“To The Permanent War Caucus, It’s Always 1938”: When The Hitler Card Won’t Do, Play The Chamberlain Card
If he accomplished nothing else during his presidency, Barack Obama has surely earned a place in the Bad Political Analogies Hall of Fame. According to savants on Fox News and right-wing editorial pages, Obama is both Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who capitulated to Nazi territorial demands in 1938.
That is, to the more fervid exponents of the Sore Loser Party, President Obama is both a psychotic dictator and a spineless appeaser of tyrants.
(I am indebted for this insight to Washington, D.C., attorney Mike Godwin, promulgator of “Godwin’s Law,” which holds that the first person to play the Hitler card in a political argument automatically loses.)
I’m thinking the law also needs a Chamberlain corollary, because the Permanent War Caucus on the Republican right accuses every American president who negotiates an arms pact with our putative enemies of weakening national security. Always and with no known exceptions.
President Nixon got compared to Neville Chamberlain for his (strategically brilliant) opening to China, as well as for the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) with the Soviet Union.
In 1988, something called the Conservative Caucus, Inc. took out full-page newspaper ads arguing that “appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in 1938.” The ad mocked President Reagan with Chamberlain’s iconic umbrella, and compared Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to Hitler.
In 1989, of course, the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR imploded.
Jonathan Chait sums up the right’s paradoxical case against Obama, weakling dictator: “He is naive in the face of evil, desperate for agreement, more willing to help his enemies than his friends. The problem is that conservatives have made this same diagnosis of every American president for 70 years…Their analysis of the Iran negotiations is not an analysis at all, but an impulse.”
Despite the fact that Tehran made concessions most observers thought were impossible, the right hates this deal because they hate all deals. Today, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his U.S. supporters, such as the forever-wrong William Kristol, describe Iran’s leaders as the new Führer. The apocalyptic enemy before that was the Tehran regime’s bitter enemy, Saddam Hussein.
Anyway, we all know how invading Iraq worked out.
Iran is five times Iraq’s size, has three times its population, and has extremely forbidding terrain.
No matter. To the Permanent War Caucus, it’s always 1938 and blitzkrieg is eternally threatened. Netanyahu has been predicting Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons for almost 20 years now — although the Wile E. Coyote bomb cartoon is a relatively recent touch.
Israel, of course, has a nuclear arsenal of its own.
But what really makes the Hitler/Chamberlain comparison so foolish isn’t simply that it’s a cliché. It’s that it completely misrepresents the power balance between the U.S., its allies, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, and militarily weak, politically and strategically isolated Iran.
In 1938, Nazi Germany had the strongest military in the world. (Indeed, there’s a revisionist school that holds Neville Chamberlain was wise to postpone an inevitable war while Britain re-armed.)
Shiite Iran, by contrast, can scarcely project power much beyond its borders, and is threatened by traditional enemies on all sides. Examine a map of the Middle East. Tehran is almost 1,000 miles from Jerusalem. Ethnically and linguistically distinct, the Persians are surrounded by hostile Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, which repress their own Shiite minorities, and are fanatically opposed to the Ayatollahs.
Almost unknown in this country, U.S. client Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran — complete with nerve gas attacks on the Persians and Kurds –remains a bitter memory. ISIS terrorists are massacring Shiites by the thousands in Iraq and Syria. For that matter, check out the U.S. military bases ringing the Persian Gulf, along with omnipresent, nuclear-armed aircraft carriers and submarines.
One needn’t have a particle of sympathy for Iran’s odious theocratic government to see that we’ve got them totally outgunned and surrounded. Economic sanctions engineered by the Obama administration have really hurt. So yes, if they thought they could trust us, it would be very much in Tehran’s interest to make a deal and stick to it — putting the nuclear temptation aside in favor of what amounts to anti-invasion insurance.
But can we trust them?
President Obama explained his thinking to the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman: “We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk. And that’s the thing…people don’t seem to understand.”
“[W]ith respect to Iran…a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”
If you’re really strong, in other words, act strong.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 15, 2015
“A Truly Extraordinary Record Of Being Wrong”: In-Demand GOP Economist Says Kansas ‘Is Doing Fine’
The first big hint that Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) was pursuing a dangerous economic course was when he hired economist Arthur Laffer to help shape the plan. Laffer, of course, rose to GOP prominence in the 1980s pushing the celebrated-but-wrong idea that tax cuts can pay for themselves.
The Washington Post profiles the conservative economist today and notes that his influence has not waned, despite the real-world effects of his policies. In fact, Laffer is evidently a go-to source for many of this year’s Republican presidential candidates.
No one has influenced Republican candidates’ thinking on the economy for the past four decades as much as Laffer, who is now 75. Laffer says he believes that limiting government and cutting tax rates, especially the rate levied on top earners, will unleash faster economic growth. Since he sold then-candidate Ronald Reagan on that prescription, every Republican presidential nominee has run on a Laffer-inspired economic platform.
As the 2016 GOP primary season takes off, Laffer is more in demand than ever before, with Republican candidates embracing tax-cut-for-the-rich policies even as they bemoan economic inequality. Candidates have been meeting with him in recent weeks, and on Friday in Nashville, he says, his schedule includes Rick Perry at 10 a.m., Ben Carson at noon, Jeb Bush at 1:15 p.m. and Bobby Jindal at 5. Dinner is scheduled with Ted Cruz. He has already met at least once with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
And this does not include the meeting Laffer has already had with Rand Paul, who asked him to look over a tax-cut plan the Kentucky Republican likes.
The conversation turned to Brownback’s radical experiment, and the Post’s article added this gem: “ ‘Kansas,’ Laffer declared over a five-hour lunch interview in Washington, ‘is doing fine.’”
“Fine,” I suppose, is a relative term. For those of us who care about the details, the economic plan Laffer created for Kansas has resulted in debt downgrades, weak growth, and state finances in shambles. It’s reached the point in which two Kansas public school districts are wrapping up the school year early because they don’t have the money needed to finish a full school year.
“Fine” probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind.
Paul Krugman added some helpful context to Laffer’s record.
Since the 1970s there have been four big changes in the effective tax rate on the top 1 percent: the Reagan cut, the Clinton hike, the Bush cut, and the Obama hike. Republicans are fixated on the boom that followed the 1981 tax cut (which had much more to do with monetary policy, but never mind). But they predicted dire effects from the Clinton hike; instead we had a boom that eclipsed Reagan’s. They predicted wonderful things from the Bush tax cuts; instead we got an unimpressive expansion followed by a devastating crash. And they predicted terrible things from the tax rise after Obama’s reelection; instead we got the best job growth since 1999.
And when I say “they predicted”, I especially mean Laffer himself, who has a truly extraordinary record of being wrong at crucial turning points. As Bruce Bartlett pointed out a few years ago, Laffer was even wrong during the Reagan years: he predicted that the Reagan tax hikes of 1982, which partially reversed earlier cuts, would cripple the economy; “morning in America” promptly followed. Oh, and let’s not forget his 2009 warnings about soaring interest rates and inflation.
Looking ahead, Krugman added the broader question is “why this always-wrong economic doctrine now has a stronger grip on the GOP than ever before.” That need not be a rhetorical question. Indeed, it should matter quite a bit to the voting public given that so many Republican presidential hopefuls – including the entire current top tier – are eager to bring their economic plans in line with Laffer’s discredited thinking.
Or put another way, a wide variety of national GOP candidates are looking at recent developments in Kansas and thinking, “How can I impose this model on the entire United States?”
It’s a bit like turning to discredited neoconservatives for guidance on foreign policy and national security. Oh wait….
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2015
“Stigmatizing The Poor”: New GOP Lie: Food Stamps on Cruise Ships
The headlines are sensational:
Kansas bans welfare recipients for spending food stamps on cruise ships.
Kansas will make sure welfare queens can’t get their palms read on the Caribbean.
The new law awaiting Governor Sam Brownback’s signature also prohibits a long list of activities including shopping at jewelry stores, lingerie shops, video arcades, theme parks and even swimming pools.
Republican lawmakers in the Sunflower State want to make sure none of this waste would happen again.
If it even happened.
(It hasn’t.)
Think of it as the 21st century’s answer to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, who existed mainly in the minds of conservative critics.
Nobody has offered a current and/or concrete example of a person receiving TANF funds (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) using their EBT card (Electronic Benefits Transaction) aboard a cruise ship, but that hasn’t stopped the Kansas legislature from passing a law to prevent it.
A provision included in their restrictive legislation will prevent TANF recipients from withdrawing any more than $25 a day from an ATM machine.
Shannon Cotsoradis, president and CEO of Kansas Action for Children, says since most ATM machines don’t deal in $5 increments, the $25 is effectively $20, plus an 85 cents fee that TANF attaches, plus another couple dollars for the ATM fee, and the result is, “We’ve just made it harder to be poor, as if it weren’t hard enough,” she says.
The list of prohibited items reads like something out of the Legion of Decency, a now defunct Catholic organization that rated films according to their moral content.
And while no one is arguing these racier activities—like patronizing adult entertainment or casino gambling—should be permissible with government funds, banning them is more about stigmatizing the poor than creating any real hardship. The real problem is the $25 limit.
“This is not about a real problem, this is not a public policy decision,” says Liz Schott, of the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities. “This is all about politics and creating a wrong impression that public welfare recipients can’t spend their money wisely.”
The Kansas bill passed the House last week by voice vote and the Senate 30 to 10. Among the 10 opponents were the chamber’s eight Democrats plus two moderate Republicans.
Minority Leader Anthony Hensley told The Daily Beast the bill is “very mean-spirited, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time, Holy Week, leading into Easter. This is not something Jesus would have approved of in my opinion.”
Kansas is not alone in modifying its TANF program, and under the welfare reform law signed by President Clinton in 1996, states have the legal right to make adjustments.
States like Kansas with a Republican governor and a GOP-controlled legislature are in the forefront of the crackdown. In Missouri, a Republican state legislator has introduced legislation that would ban “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.”
What’s behind this wave of legislation, says Brookings scholar William Galston, is a familiar grievance felt by the middle class and the working class that programs of assistance are “either not going to the right people, or they’re not spending the money in a responsible way.”
These are voters who think the Democratic Party caters to the poor, and that politicians are buying their votes with programs like TANF (overlooking fact that the poor mostly don’t vote).
The misimpressions are on all sides, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful. Cotsoradis, with Kansas Action for Children, calls the cruise ship ban “my personal favorite” because it is so ludicrous when you consider a family of three in a high-paying, more urban county in Kansas receives $429 a month; a rural family gets $386 a month.
The way TANF works, recipients take their dollars out of an ATM, and with the $25 limit, “a cruise ship is probably out of the question,” she says.
They can use their card like a debit card in a supermarket, but there’s no way to track where they spend the dollars they withdraw from an ATM. “So we have legislated something that by and large we can’t enforce,” says Cotsoradis.
Some of the provisions are just mean, says Schott, with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“It’s not even clear you can take your child on a hot day to a municipal pool,” Schott says.
How infractions like that are policed would be prone to arbitrary enforcement. Would somebody report their neighbor?
“There could be a lot of biases,” says Schott. What’s clear is the gulf between the law and the people whose behavior it is meant to regulate. “I don’t think it’s coming from a lot of fact,” says Schott.
Many if not most TANF recipients are “unbanked,” and without a checking account, how will they take out enough money to pay their rent?
“This is not based on any understanding of the daily reality of making ends meet on these inadequate benefits,” she says.
The only evidence anybody can cite of a remotely recent abuse is a widely broadcast Fox News interview two years ago when a brash young food stamp recipient boasted about buying lobster and sushi with his government assistance.
But apparently that was enough to resurrect and perpetuate that long-ago myth first spun by Reagan.
By: Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beast, April 7, 2015
“Obamacare Opponents Still Await The Apocalypse”: Opponents Are As Wrong About Obamacare As Reagan Was About Medicare
A while back, progressive activists and politicians pushed for legislation to provide health insurance for a cohort of Americans who could not easily pay for their doctors’ visits and medications. Predictably, that effort was met with fierce resistance from conservatives, who didn’t seem concerned about those less-fortunate citizens who couldn’t afford medical care.
Conservatives denounced the plan as “socialized medicine” or a “communist takeover” of the American health care system. One notable conservative was especially alarmist, declaring that if the proposal passed Congress, “… you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
No, that hysterical tirade didn’t come in response to the Affordable Care Act. Those words were spoken in 1961 by Ronald Reagan, who was crisscrossing the country to campaign against the adoption of Medicare. Yes, Medicare, which Congress passed in 1965 and is widely considered a resounding success.
Fast-forward a few decades. The same alarms were sounded more recently, as progressive activists and politicians pushed for legislation to provide inexpensive health insurance for those who couldn’t afford it. Actually, the denunciations of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, usually called “Obamacare,” may have been even more hysterical.
As the law neared passage, I watched angry crowds gather near the White House — many holding vicious, racially charged signs lambasting the president — to chant about “socialism” and “communism.” Strangely, the most vehement criticisms came from Americans 65 and older, the very cohort that benefits from Medicare.
President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, so it has been the law of the land for five years. Given that, it’s possible to make a reasoned assessment of its strengths and weaknesses.
First off, let’s note that there has been no “socialist takeover” of American medicine. Obamacare uses private health insurance providers; the law merely sets requirements for health insurance plans and issues subsidies to patients who cannot afford to purchase policies.
As you might expect, the number of Americans with health insurance — and, therefore, with access to preventive medical care — has increased in the last five years. Before the law went into effect, there were 48 million uninsured Americans. Now, with 16 million people having signed up for Obamacare, that number has been cut by a third.
Furthermore, health insurance companies are no longer allowed to deny coverage to patients who are already sick or to set a “lifetime cap” on the amount of money a company will pay for medical care. Adult children, who might be in college or working at low-paying jobs without benefits, can stay on their parents’ policies until they are 26.
The Affordable Care Act may also have decreased the rate at which health care costs were escalating. Five years ago, medical care costs were skyrocketing, well beyond the rate of general inflation. Now, those costs are still going up — but at the lowest rate in 50 years. While economists aren’t certain that Obamacare’s cost-containment measures are responsible, many of them give the law credit.
To be sure, the Affordable Care Act has been no panacea. There are still 32 million Americans without health insurance. And, despite the president’s early pledge that people already insured could retain their policies, a tiny but vocal group lost their insurance because Obamacare deemed those policies inadequate. Many in that group ended up paying more for insurance, hardly a happy outcome.
But the worst failings of the Affordable Care Act are beyond its supporters’ control. Because of persistent, irrational Republican opposition, more than 20 states have refused to expand Medicaid — even though the feds would pay the lion’s share of costs. That means that millions of working-class Americans are not getting the health care they need. Furthermore, Obamacare’s unrelenting antagonists have mounted yet another challenge to the law before the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s hard to fathom. The Affordable Care Act has failed to produce the apocalypse (remember “death panels”?) its fiercest critics predicted; instead, it has given millions of people access to decent health care. Its opponents are as wrong about Obamacare as Ronald Reagan was about Medicare.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 28, 2015
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