I have probably written many times in the past that Republicans hit a new low, but as of this week you can toss all those. This Senate letter is the definite low of all time. I didn’t think these people could shock me, but this one genuinely was shocking in so many ways—not least the dishonor it brings on the United States Senate—that every other nutso thing they’ve done drops down one notch on the charts.
Treason, as the Daily News blared? I don’t know for sure about that. But I know to a certainty that if a group of Democratic senators had done this to a Republican president, Republicans and conservative pundits would be screaming the T-word and demanding the Justice Department investigate the senators.
Imagine if, say, 47 Democratic senators had written an “open letter” (a moral cop-out that permits the senators to say that it wasn’t “really” a communication to Ayatollah Khamenei) to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 assuring him any treaty Ronald Reagan signed with him could and quite possibly would be altered or abrogated by them. Or worse still—imagine that 47 Democratic senators had written an open letter to Saddam Hussein in the fall of 2002 reminding him that only Congress could declare war and that most of them would long outlast President Bush, while closing on the breathtakingly cloying note of being happy to have enriched Saddam’s “knowledge of the constitutional system.” There seems to me no doubt whatsoever that some Republican senators and members of Congress would have been baying for Logan Act prosecutions.
Much as part of me might savor it, I don’t think we ought to go there. A far better punishment for these disgraceful intriguers would be for the letter to backfire and increase the likelihood of a deal being struck. And it might well have that effect: If the mullahs genuinely want a deal, then surely a threat like this from the Senate would make them more anxious to pursue one while they can, and then hope that Hillary Clinton, who’s indicated she’d support a deal, becomes the next president and can make it stick.
Let’s hope that’s the effect—but let’s never forget the intent. These Republican senators, says Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, an advocate for a deal, can’t block a settlement; “but they can get the Iranians to think that it’s impossible to trust the United States,” he says. Thus, “the intent of the letter was to show the United States to be untrustworthy.”
It’s pretty amazing that members of the United States Senate would want to do that to their own country—not just in the eyes of Iran, but in the eyes of the five other powers involved in the negotiations. Three are some of our closest allies (Britain, France, and Germany). The other two are the not inconsiderable nations of Russia and China. All five have had negotiators sitting at the table with us and the Iranians for a year and a half. Wonder what they think of this.
It’s a disgrace, but only another in a long history of Republican-conservative disgraces with respect to Iran. Indeed these go back to 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower green-lighted the coup that Harry Truman had blocked. And they extend up to 2003, and the now largely forgotten but suddenly rather timely story of the Bush administration’s rebuff of an Iranian diplomatic overture that could have made the history of the U.S.-Iran relationship a very different one from what it has been.
It was all widely reported then; this Washington Post article provides a good rundown. In sum, it was a point in time when the (Shia) Iranian republic had been cooperating with the United States in tracking down some (Sunni) al Qaeda men; through a Swiss intermediary, Iran passed a letter to the White House feeling the Bush administration out on broad-ranging negotiations—possibly curtailing its nuclear ambitions, cutting back on its support for (or maybe even disarming) Hezbollah, and most strikingly of all, indirectly recognizing Israel’s right to exist—all in exchange for the lifting of American sanctions.
The offer was real. Whether it had Khamenei’s blessing, no one in the West really knows. Still, some elements in the Bush administration wanted to pursue it. But guess who won? As that Post story reports it, “top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative.”
We can’t know what might have happened. “But we do know one thing,” Parsi says. “When diplomacy is rejected, as it was under Bush, when the official U.S. policy was for regime change in Tehran, you give the Iranians every incentive to do everything they can to prevent the United States from pursuing regime change.” That means spreading its talons across Iraq, and it chiefly means, of course, pushing ahead full-speed with its nuclear ambitions.
Here’s part of what that rejection of diplomacy has done for us. In 2005, Iran put an offer on the table to the Europeans calling for it to keep 3,000 centrifuges. But that was rejected, because the United States wasn’t willing to talk to Iran. So what did Iran do? While we were refusing to negotiate and rattling the saber, they were building centrifuges to beat the band.
So today, Parsi told me, Iran has about 22,000 centrifuges, of which 9,400 are operational. Any deal is going to let Iran end up with around 6,000 centrifuges. That’s twice the amount it was asking for in 2005, when we could have struck a deal at 3,000. But we weren’t talking to Iran then, because it’s weak to talk to terrorists and because the regime was on the verge of collapse anyway, see?
Our years of resistance to diplomacy, a product of neocon doctrine and pressure, has thus made the situation clearly and tangibly worse. The Obama administration, and the other five powers, are trying to stuff back into the tube the toothpaste that Dick Cheney and his confederates squeezed out. And for its attempt to repair the gaping wound the neocons and their friend Mr. Netanyahu inflicted on the world, the administration is now subject to this poisonous and quasi-treasonous attack that is designed to increase the likelihood of war with Iran (Senator Tom Cotton, the letter’s author, spoke openly at the recent CPAC conference in support of regime change).
I applaud the seven Republican senators who did not sign the letter, even if it is a little like applauding the members of the Manson family who didn’t actually kill anybody. And for those who did sign, eternal shame. The only silver lining is that the right’s track record on Iran suggests strongly that the result will be the opposite of that which they desire.
By: Michael Tomasky, The daily Beast, March 11, 2015
March 12, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Iran, Neo-Cons, Republicans | Benjamin Netanyahu, Dick Cheney, Dwight Eisenhower, George W. Bush, Iraq, Logan Act, Ronald Reagan, Senate Republicans, Tom Cotton, Treason |
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Do we really need the Israeli prime minister to appear before Congress to explain the dangers and pitfalls of certain prospective deals on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs? Would we not know otherwise? Have the U.S. critics of those prospective deals lost their voice? Are they shy about expressing their concerns? Are they inarticulate or incompetent? Do they lack the wherewithal to get their message out?
Not exactly. Every day a new report or analysis warns of the consequences of various concessions that the Obama administration may or may not be making. Some think tanks in Washington devote themselves almost entirely to the subject of Iran’s nuclear program. Congress has held numerous hearings on the subject. Every week, perhaps every day, high-ranking members of the House and Senate, from both parties, lay out the dangers they see. The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others publish countless stories on the talks in which experts weigh in to express their doubts. If all the articles, statements and analyses produced in the United States on this subject could be traded for centrifuges, the Iranian nuclear program would be eliminated in a week.
Nor can it be said that we are somehow unaware of Israel’s views on this deal. It is not as if our news media will not report Israeli concerns and complaints. The statements and opinions of the Israeli prime minister, of members of his government and of the military and intelligence services are amply covered in the United States. Israeli officials — including the prime minister — can and do travel to the United States to express their concerns, with or without presidential invitations. They give speeches at the United Nations. They go on Sunday morning television programs and voice their opinions before millions of American viewers. They can even meet with members of Congress in both parties if they choose to.
Given all this, can it really be the case that the American people will not know what to think about any prospective Iran deal until one man, and only one man, gets up to speak in one venue, and only one venue, and does so in the first week of March, and only in that week? That is what those who insist it is vital that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak before a joint meeting of Congress next week would have us believe.
Even the most eloquent speech by Netanyahu will not add more than marginally to what has already been said and heard. But even if the drama of the situation and the prime minister’s eloquence were to highlight the already well-articulated case against a bad deal, the question is: at what price?
For there is a price. I will leave it to the Israeli government and people to worry about what damage the prime minister’s decision could have on U.S.-Israeli relations going forward, and not just under this administration. Those Americans who care most about that relationship will also have to weigh whether the short-term benefits of having Netanyahu speak will outweigh potential long-term costs. Looking back on it from years hence, will the spectacle of an Israeli prime minister coming to Washington to do battle with an American president wear well or poorly?
For the United States, however, there is no doubt that the precedent being set is a bad one. This is not the first time that a U.S. administration and an Israeli prime minister have been at loggerheads. President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, reportedly detested then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and did their best to help him lose his next election. Baker even had a few choice words for the American Jews who tried to come to the Israeli government’s defense. Did anyone at the time think of inviting Shamir to address Congress? The very idea would have been regarded as laughable. Now, we’re supposed to believe that it’s perfectly reasonable.
Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq.
Does that sound implausible? Yes, it was implausible — until now. Now we are sailing into uncharted waters. Those who favor having Netanyahu speak may imagine this is an extraordinary situation requiring extraordinary measures, that one side is so clearly right, the other so clearly wrong. Yet that is often how people feel about the crisis of their time. We can be sure that in the future the urgency will seem just as great. The only difference between then and now is that today, bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies is unprecedented. After next week, it will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.
By: Robert Kagan, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; The Washington Post, February 27, 2015
March 2, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress, Foreign Policy | George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Iran, Jacques Chirac, James Baker, media, Oscar Arias, Ronald Reagan, U. S.-Israeli Relationships, Yitzhak Shamir |
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U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen’s decision to block the Obama plan to defer deportation for about 5 million immigrants here illegally ignores a basic principle of government: For better or worse, the executive branch of government always has discretion as to whether and how to enforce the law.
The judge’s lengthy opinion is wrong as a matter of law and, worse, is based on xenophobia and stereotypes about immigrants. It is very likely to be overturned by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.
Every president must set enforcement priorities on immigration, choosing whom to prosecute or whom to deport. No administration brings prosecutions against all who violate the law. Resources make that impossible, and there are laws on the books that should not be enforced.
Nor has any administration, Democratic or Republican, sought to deport every person who is illegally in the United States. For humanitarian reasons or because of foreign policy considerations or for lack of resources, the government often chooses not to bring deportation actions. In fact, as recently as three years ago, the Supreme Court in United States vs. Arizona recognized that an inherent part of executive control over foreign policy is the ability of the president to choose whether to bring deportation proceedings.
That is exactly what President Obama’s executive orders on immigration have done. He has announced that the federal government will not seek to deport 600,000 young people who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, or the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have resided in the country for at least five years. Millions of parents would be able to remain with their children because of this order and not need to live every day in fear of deportation.
The judge’s order makes several basic legal mistakes. For example, the law is clear that a federal court has jurisdiction to hear a matter only if the federal court’s decision would solve the problem. If the court’s decision would have no effect, it would be nothing but an advisory opinion, which is prohibited by the Constitution. Thus, the Supreme Court long has held that a party has standing to sue in federal court only if a favorable decision would “redress” its injury.
The lawsuit in Hanen’s court was brought by state governments that object to the Obama orders, claiming injury by the presence of immigrants here illegally. But the federal government deports only about 400,000 such immigrants a year. It is entirely speculative that stopping the executive orders would have any effect on the states that brought the suit. In fact, it is unclear what the judge’s order will mean. He cannot force the Department of Homeland Security to deport anyone.
The central argument in Hanen’s ruling is that the executive branch must promulgate a formal rule to defer deportation of these individuals. But the federal government constantly sets enforcement priorities without a formal rule. The Justice Department’s policies to not prosecute possession of small amounts of marijuana or credit card fraud below a designated dollar level, for example, were not adopted by formal rules.
In fact, recent presidents, including Republican ones, have deferred deportations without formal rules. In 1987, in response to political turmoil in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Reagan administration took executive action to stop deportations for 200,000 Nicaraguan exiles. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, post-Tiananmen, stopped deportations of Chinese students. He kept hundreds of Kuwaiti citizens who were illegally in the United States from being deported after Saddam Hussein invaded their nation. In 2001, President George W. Bush limited deportation of Salvadoran citizens at the request of El Salvador’s president, and ordered that deportation decisions include consideration of factors such as whether a mother was nursing or whether the person in question was a U.S. military veteran.
Judge Hanen, appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, has the reputation of being especially conservative on immigration issues. That tone underlies his opinion, especially as he spoke of immigrants being “terrorists” and “criminals.” What he misses, though, is that the point of Obama’s executive orders was to set enforcement priorities to focus deportations on terrorists and criminals and not on breaking up families.
It is not surprising that a conservative Republican judge would try to stop the Obama immigration policy. But it is just the first word and one unlikely to be sustained on appeal.
By: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Irvine School of Law; Samuel Kleiner, a Fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project; The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, february 20, 2015
February 23, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Deportation, Executive Orders, Immigration | 5th Circuit Court, Andrew Hanen, Conservatives, Dept of Homeland Security, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Governing, Ronald Reagan |
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Dinesh D’Souza is no one’s idea of a thoughtful participant in the nation’s public conversation. Still, his tweet on Wednesday morning may have set a new low for the right-wing rabble-rouser. Commenting on a widely circulated image of President Obama taking a picture of himself with a selfie stick, D’Souza tweeted the following message: “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO… Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment.”
The tweet has created quite a stir, especially among people who think it demonstrates D’Souza’s racism. But I think it reveals something that might actually be worse: his willingness to pander shamelessly to racists in order to increase his own power and influence.
And really, isn’t that what’s most outrageous about the contemporary Republican Party — how ready and even eager it is to go slumming for support in the fever swamps of white cultural resentment?
Yes, even worse than its lamentable enthusiasm for prostrating itself before the super-rich. For one thing, while money can certainly influence the outcome of an election, it’s unclear how much or in what way. Just ask the notorious Koch brothers, who spent over $400 million during the last presidential election cycle with decidedly mixed results. Then there’s the fact that the Democrats have their own super-rich donors, showing that money doesn’t directly translate into a fixed ideological agenda. This is true even among the most reliably Republican donors, whose policy commitments can be as unpredictable as anyone’s.
Far greater civic damage is done by the GOP pandering to (and flattering the prejudices of) right-wing cultural populists.
It all began with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 bid to catapult himself into the White House on the backs of states-rights segregationists and Orange County conservatives. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but 16 years later Ronald Reagan succeeded with a similar strategy, combining culturally alienated Southern white voters with disaffected blue-collar northern Democrats to form a winning electoral coalition for the Republican Party.
As the size of that coalition has slowly shrunk over the intervening decades — due to a mixture of demographic attrition and changes in the ideological configuration of the Democratic Party since the early 1990s — the GOP has had to work ever-harder to motivate the coalition’s remaining members to show up at the polls on Election Day. And that has turned the Republican primaries into contests over who can pander to them the most egregiously.
That’s what’s inspired such sparkling policy gems as Mitt Romney’s proposal that undocumented workers “self-deport” and Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax cut gimmick. It’s also given us Sen. Ted Cruz — a politician whose every word and action seems driven by the singular desire to transform himself into an archetype of the median Fox News viewer.
And then there’s Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who’s already in the lead to win this election cycle’s award for Achievements in Pandering.
Exhibit A is a form of groveling that these days just about every Republican engages in when asked if he or she accepts the truth of Darwinian evolution. Walker played this sorry game on his recent trip to London, when the question was posed to him by a reporter and he chose to “punt.”
When members of the right-wing media dismiss such questions as exercises in confirming that conservatives belong to a different cultural “tribe” than liberals, they have a point. A president’s views on evolutionary biology are in almost all imaginable circumstances irrelevant to his job, and most liberals who scoff at Republican expressions of evolutionary agnosticism probably know no more about biological science than their ideological opponents.
Yet there is still something more than a little pathetic about the abject refusal of Republican candidates for high office to defend the reigning scientific consensus on the matter, at the risk of offending the most stridently fundamentalist Christians. Why not be similarly non-committal about whether the sun orbits the Earth or vice versa? Just because these believers have arbitrarily decided that it’s acceptable to defer to scientists on one issue but not the other?
A politician less terrified of antagonizing scientifically illiterate voters might respond to a question about evolution like this: “Yes, I believe life evolved on Earth, not because I’m a scientist but precisely because I’m not. Scientists study these questions, they revise their views in light of new evidence, all the evidence gathered today points toward evolution, and that’s good enough for me. As a Christian, I have faith that God played a role in evolution that we can’t fully grasp through science, but that doesn’t mean the science is wrong.”
A statement like that would take the faith of religious voters seriously while not pretending that ignorance is acceptable or treating it as something positively admirable. But of course it might also alienate a few Know Nothings, and that’s apparently not something Walker is willing to risk doing.
He is not only unwilling to risk offending fundamentalists, but also seems actively committed to wooing people who think that what America really needs in 2015 is to stick it to university professors.
That’s Exhibit B: Walker’s effort to cut $300 million from the budget for the University of Wisconsin system — coincidentally at the precise moment he’s gearing up to compete in the notoriously far-right GOP Iowa caucuses.
I have no idea if Walker actually believes professors are parasites on the Wisconsin state budget — or if he’s merely ingratiating himself to those who do. What matters is that in taking this stance he’s allied himself with the forces in American society that consider Advanced Placement history courses to be a problem rather than a plus, and who know so little about university life that they actually think professors are coddled wards of the state instead of richly educated researchers and teachers who work endless hours for modest pay and (thanks in part to slanderous statements by public figures like Scott Walker) precious little social esteem.
Is this really what America needs now — a scramble to nail down the stupid vote? That is the spectacle the Republican Party seems once again poised to provide.
Add it to the list of reasons I won’t be voting for the GOP anytime soon.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, February 20, 2015
February 21, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP Presidential Candidates, Republicans, Scott Walker | Barry Goldwater, Christian Fundamentalists, Conservatives, Evolution, Koch Brothers, Ronald Reagan, Southern White Voters, University Of Wisconsin |
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The harshest penalties usually tend to be brutal, vengeful, and excessive – even when the offender is a celebrity journalist like Brian Williams. Suspended without pay from his post as the NBC Nightly News anchor for six months, Williams may be facing the end of his career in television news, which would be roughly equivalent to capital punishment.
Williams is in the public dock for telling a false story about his experiences covering the American invasion of Iraq; the disclosure humiliated him, his colleagues, and his network when exposed. For the time being, at least, he has lost the trust of many in his audience. Enforced absence from the job he loves — and wanted all his life – is a sanction that will sting far more than the barbed jokes, ugly headlines, and lost millions in salary. Off air, he may find time to engage in serious introspection, issue a forthright apology, and hope for redemption.
Troubling as his transgression was, I nevertheless hope for his redemption too.
No doubt my sympathy is spurred by the fact that I have known Williams for a long time, not as a friend or even a newsroom colleague, but as a frequent guest on a nightly cable news show he hosted and, years later, as the author of a magazine profile of him.
What I encountered then was a witty and unassuming guy from south Jersey who kept many of the same friends he had 30 years ago; an exceptionally hard-working correspondent who took reporting seriously; a history buff who avidly consumed books and newspapers to broaden his knowledge; and a dedicated professional who cherished the anchor position as a trust handed down across generations.
He always knew how lucky he was, and he certainly knows how badly he has stumbled. Whether he eventually can regain what he has lost is a matter for him and the suits at NBC to sort out. Inevitably, their calculations will include commercial as well as journalistic values. While that process unfolds, however, he deserves a few words of defense against the eager mob of executioners now swinging the ax with such gusto.
It is ironic, to put it very mildly, that more than a decade after the Iraq invasion, which resulted from official and journalistic deceptions on a vast scale, the only individual deemed worthy of punishment is a TV newsman who inflated a war story on a talk show. And it is irritating, too, that so many of the NBC anchor’s harshest critics are heard on Fox News Channel, where lying is a way of life, as Leonard Pitts, Jr., noted recently.
To recall just one especially pertinent example: Fox host Sean Hannity, who now demands Williams’ head on a stick, repeatedly told TV and radio audiences that “every penny” from his Freedom Alliance concerts would benefit the children of deceased veterans. It was a lie, because huge amounts of the proceeds were squandered on “conferences” and other dubious expenses. But Hannity got away with it because he evidently hadn’t violated any laws.
All the wingnuts ceaselessly barking about how Williams betrayed the vets could not have cared less.
Indeed, it is puzzling that Williams has excited so much frothing anger on the right, where lying and deception are routinely excused, especially about military service. (George W. Bush prevaricated blatantly about his brief stint in the Texas Air National Guard, and Ronald Reagan lied about “liberating” a Nazi death camp — but nobody on the right cared much about that, either.) If anything, Williams is resolutely nonpartisan, and when I profiled him in 2008, he seemed slightly more enthusiastic about John McCain than Barack Obama. The son of a World War II Army captain, he idolized his father and has always venerated Americans in uniform – which may help to explain, along with a muddled memory and an apparent urge to embellish, how he fell into this current difficulty.
So far as anyone has determined, Williams is not guilty of the ultimate crime, which would be filing a false news report. His exaggerations all seem to have occurred on platforms other than the Nightly News. Widely repeated accusations by a far-right blogger that he puffed his award-winning Hurricane Katrina coverage with anecdotes about flooding and floating bodies remain unproven — and there is persuasive evidence supporting his remarks.
It was during Katrina’s aftermath that Williams memorably demonstrated how well he does his work. Vanity Fair was not alone in praising his performance, noting that he “exhibited unfaltering composure, compassion, and grit,” the culmination of decades in broadcast journalism.
Today’s anchors are overpaid superstars, fighting for attention in a world no longer dominated by network news, but none of that is his fault. And in contrast to many of the charming faces on television news programs, he is an actual journalist with a long record of unblemished reporting.
So unless something worse emerges from NBC’s investigation, I share the view of Joe Summerlin, one of the brave veterans who really did survive that Chinook shoot-down in 2003, and publicly refuted Williams’ Iraq tale. His wording wasn’t generous, but his attitude is.
“Everyone tells lies,” the war veteran told the New York Times. “Every single one of us. The issue isn’t whether or not you lie. It is how you deal with it once you are caught. I thank you for stepping down for a few nights, Mr. Williams. Now can you admit that you didn’t ‘misremember’ and perform a real apology? I might even buy you a beer.”
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, February 12, 2015
February 13, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Brian Williams, Journalists, Network Television | Fox News, George W. Bush, Iraq War, Joe Summerlin, media, NBC, NBC Nightly News, Ronald Reagan, Sean Hannity, Television News |
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