“It’s Getting A Bit Old”: Conservatives Condemn Weak Weakness Of Weakling Obama
Am I the only one seeing a new sense of purpose in the old neoconservative crowd, an almost joyful welcoming of a good old-fashioned Cold War showdown with the Russkies? Nobody’s saying they don’t love the War on Terror, but let’s be honest, it’s getting a bit old. Best to forget all about Iraq, and Afghanistan isn’t much better. That jerk Barack Obama ended up getting Osama bin Laden, which was—well, let’s be kind and call it bittersweet. But this Ukraine thing is just like old times. It’s us against them, a battle of the big boys! Well, sort of anyway. So now is the time for action! Aren’t there some missiles we can move into Turkey or something?
Ukraine is providing a great opportunity for the muscle-bound manly men of the right, who are totally not overcompensating so shut up, to demonstrate how tough and strong they are. Action!, they demand. Not words! We have to show Putin who’s boss! He thinks we’re weak! Obama is weak! We must be strong! Strong strong strong!
One big problem when you’re demanding strength is that there’s only so much we can do to affect this situation if we aren’t actually willing to start World War III (back in the day, seeming willing to start World War III was an essential component of our strategy). So you see things like Marco Rubio strongly demanding “8 Steps Obama Must Take to Punish Russia,” and they’re, well, pretty weak. There’s “speak[ing] unequivocally,” introducing a UN (!) resolution, sending Secretary of State Kerry to Kiev (which Obama is doing), and my favorite, holding up the confirmation of Rose Gottemoeller to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. That’ll show ’em! Sure, Gottemoeller is already serving as acting Under Secretary, but just imagine when Putin picks up his copy of Pravda and sees that Gottemoeller will have to have that “acting” before her title for a few more months. He’ll crush the paper in his hands and bellow with rage. “Damn you, Americans! You will pay for this!”
But never mind that. In the last couple of days, Republicans have been united in their conviction that this whole thing is happening for one reason and one reason only: Barack Obama is weak. Let’s look at just a few examples:
- “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression,” says the strong and decisive Lindsey Graham.
- Representative Tom Cotton says this is happening because Putin was “Emboldened by President Obama’s trembling inaction.”
- Here’s Jonathan Tobin in Commentary: “Obama, Ukraine, and the Price of Weakness.”
- Here’s Heritage Foundation chief Jim DeMint instructing Obama that “Weak statements, history has proven, only invite aggression,” also noting that Obama has “plans to neuter our military might.” Nothing Freudian going on there.
- Here’s Charles Krauthammer: “The Ukrainians, and I think everybody, is shocked by the weakness of Obama’s statement.”
- Here’s a former Bush administration official writing in the Washington Times: “There is no substitute for strength in world affairs, and regrettably, this White House seems to prefer projecting weakness.”
- William Kristol, neocon extraordinaire, stands in awe of Putin’s manly decisiveness, and laments that under Obama, we will “be all talk, no action.”
- Here’s another conservative dude, writing in Forbes: “Leonid Brezhnev would not have ordered the invasion of Afghanistan if he had sized up Jimmy Carter as a strong president. Vladimir Putin would not be invading Ukraine if he thought that Barack Obama had a backbone.”
And there you can feel the ghost looming over this affair, history’s manliest man: Ronald Reagan. If Reagan were here, the conservatives know, he’d march right over to the Kremlin, give Putin a steely stare and say, “You got a problem, mister?” Putin would take one look in those strong, determined eyes, stare down at his shoes and say, “No sir, no problem,” then slink back to Siberia. Because that’s what happens when you’re strong. The whole world just bends to your will. Right?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 3, 2014
“The Buffoon Speaks Again”: John McCain Says Ignorant, Belligerent Things, Press Swoons
I’ll admit that I know next to nothing about Ukrainian politics. And when it comes to the current crisis there, I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how the United States could solve this problem, but that’s partly because the United States probably can’t solve this problem. My limited knowledge and lack of transformative ideas puts me on equal footing with John McCain. Yet for some reason, McCain is once again all over the news, now that the situation in Kiev is turning uglier by the hour. What does McCain have to say? Well, he believes that it’s all Barack Obama’s fault. “This is the most naive president in history,” he said, citing as evidence the fact that five years ago, the Obama administration said it wanted to “reset” relations with Russia. Got ’em there, John. Obviously, if a certain someone was president, and he’s not naming any names here, this whole thing could be wrapped up in an afternoon.
What does McCain actually think we should do about Ukraine? We’ll get to that in a moment. But if you had to sum up John McCain’s foreign policy beliefs in a single word, that word would probably be “Grrrr!” Whatever the situation is, McCain’s view is always that we should be tougher than whatever the White House is doing. This applies to both Republican and Democratic presidents. If we’re already bombing somebody, McCain’s answer to any challenge is that we should bomb harder. If we haven’t yet commenced action but are seriously thinking about it, he thinks we should start bombing. If we’re engaging in diplomacy, McCain thinks we should ditch all that talk, which is for pussies anyhow, and get “tough” with whoever it is that needs getting tough with.
That is, I promise you, the extent of the sophistication of McCain’s foreign policy thinking. Despite the fact that he is regularly lauded by the reporters who have worshipped him for so long as an “expert” in foreign policy with deep “knowledge” and “experience,” I have never heard him say a single thing that demonstrated any kind of understanding of any foreign country or foreign crisis beyond what you could have gleaned from watching a three-minute report on the Today show. And this one? Well, McCain’s got the solution: “This thing could easily spiral out of control into a major international crisis,” he says. “The first thing we need to do is impose sanctions on those people who are in leadership positions.” You mean, Senator, what the Obama administration already did? Or the ones they’re preparing with our EU allies?
Once somebody clues McCain in to that, you can bet he’ll come back and say that it isn’t tough enough, and we have to get tougher. And dozens of media outlets will run stories titled “McCain Calls for Tougher Stance Toward Ukraine,” as though he were some kind of wise and influential foreign policy voice, and not a buffoon.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 21, 2014
“It’s About The Guy In The White House”: The GOP Hypocrisy On Privacy And The Pill
I’m sure you chuckled at this weekend development as much as I did: At its winter meeting, the Republican National Committee, , passed a resolution condemning the NSA’s data-mining policy. The language about “unwarranted” government surveillance being an “intrusion on basic human rights” passed by voice vote, with only a few dissenters.
This is being read in the media as evidence for the party’s continuing turn away from war-mongery, Ari Fleischer-style, “watch what you say and do” Big Brotherism and toward a Pauline (as in Rand) libertarianism. And I wouldn’t deny that there’s something to that. The libertarian streak is very in vogue on the right, and neocons can’t seem to get Americans agitated about anything.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The passage of this resolution is mostly about the guy in the White House. If you want to try to tell me this was an act of principle by the RNC, then put Mitt Romney in the White House for a moment. Do you think the RNC would have considered such a resolution? Please. Reince Priebus would have had a stroke. He’d have quashed it in minutes. But with Barack Obama in the White House, the rules are different. The RNC passed this resolution to kick a little extra sand in Obama’s face.
This isn’t new of course, this rancid hypocritical sand-kicking, but it keeps getting worse, more comically transparent and more brazen. You may have read last week, for example, after Mike Huckabee’s birth-control throw down, that back in 2005 when he was Arkansas governor, Huckabee approved legislation requiring health-insurance plans in the state to cover contraceptive pills and devices. In fact, according to The Arkansas Times, Huckabee’s exemption for religious employers and organizations was narrower than the exemption in Obamacare.
So how did this policy go from being something a Southern Baptist fundamentalist could endorse to something that’s fodder for the next front in the culture war? What’s changed? Well, let’s see. It’s not that government is forcing insurers to pay for contraception. That’s what Huckabee approved in 2005. It’s not that contraception is different. True, we’ve had controversies in the past year about the age at which girls could have legal access to emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), but that has nothing to do with “Uncle Sugar” providing women with birth control, which was the crux of Huckabee’s lament. And besides that, it’s not as if ECPs [what does that stand for?] themselves are new—they’ve been legal for 15 years. It was George W. Bush’s FDA that changed ECPs from prescription-only to over-the-counter (for adult women), back in 2006.
No, those things aren’t very different. What’s different is who’s in the White House. What’s an acknowledgement of modern reality when a Republican is president becomes, with Obama as president, another manifestation of how he’s taking America straight to hell. If you believe the president is the Manchurian Candidate, acts that were once benign or ignorable take on a new and more sinister coloration.
Do liberals do this too in reverse? Sure, to some extent. But on the topic of the NSA and data mining, you certainly can’t say that liberals and Democrats have been silent. Many have been fierce critics of the administration, far more so than conservatives and Republicans, in fact. To the extent that Obama is changing his policies in these realms, it’s because of pressure from the left, not the right.
But now the GOP wants a piece of this action. I’m sure that to some extent the sentiment among the RNC members—national committee-people from across the country, many of them local politicos, few or none of them members of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment—is genuine. Most people don’t like the idea that the government has a log of their phone calls. It’s not exactly hard to get a bunch of conservative activists to cast a voice-vote against the government and against anything Obama is doing.
But proof of libertarian dominance in the GOP? Don’t buy it. If the Republicans nominate Rand Paul, then sure, they’ll keep sallying forth down the libertarian alley. But if they nominate a more conventional Republican who has ties to the neoconservative establishment, the delegates stand up at the 2016 convention and cheer their heads off every time that nominee talks about the homeland. And should that person become president, and do the same things Obama has done and worse…well, I wouldn’t be looking for any censorious RNC resolutions if I were you.
In the meantime, the thing to keep looking for is Republicans having no memory of LB09—Life Before 2009. It makes no difference what position the party or any individual Republican took before January 20 of that year. All that matters from their way of seeing things is that on January 20 of that year, everything changed. That’s the governing emotional reality of the GOP opposition, and it will remain so until the day the black guy leaves the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 27, 2014
“The Shot Not Heard”: How President Obama Left The Neocons Feeling Foolish
“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
–Winston Churchill, June 26, 1954
Before you make the mistake of taking President Obama’s most strident critics regarding the Syrian deal too seriously, ponder this: With few exceptions, those calling the Russian-American agreement to eliminate Bashar al-Assad’s nerve gas arsenal a capitulation, a sellout, and a shameful retreat also think bombing Damascus wouldn’t have been nearly enough.
Nothing short of a boots-on American invasion of Syria would have satisfied these jokers. Prominent among them is Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who views the diplomatic breakthrough as “an act of provocative weakness on America’s part.”
McCain, who has vigorously supported all nine of the nation’s last three wars on about 316 TV talk shows, is never happy unless the U.S. is attacking somebody. Only violent solutions strike him as realistic. That’s probably the single biggest reason he never became president.
Then there’s Eliot A. Cohen, founding father of the Project for a New American Century, a now-defunct Washington pressure group whose messianic schemes for a U.S. empire stretching from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan inspired the Iraq War. Featuring such luminaries as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, to these geniuses, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was only the beginning. Next on their agenda was Iran, in case you wonder why the mad ayatollahs have been tinkering with nukes.
So anyway, just as President Obama was getting ready to ask Congress to endorse a punitive strike against Syrian chemical weapon sites, Cohen published a Washington Post column scolding Americans for their cowardice. The families of the war dead, he allowed, were entitled to their sorrow.
“But for the great mass of the American public,” he wrote “for their leaders and the elites who shape public opinion, ‘war-weariness’ is unearned cant, unworthy of a serious nation and dangerous in a violent world…Americans can change the channel if they find the images too disturbing.”
Got that citizens? Shut up, pay your taxes and avert your eyes.
Next the Obama administration pulled a large Russian rabbit out of its hat, leaving the neocons feeling foolish. For all the hugger-mugger about “red lines” and the White House’s odd decision to position a naval task force within striking range of Damascus before deciding to ask congressional permission, the end result was nevertheless remarkable.
Clumsy? Definitely. But it’s not a Bruce Willis movie; it’s a foreign policy.
“By hook or by crook,” Kevin Drum writes “Obama (a) raised the issue of Assad’s chemical weapons to an international level, (b) got Vladimir Putin (!) to take a lead role in reining them in, (c) got Assad to join the chemical weapons ban and agree to give up his stockpiles, and (d) [did] it all while keeping military pressure as an active option, but without ever firing a shot.”
In other words, for all the nonsensical talk of “appeasement,” the very crafty President Putin and the Syrian dictator now own this deal. Meanwhile, U.S. military options remain unchanged. President Obama has bought himself considerable freedom of action.
Mike Tomasky has it right: “If Assad is mad enough to use [chemical weapons] again, Obama won’t mess with Congress or even Russia. He’ll be credited by most observers…for having shown restraint the first time, and more people will agree at that point that Assad must be punished.”
Then there’s Charles Krauthammer, the Post columnist who accuses Obama of “epic incompetence,” complaining that the Russians prefer to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. He worries that “Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean.”
Hmm… Isn’t something missing here? Let’s go to the maps. It’s roughly 900 miles from Tehran to Damascus via, oh yeah… Baghdad. See, it’s precisely the U.S. invasion of Iraq championed by Krauthammer and his chums that created this supposedly scary alliance. Sectarian strife among Sunni and Shiite Muslims has erupted there at irregular intervals for almost 1,400 years. Shouldn’t these brilliant thinkers have thought of that before now?
So what do the Russians want? In a word, stability. Unlike the U.S., Russia has a large Muslim minority. Roughly 1 in 6 Russians is Muslim. Like the Tsarnaev bothers of Boston, MA, nearly all are Sunni. What Putin definitely doesn’t want is Chechen separatists getting their hands on nerve gas. Driving overland, Syria’s roughly as close to Chechnya as to Iran.
Can Putin be trusted? To do what’s good for Russia, yes. As President Obama explained to George Stephanopoulos, the Cold War is over. “I don’t think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do,” he said. “But what I’ve also said to him directly is that we both have an interest in preventing chaos, we both have an interest in preventing terrorism. The situation in Syria right now is untenable.”
And he also quoted Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, September 18, 2013
“Where’s My War?”: Spoiling The War With Iran That GOP Hawks So Fervently Desire
Last week I predicted that a lot of conservatives would wind up opposing the president’s request for a use-of-force resolution aimed at limited objectives based on a revival of the ancient “no-win-war” meme: that only a big, brawling unlimited war based on imposing America’s will unilaterally is worth fighting. Now that the threat of a military strike is being explicitly linked to the possibility of a diplomatic solution, neocons and regular old-school defenders of the military-industrial complex look to be stampeding in that direction.
Mitch McConnell has released his draft speech opposing a use-of-force resolution, and it relies very heavily on the no-win-war meme (even if his real motives are inveterate Obama-hatred and fear of getting out of synch with his most crucial ally is his primary battle back home, Rand Paul).
On the deepest level, I think it comes down to a fundamentally different view of America’s role in the world. Unlike the President, I’ve always been a firm and unapologetic believer in the idea that America isn’t just another nation among many; that we’re exceptional. As I’ve said, I believe we have a duty, as a superpower without imperialistic aims, to help maintain an international order and balance of power that we and other allies have worked very hard on over the years.
This President, on the other hand, has always been a very reluctant Commander in Chief. We saw that in the rhetoric of his famous Cairo speech, and in speeches he gave in other foreign capitals in the early days of his administration. The tone, and the policies that followed, were meant to project a humbler, more withdrawn America … and, frankly, I’m hard pressed to see any of the good that’s come from it.
He goes on and on, but the bottom line is that he won’t support a limited war and doesn’t think this president is capable of anything else.
Since neocons like John McCain and Lindsey Graham were already furious at Obama for failing to commit fully to war in Syria, and stayed on the reservation only when the use-of-force resolution was amended to aim at a change of the balance of forces between Assad and the rebels, it will be interesting to see if they defect as well (they have not so far) if the diplomatic initiative doesn’t collapse right away.
But neocon blogger Jennifer Rubin, who previously managed to support the use-of-force resolution while continuing to hurl insults at its prime proponent in the White House, has had enough of this peace talk:
This is fitting in a way. The president went to Congress for political cover. Then he went to Putin. Congress at this point is entitled to tell the president to solve his own mess.
Yeah, it’s sad that Obama may be in the process of spoiling the war with Syria that was supposed to pave the way to the war with Iran that so many GOP “hawks” actually want. So many of them may well move from a tactical alliance with Obama to a tactical alliance with Rand Paul, squawking belligerently all the way.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 10, 2013
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