“A Stew Of Resentment And Hatred”: Republicans Say Obama Has Been Historically Divisive. That’s Very, Very Revealing
There’s no doubt that when historians assess the Obama presidency, they will pay a great deal of attention to the deep political divisions within the country, and how those divisions shaped political events. There are racial divisions, class divisions, and, most of all, political divisions. Within Congress, for instance, the parties have been moving apart for the last 40 years, as fewer and fewer moderates get elected and the median of both parties moves toward the edge. But the reality is that while Democrats have moved left, Republicans have been moving right much more sharply — a fact not only established by political science but evident to anyone remotely familiar with Capitol Hill.
Yet Republicans are sure that the fault for all this — long-term trends and recent developments alike — can be laid at the feet of Barack Obama, who is terribly, appallingly, despicably divisive.
If we are divided, it’s only because Obama has divided us. “We have not seen such a divisive figure in modern American history” as Barack Obama, Marco Rubio said in 2012. Four years later, his opinion hasn’t changed; last week he tweeted, “This president has been the single most divisive political figure this country has had over the last decade.” After Obama’s recent State of the Union address, Ted Cruz fumed, “He lectures us on civility yet has been one of the most divisive presidents in American history.” Or as one Republican congressman said last week, “There probably has not been a more racially-divisive, economic-divisive president in the White House since we had presidents who supported slavery.” You won’t find too many Republicans who would disagree.
Yet if you spend some time investigating what evidence Republicans offer when they call Obama divisive, what you find is not actually evidence at all, but their own skewed interpretations of events. “He says ‘It’s my way or the highway’ on legislation!”, they charge — although he doesn’t actually say that. It’s just that he has a different legislative agenda than they do. “He crammed ObamaCare down our throats!” — this is a sentence that has been written and spoken a thousand times (just Google it for yourself). Back on Planet Earth, the Affordable Care Act spent over a year going through endless hearings, floor speeches, and debates, and in the end passed the House and Senate and was signed by the president, which you may recall is how a bill becomes a law.
Here’s the truth: You might like Barack Obama or you might not; you might think he has been a good president or a bad one. But the idea that blame for the political divisions we confront lies solely or even primarily at his door is positively deranged.
Let’s just remind ourselves of how Republicans have treated Obama over his seven years in office, with a few of the greatest hits. You can start right on the day of his inauguration, when congressional Republicans gathered for a dinner at which they decided that rather than seek areas of cooperation with the new president, they would employ a strategy of maximum confrontation and obstruction in order to deny him any legislative victories.
They followed through on this plan. As Mitch McConnell explained proudly in 2010, “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny Barack Obama a second term.”
At Obama’s speech in front of Congress in 2009, a Republican member of the House, acting like a drunk frat boy in a comedy club, decided to heckle him, shouting “You lie!” In the time since, conservative Republicans have regularly acted as though Obama is presumptuous for even acting like the president; they’ve suggested things like not inviting him to deliver the SOTU, or depriving him of the use of Air Force One.
And then there’s the question of how they explain it when Obama does things they don’t like. Before you protest that Obama himself sometimes questions his opponents’ motives, it’s important to realize that when he does so, it’s in a narrow way focused on the issue at hand — they really want to cut taxes for the wealthy, they don’t think women ought to have access to abortion, they’re too eager to start a new war, and so on — to explain their behavior at a particular moment. What he doesn’t do, and what he has never done, is accuse them of hating their country. But this is something Republicans have done constantly — not once or twice, not a dozen times or even a hundred, but constantly for seven years.
“I do not believe that the president loves America,” said Rudy Giuliani last year, in a statement notable only for being a tad more explicit than the way Republicans usually talk about this question.”He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” Often they will argue that the policies they disagree with are part of a secret plan of Obama’s to hamper, diminish, or even destroy the country. Among the things said in the last debate by Marco Rubio — supposedly the reasonable establishment candidate — were that Obama “believes that America is an arrogant global power that needs to be cut down to size,” that when elected in 2008 he “didn’t want to fix America,” that he “doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” and that he “doesn’t believe in the free enterprise system.”
In fact, any time you hear a Republican begin a sentence with “Barack Obama believes…” it’s an absolute guarantee that what follows will be an utter lie about how Obama doesn’t accept the basic values nearly all Americans agree on, that his ideas are alien and threatening. As Newt Gingrich said in 2010, “What if he is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
Their voters believe it — indeed, many if not most of them believe that Obama is not American at all. A recent poll by the Democratic firm PPP found that only 29 percent of Republicans would grant that the president is an American citizen. A majority of Republicans also believe he is a Muslim; in other words, that when he goes to church or talks about his Christian beliefs, he’s just lying. Polls have shown similar findings for much of his presidency. A poll by the same firm just after the 2012 election showed 49 percent of Republicans saying ACORN stole the election for Obama (which would have been quite a feat, since the organization ceased to exist in 2010).
They don’t get these ideas from nowhere. They get them from the leading lights of the GOP, the politicians and media figures who tell them day in and day out that Obama hates them and hates America, and that he is a black nationalist whose policy proposals are about exacting reparations from whites for imaginary racial sins of the past.
If you’re even a marginally aware conservative, you’ve been marinating for seven years in this toxic stew of resentment and hatred. So no one should be surprised that this year Republican voters are angry. But that’s Obama’s fault too, of course — you might have heard many of them blame the fact that their party has been taken over by a xenophobic blowhard on, you guessed it, Barack Obama.
Yes, it was terribly poor manners of him to make them hate him so, to bring out such ugliness in Republicans. But what choice did they have? And this is the best explanation for their argument that Obama is so terribly divisive: it’s projection. They’re blaming him for their own shortcomings, their own misdeeds, the political divisions that they have worked so hard to exacerbate.
“It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency,” Obama said in his State of the Union address this year, “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide.” Maybe, but probably not.
Obama could have invited more Republicans to play golf with him, or invested more time trying to convince them that the Affordable Care Act was a good idea. But would those things — or anything he might have done — really changed how they acted? The party who wouldn’t work with him on any legislation, who shut down the government, who vilified him from the moment he took office, who literally made him show his birth certificate to prove he’s an American? Not a chance.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, January 19, 2016
“The GOP Sounds Of Silence”: From ‘Where Are The Jobs?’ To ‘Where Are Republicans On Jobs?’
The economic news on Friday was even better than optimists expected: the United States added nearly 300,000 jobs in December, wrapping up the second best year for the American job market in over a decade. In fact, looking at the last two years combined, 2014 and 2015 were the best back-to-back years for job creation since 1998 and 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom.
While no mainstream American politicians publicly root against the U.S. economy, the fact remains that this strong job growth must be baffling to Republicans. GOP orthodoxy, repeated ad nauseam, is that President Obama’s domestic agenda – the Affordable Care Act, higher taxes on the wealthy, Wall Street regulations, environmental safeguards, et al – is crushing the economy and stifling the American job market.
The only way to put Americans back to work, Republicans insist, is to do the exact opposite of the policies that cut the unemployment rate from 10% to 5%.
Obviously, that’s a tough sell for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the facts, but it got me wondering: how exactly did Republican officials and candidates respond to Friday’s good news?
When I say they reacted to jobs report with silence, it’s important to stress that I’m being quite literal. For years, the Republicans’ economic line was, “Where are the jobs?” With over 14 million new private-sector jobs created in the last 70 months, the new, more salient question has become, “Where are the Republicans on jobs?”
Over the weekend, for example, I checked House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) official blog, which used to publish a statement with the release of every new jobs report. Friday, however, featured plenty of new content, none of which referenced the job numbers.
The Republican National Committee’s official blog also used to issue once-a-month press releases on unemployment, but on Friday it said nothing. The same is true of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ Twitter feed.
There was similar silence from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the Senate Republican leadership team.
How about the presidential candidates? Nothing from Donald Trump. Or Ted Cruz. Or Marco Rubio. Or Jeb Bush. Or Chris Christie.
Look, I don’t expect GOP presidential candidates to issue a statement celebrating President Obama’s successes in putting Americans back to work after the Great Recession. And I certainly don’t imagine Republicans are going to announce a plan to reevaluate all of their bogus assumptions about Obama’s agenda and the economy.
But we’ve reached the point at which Republicans no longer seem interested in talking about job creation at all. It’s as if they hope ignoring the issue altogether will keep people from noticing one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the job market in a generation – which might even work, since much of the political world barely stopped to notice Friday’s jobs report.
Republicans could say the good news will be even better if they’re elected. They could celebrate strong job growth and make the case that Obama deserves no credit. They could say something about the issue that, up until quite recently, dominated the political debate like no other.
But for now, it seems the GOP has decided the easiest course of action is to pretend the good news on jobs simply doesn’t exist. Up until fairly recently, such a scenario would have been hard to even imagine.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 11, 2016
“Turn Off The Money And Turn Up The Pressure”: When Will Corporate America Confront Republican Climate Denial?
Much as the world must hope that the governments assembled in Paris achieve their objectives, at the very least they have provided an occasion for business leaders of all descriptions to announce their commitment to climate sanity. With sponsorships, pledges, and official statements, a long list of major corporations has declared that man-made climate change is real and must be reversed to save the earth — and their profits.
Easy as it is to lampoon the professions of these corporate leaders, there should be little doubt that some and perhaps most are sincere. They’re sentient human beings, after all, whose children and grandchildren will have no choice but to live on this endangered planet. They say that is why they’ve publicly expressed support for successful negotiations in Paris and promised to reduce carbon emissions while using and investing in clean energy.
According to the White House, many of those firms have made still more stringent vows, to cut emissions by 50 percent, to reduce water waste by as much as 80 percent, to send no more solid waste to landfills, to purchase only renewable power, and to stop causing deforestation. All of which sounds marvelous and necessary – but what would American corporations do if they really, truly, seriously wanted to stop climate change?
They would do what they do whenever they want to influence any important policy change, of course: Deny financing to political forces on the other side, and deploy their enormous lobbying clout against those forces.
Today, that would mean giving not another dime to House and Senate Republicans – or to any Republican presidential candidate who denies climate realities and insists on reversing President Obama’s current initiatives.
As a matter of policy, the Republican Party obstructs any serious effort to prevent catastrophic climate change. And because the United States is still the largest carbon polluter per capita in the world — and now the second largest in absolute terms – Republican obstruction has worldwide consequences. Just this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell barked an ominous warning to the world leaders meeting in Paris, saying that the next GOP president could simply “tear up” all of Obama’s efforts to diminish power-plant pollution.
The myopic McConnell (whose home state of Kentucky produces dirty coal), has gone even further, sending his aides to foreign embassies with the message that none of America’s international partners can rely on commitments made by Obama in Paris. Unfortunately, McConnell’s irresponsible conduct is merely typical of his party’s leadership.
But the Republican hostility to climate science is a minority viewpoint in the United States, as polling data has demonstrated clearly for years. Two out of three Americans view climate change as a global menace and support a binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. More than half want the United States to lead the world in dealing with that threat. Even a majority of Republican voters understand that an overheating planet is dangerous, and support the power-plant regulations that McConnell and his Senate caucus oppose.
Republican Congressional leaders in both houses know they can continue to lie and deny on climate, so long as the nation’s business leaders fail to demand change. Although they will always collect millions from ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, and assorted fossil fuel profiteers, they might begin to worry if other economic interests that have traditionally supported them suddenly turned off the money and turned on the pressure.
From Goldman Sachs to General Mills, from Microsoft to Monsanto to McDonalds, scores of major companies have signed the White House’s American Business Act on Climate Change Pledge. By doing so they affirmed support for “action on climate change and the conclusion of a climate change agreement in Paris that takes a strong step forward toward a low-carbon, sustainable future.”
Companies like these have huge lobbying, political action, public relations, and advertising budgets – and all of them could well afford to spend even more on such a crucial issue.
No doubt they would risk trouble with the Congressional Republicans if they took strong political action on climate. But they claim to believe their future at stake, along with the future of generations to come. So if they wish to accomplish more than green-washing their reputations, then the time is surely coming when the corporate environmentalists will have to confront the Republican Party – or be exposed as frauds.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post; The National Memo, December 4, 2015
“New ‘Select Committee’ On Planned Parenthood”: Where Do GOP Investigations Of Planned Parenthood Go Now?
The shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs on Friday was a vivid reminder that the organization isn’t just a political lightning rod for conservatives who oppose abortion rights. It’s also under constant threat of harassment and violence from radical anti-abortion advocates, ranging from hate mail and vandalism all the way up to arson, bombings, and in a few cases, the murder of clinic staff or patients.
The Colorado attack comes at a time when the Republican Congress is trying to figure out new ways to go after the group. So where will those efforts go now?
At the moment, we don’t have direct confirmation that Robert Dear, the alleged killer, was motivated by objections to abortion. What we do know is that, according to anonymous law enforcement sources, he said “no more baby parts” to officials, which would be a clear reference to the “sting” videos created by an anti-abortion group showing Planned Parenthood personnel discussing the transfer of fetal tissue to researchers. (Though many have charged that the videos show Planned Parenthood “selling baby parts,” that is not in fact true. The organization only accepts small reimbursements on the order of $50 or so to cover their costs when making these transfers, and the videos don’t show them doing anything different.)
In any case, the important context to understand is that Planned Parenthood has almost never not been under attack, both from violent extremists and from Republicans in Congress who would like to see the organization disappear, or at least deprive it of the Medicaid reimbursements it gets for things like pap smears and cancer screenings (no government money can go to fund abortions). The nature and intensity of that assault ebbs and flows, but a confluence of events has caused the attack in Colorado Springs to get even more attention than it otherwise would have.
After those videos were released, Republican presidential candidates began condemning Planned Parenthood in unusually vituperative terms, accusing the group of murder and all manner of other crimes. Their colleagues in Congress saw an opportunity to renew what had been a sporadic attack on the group, so they mounted multiple investigations in an attempt to find something they could use as a justification for cutting off the group’s Medicaid reimbursements. When the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s lengthy grilling of Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards not only didn’t prove any wrongdoing but made the Republicans on the committee look foolish, outgoing Speaker John Boehner announced the creation of a Benghazi-style committee to investigate the organization.
The idea, as it seems to be in most congressional investigations Republicans launch, is that while they don’t really know what they’re looking for, if they look hard enough then they’ll find something that can be used against Planned Parenthood. And it’s possible they will, though there isn’t actually much reason to think so. If they do find something that sounds problematic, it will suddenly become the one aspect of the abortion issue Republicans care about above all others.
Don’t forget that before those videos came out and Republicans decided that “selling baby parts!” was a handy tool that could be used to bludgeon the group, they weren’t crusading to end fetal tissue research. Some of them even supported it; notably, Mitch McConnell voted for the law that allowed such research to take place. They’ve shown no interest in any new law changing the regulations covering how that research is conducted. If any of the presidential candidates who were in such high dudgeon over the videos have a plan to outlaw fetal tissue research, I haven’t heard about it.
The truth is that Republicans don’t despise Planned Parenthood because they genuinely believe the organization is breaking the law. They despise it because they despise abortion rights, and also because Planned Parenthood’s political activities support Democrats. It’s not complicated.
And now we have a situation where the Colorado murders help establish a context in which further “investigations” of Planned Parenthood in Congress will take place. Will the group’s advocates bring up those murders again and again, arguing that clinic violence and congressional harassment are all parts of the same animal? You bet they will. That won’t change Republicans’ desire to go after Planned Parenthood, but it might make them a little hesitant about doing so, at least until memories have a chance to fade.
The Benghazi committee has been going for a year and a half, and shows no sign of ever wrapping up its work so long as there’s some miniscule chance it might find something incriminating on Hillary Clinton. So Republicans might just make their select committee on Planned Parenthood semi-permanent, even if they put it on the back burner for a while.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, November 30, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 