“Ted Cruz’s Frightening Gun Fanaticism”: When A Presidential Contender Encourages Armed Insurrection
As incredible as it sounds, there’s an argument going on right now between two Republican senators (and, potentially, two Republican candidates for the presidency) over whether the American citizenry should be ready to fight a war against the federal government. The two senators in question are Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, and they can’t seem to agree whether the Second Amendment serves as bulwark against government “tyranny.”
It all started with a fundraising email Cruz sent making the case that “The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution isn’t for just protecting hunting rights, and it’s not only to safeguard your right to target practice. It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny — for the protection of liberty.” TPM’s Sahil Kapur asked Graham what he thought of his Texan colleague’s view of the Second Amendment, and the South Carolina senator was not impressed. He even invoked the Civil War, which should make Cruz’s people plenty upset. “Well, we tried that once in South Carolina,” Graham said. “I wouldn’t go down that road again.”
This view of gun rights that casts personal firearm ownership as a check on the abuses of government doesn’t make a great deal of practical sense, and it betrays a lack of faith in our democratic institutions. But it’s become increasingly popular among high-level Republican officials who quite literally scare up votes by telling voters they’re right to keep their Glocks cocked just in case the feds come for them. Iowa’s new Republican senator Joni Ernst famously remarked that she supports the right to carry firearms to defend against “the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”
The obvious question raised by statements like those from Cruz and Ernst is: when does the shooting start? What is the minimum threshold for government “tyranny” that justifies an armed response from the citizenry? In 2014, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy was ready to start a shooting war with the feds to defend his illegal grazing practices, and he garnered the support of top-level Republican officials (they only abandoned him after he started wondering aloud whether black people would be better off as slaves).
It’s an important question because Republicans and conservatives – Ted Cruz included – tend to throw around terms like “tyranny” sort of haphazardly when criticizing policies and politicians they disagree with.
In May 2013, Cruz spoke at a press conference arranged by then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (remember her?) to vent rage at the IRS over its targeting of Tea Party-aligned non-profit groups. Cruz quoted Thomas Jefferson to suggest that the IRS scandal (along with Benghazi and Obamacare and other stuff) was a harbinger of “tyranny” from the federal government: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4534673/cruz-tyranny .
Last January, Cruz said Barack Obama was running the country like a dictator because of his executive orders on immigration and the administration’s delay of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate. “There are countries on this globe where that is how the law works,” Cruz said. “You look at corrupt countries where the rule of law is meaningless, where dictators are in power and they have things they call law. But what does law mean?”
Later that same month he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed suggesting that Obama’s “lawlessness” was a threat to personal liberty:
That would be wrong—and it is the Obama precedent that is opening the door for future lawlessness. As Montesquieu knew, an imperial presidency threatens the liberty of every citizen. Because when a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president.
I don’t doubt that Cruz would argue strongly against an armed response to Obama’s immigration orders and tweaks to Obamacare. But at the same time, he’s the one bringing up government “tyranny” and “lawlessness,” and he’s the one bringing up the need to arm oneself in order to preserve one’s liberty. So he should be the one to explain where those two concepts intersect, and when an armed citizen would be justified in committing violence against the government.
By: Simon Maloy, Political Writer, Salon, April 17, 2015
“A Confused And Bitter Old Man”: Obama Reminds McCain How Foreign Policy Works
Late last week, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei took issue with the United States’ characterization of the recently negotiated nuclear framework, though the White House was dismissive of the Iranian leader’s posturing.
“The test of whether or not that framework can be memorialized in a deal is not going to be a comment on any given day by a particular Iranian leader,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters Friday.
But in a bizarre twist, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seemed to endorse the Ayatollah’s credibility over the U.S. Secretary of State’s. “I think you’re going to find out that they had never agreed to the things that John Kerry claimed that they had,” McCain said Friday. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made similar remarks.
To put it mildly, it was an unexpected development. For months, Republicans insisted, “We can’t trust Iranian leaders.” And yet, on Friday, McCain and Graham suggested rhetoric from Ayatollah Khamenei should be accepted at face value – while arguments from the American White House should not.
During a press conference at the Summit of the Americas, President Obama seemed visibly frustrated by the GOP’s increasingly unhinged approach to international affairs.
“When I hear some, like Senator McCain recently, suggest that our Secretary of State, John Kerry, who served in the United States Senate, a Vietnam veteran, who’s provided exemplary service to this nation, is somehow less trustworthy in the interpretation of what’s in a political agreement than the Supreme Leader of Iran – that’s an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries. And we’re seeing this again and again. We saw it with the letter by the 47 senators who communicated directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran – the person that they say can’t be trusted at all – warning him not to trust the United States government.
“We have Mitch McConnell trying to tell the world, ‘Oh, don’t have confidence in the U.S. government’s abilities to fulfill any climate change pledge that we might make.’ And now we have a senator suggesting that our Secretary of State is purposely misinterpreting the deal and giving the Supreme Leader of Iran the benefit of the doubt in the interpretations.”
Obama added this isn’t how the United States is “supposed to run foreign policy, regardless of who’s president or secretary of state.” The president concluded that this is “a problem” that “needs to stop.”
I think even the most ardent Republicans, if they were to pause and think about this objectively, would be hard pressed to disagree with the underlying principles Obama presented. Put aside the GOP’s bitter, often ugly, contempt for the president and consider a more fundamental question: has American foreign policy ever worked this way?
Is there a scenario in which it can work this way? What signal does it send to the world when the legislative branch of the United States tries to undermine the executive branch of the United States on matters of international affairs?
For his part, McCain expressed a degree of dismay over Obama “attacking” him. I suppose that’s one way to look at it. The other way is that the president defended American foreign policy and America’s chief diplomat against ridiculous criticisms from a confused senator.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 13, 2015
“Holding The Boston Bomber As An Enemy Combatant?”: Would Tsarnaev Be Convicted Under President McCain?
That was justice at work. It took a week less than two years, an impressively brisk time window, for federal prosecutors in Massachusetts to deliver justice to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the jury needed just 11 hours to deliberate. We didn’t waterboard him or send him to Gitmo, his jailers didn’t make him strip naked and get down on all fours while they led him around on a leash; and still, miraculously, despite these failures of our resolve, the people of the United States got a conviction.
I say “failures” above, obviously, in an ironical kind of way. But I wrote it like that because it strikes me that this is a day more than most other days to take stock of such matters and to remember that in this case, if John McCain and Lindsey Graham had had their way, some of those things could conceivably have happened to Tsarnaev. You might be tempted to say, so what, he’s a mass murderer. And that he is. But he’s a citizen of the United States, and citizens of the United States, no matter how despicable, have rights.
But in April 2013, right after the bombing, when the demagogue needle was way over in the red, McCain and Graham were leading the call for Tsarnaev to be detained as an enemy combatant. Not to be tried as one—even they understood that that would be crossing the line when it came to a U.S. citizen. But they wanted him held and questioned as an enemy combatant—thrown in a military brig and then questioned by military and CIA personnel rather than the FBI, a process that would have stripped him of his right to legal counsel and other basic rights to which any citizen is entitled.
McCain and Graham were joined by their usual compatriots in these crusades, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte and New York Congressman Peter King. Their argument was that holding Tsarnaev as a combatant for a certain period of time would allow the government to ascertain things like whether he had any al Qaeda connections. Graham said at the time that being able to question Tsarnaev without a defense lawyer present was his whole point. That might sound reasonable, if it weren’t for, you know, the Constitution.
I don’t doubt that there was some measure of sincerity in McCain’s and Graham’s belief at the time, but even if it was quasi-sincere, it was just the worst kind of demagoguery. This did not happen in a vacuum, of course, but was yet another instance in a long chain of McCain-Graham demagoguery that went back to the very beginning of the Obama administration, when the new president was trying to close Gitmo, and Republicans—Graham was particularly noxious, as I recall—were running around charging that Obama was trying to release Gitmo prisoners onto the American mainland so they could live among us.
The reality, of course, is that the Gitmo detainees would by and large have been transferred only to the most secure Supermax prisons in the continental 48. But the reality didn’t matter, see, because what was important was to establish the narrative that this new president, with his suspicious name and questionable provenance and terrorist-palling-around and so on, didn’t want to defend America the way you and I did.
Then came the uproar over the administration’s plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian New York court. Now to be sure, the administration botched that one in p.r. terms, by not reaching out in advance to then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg and to Senator Chuck Schumer to make sure they’d both be on board. It wasn’t the first time or the last that the administration has aimed the revolver at its own foot.
But where are we now on that front? KSM still sits down in Guantanamo Bay, awaiting trial. He’s been ping-ponged from the military court system to the civilian and back again. He purports in more recent years to have had a change of heart, bless him, regarding the whole wholesale slaughter of innocents business. Whatever the case on that front, the core fact remains that the families who lost loves ones on 9/11 have not seen any resolution with regard to the legal fate of the mastermind of those attacks.
The families of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, on the other hand, got justice in two short years. And this civilian-court efficiency is no aberration. Up through 2011, according to Human Rights First, federal civilian criminal courts had convicted around 500 terrorism suspects. Military courts had convicted eight, and three of those were overturned completely and one partially. It’s hard to find more recent precise numbers, but it’s not exactly as if military tribunals have caught up since then. The bottom line is clear. Civilian prosecutions work, and they live up to (well, more or less—Tsarnaev was questioned before being read his Miranda rights) constitutional standards.
And yet the snarling from McCain and Graham and their amen corner never ends. Obama/Democrats soft on terror is too tantalizing a story line, a toothsome steak that they can’t help but bite into. One of Obama’s more admirable attributes, in fact, is the way he has stood up to this bullying. He’s tried (without always succeeding) to bring our terrorism policies more in line with our stated values while at the same time still prosecuting actual terrorists. If you lament Obama’s shortcomings, just stop today and ask yourself where you think we’d be on these fronts if President McCain had been elected in 2008. His fomentations tell us all we need to know.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 10, 2015
“Rand Paul Is Already Doomed”: The Simple Reason Why He Will Never, Ever Be President
William F. Buckley Jr. once famously said that Republicans should nominate the most conservative candidate who can also win. The test has proven a surprisingly accurate predictor of the party’s presidential candidate: Mitt Romney beat the unelectable conservatives to his right; George W. Bush beat the waffling conservatives to his left.
This time around, most of the potential GOP candidates once again lack either broad electoral appeal (Ted Cruz) or the credentials to win over the conservative base (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie). One candidate, however, has the unique distinction of failing both of Buckley’s criteria: Rand Paul.
The Kentucky senator, who officially announced his presidential run on Tuesday, is perhaps alone among Republican candidates in being both insufficiently right-wing and too far outside the mainstream of American politics. Because of these twin weaknesses, Paul is spectacularly ill-suited to capture his party’s nomination.
Paul’s problems with the right are legion, but it’s his foreign policy views — from ISIS to Russia to Cuba — that most obviously separate him from conservatives. On Iran, for instance, the Republican Congress has repeatedly flayed President Obama for failing to confront the dire threat posed by the ayatollahs. But in 2007, Paul said that “…If you look at it intellectually, look at the evidence that Iran is not a threat. Iran cannot even refine their own gasoline,” according to Bloomberg News.
As his presidential campaign drew near, Paul lurched to put himself closer to the mainstream of the Republican party. But even if he now falls completely in lockstep with conservatives, it’s hard to imagine how Paul can escape the shadow of his former statements. In 2009, for instance, Paul suggested that former Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to invade Iraq to benefit his former employer, Halliburton. Then there was his policy speech on the Ukraine last year, which the National Review called “bizarre and delusional.” There’s also Paul’s flip-flopping on the legality of drone strikes.
Conservatives are clearly unconvinced by the reinvention, and Paul’s opponents are already jumping at the chance to portray him as an isolationist unconcerned about global terrorism. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a possible presidential candidate, said this week that Paul is “to the left of Barack Obama” on foreign policy. Conservative hawks have already purchased $1 million in advertising to portray Paul as dangerous on foreign policy, according to The New York Times.
Paul, of course, is not alone among GOP contenders in facing challenges winning over the right-wing. Jeb Bush, in particular, has already been criticized for his (allegedly) conciliatory views on immigration and education. Romney was able to overcome similar suspicions on the right.
The difference is that where Bush’s heresies broaden his possible base of support, Paul’s actually make him less appealing in a general election. Romney could plausibly argue that his history of working with Democrats in Massachusetts made him more likely to beat Obama. Jeb Bush can rightfully claim that a more humane immigration policy will give Republicans a better shot with Hispanic voters.
Though infuriating to conservatives, these appeals to electoral realities won valuable insider support for Romney. They’ve proven similarly effective at giving Bush the edge in the “invisible primary” with the establishment. But what comparable electoral advantage could Paul claim from his controversial heterodoxies on foreign policy? And that’s before we even mention his policy quirks outside the realm of international relations — like, for example, the strange beliefs about monetarism he inherited from his father (the economically dubious suggestion that America return to the gold standard chief among them). His more humane approach to criminal sentencing is similarly unlikely to win over conservatives.
And so, even as Paul launches his campaign in earnest, one thing is certain about the 2016 race: We don’t know who the Republicans will nominate for president. We just know it won’t be Rand Paul.
By: Jeff Stein, a recent Cornell graduate and The Editor of the Ithaca Voice; Salon, April 7, 2015
“The Latest Illustration Of Delusional Paranoia”: Dick Cheney’s Ongoing Descent Into Insanity Accidentally Clarifies Iran Debate
Every so often Dick Cheney will appear in public to vocalize his latest irritable mental gesture. Today he appeared with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt to assert the following: “I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing.”
Cheney’s regular utterances tend to meld together into an undifferentiated belligerent growl, but in this case he is (inadvertently) telling us something useful. The former vice-president is endorsing, or at least half-endorsing, the right-wing belief that to dismiss Barack Obama as a naif and a failure is far too kind. No, Obama is carrying out a secret plan to undermine American power. Versions of this theory have been fleshed out by such figures as Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, and Dinesh D’Souza. They hold that Obama, driven by well-hidden black rage, seeks to humiliate the country that has oppressed African-Americans. This line of thought, while too deranged for Republican leaders to publicly endorse, has a great deal of influence among conservatives. Cheney’s comments serve as the latest illustration of the delusional paranoia running through even the very highest levels of the Republican Party.
Cheney’s logic also helpfully (and, again, inadvertently) illustrates the dilemma surrounding the current debate over Iran’s nuclear program. Like all Republican officeholders and some Democratic ones, Cheney thinks Obama has struck a weak deal with Iran. Unlike most of them, Cheney suspects Obama has done so not out of naïveté but out of a cunning plan to actually encourage the Iranian nuclear program.
But what if we apply Cheney’s analytic method to his own administration’s Iran policy? After all, it was under the Bush administration that the Iranian nuclear program flourished, bringing the regime from 164 to 8,000 centrifuges. Even so hawkish a failure as Lindsey Graham concedes that the previous administration utterly botched the task of preventing a nuclear Iran. (“I think the Bush administration, they were a miserable failure when it came to controlling Iran’s nuclear ambition,” Graham said.)
What’s more, the expansion of Iran’s power under Bush was not limited to the blossoming of its nuclear program. In 2003, an extremely hostile neighboring regime (that had launched a war against it two decades before) was deposed, creating a power vacuum that Iran filled. Cheney seems to have played a role there. A Cheney-style analysis of the Bush administration’s Iran policy would conclude that it was carrying out a deliberate plan to elevate Iran’s standing.
Such a conclusion would obviously be insane. But it happens to fit the facts far more tightly than the same conclusion about Obama’s Iran policy. And this, in turn, reminds us that the most plausible real-world alternative to Obama’s Iran deal is not some “better deal.” The alternative is either war or threatening war while refusing to negotiate.
It is true that the deal Obama struck is probably not going to leave the Middle East a terribly secure place. Iran will most likely test the international community’s willingness to uphold the letter of the agreement, and its willingness to reimpose sanctions if and when Iran violates its terms. History shows that containing the nuclear ambitions of a determined state is extremely hard. Obama’s approach implicitly acknowledges the limits of American leverage, trading away its maximal demand to end all Iranian nuclear work completely in return for pragmatic concessions (like the elimination of advanced centrifuges, and the establishment of a vigorous inspection regime) that at least offer a chance to contain Iran’s race to the bomb. The Bush approach claimed to deny Iran any right whatsoever to nuclear research, but its actual success at holding this line was less than nothing.
The Bush administration has been out of power long enough to allow Obama’s critics to conveniently forget how the conservative Iran strategy actually operates in practice; Cheney’s comments offer a timely reminder.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, April 8, 2015
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