“Should You Still Despise George W. Bush?”: He Hasn’t Initiated A Disastrous War Or Bankrupted The Government In Years
Twitter was alight this morning with mockery of this post from Washington Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, explaining a marginal improvement in George W. Bush’s post-presidential approval ratings (from 33 percent when he left office to 47 percent now) by noting that Bush won that ugly Iraq War (who started that again?), gave us a great economy, and pretty much solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other accomplishments, and also had a “tender, tearful love of country,” unlike some people she could mention. I’ll leave it to others to respond to the particulars of Rubin’s journey to Bizarro World, but if we assume this poll to be accurate, the question is, why might Americans’ opinions of Bush be somewhat less dreadful than they used to be?
Let’s think about it this way: How do you feel about Bush? If you’re like me, your contempt for him isn’t what it once was. Back in the day, I took a back seat to no one when it came to displeasure with him. But I’ll admit that in the four years since he left office, my own feelings toward him have softened. Not that I now think he was anything other than a terrible president, but I’m not actively mad at him anymore. My rational judgment hasn’t changed, but my more emotional feelings have dissipated somewhat.
That’s partly because of the rise of the Tea Party and its takeover of the GOP, which made Bush look like a moderate by comparison with the lunatics who are now exerting so much influence over his party. But more than that, I think, is the fact that he’s just not in our faces every day. If you were a liberal in the 2000s, Bush was pissing you off all the time. But give the guy some credit: he hasn’t initiated a disastrous war or bankrupted the government in years!
I suspect if you asked conservatives about Bill Clinton, a few might admit to the same evolution. When Bubba was president, their hatred of him burned with the fire of a thousand suns. But now? There are so many other things to get mad about, and if Clinton is spending his time raising money to buy mosquito nets to stop malaria, well there’s nothing wrong with that. And if Bush is spending his days painting pictures of dogs, it’s hard to get worked up about it.
There will no doubt now be a campaign to resuscitate Bush’s image; National Journal‘s Ron Fournier does his part with a column noting that Bush has been known to write a thank-you note, and is also very punctual. Nobody could argue he did nothing good; for instance, he put resources toward addressing the AIDS crisis in Africa, knowing that there was little domestic benefit to be had. And from what one can tell, in person Bush was usually a nice guy. But we shouldn’t let the mists of time make us forget all the awful things he did, too. Presidents have to be judged by their actions and the effects those actions have on the country and the world. Bush’s eight years in office were a string of disasters, and not little ones either. His disasters were grand and far-reaching, from the hundreds of thousands who died in Iraq to the squandering of trillions of dollars to the abandonment of New Orleans during Katrina. A few years later those things may no longer make us boil with rage. But we shouldn’t forget them.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 23, 2013
“Scary Cruz Control”: Republican Leaders Don’t Know How To Control The Monster They’ve Created
Is there nobody who can tell Ted Cruz to shut up?
The young senator from Texas has been on the job for about 100 days, but he has already turned the Senate’s ancient seniority system upside down and is dominating his senior Republican colleagues. He’s speaking for them on immigration, guns and any other topic that tickles his fancy; Republican leaders are seething at being outshone yet are terrified of challenging him.
Consider his news conference this week to promote the Republican alternative to gun control. With Cruz on the stage in the Senate TV studio: the bill’s primary author, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a 32-year Senate veteran and longtime chairman or ranking member of the finance and judiciary committees; Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (10 years in the Senate and eight in the House); and Dan Coats of Indiana (12 years in the Senate and eight in the House).
But Cruz took over the lectern and refused to relinquish it. He spoke 2,924 words for the cameras, more than Grassley (904), Graham (1,376) and Coats (360) — combined. Factoring in his dramatic pauses to convey sincerity and deep thought, Cruz’s dominance was even more lopsided. The others shifted uncomfortably and looked awkwardly around the room. At one point, Graham requested a chance to speak. “Can I?” he asked Cruz.
Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration. Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year with the insinuation that Chuck Hagel, now the defense secretary, may have been on the payroll of the North Koreans. Cruz also wrote in Politico that “Hagel’s nomination has been publicly celebrated by the Iranian government.” He later alleged that Democrats had told the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.”
Now Cruz is turning his incendiary allegations against fellow Republicans. On immigration, he has described as amnesty the compromise that Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and three other Republicans negotiated with Democrats. Cruz said such a plan would make “a chump” of legal immigrants. On guns, he said the background checks Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated in a bipartisan compromise would lead to a national gun registry — an outcome the doomed proposal explicitly prohibited.
Democrats see a potential bogeyman in Cruz because of his outrageous pronouncements, and reporters love his inflammatory quotes. Republican leaders, however, don’t know how to control this monster they created.
GOP lawmakers encouraged the rise of the tea party, which now dominates Republican primaries and threatens the same leaders who nurtured it. Cruz’s fellow Texan, John Cornyn, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, could face a primary challenge next year and therefore can’t afford to cross Cruz, who beat an establishment Republican in the 2012 primary. Likewise, the Senate GOP leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is up for reelection and has to keep on the good side of tea party favorites such as Sen. Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, and Cruz.
I’ve argued before that Cruz is more cunning than ideological. He’s Ivy League-educated and a skilled debater who has perfected a look of faux earnestness that suggests his every pronouncement is the most important oration since Gettysburg. Cruz has correctly calculated that the way to power among Senate Republicans is through attention-grabbing accusations.
On immigration, his Latino credentials have helped him undermine Rubio’s bipartisanship. When Rubio made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows April 14, he was confronted with Cruz’s criticism by both NBC’s David Gregory and ABC’s Jon Karl.
On guns, Cruz’s high profile required Grassley to give the upstart a premium chunk of floor time for his trademark falsehoods. Cruz claimed that his bill was the “result of multiple hearings in the Judiciary Committee.” (It was never brought before the panel.) He claimed the opposing legislation would extend “background checks to private transactions between private individuals.” (The bill applied to only advertised sales.) Off the floor, he made the patently false claim that the “so-called ‘gun show loophole’ ” doesn’t exist.
If Republicans are willing to look the other way when Cruz assaults the facts, they may find it increasingly grating to endure his assaults on their dignity. At their news conference on guns, Grassley was made to stand silently for half an hour while Cruz gave an eight-minute opening statement (more than twice the length of Grassley’s) and fielded six questions before yielding to his senior colleague. “I’m just going to say one thing,” Grassley said, “and then I’m going to have to go.”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 19, 2013
“The MarcoPhone”: Marco Rubio’s Life Is About To Get Complicated
Marco Rubio has had a pretty charmed political life. He rose quickly through the ranks in the Florida legislature, won a Senate seat without too much trouble at the tender age of 39, then suddenly found himself the “Republican savior” a mere two years after arriving in Washington. At a time when the GOP is desperate to appeal to Latinos, he’s a young, smart, dynamic Latino who could be their presidential nominee in 2016. What could go wrong?
Immigration reform, that’s what. Many elite Republicans feel, and not without reason, that while supporting comprehensive reform might not win them the votes of Latinos, opposing it will pretty much guarantee that those votes will be lost to them. And Rubio almost has no choice but to be one of the leaders, if not the leader, of the party in that effort. He can’t be the Great Latino Hope if he isn’t. Trouble is, lots and lots of rank-and-file Republicans, particularly the kind who vote in presidential primaries, don’t much like reform the way it’s shaping up. Sure, under the “Gang of 8” plan in the Senate it’ll take 13 years for a current undocumented immigrant to become an American citizen. But for many in the party’s base, that’s about 113 years too quick. Enter the MarcoPhone. Wait, what? Get a load of this:
Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. Despite the moniker, it predated the current administration by decades and rose to prominence last year mostly due to a viral video of a female black Obama supporter talking about the program.
Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”
The provision in question doesn’t give phones to undocumented immigrants, it gives phones to people who live on the border so they can call the Border Patrol if they see people crossing from Mexico. But as Ed Kilgore says, “I’m having trouble feeling bad for Rubio getting a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Tea Party delusion.” It’ll certainly be an interesting test of Rubio’s and his team’s communication skills to see if they can squash this (they’re already trying).
What folks like Ingraham understand is that when you’re trying to gin up outrage about a big, complex piece of legislation, the way to do it is to find some component of the bill that is weighted with symbolic value and will hit directly on your target audience’s resentments and fears. It doesn’t matter how minor the provision is, or how much you need to distort its actual function and intent. All that matters is that it’ll get people pissed off.
“Death panels” was the prototypical example. It told people who feared increased government power and control that the Affordable Care Act would literally give heartless Washington bureaucrats the power to decide who lives and dies. It was not just a lie but an absurd lie, an insane lie. But it worked, at least well enough. Gun advocates who wanted to defeat the Manchin-Toomey background check proposal went around saying it included a “national gun registry,” despite the fact that the bill prohibited the government from ever making such a registry, because they knew that would play on the most paranoid fears of gun nuts who think that any moment the jackbooted AFT thugs are going to come busting down their door to confiscate their AR-15s. The MarcoPhone can function the same way. What does it tell people in the anti-immigrant portion of the GOP base? That a bunch if illegals aren’t just getting amnesty, they’re going to be getting freebies, paid for with your tax dollars!
If it isn’t nipped in the bud, this could be deadly for Rubio. His Tea Party credentials may be impeccable, but if he starts looking soft on the foreign horde to the south, a lot of Republican primary voters will start getting suspicious of him. It’s possible that now that it has been explained to them, people like Ingraham will back off, especially since the guy they’re attacking is one of their own. As long as they still consider him one of their own.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 18, 2013
“A Ticket To Long Term Love”: The Liberal Media’s Gift To Mitch McConnell
After a recording of an opposition research strategy meeting was leaked to Mother Jones, Mitch McConnell is demanding that the FBI investigate the bugging of his office by the “political left.” This is silly. McConnell knows it’s silly. The meeting was almost certainly recorded by an attendee, not by “bugs” planted by liberal spies.
But the point isn’t really to catch the perpetrator. The point is this ridiculous splash on his campaign website, in which visitors are told that McConnell’s office was “wiretapped” by “liberals” and are encouraged to respond by sending all of their contact information, along with some money, to Mitch McConnell’s reelection campaign.
A good “victim of liberal persecution” story is a ticket to long-term love — and cash — in the persecution-fixated conservative movement. That’s why Fox hired Juan Williams and why people gave money to Michele Bachmann and Allen West. Mitch McConnell, who is among the least popular humans on the planet, especially in Kentucky, needs to get conservatives excited to support him, and a fantastical tale of wiretapping by leftist thugs will help.
He shouldn’t actually need this, though. The weird thing about Mitch McConnell is that he’s easily the best friend the conservative movement has in Washington, and yet the activist right-wing base hates him.
No one has done more to thwart Barack Obama than McConnell. But the CPAC rabble reserve their affection for loudmouthed clowns like Louie Gohmert, who has never accomplished anything. McConnell operates quietly, but more effectively than almost any other major conservative elected official in Washington. He is keeping liberal (or, more often, moderate) judges from being confirmed, he’s hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and effectively stopping the National Labor Relations Board from carrying out its mandate. If Senate Republicans were led by a squishier, more moderate senator, one who actually took seriously the “tradition” and “civility” bullshit the chamber’s old men pretend to hold dear, they might not have been willing or able to carry out four straight years of delay and filibuster on every single piece of Senate business. Despite that, McConnell is derided as a squishy moderate. In fact, it’s only through McConnell’s considerable political skill that he’s managed to avoid a serious right-wing primary challenger.
That’s why McConnell needs this battle with “the political left.” His very bright campaign manager — Jesse Benton, whom you may know from the Rand Paul and Ron Paul campaigns — clearly knew that the smart move was to immediately hype the fact that The Liberals are Attacking Mitch McConnell. While Tea Party types distrust McConnell, they loathe all liberals. That’s why McConnell kept repeating that the “bugging” of his office was carried out by “the political left,” and that’s why he broadly attempted to associate that phrase — though not assign responsibility for the taping — to the Kentucky liberal group that recently made headlines for a racist attack on McConnell’s wife. (A racist attack that much of “the political left” criticized as racist.)
If you want proof that this is working, check out this column by the National Review’s Michael Walsh, a man who used to write under a pseudonym as a parody of Hollywood liberalism, and who now writes under his own name as a much funnier and more cutting (if unintentional) parody of hysterical right-wing ranting. Walsh is pleased that Sen. McConnell has recognized the essential truth of modern politics: That the Left is vicious and unrelenting.
Good to see that Senator Mitch McConnell has finally figured out what some of us have been shouting for years: The Left plays to win and they don’t much care how they do it. When they say, “by any means necessary,” they mean it.
He goes on:
As the Mother Jones story ripples through the rest of the compliant, complicit media, the takeaway won’t be the substance of the story, or lack of it. It will be: Those mean Republicans, blah, blah, blah. In other words, it’s not a story in the old journalistic sense. It’s a meme-reinforcer. And that’s how the Democrat-Media Complex plays the game; even a nothing-burger story like this can be used as a club with which to pound the opposition, with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing them completely.
The only people here exploiting the appetite of a portion of the political press for simplistic “memes” are the Mitch McConnell campaign, who know that easily riled-up dopes like Walsh will freak out in a grand style when presented with any excuse to.
Once the FBI has finished its investigation, McConnell should send David Corn a fruit basket.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 10, 2013
“Popping Out Of Every Hole”: Mitch McConnell Faces A Real Threat, And It’s Not Left-Wing Leaks
As is often the case, we’ve been burying the lead as we dissect the leaked recording of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s private whack-a-mole strategy session.
Most of the talk, on the recording and in the media, has been about the cold-blooded, ruthless assessment of the alleged weaknesses of Democratic activist-actress Ashley Judd as a reelection challenger. Riveting if revolting stuff. But what caught my eye was the very last paragraph of the colloquy, in which the Kentucky Republican’s staffers assure their boss that they are going to vet and figure out how to destroy “potential primary folks.”
Specifically, they said they would investigate a wealthy Louisville, Ky., businessman Matthew Bevin, who has been willing at least to listen to some tea party types.
To understand what the Republican Senate leader is up to these days, you need to remember that he now lives in fear less of his home-state Democrats — whom he has essentially neutered in his nearly 30 years in the U.S. Senate — than of tea party and other Republicans who hate his grip on the GOP in Kentucky and his record of talking a better conservative game than he plays.
Working on that resentment is how now-Sen. Rand Paul managed to defeat McConnell’s handpicked GOP candidate for junior senator from Kentucky in 2010. And even though Paul now pledges support for McConnell, and Paul’s former campaign manager is now on McConnell’s team, the five-term incumbent can’t be sure that he is a lock in the May 2014 GOP primary.
That is one reason why McConnell took the unusual step (for a party leader) of joining a list of other senators who vowed to filibuster any and all new gun control legislation.
That is why McConnell hit the floor the other day to roundly denounce — in far more caustic terms than those used by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — the president’s new budget.
And that is why McConnell is screaming bloody murder about what he claims was the involvement of the “left” in the “bugging” of his campaign office in Louisville last February.
McConnell and his minions have no proof of who was responsible for the recording and the gifting of it to Mother Jones. He may turn out to be correct.
But it is equally possible that the guilty party was a disgruntled Republican — or even that someone on McConnell’s team tried to emulate the tactic allegedly used by GOP strategist Karl Rove in a Texas gubernatorial race in 1986. Rove was widely suspected by the Texas press, and many Republicans, of having bugged his own office so that the device could be “discovered” and he could denounce the Democrats.
No device was found in the McConnell office, though no one apparently looked for one until this week, when the Mother Jones story broke.
Whatever the leak’s provenance, McConnell rushed to the microphones in the Capitol on Tuesday, surrounded by his loyal Senate GOP followers, to denounce the recordings as an example of how the “left wing” was out to get him in Kentucky.
McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton stepped up the hysteria level on Wednesday, saying on Mike Huckabee’s radio show that the recording’s release were evidence of “Gestapo kind of scare tactics.”
Translation: Hey, Tea Party! You think I’m an unprincipled dealmaker with centrist tendencies? Look how the left wing hates me!
The idea that a Kentucky Republican might have gotten hold of the recording and leaked it is not so far-fetched in a state party that has begun to feel stale and discontented after decades of control by the Louisville-based McConnell.
“There is a lot of discontent in McConnell Land,” said David Adams, who blogs in Kentucky and was Rand Paul’s first campaign manager in 2010. “People aren’t feeling like the Republican Party in the state is going in the right direction.”
The relationship between McConnell and Paul — who were ferocious enemies until the end of the 2010 primary — is described by one Kentuckian on the Hill as merely “transactional.” McConnell was the tea party’s real target in that election, with his chosen candidate, Trey Grayson, just the stand-in.
Now it is McConnell himself who has to face the grassroots wrath, at a time when his overall approval rating in the state is 36 percent — the worst of any senator.
Adams ticked off his major complaints about McConnell on the issues: “The bank bailout. The sum total of all the wasteful federal budgets he voted for, especially in the Bush years. The Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, for what they did to privacy and civil rights. All the pork barrel money he brings back and all the press releases he puts out it.
“We’ve got hundreds.
“Just all the years of him claiming that he cares about freedom and liberty when his long record shows otherwise.
“He’s playing his own form of whack-a-mole. He pops out of every hole there is.”
By: Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post, April 10, 2013
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