“The Neocons Are Losing”: Warmongers Are Howling At The Moon
I liked former New Republic writer Dana Milbank’s column this morning about how “Republicans mindlessly oppose Iran Nuclear Deal.” I liked it not just because it was witty, but because its prominence in the Washington Post—and its place when I woke up near the top of its list of the most popular stories—suggests that in this latest fracas over foreign policy, the conventional wisdom, as well as public opinion, is on the side of liberal internationalism rather than neo-conservative war-mongering. That this time it is the Bill Kristols and Ari Fleischers and Marco Rubios who are howling at the moon.
That’s especially important because in this case, there is an underlying truth—an emperor without any clothes, an elephant in the room—that no one in the administration or in the Republican opposition wants to openly acknowledge. It goes something like this: We all want Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, and we hope that through sanctions and negotiations, and the threat of war, we can achieve that result. But we Americans also know that if negotiations fail, then war may not be a real option. As the debate over intervention in Syria showed, the American public is not eager to go to war in the Middle East when the United States itself is not in danger. The Obama administration would have a hell of a time carrying out its threat. And even if it did, it would have a hell of a time achieving its objective of knocking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
So the various politicians and pundits who called for upping the sanctions as the interim deal was being negotiated, and who now denounce the deal as being woefully inadequate are doing a particular disservice. On one level, they are calling for war, which is the only alternative if we don’t pursue diplomacy. But on another level—if you consider the political and strategic difficulty, in this case of war—they are calling for a shutdown of our foreign policy—for the kind of national embarrassment and blow to our global standing from which we were saved in Syria by the Russians. So three cheers for Dana Milbank and for the good sense of the American people and the old foreign policy establishment of the Scowcrofts, Albrights, and Brzezinskis.
By: John B. Judis, The New Republic, November 26, 2013
“Less Than American”: It Is In The Public Interest To Have People Assimilated And Participating Stakeholders In Our Democracy
Not so long ago, it seemed the debate over immigration reform was all about borders. Politicians competed to offer the most draconian solutions — higher fences, longer fences, electrified fences, armies of guards, fleets of drones, moats and crocodiles. Never mind that the Border Patrol had already more than doubled in a decade. Never mind that many of those here illegally never hopped a fence but simply overstayed a student or tourist visa. The nativist mythology has us under siege from relentless hordes striding toward Arizona on, in the fevered imagination of Tea Party Congressman Steve King, “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” To pacify the border neurotics, authors of the bill that passed the Senate last summer included $46.3 billion to militarize our southern flank.
Now, with the bill stranded in the House, it seems the immigration debate is all about citizenship. To opponents, the idea of offering 11-plus million undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship — even a 13-year slog like the one envisioned by the Senate bill — is anathema, so politically toxic that the measure’s most prominent Republican sponsor, Senator Marco Rubio, pulled back as if he’d put his hand on a lit stove. To proponents of comprehensive reform, or at least to activists on the issue, citizenship is the prize, and nonnegotiable.
It’s beginning to look as if advocates of fixing our broken immigration system will face an unpleasant choice: no bill at all, or a bill that legalizes the foreigners who are already here but does not offer most of them a chance to become citizens. On Capitol Hill several lawmakers are quietly drafting compromises that give the undocumented millions little hope of full membership in America.
The first thing to note is that this is progress. The Republican mainstream view has moved in the last year or so, from Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” to something considerably less callous. Most Republicans in Congress now say they can live with legalizing the undocumented as long as (a) we don’t call it amnesty and (b) we don’t reward lawbreakers by bestowing the precious gift of citizenship.
The second point that needs making — and my Times colleague Julia Preston made it last week — is that while citizenship is the priority for pro-immigration activists, to immigrants living here as a fearful underclass the aim is not so clear cut. For many of them, the priority is to be made legal, to come out of hiding and live their lives without the threat of deportation, without the risk of exploitation by unscrupulous employers, without wondering whether your spouse will make it home at night.
“The entire narrative behind comprehensive immigration reform has elevated the path to citizenship as this must-have component of an acceptable bill,” said Oscar Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, a network of immigrant organizations that includes many foreigners here without visas. “What you hear from the undocumented is: ‘We like the idea of citizenship, but what really hurts us is that we are vulnerable, that I can’t easily get a job to feed my family, that I can’t drive a car without being at risk, that I want to be able to visit relatives back home and come back safely.”
Just to be clear, I believe (and so does Oscar Chacon) that deliberately creating a class of disenfranchised residents goes against the American grain. There are few precedents for consigning whole categories of people to a sub-citizen limbo, and they are not proud moments in our history. (See the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.) It is clearly in the public interest to have people become assimilated, taxpaying, participating stakeholders in our democracy. Most Americans polled, including a majority of Republicans, agree that those now in the country illegally should be allowed to eventually apply for citizenship.
If House Speaker John Boehner is willing to brave the fury of his extreme flank and put the matter to a vote, a path to citizenship stands a decent chance of passing the House with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans. You might even think Republicans would want to get immigration settled and off the table so they could begin wooing Hispanic voters on more favorable ground — social issues, taxes, education. But among the people most immersed in this issue, I can’t find many who expect Boehner to suddenly become a statesman and defy his fanatics. In part, let’s be honest, that’s because the Republican stance is, “We protect America from Obama.” It is also in part because they fear newly enfranchised Hispanics will become Democrats — which the Republicans, by opposing citizenship, make a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it may well be that supporters of immigration reform have to choose between half a loaf and none at all. Half a loaf might include a prospect of citizenship for some undocumented immigrants — the so-called Dreamers, who entered the country as children, and those in the military — but not the majority. If that’s the option, should Democrats swallow hard and take it?
Yes, and here’s why.
First, even without a prospect of citizenship, legalization would make the undocumented much safer from the family-wrecking heartbreak of deportation, which has continued at record numbers under President Obama. It would free them to press for better education for their children, to approach the police when they are victims of crime, to challenge abusive employers, to seek medical care without fear of exposure. Some advocates of citizenship-or-nothing suggest that the president should simply use his prosecutorial discretion to stop deportations altogether, as he has done for the Dreamers and undocumented soldiers. But the public would view that as a grievous abuse of power, and Congress might very well take away his authority. An executive order is no substitute for a protection enshrined in the law.
Second, the legislation has other good things going for it. It puts a little sense into our archaic legal immigration system, and establishes some meaningful protection against future illegal immigration (like holding employers rigorously accountable for assuring their workers have legal status, much more important than fortifying the border.)
Third, this is not the end of the story. We elect a new Congress in 2014, and another in 2016, and so on, and the electoral clout of Hispanics will continue to grow. “I’m a firm believer in the notion of incremental change,” Chacon told me. “The best public policies — look at gay rights — have evolved, they didn’t happen all at once.”
And fourth, even if many undocumented workers never make it to citizenship, the injustice will last for just one generation. Their children are citizens by birth. Young Latinos are reaching voting age at the rate of about 50,000 per month. I suspect many in that rising generation will remember, and punish, the politicians who decided their parents should remain less than American.
By: Bill Keller, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 24, 2013
“The American Ayatollahs”: President Obama Crushes The Neocons
Well, the ayatollah appears to have lent his provisional support to the historic U.S.-Iran accord announced Saturday night. In a letter to President Hassan Rouhani, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the deal “can be the basis for further intelligent actions.” Now we just need sign-off from our American ayatollahs. But the early indications are that the Republicans, eager to perform Bibi Netanyahu’s bidding—not that they needed a second reason to oppose something Barack Obama did—will do everything within their power to stop the thing going forward.
We shouldn’t get too carried away in praising this accord just yet. It’s only a six-month arrangement while the longer-term one is worked out. Those talks are going to be harder than these were, and it’s not at all a stretch to envision them collapsing at some point. Iran is going to have to agree to a regular, more-or-less constant inspection regime that would make it awfully hard for Tehran to be undertaking weapons-grade enrichment. It’s easy to see why they agreed to this deal, to buy time and get that $4.2 billion in frozen oil revenues. But whether Iran is going to agree to inspections like that is another question.
Still, it is indeed a historic step. Thirty-four years of not speaking is a long time. So it’s impressive that this got done at all, and even more impressive are some of the inner details, like the fact that Americans and Iranians have been in direct and very secret negotiations for a year. Rouhani’s election does seem to have made a huge positive difference—four of five secret meetings centered in Oman have been held since Rouhani took office, which seems to be a pretty clear indication that he wants a long-term deal to happen.
So this is potentially, I emphasize potentially, a breakthrough that could have numerous positive reverberations in the region—not least among them the virtual elimination of the chance that the United States and Iran would end up at war. And what a refutation of those harrumphing warmongers! I’d love to have had a tap on John Bolton’s phone over the weekend, or Doug Feith’s, or Cheney’s, and heard the combination of perfervid sputtering and haughty head shaking as they lament Obama’s choice.
Well, then, let’s compare choices. They chose war, against a country that never attacked us, had no capability whatsoever to attack us, and had nothing to do with the allegedly precipitating event, 9/11. We fought that war because 9/11 handed the neocons the excuse they needed to dope the public into supporting a unilateral war of hegemony. It has cost us more than $2 trillion now. It’s taken the lives of more than 100,000 people. It has been the author of the trauma of thousands of our soldiers, their limbs left over there, their families sundered. And on the subject of Iran, the war of course did more to strengthen Iran in the region than Obama could dream of doing at his most Machiavellian-Manchurian. Fine, the world is well rid of Saddam Hussein. But these prices were far too steep.
Then along came Obama in 2008, saying he’d negotiate with Iran. I’d love to have a nickel for every time he was called “naive” by John McCain or Sarah Palin (after the differences between Iran and Iraq were explained to her) or any of dozens of others (and yeah, even Hillary Clinton). I’d settle for a penny. I’d still be rich. You might think that watching this past decade unfold, taking an honest measure of where the Bush administration’s hideous decisions have left us, that some of them might allow that maybe negotiation was worth a shot.
Of course that will never happen. Marco Rubio was fast out of the gates Sunday, but he will be joined today by many others. Some will be Democrats, yes, from states with large Jewish votes. Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez have already spoken circumspectly of the deal (although interestingly, Dianne Feinstein, as AIPAC-friendly as they come, spoke strongly in favor of it). There will be a push for new sanctions, and that push will be to some extent bipartisan.
But the difference will be that if the Democrats get the sense that the deal is real and can be had, they won’t do anything to subvert it, whereas for the Republicans, this will all be about what it’s always about with them—the politics of playing to their Obama-hating base. But there’ll be two added motivations besides. There’s the unceasingly short-sighted and tragic view of what constitutes security for Israel, which maintains the conditions of near-catastrophe that keep just enough of the Israeli public fearful of change so that they perpetuate in putting people like Netanyahu in power, thus ensuring that nothing will ever change. And perhaps most important of all in psychic terms to the neocons, there is contemplation of the hideous reality that Obama and the path of negotiation just might work. This is the thing the neocons can’t come to terms with at all. If Obama succeeds here, their entire worldview is discredited. Check that; even more discredited.
Rouhani appears to be moving his right wing a bit. Ours, alas, isn’t nearly so flexible as Iran’s.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 24, 2013
“Radicalism For The Sake Of Radicalism”: Four Years Later, The Tea Party Has Learned Nothing
The Tea Party is no longer a brand-new movement in American politics. So, more than four years in, what do they appear to have learned? How about: nothing. And they seem to want it that way.
Certainly that appears to be the case with the Tea Party as an electoral force. Oh, Tea Partyers will remind you – they’ve won some. Ted Cruz in Texas, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin – all True Conservatives in good standing (at least last I looked; these things can change rapidly), all solid winners in their election bids. It’s hardly the case that nominating a Tea Party candidate is guaranteed to turn a win into a loss.
But three election cycles in, it’s pretty clear that nominating a candidate favored by Tea Partyers over what they consider “establishment” candidates is a formula for risking Republican disaster. And that it’s not going to change any time soon.
So it was for Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle in 2010. So it was with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in 2012. And so it’s likely to be with the 2014 crop.
The thing is, four years is plenty of time to develop solid, seasoned candidates. Indeed, once upon a time Marco Rubio was one of those solid, seasoned candidates. Rubio was a successful Florida Republican who had risen rapidly to become speaker of the Florida House; he then adopted the emerging Tea Party and went on to easily win an open U.S. Senate seat. But Rubio’s Tea Party credentials were tarnished because he actually tried to legislate on immigration; while it’s much too early to declare his career in trouble and it wouldn’t be surprising if he still ran a solid race for the Republican presidential nomination, it’s also very easy to imagine him having to fend off a Tea Party primary of his own if he runs for reelection instead of the White House in 2016.
So what do Republicans have for 2014? Matt Bevin, taking on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, is a first-time candidate; should he win, Republicans would probably lose that seat. In Georgia, Paul Braun in particular is thought by many to be a particularly weak candidate, capable of losing that open seat to Democrat Michelle Nunn if he emerges as the nominee. In Louisiana, Republicans had settled on a solid candidate to challenge Mary Landrieu, but Tea Partyer Rob Maness has jumped in with plenty of serious organizational support.
Granted, this early in the cycle, none of these candidates has (to my knowledge, at least) managed to embarrass himself by orating on rape. Nor have any of them yet revealed themselves as certified non-witches. Indeed, it’s so early that I don’t even know if they have a history of having said crazy things – although I suspect that Mississippi Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a former talk radio host, has furnished enough for a fat opposition research file.
Still, it appears to be no more distinguished of a crop than the 2010 and 2012 versions, and I strongly suspect they will begin to generate equally baroque sound bites as soon as the public portion of the campaign season begins. After all, we just had birther Dean Young, who provided plenty of entertainment if you enjoy politicians saying crazy things, come close to knocking off mainstream conservative Bradley Byrne in the Alabama 1 special election.
There’s nothing about being conservative, even extremely conservative, that would necessarily generate bad candidates. But it’s a mistake to interpret Tea Partyism as simply about being more conservative than mainstream Republicans. Instead, in practice, it’s basically turned out to be a cross between radicalism for the sake of radicalism, along with an extreme suspicion of elites. Which in turn has made it rather easy for hucksters and scam artists to convince Tea Party voters and activists that solid conservatives are really squishes and RINOs. There are no issue positions one can cling to that will prevent those charges; accusations of being insufficiently “conservative” in this atmosphere, to these voters, are impossible to refute.
Indeed, as we’ve seen with Ted Cruz, the very reaction to crazy things that Tea Party politicians say really is the best proof that they are actually True Conservatives.
Which doesn’t mean that Democrats are about to win a Senate seat in Mississippi (although they would be smart to at least get a plausible candidate on the ballot, just in case). But it does mean that we can expect more of the same from Tea Party candidates – perhaps even worse, since by this cycle, perhaps, raving against rape will be too old hat to get condemned by Rachel Maddow, and therefore not sufficient to establish one’s True Conservative credentials.
And therefore, expect Republicans to continue to give away elections they could have won – and to prove incapable of governing in many cases when they do win. The dysfunctional Republican Party isn’t getting better any time soon.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Nation, November 9, 2013
“An Obvious Problem”: Chris Christie Needs Republicans To Have A Terrible 2014
I wouldn’t say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016—though, like Ross Douthat, I’m not sure who could beat him—but it is true that he is the official candidate of the GOP establishment. And, with a reelection coalition of Republicans, Democrats, young people, Latinos, and African Americans, Christie stands as the only potential presidential nominee that can claim a credible path to victory.
It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, to learn that his rivals are already throwing shade in his direction. NBC News has a good round-up of the Republican presidential contenders who have opened fire on the New Jersey governor:
Even after the disaster of the shutdown and Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race, the operating assumption of right-wing Republicans is that success will come when conservatives take a doctrinaire approach to their ideology. The available evidence makes clear that this isn’t true—Ted Cruz, for instance, won his election, but he underperformed Romney—but this doesn’t matter to either the GOP base or lawmakers like Cruz.
This poses an obvious problem for Christie. Insofar that his message of electability has any chance of resonating with Republican primary voters, it will be because they have given up the quest for purity, and are desperate to win, which means that, for Christie, the best thing that could happen is for Republicans to have a terrible 2014. If the GOP continues down its path of extremism, and loses its shot at capturing the Senate as a result, Christie has perfect ground for making his pitch.
Unfortunately for him, the more likely outcome is that Republicans do pretty well. The combination of a sluggish economy and voter discontent will hurt incumbents, which threatens the Democratic majority in the Senate and precludes the party from making real gains in the House. And a GOP base that does well—or even okay—in next year’s midterms is one that doesn’t have much interest in Christie’s message.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, November 7, 2014
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