“Rewriting History, Again”: No, Mitt Romney Didn’t Save The Auto Industry
One might think that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney would be a little more careful on two fronts: thinking about how his comments will come across before he says them, and being sensitive to concerns about him changing his views on things. So what would lead a smiling Romney to take credit for the resurgence of the automobile industry?
Somewhat incredibly, Romney, campaigning recently in auto industry-reliant Ohio, told a Cleveland radio station:
I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back. My own view is that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy.
Forget about the auto industry turnaround; Romney’s remarkable statements represent a turnaround in either policy or memory that makes the stunning new success of GM pale in comparison. This is a candidate who, in 2008, penned a New York Times op-ed entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” And while the headline (which Romney did not write) was a tad provocative, Romney was very clear in the piece in saying that if the auto bailout went ahead, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”
It’s hard to imagine Romney forgot about that op-ed, which has been resurrected many times in the media. It’s a weakness for Romney in the industrial Midwest. But purporting to be the source of Obama’s strategy (as if the president was taking advice from Romney) is a metaphorical shaking of the Etch A Sketch that requires a bodybuilder to achieve.
A lot of conservatives are unhappy with Romney, and it’s not just because they don’t think he’s conservative enough, it’s because they aren’t confident he means what he says about conservative issues. The man who promised to be more pro gay rights than late Sen. Ted Kennedy has a hard time convincing social conservatives he will be the opposite. The man who once supported abortion rights has a tough task in convincing the GOP base that he feels differently now. It’s one of the reasons primary foe Rick Santorum took so long to endorse Romney, and then did so in a long E-mail to Santorum supporters—an E-mail in which he delivered the most tepid of endorsements to Romney. So attempting to rewrite history for voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania doesn’t help with his image.
Romney’s argument in 2008 would look smarter if Obama’s strategy didn’t work. But it did, and even if Romney has a sincere free-market opposition to industry bailouts, he could acknowledge that happy development without endorsing government ownership of private industry. He could say, Gosh, I’m glad things are looking up. But we’re going down a dangerous road if we let the federal government tinker with private companies that way. It undermines the principles of the free market and entrepreneurship, and it exposes the government to private-sector losses if the companies don’t rebound. That’s a less powerful argument to make now that the auto industry is coming back, but at least it’s sincere and consistent.
It’s also possible that this is all about Obama, and the refusal by some of his opponents to give him credit for anything, even if there’s a clear success. Obama gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden, and it worked—the most hated man in America is dead, and not a single Navy SEAL died in the mission. But many Republicans first blasted Obama for not crediting Bush’s work on the effort, and now are mad because Obama is touting the major success as some proof that, well, he’s done some good things in office. No one can credibly argue that it’s bad that bin Laden is dead, so Obama critics—who still can’t seem to accept the fact that he’s actually the president—want to argue that Obama had little to do with it.
That makes Romney’s “I take a lot of credit” comment especially jarring. If it’s “spiking the ball” for Obama to take credit for killing bin Laden, how do we characterize the words of a candidate who takes credit for something he opposed, but which turned out to be successful? The campaign, like most campaigns, will erase some of the past with a symbolic Etch A Sketch. But you can’t Etch A Sketch away history.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, May 9, 2012
“A Damn Good President”: Exotic Kenyan, Anti-Colonial, Marxists Doesn’t Hate America Afterall
The Associated Press reports:
The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press has learned.The plot involved an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. This new bomb was also designed to be used in a passenger’s underwear, but this time al-Qaida developed a more refined detonation system, U.S. officials said.
Add to this the fact that nobody from outside America has managed to attack us inside America during the Obama administration, that Osama bin Laden has been brought to justice, that over the weekend a key player in the U.S.S. Cole bombing was taken out, and that al Qaeda in general has been decimated, and suddenly it doesn’t seem like Barack Obama hates America nearly as much as Republicans would like everyone else to believe.
In fact, given that he’s ended the war in Iraq and set a timeline to withdraw from Afghanistan—albeit, too long of a timeline—maybe it’s time we start electing more badasses like him to office. (Come 2016, I’m thinking maybe someone along the lines of a Chicago-born hippie feminist who went to an all-female college … and happens to be our current secretary of state.)
Bottom line is that it turns out you don’t need to look like Mitt Romney in order to be a damn good president. So, whaddya say, haters?
By: Jed Lewison, The Jed Report, Daily Kos, May 7, 2012
“Unpatriotic And Treasonous”: The Secretive Group Trying To Swift Boat Barack Obama
A secretive right-wing group, Veterans For A Strong America, is attempting to do to President Obama what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did to Sen. John Kerry in 2004. And they aren’t shy about it. The group’s leader and sole employee, Joel Arends, told Mother Jones, “Yes, it’s the swift boating of the president.”
Arends said his goal is to take “what’s perceived to be [Obama’s] greatest strength” — the successful raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistani compound — and make it “his greatest weakness.” The effort started this week with a web video attacking Obama for taking too much credit.
In an interview with ThinkProgress, Arends refused to discuss any information regarding how the group was financed or its leadership. Arends also declined to provide legal forms he claims to have filed with the IRS. A representative from the IRS told ThinkProgress that the agency does not have any forms from Arends’ group on file.
Here’s what we do know about Arends and Veterans For A Strong America:
1. In four days, the first ad by Veterans For A Strong America garnered almost 1 million views on Youtube. It has also been played frequently on TV news shows. [YouTube, 5/1/12]
2. Veterans For A Strong America is seeking to recruit Navy SEALS to attack Obama. “In the wake of a warm conservative reception for a web video trashing the president for ‘spiking the football’ on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death, the conservative group Veterans for a Strong America plans to gather Navy SEALs and Special Forces operators to criticize the White House during the 2012 campaign.” [BuzzFeed, 5/3/12]
3. Arends also tried to Swift Boat Obama in 2008. Arends, under the auspices of a similar group called “Vets for Freedom,” ran an ad accusing Obama of refusing to meet with wounded soldiers from Illinois. [NPR, 7/5/08]
4. Arends worked as a consultant for the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. “Though he doesn’t list it on his public resume, around 2006 Arends went to work for Craig Dewey, the state director of Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy outfit that’s Astroturfed everything from the tea party and the Wisconsin union fight to public-school segregation.” The Koch Brothers and their allies have pledged to spend $100 million to defeat Obama. [Mother Jones, 5/4/12; HuffingtonPost, 2/3/12]
5. In 2008, Arends — posing as a “journalist” — organized and participated in a taxpayer-subsidized propaganda trip to Iraq. “American taxpayers are paying for politically slanted, pro-McCain, anti-Obama ‘reporters’ embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. Vets for Freedom – a pro-war organization that buys attack ads against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama – assembled a team of eight military veterans with dubious journalistic credentials to report ‘objectively’ on what is occurring in Iraq…Joel Arends, another “reporter,” is VFF’s executive director and was on McCain’s campaign payroll between March 2007 and February 2008.” [Charleston Gazette, 8/28/08]
6. Arends is coordinating with key Islamophobic figures on the far right. He regularly appears at events with anti-Islam conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, who has been condemned by mainstream conservatives for his intolerant views. He is also alligned with William “Jerry” Boykin, who was found to have violated Pentagon rules by expressing his anti-Muslim views in an official capacity. [ThinkProgress, 2/12/12; For The Common Defense; New York Times, 3/4/05]
7. Arends helped promote a documentary advocating war with Iran. Arends appeared on a panel in March 2011 in South Dakota promoting the documentary Iranium, which strongly suggests beginning a war with Iran. [Flier; ThinkProgress, 11/3/11]
8. Veterans for A Strong America is fully endorsed by Karl Rove. The man known as “Bush’s Brain” tweeted his support of their first web ad. [Twitter, 5/3/12]
Veterans For A Strong America is already succeeding in influencing the political discussion. Its web ad was aired nationally, for free, on ABC’s This Week. Many members of the political round-table then echoed Arends talking points on Obama and Bin Laden.
By: Judd Legum and Adam Peck, Think Progress, May 6, 2012
“Turning The Page”: Obama’s Winning Strategy On Foreign Policy
We expect some hypocrisy in politics, but it was still jaw-dropping to behold Republicans accusing President Obama of politicizing the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Wasn’t it just eight years ago that the GOP organized an entire presidential campaign — including the choreography of its 2004 national convention — around the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and George W. Bush’s response to them?
Obama’s opponents don’t just think we have short attention spans. They imagine we have no memories whatsoever.
Yet very quickly, Mitt Romney and the rest of his party began slinking away from their offensive. It’s true, of course, that Obama played the ultimate presidential trump card. He visited our troops in Afghanistan on Tuesday, the anniversary of the bin Laden raid, and, with military vehicles serving as a rough-hewn backdrop, addressed the nation from the scene of our longest war.
But the GOP retreat reflected something else as well. For the first time since the early 1960s, the Republican Party enters a presidential campaign at a decided disadvantage on foreign policy. Republicans find it hard to get accustomed to the fact that when they pull their favorite political levers — accusations that Democrats are “weak” or Romney’s persistent and false claims that Obama “apologizes” for America — nothing happens.
The polls could hardly be clearer. In early April, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53 percent of Americans trusted Obama over Romney to handle international affairs. Only 36 percent trusted Romney more. On a list of 12 matters that a president would deal with, Obama enjoyed a larger advantage on only one other question, the handling of women’s issues. And on coping with terrorism, the topic on which Republicans once enjoyed a near-monopoly, Obama led Romney by seven points.
How did this happen? The primary reason, to borrow a term from science, is negative signaling: By the end of Bush’s second term, the Republicans’ approach to foreign policy was discredited in the eyes of a majority of Americans. The war in Iraq turned out (and this is being quite charitable) much differently than the Bush administration had predicted.
It is always worth recalling Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 16, 2003. Among other things, Cheney famously declared that “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.” And when Russert asked whether “we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there” in Iraq “for several years in order to maintain stability,” Cheney replied, “I disagree,” insisting: “That’s an overstatement.”
It was not an overstatement.
More generally, Americans came to see that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with what they cared most about, which was protecting the United States against another terrorist attack. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan, which was a direct response to 9/11, was pushed aside as a priority. At one point, Bush declared of bin Laden: “I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him . . . to be honest with you.”
And this is where negative signaling turns into a positive assessment of Obama. He understood the importance of bin Laden. He addressed the broad and sensible public desire to get our troops out of Iraq. He focused on how to get a moderately satisfactory result in Afghanistan — which is probably the very best that the United States can do now.
The Afghan policy Obama announced Tuesday reflected the president’s innate caution. He wants to withdraw our troops but not so fast as to increase the level of chaos in the country. He imagines a longer engagement with Afghanistan because he does not want to repeat the West’s mistake of disengaging too quickly after U.S. arms helped the mujahedeen defeat the Soviet Union there in the 1980s.
Public opinion is on the side of getting out sooner. But most Americans are likely to accept the underlying rationale for Obama’s policy because it is built not on grand plans to remake a region but on the narrower and more realistic goal of preventing terror groups from regaining a foothold in the country.
And that’s why Republicans finally seem to realize that driving foreign policy out of the campaign altogether is their best option. After a decade of war, Americans prefer prudence over bluster and careful claims over expansive promises. On foreign policy, Obama has kept his 2008 promise to turn history’s page. The nation is in no mood to turn it back.
“The Disloyal Opposition”: Obama Has Made America Safer, But He Could Use Some Help
To paraphrase a famous election-year question, “Is American safer now than it was four years ago?” Emphatically, yes.
We are safer at home, safer overseas, and our national power and position in the world are largely unthreatened. Our soldiers are no longer in harm’s way in Iraq, thanks to the fulfillment of a promise by the president. We are on a timetable to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 2014, and our allies and the Afghan police and military are carrying an increasing share of the burden, even if the security status there is somewhat dubious. Despite some rattling of sabers by Iran and scattered incidents of maritime piracy and terrorism, the U.S. military is still without peer or challenger.
The president has continued a war against al Qaeda that he inherited, and he has increased the intensity of that war, using UAV strikes and special forces raids. The killing of Osama bin Laden is only one symbol of the successes of the wider fight—one that the U.S. and its allies are winning, as the remnant of al Qaeda struggles to remain relevant amid the political awakening in much of the Islamic world.
In the area most visible to many Americans, security in our skies, we are, sadly, no safer. Despite spending billions of dollars per year, the TSA and Department of Homeland Security for the most part continue to offer only the appearance of security, rather than effective, efficient security. The president, like his predecessor, may take credit for the absence of any successful attack, but this is likely the result of our luck and our enemy’s ineptitude, rather than of millions of us taking off our shoes and throwing away our water bottles.
Finally, as Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress in February 2009, our national security was most threatened by the financial crisis. The recovery may be unsteady, but we are immeasurably safer today than four years ago. The president took steps that most economists agree prevented a global depression, and his policies have resulted in a safer world, not just a safer United States.
With our troops still at war in Afghanistan, and threats from nuclear Iran and North Korea, the president’s policies are being criticized, and he is still being attacked personally. Our country would be safer, still, if the opposition were a loyal one, and the discourse more civil.
By: Lawrence Husick, U. S. News and World Report, May 2, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 