’s obviously important to understand how ISIS’ ideas, actions, and decisions grow out of their particular interpretation of Islam. But that’s very different from saying that in order to defeat them, we have to declare to the world that we’re fighting Islam (and of course, there’s nothing ISIS would want more).
What Republicans are now demanding is that we once again make our thinking as simplistic as possible. When Obama says that we need to understand the complex forces — economic, political, religious — that produce the cadre of disaffected young men on which ISIS relies, they shake their heads and say: No, we don’t need to understand anything. This is about Them and Us, and if we just say we’re fighting Them, then we’re halfway to victory.
Every Republican politician, particularly those running for president, should be thinking very carefully about how they want to address this issue in the coming days, because they’ll have to. Particularly given the widespread beliefs within the GOP base about President Obama — that he’s too solicitous of Muslims or may be a secret Muslim himself, that he hates America and sympathizes with terrorists — there will be a great deal of pressure on presidential candidates to show that they’re as alarmed and angry about the Muslim threat as the guy at the next podium.
The real test of how mainstream this kind of anti-Islamic sentiment has grown within the GOP isn’t so much what those like Huckabee and Jindal say — they’ve obviously decided that advocating for religious war is the path to becoming the favored candidate of Christian conservatives (though they seem to have forgotten that the candidate who wins that mantle almost never gets the GOP nomination). The test is whether we see candidates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio, who are looking to appeal to a wider group of voters, dipping their toes in those rancid waters.
One Republican candidate has done the right thing in response to this question. In 2011, Chris Christie appointed Sohail Mohammed to a state judgeship, a decision for which he was attacked by some conservatives in the most blatantly bigoted ways you can imagine. The critics called Mohammed, an accomplished attorney, a terrorist sympathizer and someone who would attempt to impose sharia law on the citizens of New Jersey. Christie treated the criticisms with the contempt they deserved. “This sharia law business is crap,” he said. “It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
But that was then. We’ll see what the candidates do when someone at an Iowa town meeting stands up and says something grossly anti-Muslim, because that absolutely will happen. Will they agree? Will they just try to change the subject? Or will they say, “Now hold on there”? That’ll show us what they’re really made of.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, February 20, 2015
February 22, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Conservatives, GOP Presidential Candidates, Islamophobia | Bill O'Reilly, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Christianity, Holy War, ISIS, Lindsey Graham, Michael McCaul, Mike Huckabee, Terrorism |
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