“Beyond The Borders Of Logic And Reason”: The Threat Of Terrorism Is Still Making People Really Stupid
When you’re a partisan, you have a certain obligation to be, well, partisan. That means you have to put the things your side does in the best light and the things the other side does in the worst light. Their motives are always suspect while your are always pure, and if anything goes wrong it was obviously their fault, while if anything goes right they had nothing to do with it.
But just how far does this obligation extend? How far beyond the borders of logic and reason can you ride it? The unfortunate answer is, pretty darn far.
As you’ve heard, the administration ordered a number of embassies, mostly in the Middle East, closed for a few days because of some “chatter” relating to a potential al Qaeda attack. Republican Congressman Peter King said that this demonstrates that “Al Qaeda is in many ways stronger than it was before 9/11,” which is kind of like saying that the fact that the Backstreet Boys are currently touring shows that they’re even more popular than they were in the 1990s. And for some unfathomable reason, Rick Santorum was invited on Meet the Press on Sunday, and when he was asked about the significance of this potential attack, here’s what he said:
Oh, I think it’s a huge deal. And I think it’s really a consequence of the policies of this administration. I mean, if you look at Benghazi and what happened there. We had an attack on our embassy. We’ve seen really nothing other than cover-ups. We haven’t seen anything from this administration really go after the people who are responsible, or the network behind it. And I’m sure if you’re looking at it from a terrorist perspective, you say, “Well, here’s an administration that’s pulling back, that’s timid, and an opportunity to go after additional embassies.” So this is to me a direct consequence from what we saw in Benghazi.
Oh for pete’s sake. Now let’s think about this for a moment. What actually happened here? Well, American intelligence agencies, through whatever combination of techniques they’re employing, picked up information leading them to conclude that some kind of an attack or series of attacks was imminent. The government then decided to take action to make it more difficult for those attacks to take place, in a highly public way that no doubt had as one of its purposes letting the potential perpetrators know that we’re on to them. Unless there is an attack, this would seem like exactly what we want the government to do. Success, right?
But Santorum wants us to believe that this is actually a terrible failure! Sure, we may have headed off the attack, but just the fact there are still terrorists in the world who would even contemplate committing acts of terrorism shows how weak Barack Obama is.
Now, perhaps one should be asking, “Why the hell would Meet the Press think anyone gives a crap what Rick Santorum thinks?” Is he really the best person they could get to represent the Republican view of things? A former senator and failed presidential candidate, widely acknowledged to be one of the most repellent characters in American politics in the last couple of decades? What was the producers’ meeting like that week? “You know who we should try to book? Rick Santorum! He’s terrific! And such an important and influential voice!” “Ooh, great idea, Biff—get on it!”
Back on Earth, when you identify a possible terrorist attack and take steps to prevent it, that’s a good thing, even if there’s a Democrat in the White House. But I wonder what your average middle-of-the-road voter thinks when she hears stuff like this. Is she turned off by it? Does it not really bother her, or make even the tiniest difference in how she looks at the parties and how she might vote next time around? Now imagine if Rick Santorum had said, “This is certainly serious, but let’s give credit where it’s due—if what we’re hearing is accurate, we should commend the intelligence analysts for locating this threat, and the Obama administration did the right thing by closing the embassies as a precaution.” People watching would have said, “Wow, maybe Santorum is a more thoughtful, reasonable guy than I thought.”
But hey, it isn’t just Republicans! Here’s Candy Crowley asking Lindsey Graham, “Since the mission of terrorists is to terrorize, in some sense do you feel as if they’ve already won?” Because we temporarily closed some embassies! Of all the reactions to the threat of terrorism you could come up with, that’s about the least terrorized you could imagine. Something about this topic seems to turn so many people into idiots.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 5, 2013
“Goodbye Rick Perry”: Those Of Us Out In Fake America Will Miss You
Farewell, Rick Perry! We’ll miss you, those of us out in fake America, unless Texas is fake America, because of the whole Republic thing, in which case you will be missed in all the various Americas. Because once you are done as governor of your massive, slightly ridiculous oil-soaked state, you will pretty much be done.
Perry is not going to seek a fourth term as governor of Texas, a high-status, low-authority gig that he has worked at longer than anyone else in history. The next governor will likely be Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (Stu Rothenberg is keeping the position listed as “Safe Republican”).
Perry isn’t just going to go away, or at least he doesn’t intend to. He is not going to put on a stupid hat and retire to a ranch that was until very recently named something unspeakably awful. He is going to run for president. Because once a sufficient number of people have convinced an egomaniac that he would be a very good president, it’s hard for that egomaniac to let go of that dream, even after a bunch of voters do everything they can to discourage it.
In 2011, we in the rest of America were told to look out for Perry, that he was savvy, a brilliant politician, and that he’d be totally irresistible to the electorate once he made his inevitable decision to run for president. He turned out to be a dunce, completely incompetent at basic tasks like “debating” and “public speaking.” Maybe it was pain meds (but then, who decides it’s a good idea to jump into a national race while you’re on pain meds?), but either way the last presidential campaign was a disaster for the Perry brand. No one in 2016 will be particularly frightened of him, and he also probably won’t have the luxury of running against a field made up entirely of clowns and a front-runner no one in the party actually liked.
He’s amiable, decent-looking, and right-wing enough to suit the modern Republican Party, but he is also a bit of an idiot and nothing about him appeals to anyone outside his state. Republicans aren’t interested in him anymore, even in Texas. Public Policy Polling (a liberal shop, but still) has Hillary Clinton beating Perry 50 to 42 in a potential presidential contest. A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll showed Texas Republicans preferring Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul over their finally outgoing governor. And if they don’t want him there’s no reason to suggest Republicans anywhere else will want him. “Vote for your dumb right-wing dad” won’t work any better in 2016 than it did in 2012.
Still, Perry’s decision to join Texas Republicans in provoking a big fight over abortion access does make a bit of sense in this light: He I guess wants to be 2016′s Rick Santorum, the choice of the fundamentalist set who don’t necessarily like the recent rhetorical ascendency of pseudo-moderation and pseudo-libertarianism in the GOP. Rick Santorum still might want to be the Rick Santorum of 2016, of course, but he also might be too busy making Christian movies. (Though none of the major 2016 Republican front-runners, with the possible exception of Jeb Bush, are remotely “moderate” on abortion access, it should be pointed out.)
It is always a happy day when the political careers of mediocre right-wing hacks like Rick Perry come to an end, even if it is by choice and not a forced resignation following a humiliating scandal or exposure of criminal activity. Texas will probably be better off without Rick Perry, even if the next guy is an asshole (and he is probably going to be an asshole), and Rick Perry will get to see his dream end in tears once more in 2016, at which point his only hope to remain in elected office will be a Congressional seat or something. Though obviously he will also make a great deal of money “consulting” for some awful rich person or another, so it’s not all good news.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 9, 2013
“The GOP’s Pitiful Reformers”: Those Who Falsely Deny The GOP Is Off Its Rocker Are Lying To Themselves And Their Readers
Over the weekend, Bob Dole delivered the opinion that he couldn’t make it in today’s Republican Party. And not just him: “Reagan couldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, ’cuz he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.” His words put me in mind, as a disturbing number of things do these days, of the so-called conservative reformers, the half-dozen or so male pundit-intellectuals on the right who have, through some clever prestidigitation that I have yet to comprehend, come to be known as reformers. They are very smart fellows, and they can be interesting to read. But they are “reforming” the Republican Party in about the sense that Whitney Houston’s hairdresser was helping her by giving her a great coif. Houston’s problem in life wasn’t her hair, and what’s wrong with today’s GOP—what Dole was talking about—isn’t going to be fixed by figuring out exactly what kind of “base-broadening” the tax code needs.
The men often named in this group include David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin, Reihan Salam, Avik Roy, and a few others. Josh Barro is sometimes included, as are David Frum and Bruce Bartlett. But these are errors: Frum and Bartlett have been so outspoken—courageously so, I note—in their contempt for today’s GOP that they have sort of taken themselves off the roster. Barro, a young Bloomberg View columnist, is (it seems to me) more than halfway down the Frum-Bartlett path.
There has been lots of interesting writing on my side of the fence about these men lately. Ryan Cooper wrote a big Washington Monthly piece with short bios of all of them and a rating system assessing their zeal for reform and access to power. Jon Chait profiled Barro in The Atlantic. Policy analyst Mike Konczal assessed whether their policy proposals really constitute something new that isn’t being said by elected officials within the party. Paul Krugman has weighed in as well.
The general verdict among these writers is that there isn’t much there there. Konczal takes them seriously as policy analysts but concludes that much of what they say “is actually a defense and potential extension of already-existing policies against people further to the right” and is ultimately “more gestural than substantive.” If you read through Cooper’s rating system, you will be struck by the consistency with which those he deems most committed to reform are the ones with the lowest juice quotient, while the one with the lowest reform rating—Levin, who just won some big quarter-million-dollar right-wing prize of some kind (wish we had those!)—has a perfect-10 insider score.
Just yesterday, Avik Roy responded to these and other articles by lamenting that we liberals just don’t understand what Al Haig might have called the “nuance-al” genius of the new breed. It seems liberal critics have missed the “important philosophical difference between the liberty- and opportunity-oriented conservatives.” Further, these con-reformers believe in equality of opportunity, not of outcomes, and therefore liberals (who support the latter, you see) couldn’t possibly grasp the depth of their insights.
Here’s what Roy says he wants: to “orient the GOP agenda around opportunity for those who least have it, to offer these individuals a superior alternative to failed statist policies.” Please. You get a lot of this from Republicans. Paul Ryan says things like this all the time. Rick Santorum did. Even Mitt Romney did, though to a lesser extent. But it’s all nonsense because they have invented a straw-man version of liberalism in their heads that isn’t anything like the liberalism that actually exists.
A few years ago, Santorum published his book It Takes a Family, his response to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. He said the book was about poverty. As Mark Schmitt noted in a merciless review in The American Prospect, Santorum kept announcing that he was advancing brave new proposals that the “village elders” (the liberal establishment) would never countenance. The only problem was that every one of Santorum’s brave new ideas—helping poor families build wealth—were old liberal ideas. Asset-building as an idea has existed since about 1990, and it wasn’t conservatives who invented it.
The journal I edit (also not conservative!) just published a big symposium on asset-building. We did that in conjunction with a group called the Corporation for Enterprise Development, which has been working on the issue for 20 years. They’re a nonpartisan group, so they are not political with a big P, but let’s just say I don’t think there are many Atlas Shrugged readers roaming CFED’s halls. Put more simply, it’s liberals who have led the way on asset-building for years, in the academy and on Capitol Hill. But Santorum has, and all conservatives have, a liberal demon in their heads who wants poor people to remain dependent on big-daddy government. It’s a lie, and a really lame and stupid one.
And let’s say an asset-building-related piece of legislation—there are several, and they’re just sitting there—became the subject of attention and controversy. Who would be for it, and who would be against it? We know very well who. At the first syllable Obama uttered in its favor, the Republicans practically to a person would oppose it. And now, finally, we get to the real problem with the GOP, a problem these people all just ignore, and why the opening analogy to Whitney’s stylist is apt.
The big problem with today’s Republican Party isn’t its policies. Certainly, those policies are extreme and would be deeply injurious to middle-class and poorer Americans should they be enacted. But Bob Dole wasn’t thinking, I don’t believe, just of policies. He was talking about the whole package—the intolerance, the proud stupidity, the paranoia, the resentments, the rage. These are intertwined with policy of course—indeed they often drive policy. But they are the party’s real problem. And where these “reformers” fail is that they never, ever, ever (that I have seen) criticize it with any punch at all.
Hey, Avik! Would you like to know why 90 percent of black people aren’t listening to your message? Because you don’t want them to vote! Not you personally (at least I assume), but your party. I know that you think black people are victims of false consciousness (how Marxist of you!), but do you also think they are stupid? If you and your wonderful Arthur Brooks want to develop a program to attract black voters, you might start by trying to change your party’s position on the question of attempting to pervert the law to deny them their franchise.
But they’ll never do that. And these people never call out the crazies. I’m sure that Louie Gohmert and Steve King probably embarrass them. Or maybe they don’t; Ponnuru recently penned a pretty sprightly defense of Ted Cruz. This is actually an interesting question, and I suppose the answer varies from person to person. But either way the result isn’t flattering. Those who falsely deny that the current GOP is off its rocker are lying to themselves and their readers, while those who genuinely don’t think it is are by definition out to lunch themselves. And the bottom line is that if they don’t say anything about all this, then they’re simply not reforming the Republican Party in any sense that is worth taking remotely seriously.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 28, 2013
“Everybody Say’s We’re Great”: Discovering The American Majority With The NRA And Conservative Politicians
I have a piece going up later today over at CNN.com on the NRA convention, but there’s something I raise there that I want to elaborate on. If you look at the list of Republican politicians who spoke to the assembled firearm enthusiasts, it wasn’t exactly the A-team. Last year Mitt Romney showed up, but this year they had failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum, failed presidential candidate Rick Perry, universally disliked freshman senator Ted Cruz, currently unpopular Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and former half-term governor and current punch line Sarah Palin. Every one of them would like to be president one day, but the only one with even the ghost of a chance is Jindal.
And what do they have in common? Some are has-beens, some have reached the pinnacle of their careers even if they don’t know it yet, but what distinguishes them isn’t just that they’re very, very conservative. It’s that—like the NRA itself—they’re obviously convinced that they represent the majority of the American public, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
When you’re faced with apparent public disapproval of your position on something specific or even your broad ideological approach, there are a couple of ways you can address it. The first is to say that the public may not agree with me, but they happen to be wrong. That, after all, is why we have certain protections written into the Constitution, so they are immune to the vagaries of popular sentiment. If we took a vote every time a new question about free speech came up, we would no longer have free speech. I’m sure gun advocates believe that even if most Americans wanted to outlaw private gun ownership, that would still be wrong, which is why it’s a good thing the right to bear arms is in the Constitution. The corollary is that Americans just don’t understand the issue well enough yet, but once they hear a full explanation, most will come over to your side.
The second approach you can take is to say that although it appears that you’re in the minority, that’s only because the public will hasn’t been properly understood. For instance, maybe the polls aren’t measuring opinion correctly. This was what many conservatives believed during the 2012 campaign, claiming that the polls were methodologically flawed and Romney was headed for triumph on election day. Or you can say that the truth isn’t to be found in numbers or systematic analyses, but in measures closer to the ground, like what you feel in your gut, or what people come up and tell you when you’re traveling around.
It’s natural for people to weigh that kind of “evidence” more heavily when they think about where they stand in relation to the public. We all think we’re right, and if you’re engaged in the democratic process in any way, you have to believe that the people are, if not always wise, at least capable of arriving at the right decision given the opportunity. And if you’re a politician or a high-profile advocate, people are constantly coming up to you and telling you you’re doing a great job. Think about it this way: Let’s say you were in an airport and you saw coming toward you Elizabeth Warren and Linsdey Graham, and you were feeling bold, but you only had time to talk to one of them. Would you go tell Warren you think she’s a terrific advocate for the middle class and you hope she runs for president one day, or would you go up to Graham and tell him what you thought about him? Most of us are basically polite, and don’t like initiating confrontations with strangers if it isn’t necessary. So the politician thinks, “Everybody says I’m great!” because most of the spontaneous expressions of opinion they hear are positive ones.
If you’re someone like Wayne LaPierre, this is even more exaggerated, because you spend your time going from gun convention to gun show to gun club to gun barbeque, meeting a seemingly endless number of gun people. So how do you understand the fact that you just defeated a bill that every poll showed was supported by around 90 percent of Americans? You convince yourself that that 90 percent stuff is all just a bunch of baloney. First, your enemies aren’t part of America at all. “The media and political elites,” Wayne Lapierre said in his speech to the convention, “don’t get it because they don’t get America.” And if you want to know what Americans think, don’t bother with polls: “Everywhere I go,” LaPierre said, “I’ve learned that the NRA is truly at the heart of America’s heartland. That we are in the middle of the river of America’s mainstream. That what we want is exactly what most Americans want.”
The truth is that the NRA is a lot of things, but “the middle of the river of America’s mainstream” isn’t one of them. But from where he sits, that sounds perfectly accurate, in the same way that from where Sarah Palin sits, her brand of conservatism seems to have the support of most Americans, and if she ran for president she’d win. After all, everybody she talks to tells her she’s great.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 6, 2013
“Santorum Ignores Shift”: What Rick Santorum Views As A Passing Fad Is Likely To Become The Norm Quite Soon
Several 2016 presidential campaigns are already up and running — some more quietly than others — and Republicans hoping to be their party’s nominee are preparing for a primary that could potentially bear little resemblance to those of 2012 and 2008. As the party grapples with a shifting electorate, it is divided over differences on gay marriage, immigration reform, national security policy and even guns — gaps that could only widen by 2015, when campaigns will be in full swing.
Potential candidates are busy searching for safe corners on these contentious issues and are either acknowledging the profound shifts, even when they haven’t changed their minds, or saying little until they have to — all of them, so far, except former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).
Santorum, of course, won the Iowa caucuses last year and nearly derailed Mitt Romney’s path to the GOP nomination before he started speaking out against the dangers of college education, free prenatal testing and contraception. Just this week he predicted that a “chastened” U.S. Supreme Court would not rule in favor of gay marriage and that the Republican Party was not going to change on the issue because doing so would be the end of the party. Yes, the end.
“The Republican Party’s not going to change on this issue. In my opinion it would be suicidal if it did,” Santorum told The Des Moines Register. The ex-lawmaker described new support for gay marriage as “popular” and “the fancy of the day,” but also considers it fleeting, as “not a well thought-out position by the American public.”
In the past Santorum has made clear he believes gay marriage is “antithetical” to healthy families. “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality,” he said in 2003.
Santorum told the Register on Monday he is considering another presidential run but hasn’t made any decisions. He will return to Iowa next week to speak to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, where he said he will address this topic. “One of the things I learned from the last four years is that when you go to Iowa, people pay attention to what you say,” he said in his interview. “That’s always a gift to any person in public life. We’re going to talk about the concerns I have.”
It is understandable that, as a religious Christian, Santorum is uncomfortable with the idea of same-sex marriage. Many Republicans who also want to be president feel exactly the same way. But they are not encouraging their fellow Republicans to alienate homosexual voters. Telling voters their opinions are wrong isn’t usually a winning campaign strategy. The strong majority support for gay marriage, even among Republicans, can be denied no more than the growth of the Latino population and the fact that President Obama won it 71 percent to 27 percent over Romney. They are stubborn electoral shifts, just like the fact that young voters and Asian Americans have recently turned away from the GOP in greater numbers, which any Republican hoping to win the White House in 2016 will have to contend with and accept.
There is a significant difference between a trend and an evolution. What Santorum views as a passing fad is likely to become the norm quite soon; young people support gay marriage by a margin of 4 to 1. More acceptance isn’t likely to give way to less over time, no matter how much chastening Santorum has in mind.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, April 10, 2013
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