“When Expedience Feels Like Wisdom”: What, Exactly, Is It We’re Fighting To Defend?
“Let’s stop worrying about people’s rights.”
Sadly there are dozens of junctures in American history from which that shameful quote might spring.
It could date as far back as 1798 when President Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, making it illegal to criticize the U.S. government.
It could come from the 1870s when Southern Democrats used violence to bar black voters from the polls and Northern Republicans looked the other way.
It could have been said in the 1940s when Americans put Americans in concentration camps, or in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy saw red everywhere he looked, or in the 1960s when J. Edgar Hoover sat listening to Martin Luther King’s phone calls, or, also in the ’60s, when the Supreme Court gave police the power to stop and frisk (and harass and intimidate) without warrants or probable cause.
It could have been said on any number of occasions, but it was actually said just last week on Fox “News,” where Sean Hannity convened a panel to discuss the terrorist attacks in Paris. Fox is the First Church of the Perpetual Indignation, so you can guess how that went.
A Dr. Gina Loudon, identified as a “psychology expert,” claimed “80 percent” of the mosques in America advocate violence. Coincidentally, about the same percentage of facts spewed by Fox “experts” turn out to be pure equine excreta.
Hannity, meantime, worried that a Syrian refugee might go into a crowded theater and start shooting people at random. Right. Like we need Syrian refugees for that.
But it was left to Bo Dietl, a former New York City cop, to cross the line from the simply stupid to the downright chilling, as he called for mass surveillance of mosques. Unconstitutional, you say? “Let’s stop worrying about people’s rights,” he said.
It is a seductive invitation. When you are scared — and Americans seem to live in a state of permanent terror — you run toward anything that promises a quick resolution of whatever has you frightened. In such an atmosphere, “rights” can seem a frivolous abstraction and expedience can feel like wisdom.
The irony is, that’s precisely when expedience is most dangerous — and rights most important. In light of all the overreactions that stain American history, all the lives ruined and lost because we disregarded guarantees that supposedly define us, Dietl’s words should make thinking people cringe. Especially given how often acts of expedience and the abridgment of rights have proven needless and wrong.
We supposedly hold sacred the values inscribed in this nation’s founding documents. Yet every time the world says “Boo!” some of us are pathetically eager to toss those values aside as if they were suddenly a burden too heavy to bear. But if the things that make America America are so easily sloughed off — if they are that unimportant — then what, exactly, is it we’re fighting to defend?
Why does “America” even matter?
Sept. 11 damaged and destroyed iconic buildings and took thousands of lives. But it also shredded the Constitution and made America unrecognizable to itself. The government tortured. It disappeared people. It snooped through innocent lives. It created a secret “no-fly list” of supposed terrorists that included many people with zero connection to terrorism, at least one of them a U. S. senator; you could never find out how you got on the list and there was no effective procedure for getting off. It also gave the president unilateral power to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial or even judicial oversight.
And after all that, here comes Bo Dietl. “Let’s stop worrying about people’s rights,” he says.
Here’s a better idea. Let’s start.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald,; Featured Post, The National Memo, November 22, 2015
“The GOP’s Islamic State Bluster”: As Far As The GOP Field Is Concerned, Generosity Of Spirit Is For Losers
The impact of the Paris attacks on the Republican presidential race may turn out to be minimal, especially since the establishment candidates aren’t making any more sense than outsiders Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Theoretically, a deadly rampage by Islamic State terrorists ought to make Republican voters think twice about presidential hopefuls who have zero experience in government and no expertise in foreign or military affairs. But the contenders who hold or held high office are offering little more than bellicose rhetoric and overblown pledges of toughness.
Not that it’s easy to match Trump for hyperbole. “Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country,” he said on Twitter. “Who knows who they are — some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?”
But Chris Christie, who should know better, went not just over the top but around the bend. He said all Syrian refugees should be turned away, including “orphans under 5.” As governor of New Jersey, maybe he’ll order a security sweep of the Garden State’s elementary school playgrounds.
For the record, Syrian refugees are not “pouring” into the United States. There’s hardly even a trickle: Since the civil war began, slightly more than 2,000 refugees have been admitted. Compare our meager total with the estimated 2 million Syrians taking refuge in Turkey or the hundreds of thousands flooding into Europe. Boosting the number to 10,000 over the next year, as Obama plans, would still mean that the U.S. contribution to alleviating one of the worst refugee crises since World War II doesn’t amount to a drop in the bucket. I could describe in detail the lengthy pre-entry vetting process, which can take up to two years, but why bother? As far as the GOP field is concerned, generosity of spirit is for losers.
Carson’s response to the Islamic State is, unsurprisingly, vague and off-the-wall. He wrote an op-ed in The Post calling for a military strategy virtually identical to President Obama’s, augmented by “a multi-pronged communications strategy that leverages our strengths in media production and messaging, combined with cutting off traditional access routes to social media for radical Islamist groups.” He seems to mean we should create a really cool smartphone app.
But Marco Rubio, too, called for a dramatic escalation in social-media warfare. He said Sunday that “where we strike them, we capture or kill their leaders, we videotape the operations, we publicize them, because this is a group that heavily uses propaganda to attract fighters and donors from around the world.” And John Kasich proposed a new government agency to promote “Judeo-Christian Western values” to the world.
Lindsey Graham had the best response to Kasich’s brainstorm: “I think that was the Crusades.”
Jeb Bush, the ultimate establishment candidate, seemed to sense both opportunity and peril. “The United States should not delay in leading a global coalition to take out ISIS with overwhelming force,” he said in a speech Wednesday. “Militarily, we need to intensify our efforts in the air — and on the ground.”
Coming from anyone else, those words might strike Republican voters as tough and sober. Coming from a candidate named Bush, however, they could portend a geopolitical blunder of historic proportions. Perhaps that is why Bush is vague on how many U.S. ground troops he would send and what they would do, saying he would rely on the judgment of the professional soldiers advising him.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because all the establishment GOP candidates pledge to rely on the generals to tell them how many troops to send. Obama says he follows the generals’ counsel, too.
Rogue candidate Trump, of course, needs no advice. He says he will “bomb the [expletive] out of [ISIS],” applauds the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing the same and vows to destroy the oil fields that provide much of the Islamic State’s wealth.
He says all of this in typically bombastic fashion. His claim that he will “win” by sheer force of personality is deeply unserious. But the actual policies he rants about may resonate with GOP voters: Rely on air power, get other countries to put troops on the ground, take no chances with refugees, talk really tough.
Two new polls of New Hampshire Republicans, conducted since the Paris attacks by WBUR of Boston and Fox News, show that Rubio may be doing a little better in that state and Carson a little worse. But Trump remains far ahead of the pack. Plus ça change.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 19, 2015
“The Perils Of Circus Politics”: Circus Politics May Be Fun To Watch, But It’s Profoundly Dangerous For America And The World
The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal.
We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader.
Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.
How have we come to this?
First, anyone with enough ego and money can now run for president.
This wasn’t always the case. Political parties used to sift through possible candidates and winnow the field.
Now the parties play almost no role. Anyone with some very wealthy friends can set up a Super PAC. According to a recent New York Times investigation, half the money to finance the 2016 election so far has come from just 158 families.
Or if you’re a billionaire, you can finance your own campaign.
And if you’re sufficiently outlandish, outrageous, and outspoken, a lot of your publicity will be free. Since he announced his candidacy last June, Trump hasn’t spent any money at all on television advertising.
Second, candidates can now get away with saying just about anything about their qualifications or personal history, even if it’s a boldface lie.
This wasn’t always the case, either. The media used to scrutinize what candidates told the public about themselves.
A media expose could bring a candidacy to a sudden halt (as it did in 1988 for Gary Hart, who had urged reporters to follow him if they didn’t believe his claims of monogamy).
But when today’s media expose a candidates lies, there seems to be no consequence. Carson’s poll numbers didn’t budge after revelations he had made up his admission to West Point.
The media also used to evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, and those evaluations influenced voters.
Now the media’s judgments are largely shrugged off. Trump says he’d “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, round up all undocumented immigrants in the United States and send them home, and erect a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexican border.
Editors and columnists find these proposals ludicrous but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Fiorina says she’ll stop Planned Parenthood from “harvesting” the brains of fully formed fetuses. She insists she saw an undercover video of the organization about to do so.
The media haven’t found any such video but no one seems to care.
Third and finally, candidates can now use hatred and bigotry to gain support.
Years ago respected opinion leaders stood up to this sort of demagoguery and brought down the bigots.
In the 1950s, the eminent commentator Edward R. Murrow revealed Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy to be a dangerous incendiary, thereby helping put an end to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.
In the 1960s, religious leaders and university presidents condemned Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and other segregationist zealots – thereby moving the rest of America toward integration, civil rights, and voting rights.
But when today’s presidential candidates say Muslim refugees shouldn’t be allowed into America, no Muslim should ever be president, and undocumented workers from Mexico are murderers, they get away with it.
Paradoxically, at a time when the stakes are especially high for who becomes the next president, we have a free-for-all politics in which anyone can become a candidate, put together as much funding as they need, claim anything about themselves no matter how truthful, advance any proposal no matter how absurd, and get away bigotry without being held accountable.
Why? Americans have stopped trusting the mediating institutions that used to filter and scrutinize potential leaders on behalf of the rest of us.
Political parties are now widely disdained.
Many Americans now consider the “mainstream media” biased.
And no opinion leader any longer commands enough broad-based respect to influence a majority of the public.
A growing number of Americans have become convinced the entire system is rigged – including the major parties, the media, and anyone honored by the establishment.
So now it’s just the candidates and the public, without anything in between.
Which means electoral success depends mainly on showmanship and self-promotion.
Telling the truth and advancing sound policies are less important than trending on social media.
Being reasonable is less useful than gaining attention.
Offering rational argument is less advantageous than racking up ratings.
Such circus politics may be fun to watch, but it’s profoundly dangerous for America and the world.
We might, after all, elect one of the clowns.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, November 17, 2015
“So Much For American Exceptionalism”: Fear Of Syrian Refugees Brings Ugly Past Incidents To Mind
It didn’t take long for the stampede to start.
By Sunday, even as stunned Parisians were still placing flowers at the sites of the terrorist atrocities that claimed more than a hundred lives and injured hundreds more, a couple of American governors had announced that Syrian refugees would not be welcome on their turf.
Within a few days, more than half the nation’s governors had signed on. (Never mind that governors have no authority to control borders.) Republican presidential candidates rushed to keep up, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz pledging a religious test that would admit only Syrian Christians. By Thursday, the House had passed a bill with such stringent vetting standards that it would be virtually impossible to admit any Syrian refugees.
How depressing. Whatever happened to political leadership?
Yes, yes, Americans are shocked and frightened — and understandably so. The savage attacks on unarmed Parisians were carried out by affiliates of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL), which has established a stronghold in Syria, and were calculated to produce horror, to instill fear, to provoke panic. The point of terrorism, after all, is to terrorize.
And since fear is such a powerful emotion — with the capacity to overwhelm reason — it’s no surprise that the American public is now exhibiting a deep reluctance to take in Syrians displaced by war, even though many of them are also targets of ISIL’s brutality. A Bloomberg survey conducted in the wake of the Paris attacks showed that 53 percent of Americans oppose granting asylum to Syrian refugees.
But the proper duty of political leaders is to, well, lead. They shouldn’t pander to our fears or inflame our basest instincts. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many of them chose to do.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie, desperate to raise his standing in the GOP presidential race, was more shameful than his rivals: “I don’t think that orphans under 5 should be admitted to the United States at this point.” Even for a governor who prides himself on in-your-face provocations, that’s pretty despicable.
But some pols managed to sink even lower. One Tennessee legislator, Rep. Glen Casada, proposed sending the National Guard to round up any Syrian refugees who’ve been resettled in his state and ship them out. Casada has clearly refused to learn from some disgraceful episodes in the nation’s history.
In 1939, for example, the United States, along with Cuba and Canada, denied entry to more than 900 Jews aboard the MS St. Louis seeking refuge from Nazi Germany. The refugees were forced to return to Europe, where, historians estimate, about a quarter of them later perished in death camps.
As historian Peter Shulman, a professor at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, recently pointed out, antipathy toward European Jews ran high even as the Nazis began their campaign of extermination. He cited a 1938 poll showing that 67 percent of Americans opposed bringing in “German, Austrian and other” political refugees.
The historical comparison isn’t perfect. The U.S. had not fully emerged from the Great Depression, and fear of economic competition was certainly a factor. But so was anti-Semitism — just as an anti-Muslim xenophobia is now. Among some, including President Roosevelt, there was also the suspicion that Nazi agents might be hiding among Jewish refugees. Sound familiar?
The nation’s hysteria didn’t stop with the refusal to aid the Jews aboard the St. Louis. Roosevelt also signed an executive order to round up more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent and hold them in internment camps; 62 percent of them were American citizens, some with sons serving in the U.S. armed forces. Decades later, the U.S. government officially apologized and acknowledged that the camps resulted from, among other things, “race prejudice.”
History, then, offers some powerful lessons about fear and the shameful reactions it can provoke. So let’s all keep our heads.
The Obama administration already has a thorough and painstaking vetting process for Syrian refugees that can take as long as two years. Is it perfect? No, it isn’t. But it sets a high bar for entry while also preserving our ability to assist those who most need our help.
Isn’t that what American exceptionalism is all about?
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, November 21, 2015
“Where’s The Cool-Down Switch On This Thing?”: The Apocalyptic Mind-Set That Has Developed Among Republicans
Krugman is, as usual, right: the hysteria level among Republicans at present is just out of control. You imagine them examining their own bodies for a cool-down switch or maybe plunging themselves into cold bathwater periodically.
[W]e shouldn’t really be surprised, because we’ve seen this movie before (unless we were too scared to go to the theater). Remember the great Ebola scare of 2014? The threat of a pandemic, like the threat of a terrorist attack, was real. But it was greatly exaggerated, thanks in large part to hype from the same people now hyping the terrorist danger.
What’s more, the supposed “solutions” were similar, too, in their combination of cruelty and stupidity. Does anyone remember Mr. Trump declaring that “the plague will start and spread” in America unless we immediately stopped all plane flights from infected countries? Or the fact that Mitt Romney took a similar position? As it turned out, public health officials knew what they were doing, and Ebola quickly came under control — but it’s unlikely that anyone on the right learned from the experience.
What explains the modern right’s propensity for panic? Part of it, no doubt, is the familiar point that many bullies are also cowards. But I think it’s also linked to the apocalyptic mind-set that has developed among Republicans during the Obama years.
Think about it. From the day Mr. Obama took office, his political foes have warned about imminent catastrophe. Fiscal crisis! Hyperinflation! Economic collapse, brought on by the scourge of health insurance! And nobody on the right dares point out the failure of the promised disasters to materialize, or suggest a more nuanced approach.
Given this context, it’s only natural that the right would seize on a terrorist attack in France as proof that Mr. Obama has left America undefended and vulnerable. Ted Cruz, who has a real chance of becoming the Republican nominee, goes so far as to declare that the president “does not wish to defend this country.”
The context also explains why Beltway insiders were so foolish when they imagined that the Paris attacks would deflate Donald Trump’s candidacy, that Republican voters would turn to establishment candidates who are serious about national security.
Who, exactly, are these serious candidates? And why would the establishment, which has spent years encouraging the base to indulge its fears and reject nuance, now expect that base to understand the difference between tough talk and actual effectiveness?
Sure enough, polling since the Paris attack suggests that Mr. Trump has actually gained ground.
And why shouldn’t he? The entire GOP field has been moving in his direction on this inflammable “Issue” of immigration linked to terrorism. The Republican Establishment types who have regarded the Trump candidacy as summer entertainment for the hoi polloi before they settle down to do their duty to the party by nominating Jeb have never really understood Trump’s appeal. All they can do now is mimic his rhetoric.
By: Ed Kilgore, Senior Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 20, 2015
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