“The Pretzel Logic Of The Right”: Another Perceived Attack On The Sovereignty Of America, God And Family!
It’s hardly news any more when conservatives oppose ratification of a treaty reflecting widely shared American values. Concern for U.S. “sovereignty,” often based on conspiracy theories about the United Nations and other multinational organizations the U.S. helped create, has become a reflexive excuse for a kind of rigid unilateralism once associated with the John Birch Society or even older, isolationist conservatives.
But the current conservative fight to kill ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is especially interesting because the most avid opponents are the cultural conservatives who often profess solidarity with the disabled as part of their fight against legalized abortion. Anti-choicers and home-schoolers, however, have declared war on the convention on the theory that it confirms the “reproductive rights” of people with disabilities, and/or might confer other rights upon them that intefere with the absolute power of the family (presumably a servant-leader male-directed family) to raise children as they wish.
Thus it’s not surprising that Rick Santorum is at the head of this particular parade in the Senate, which raises the ire of WaPo’s Dana Milbank:
The former presidential candidate pronounced his “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people with AIDS, who are blind, who use wheelchairs and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared at a news conference….
[Mike] Lee, a tea party favorite, said he, too, has “grave concerns” about the document’s threat to American sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification, and I have secured the signatures of 36 Republican senators, all of whom have joined with me saying that we will oppose any ratification of any treaty during this lame-duck session.”
Lame or not, Santorum and Lee recognized that it looks bad to be disadvantaging the disabled in their quest for fair treatment. Santorum praised Lee for having “the courage to stand up on an issue that doesn’t look to be particularly popular to be opposed.”
Courageous? Or just contentious? The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”
Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.
And so, Santorum brought his famous daughter Bella, who suffers from a severe birth defect, to the hearing where he fought against acknowledgement of the rights of people like her.
This is where the pretzel logic of the Right can lead.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 27, 2012
“No Comment”: The National Rifle Association’s Bizarre Colorado Response
The National Rifle Association’s nightly online newscast, “The Daily News,” opened Friday with the unavoidably prime news of the day: the movie-theater horror in Colorado.
Its report on what anchor Ginny Simone termed “the unthinkable tragic shooting that shocked the country today” lasted 35 seconds. It concluded with word that, “at this hour the NRA is telling all media, including the NRA Daily News, that its policy is that it will have no comment until all the facts are known in this case.”
She then segued to a report about ongoing United Nations negotiations on a global arms treaty to regulate trade in conventional arms. That segment, making clear the anchor’s own outrage with the negotiations, lasted more than 10 minutes.
It was thus far easier to bash the U.N. for its audacity in trying to curb arms sales to wayward nations and faraway criminals than to wonder if there just might be a link between Friday’s tragedy and the easy access to firearms in this country.
The U.N. talks result from years of lobbying by human-rights groups and also mark the Obama administration’s decision to reverse Bush-era policy and to support the negotiations involving 200 nations.
However, amid opposition from pro-gun legislators, the administration has backed off its support of what some see as a quite important provision to also cover trade in ammunition.
The thrust of the U.N. proposal involves a wide range of weapons in a worldwide market thought to be as much as $60 billion a year. The U.S. is the biggest exporter in a system in which only a minority of governments regulate arms dealers, with a variety of regional and multination arms embargoes seen as generally ineffective.
The Christian Science Monitor has put it the overall context succinctly: “While the U.S. and a few other countries have relatively tough regulations governing the trade of weapons, many countries have weak or ineffective regulations, if they have any at all. The result is that there are more international laws governing the trade of bananas than conventional weapons, like AK-47s.”
As far as the NRA newscast was concerned, the “news” was that “the treaty may be in trouble of being approved by July 27, a deadline set by the U.N.”
That didn’t surprise the report’s primary interviewee, former Bush-era U.N. ambassador John Bolton. He proceeded to belittle the slow-moving ways of the organization and added that “August is a sacred month in New York,” with few working at the U.N.
But Bolton fretted that an inability to come to a resolution by month’s end could thus mean that President Obama might swoop in during September, prior to the annual convening of the General Assembly, and influence the final result.
Simone then turned to the NRA’s primary correspondent covering the talks New York, Tom Mason. He’s an official of the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities. She opened by indicating that Mason had told her that “panic has definitely set in at U.N. headquarters. They realize time is running out.”
Both Mason and Simone derided many elements of the treaty and the views of proponents. Those included linking the internal arms trade with violence against women.
Simon cited unidentified nations she terms “some of the worst human-rights abusers in the world” that were involved in the talks. She wondered how the treaty “will stop the killing and rape of people with no chance to defend themselves.”
The U.N. agenda, she said, is “to disarm people,” implying it would leave the defenseless even more so.
Both Mason and the anchor alleged a de facto media conspiracy of silence in covering the talks.
With one of several rhetorical questions, Simone asked him, “Is it fair to say civilian ownership and ammunition are very much on the hit list?”
“Yes, very much so,” said Mason.
The duo concluded with a broadside against the UN’s record in dealing with human-rights abuses, with Mason claiming, “They’ve never really thought this concept through of stopping human rights abuses.”
“But they have thought about how they can erode the Second Amendment in the U.S.,” he said.
Not mentioned was that the treaty is all about international transfers of weapons, not their internal domestic regulation.
By: James Warren, The Daily Beast, July 22, 2012
“Ultra Hawk”: John Bolton, Too Far Right Even For George W.Bush
If Mitt Romney plans to make even a slight move toward the middle in the general election, campaigning with John Bolton is not a great way to do it. Bolton, a key foreign-policy advisor to Romney, created a stir recently by appearing to rejoice in an op-ed in The Washington Times that talks between Iran and the U.S. and the “P5 plus one”–the U.N. Security Council members and Germany – had “produced no substantive agreement.” Bolton said any talks with Iran were merely “a well-oiled trap” and declared that President Obama had become “increasingly a bystander” in Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon (despite the disclosure that Obama has authorized aggressive cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities).
“Bolton has made it clear that he’s rooting for American diplomacy to fail and has repeatedly called for a rush to war with Iran,” said Michelle Flournoy, the Obama administration’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in a statement issued by the Obama campaign on Tuesday.
What is less understood about Bolton — and what is truly one of the great oddities in the career of any diplomat in U.S. history — is that for more than a decade the former undersecretary of State and U.N. ambassador has stood fast consistently against most diplomatic efforts, to the point of regularly belittling his former colleagues at the State Department. Both as a Yale-trained lawyer and a public official, Bolton has long campaigned against U.S. fealty to international agreements and multilateral treaties, and he was so extreme in these views that he proved to be too far right even for the George W. Bush administration, according to several former senior Bush officials. A favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, Bolton ran afoul of senior officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and failed in successive bids to be named her deputy and to replace Douglas Feith as No. 3 at the Pentagon. He was given the U.N. job as a consolation prize, at the urging of Cheney’s office, in part to keep him out of Washington, according to the former senior officials.
Even the British, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, found they could not work with Bolton diplomatically. On several occasions, Britain was irked by what U.S. and British sources said were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. In 2003, U.S.-British talks to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program succeeded only after British officials “at the highest level” persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team, my then-Newsweek colleague John Barry and I reported at the time. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Qaddafi’s demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House finally agreed to keep Bolton “out of the loop,” as one source put it. A deal was struck only after Qaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for “policy change”–surrendering his WMD.
Often misidentified as a neoconservative because of his ultra-hawkish views, Bolton told me in an interview in the early 2000s that he is actually a libertarian conservative, albeit not of the Ron Paul variety. Based on that interview and on his writings, in such essays as “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2000), Bolton has made plain that his career-long goal has been to unwind America’s deep ties to the international community, including the U.N. and multilateral treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he believes is based on an unsound legal concept. Bolton believes that international law in effect doesn’t exist and has no sway over U.S. sovereign prerogatives, especially whether to go to war.
At one point, Bolton even appeared to undermine the president’s own wishes in pursuing his personal agenda of undermining multilateral affiliations. In a landmark speech at the National Defense University in February 2004, Bush had called for a toughened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Bolton, who as undersecretary for arms control was supposed to be in charge of that project, “was absent without leave” when it came to implementing the agenda that the president laid out, failing to prepare for a five-year review conference of the NPT in 2005, a former Bush official who worked with Bolton told me at the time. “Everyone knew the conference was coming and that it would be contentious. But Bolton stopped all diplomacy on this six months ago,” another former official told me then. “The White House and the National Security Council started worrying, wondering what was going on. So a few months ago the NSC had to step in and get things going themselves. ” Bolton also held up a plutonium disposal project that required agreement with the Russians; it was completed after he left office.
Bolton is sometimes described as the author of the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative–a multilateral agreement to interdict suspected WMD shipments on the high seas. But the former senior Bush official who criticized Bolton’s performance on the NPT conference said that in fact Bolton’s successor, Robert Joseph, deserved most of the credit for the PSI. This official adds that it was Joseph, who was in charge of counterproliferation at the NSC, who had to pitch in when Bolton fumbled preparations for the NPT conference as well.
After he left the Bush administration, Bolton also became a vocal critic of its turn toward diplomacy, openly criticizing then-Secretary Rice’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea, which ultimately failed. “This is classic State Department zeal for the deal,” Bolton said on Fox News. He also declared, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that the Bush administration, having purged or sidelined most of its hardliners, was “in a state of total intellectual collapse.”
And now John Bolton is back.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, June 6, 2012
“Number One Geopolitical Foe”: Romney’s Comments On Russia ‘Are A Bit Puzzling’
GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney thought his mediocre campaign stumbled upon a game changer this week when President Obama was caught on an open mic telling Russian President Dimitry Medvedev that he’d be more “flexible” on issues like missile defense after the election. Romney called Obama’s comment “frightening” because Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe.” As evidence, Romney said “it is always Russia” that opposes the United States at the United Nations.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked into this claim and concluded that “Romney’s comments are a bit puzzling“:
But on the broader question of Iran and North Korea, Romney’s comments are a bit puzzling. Russia has repeatedly supported resolutions that have sought to limit Tehran’s and Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, such as the 2010 Security Council resolution that paved the way for increasingly tough sanctions on Iran.
As we wrote in our book on former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, some of the negotiations leading up to those resolutions were difficult and contentious, but it would be wrong to say Russia was “standing up” for those “bad actors.” Russia has cast no vetoes on resolutions concerning Iran and North Korea.
Indeed, Romney has been misrepresenting Obama’s record on Russia and Iran throughout the presidential campaign. “Had he gotten Russia to agree to impose tough, crippling sanctions on Iran, we could have put a lot more pressure on Iran,” Romney said back in September.
But as this blog noted at the time, the Obama administration spearheaded an effort to apply tougher sanctions on Iran in 2010. In June, Russia voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed a fourth round of tough sanctions on Iran because of it’s failure to comply with earlier resolutions demanding an end to nuclear enrichment. Last Spring, a U.N. experts panel on the sanctions concluded that the new measures “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”
Romney said this week that he does not think Obama “can recover” from the fallout of his comments to Medvedev. But it might turn out that it’s the former Massachusetts governor who will have some more explaining to do. Apart from being wrong on the substance of his attack on Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) basically told Romney to stop criticizing the president and even some of Romney’s supporters have said publicly that he’s wrong to say that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe.”
By: Ben Armbruster, Think Progress, March 28, 2012
United Nations Sharply Critical Of U.S. On Women’s Rights
The United Nations Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, has issued a very critical report of the U.S. on its policies on women’s rights. The report is based on a trip of the Special Rapporteur to the US from 24 January to 7 February 2011. During that trip, Ms. Rashida Manjoo broadly examined issues of violence against women in different settings. Her recommendations should provide fruitful material for the U.S. to improve its policies towards women.
As indicated in the report, “Violence against women occurs along a continuum in which the various forms of violence are often both causes and consequences of violence.” Domestic violence or Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is one of the most critical expressions of violence. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) 552,000 violent crimes by an intimate partner were committed against women in the U.S. in 2008.
Their husbands or intimate acquaintances are responsible for the majority of crimes against women. The Violence Policy Center states that the number of women shot and killed by their husbands or intimate acquaintances was four times higher than the total number of women murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined, according to an analysis of 2008 data.
Rape and sexual assault continue to be prevalent forms of violence against women in the country. According to the NCVS, 182,000 women were raped or sexually assaulted in the U.S. in 2008, i.e. approximately 500 women per day. In addition, there were 3.4 million persons who were victims of stalking, most of them women. 1 in 12 women and 1 in 45 men have been stalked in their lifetime in the U.S.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics, the cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $5.8 billion each year. $4.1 billion of that amount is for direct medical and mental health services. Intimate partner violence incidents result in more than 18.5 million mental health care visits each year.
Children are also victims of violence carried out against their mothers. It has been shown that 30% to 60% of perpetrators of intimate partner violence also abuse children in the household. Witnessing violence between one’s parents or caretakers is the strongest risk factor for transmitting violent behavior among generations. In that regard, it has been shown that boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults.
Domestic violence offenses are one of the most chronically underreported crimes. It is estimated that only approximately one-quarter of all physical assaults, one-fifth of all rapes, and one-half of all stalkings carried out against females by intimate partners are reported to the police.
There are several reasons for these crimes not being reported. Among those reasons are: fear of retaliation from their abuser, the perception that the police will not respond adequately to the complaint or the belief that these are issues that should be privately addressed. According to a 2009 Department of Justice report, only 56% of intimate partner violence cases filed with the courts resulted in a conviction.
Women victims of domestic violence suffer a wide array of negative consequences, aside from the physical and psychological. Women victims of domestic violence face serious consequences in terms of economic instability, loss of employment and homelessness. In addition, violence against women is frequently seen among women in the military, women in detention, and among immigrant and undocumented women.
The extent of the phenomenon has made that violence against women is now recognized as an issue that belongs not only to the private sphere but that requires State intervention. According to the U.N. Rapporteur, the U.S. Government has taken positive legislative and policy initiatives to reduce the prevalence of violence against women.
Among those steps is the enactment and subsequent reauthorizations of the Violence against Women Act, as well as the establishment of dedicated offices on violence against women at the highest levels of government. However, according to the UN Rapporteur, more U.S. government actions are needed to curb a phenomenon that continues to cause tremendous harm to women’s health and quality of life.
By: Cesar Chelala, MD, PhD, CommonDreams.org, June 4, 2011
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