“Republicans Rant But Offer No Solutions”: There’s A Contest Among Republicans To See Who Can Be More Shameless And Irresponsible
Apparently there’s a contest among Republicans to see who can be more shameless and irresponsible in criticizing President Obama’s foreign policy. So far, Chris Christie is winning.
The New Jersey governor alleged Saturday that “the unrest you see in the Middle East is caused in some measure — not completely, but in some measure — by the fact that this president has not acted in a decisive, consistent way.”
If you disregard the rantings of unserious provocateurs such as Sarah Palin, Christie’s attack represents a new low. He accuses the president of the United States of actually being responsible “in some measure” for violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shiites, dictators and rebels — conflicts and antagonisms that began, I seem to recall, well before Obama took office in January 2009.
One might assume that Christie offered specific ideas about what Obama should be doing differently. Nope.
The president should be “trying to bring stability to that region by having America be a forceful voice in favor of a democracy like Israel and be condemning, in the strongest terms and in actions, the things that are being done by Hamas against Israel.” All of which Obama has already done.
Asked whether Obama should take some kind of military action in the region, Christie answered, “I’m not going to give opinions on that. I’m not the president.”
Very helpful, Governor. Please return to your intensive study of traffic patterns on the George Washington Bridge.
Other Republicans who, like Christie, are running for president offer equally vague and useless criticisms of Obama’s policies in the Middle East and around the world. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who’s going for the bookish intellectual look these days — he has started wearing glasses and stopped wearing cowboy boots — wrote an op-ed in The Post on Saturday accusing Obama of “confused leadership and passivity” that “enabled groups such as the Islamic State to grow.”
What exactly, in Perry’s view, did Obama do wrong? We’ll never know, I guess, because “the window to shape events for the better passed years ago.” It would have been helpful had Perry let us know at the time he saw that window passing, or perhaps closing, or something.
Perry does suggest there is still time for the United States to provide “meaningful assistance” in Iraq and Syria, including “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sharing and airstrikes.” But he neglects to specify whom we should meaningfully assist: one of the also-ran rebel groups in Syria, the sectarian Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, the Islamic theocracy in Iran . . .
In fairness, Perry’s prime target wasn’t Obama. He was aiming at Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose “isolationist” policies Perry sees as a potentially grave threat to our national security. The fact that Paul also poses a potentially grave threat to Perry’s presidential ambitions — he leads most polls for the GOP nomination — is pure coincidence, I’m sure.
Paul responded Monday with an op-ed in Politico, saying of Perry that “apparently his new glasses haven’t altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly.” He notes that during the 2012 campaign, Perry advocated sending troops “back into Iraq” to counter the growing influence of Iran — but now seems to advocate helping Iran against the Islamic State extremists.
In the Politico piece, Paul refrains from gratuitous criticism of Obama. But in a National Review essay this month, Paul blasted the White House for urging Israel to show “restraint” in responding to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers.
Paul called for a cutoff of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority. He should be smart enough to understand that this would only strengthen the position of Hamas. But perhaps his real aim is to dispel the notion that he is insufficiently pro-Israel.
The Republican critique of Obama’s foreign policy that has achieved the most traction — undeservedly so, in my view — comes from a non-candidate: Mitt Romney. The basic thrust: “I told you so.”
But what was Romney so right about, except the blindingly obvious? That a large, permanent U.S. residual force in Iraq could have prevented the gains by the Islamic State? Of course, but the American public didn’t support keeping troops there and the Iraqi government said no. That it would be better if the “moderate” rebels were winning in Syria? Certainly, but shaping the outcome of that multi-sided civil war would require a robust intervention.
People who see easy options really should have their eyes checked.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 14, 2014
“A Good Time To Count Our Blessings”: Imagine The Iraq Crisis–But With A GOP President At War With Iran
As Iraq spirals deeper into a sectarian crisis between an ineffectual Shi’ite government and radical Sunni militants, the importance of a grudging working relationship between the United States and Iran has never been of greater importance. Without some Iranian help, Iraq’s central government will likely fall apart and the nation will be overrun by extremists potentially as dangerous as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan ever was.
So today would be a good time to count our blessings that we do not have this man as president:
John McCain: “You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
Or this one:
Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said he would “bring the current policy of procrastination to an end.” “Hope is not a foreign policy,” Romney said. “The only thing respected by thugs and tyrants is our resolve.”
Or this one:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also addressing the group by satellite, said in his administration, “we would not keep talking while the Iranians keep building.” He said the “red line” was not when Iran was ready to detonate a nuclear bomb. “The red line is now” because the Iranians are “deepening their commitment to nuclear weapons while we talk,” Gingrich said. “It is an unacceptable risk.”
Here is what the President said after Romney, Gingrich and others were getting their war talk on:
“These folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities,” the president said. He said he was struck by the “casualness” of the way his political opponents talk about war. “I’m reminded of the costs involved in war.”
No kidding. If a Republican had been elected President in either 2008 or 2012, we would likely be at hot war with Iran by now or at the very least on the edge of it. This would have further weakened the Shi’ite position in Baghdad even as Syria devolved into the nightmare that has been helping to fuel ISIS, the Sunni extremists. The entire Middle East would be in abject chaos, with potentially nuclear consequences.
A McCain or Romney presidency would have been a foreign policy disaster that would have made George W. Bush look like a skilled statesman and general, and it would have cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal, The Washington Times, June 28, 2014
“Congress Does Nothing But Sue Obama”: Boehner’s Obama Lawsuit Is The Fault Of The Do-Nothing Congress
House Republicans are so angry that President Obama has been going around them to make policy that Speaker John Boehner says he will file a lawsuit against Obama to stop what the GOP sees as abuse of executive power. Said Boehner:
The Constitution makes it clear that a president’s job is to faithfully execute the laws. In my view, the president has not faithfully executed the laws. When there are conflicts like this between the legislative branch and the administrative branch, it’s … our responsibility to stand up for this institution.
Hello, pot? It’s the kettle calling. You’re black.
Boehner’s right in that the executive branch has been driving policy changes – even ones around the edges – and often using executive orders to do it. Obama is not the only president to do this, and it’s understandable that Congress would be irked at not being made a part of the process.
What rings hollow here is that Congress has aggressively chosen not to be part of the process. The 113th Congress is the least effective Congress in recent history, unable to get even basic budget and appropriations items, let alone a comprehensive immigration bill or entitlement reform. This Congress, and the House in particular, has made it a mission to oppose pretty much anything Obama wants to do (even, in some cases, where what Obama wants to do is not that dissimilar to what a lot of Republicans say they want). That’s their right, but it’s not rational for them to expect Obama to just sit by, throw up his hands and say, “oh, well – I guess I just won’t have any impact on the nation, even though I’m president.” (Though that would serve a Republican goal, too, giving them fodder to call Obama “weak” and “ineffective.”)
And it’s not as though the legislative branch hasn’t tried to flex its muscles and push around other branches of government . The House, in the past, has considered legislation that says, in the text, that the law cannot be subject to judicial review. Another bill would force another branch of government, the Supreme Court, to allow cameras in the room during oral arguments – something the high court doesn’t want and sees as a legislative branch encroachment on its day-to-day workings.
And is Obama really the only “kinglike” figure here? Mitt Romney, in the 2012 campaign, repeatedly pledged to undo Obamacare – a law written by Congress and passed by Congress – by executive order on his first day in office. Obama has been fiddling with enforcement and application of laws and regulations administered by the executive branch. Romney wanted to undo an entire law, just because it was approved by people who were duly elected by their constituents but with whom Romney does not agree. Rick Santorum, running in 2012, listed nine executive orders he planned to issue to undo laws of the land relating to abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage. He also pledged to call on Congress to abolish the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court whose rulings Santorum did not like.
Power abhors a vacuum. And if Congress categorically refuses to participate in the law-making process, it can’t expect other branches to follow suit. The Supreme Court has had a major role recently in public policy, especially issues such as gay marriage. It’s not because nine justices are sitting in a room, wringing their collective hands in a menacing way while laughing evilly. It’s because the legislative and executive branches have been unable to work together and recognize each other’s authority.
So some in Congress think Obama is taking too much power in the way he does his job. Maybe if Congress would do its job, there would be no problem.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, June 26, 2014
“Just Like Us”: Obama’s Iraq ‘Nap’ Represents Who We Are; Sick Of Being The World’s Policeman
Conservative critics of Barack Obama’s foreign policy are right: it’s vague when articulated and contradictory when enacted. He refuses to act decisively and tunes out the rhetorical bravado of foreign leaders. And if the United States is to avoid another round of pointless bloodshed in the Middle East, that’s the kind of foreign policy our country needs right now. Indeed, it’s the one we want.
On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Mitt Romney added to the existing critique of Obama as feckless-bordering-on-fey. The president, his former challenger asserted, was not just ineffectual in his stance toward Iraq and Syria – he was also ignorant. The president, said the former one-term governor of Massachusetts, has “repeatedly underestimated the threats” posed by chaos in Iraq – or “Russia or Assad or Isis or al-Qaida itself”.
The terror that has gripped Iraq over the past week is, no doubt, horrific. When militants claim they’ve massacred 1,700 soldiers, it would be foolish not to give yourself options by moving an aircraft carrier here and toughening up an embassy there – which Obama has done, actively, not through “neglect” or “a nap”, as still more critics claimed over the weekend.
But let’s remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn’t by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was by overestimating it.
“Overestimating” may even be too generous. We created a threat when there was none, not out of whole cloth so much as a web of pride, avarice and insecurity. Obama’s haters on the right – and maybe even some formerly hawkish apologists on the left – need a refresher course on just how much of the Iraq invasion hinged on ego and imagined taunts. It wasn’t all about revenge for Daddy’s loss. Don’t forget the perception in the Bush White House that the president was “weak” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: the frozen look as he read from My Pet Goat, the hours of hop-scotching around the country, out of sight, as the carnage and panic continued to unfold.
It was Bush’s improvisation of macho defiance – in those moments following his 9/11 lapse into visible doubt – that created the blueprint for these wars that have refused to end. The declaration that the US would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them” was made in a speech given less than twelve hours after the first tower was hit. Today, we call that formulation the Bush Doctrine, though anything so hastily conceived hardly merits the title of “doctrine”.
Governments are supposed to be slower to act than people. They are supposed to filter our instinctive desires, not jump on them. It is probably not a coincidence that support for the death penalty in America is at a record low as well. The state’s power to take a life is democracy’s most dubious gift. We have learned that the hard way.
That the Bush administration misled the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq is now all but common knowledge; what we talk about less is why Americans were moved so easily from concern about possible attacks from overseas into almost pornographic nationalism.
Clearly, we were intoxicated by some heady perfume of testosterone and saddle leather that pulled along George W Bush by the nose. When the Iraq war began, nearly 80% of Americans thought it was a good idea. Almost as many approved of how the president was handling it. Irrational exuberance is not just for markets.
How we have sobered since then!
A record high number of people (53%) believe that America is “less powerful and less important than it was ten years ago”; the percentage of those who believe that America should “mind its own business internationally” (52%) is the highest it’s been in 50 years. And support for specific foreign interventions is as wobbly as the reasoning for undertaking them: only 25% of Americans supported air strikes on Syria; just 14% approved of a Nato-led military action in the Ukraine.
The existing members of the GOP leadership, whether visiting Romney’s weekend retreat or a Sunday show set on their way to re-intervention, might well wonder where that reliably woozy patriotism has gone. Certainly, Republicans haven’t developed a tolerance. They sniff the air and howl: “This is another 9/11 in the making,” Lindsey Graham said Sunday on CNN, three days after saying “we’ve got another Benghazi in the making here”. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon blustered: “The White House has a history of ‘considering all options’ while choosing none.”
Would that Bush have been so indecisive.
The mistake by Republicans – and it is one they make in all sorts of situations – is that they confuse a desire for small government and more individual freedom with a government that acts like an individual. They project onto government the desires and fears that animate a person; in the imagination of Republicans “the government” wants all kinds of things: your guns, for instance. And when Republicans have one of their own in the White House, it pleases them to think that he doesn’t just represent the country but is the country.
Perhaps it is a function of having a president who is so radically (including, yes, racially) different from all the ones who came before that Americans seem comfortable with – or at least have accepted the fact of – some distance between who they are, who the president is, and that for which the country stands. It is most certainly a function of having seen so many lives lost, but the American people are comfortable with inaction. Barack Obama’s foreign policy is less of a doctrine than a stance – guarded but cautious, careful but alert … just like us.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, June 16, 2014
“The Great Benghazi Scandal Gets Sillier”: Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto; Well, You Know The Rest
You say potato and I say potahto,
You say tomato and I say tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto:
Let’s call the whole thing off.
–George and Ira Gershwin
Here’s how unreal the Great Benghazi Scandal had already grown as of last year. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler devoted an entire May 2013 column to the scholastic question of whether President Obama’s calling the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. Consulate in Libya an “act of terror” was the same as calling it an “act of terrorism,” as he’d recently claimed.
Kessler pondered the deep semantic differences between the two phrases before awarding Obama a full four “Pinocchios,” signifying a “whopper.” Seriously. That’s the big cover-up House Republicans pretend they’re outraged about.
Obama’s exact words, from the White House Rose Garden on the day after the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his security team:
No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.
So who was Obama trying to deceive? People who hadn’t seen the smoking ruins on TV? And about what? Kessler doesn’t say. Only that the two phrases don’t signify precisely the same thing — a distinction without a difference in any realistic political context.
It will be recalled that GOP nominee Mitt Romney executed one of the clumsiest pratfalls in presidential debate history for mistakenly challenging Obama on this exact point. Had the president, or had he not, described the Benghazi disaster as an “act of terror?”
Obama cooly urged his rival to consult the transcript. In fact, he’d used the phrase several times. Had the Washington political press not had so much invested in a “cliffhanger” election narrative, Romney’s blunder would have been compared to President Gerald Ford’s denying Soviet influence in Poland during a 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter.
But then this is the great mystery confronting non-initiates in the great GOP Benghazi cult. What on earth are these people going on about? That if Obama had said “act of terrorism” instead of “act of terror,” Americans would have punished his failure to eliminate jihadists from the face of the earth by turning to Mitt “47 percent” Romney?
That everything would be different if UN Ambassador Susan Rice had cast aside White House “talking points” about inflammatory videos on the Sunday political chat shows and candidly confessed that “[w]hether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself…is one of the things we’ll have to determine?”
Because those were Rice’s exact words, block copied from the transcript of CBS’s Sept. 16, 2012 Face the Nation broadcast in response to a direct question from Bob Schieffer about al Qaeda involvement.
Everybody now pretends she named no terrorist groups, for the sake of keeping the make-believe scandal alive.
It follows that contrary to everything you hear from partisan mischief makers and their helpers among the Washington press, the Obama White House has never sought to deny the obvious: that the kinds of religious zealots who bring rocket-propelled grenade launchers to street demonstrations didn’t simply find them lying around in the bazaar.
The original CIA talking points released 11 months ago said pretty much what Ambassador Rice said: that outrage at a crude, American-made video mocking Islam sparked violent protests across much of the Middle East, and that militants took advantage of the resulting chaos for their own bloody purposes. The exact identity of those responsible isn’t yet known.
See, out there in the real world, it doesn’t always have to be either/or. Most often it’s both/and: armed terrorist groups and a provocative video. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released last January sharply criticized the State Department, but also concluded “that the attack was not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
David D. Kirkpatrick’s masterful reporting in The New York Times established that the anti-western Libyan militia Ansar Al-Sharia had long had the consulate under surveillance, although “[a]nger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters….A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him.”
However, a 2012 White House email has recently emerged, re-stating CIA talking points in somewhat different language. So big deal.
They’ll be singing all summer: Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
Well, you know the rest.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, May 7, 2014
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