Category Archives: Politics

John McCain: no longer a maverick, now just a bitter old man

Politics, , , ,

[cnnvideo url=”http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2012/11/15/exp-tsr-bash-mccain.cnn” inline=’true’]

Oh, the irony:

Most of the Republican members of a Senate committee investigating the terrorist attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, skipped a classified briefing by administration officials on the incident Wednesday, CNN has learned.

The missing lawmakers included Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who at the time of the top-secret briefing held a press conference in the Capitol to call for the creation of a Watergate-type special Congressional committee to investigate how and why the attack took place.

McCain, who has accused President Barack Obama of not telling the truth about the Benghazi attack, said that even though there are several committees involved in the probe, only a select committee could streamline the information flow and resolve the “many unanswered questions” about the tragedy.

When CNN approached McCain in a Capitol hallway Thursday morning, the senator refused to comment about why he missed the briefing, which was conducted by top diplomatic, military and counter-terrorism officials. Instead, McCain got testy when pressed to say why he wasn’t there.

“I have no comment about my schedule and I’m not going to comment on how I spend my time to the media,” McCain said.

Asked why he wouldn’t comment, McCain grew agitated: “Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me I can or not?”

When CNN noted that McCain had missed a key meeting on a subject the senator has been intensely upset about, McCain said, “I’m upset that you keep badgering me.”

So let’s get this straight: McCain skipped a classified intelligence briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference about how he doesn’t have enough information on Benghazi.

In unrelated scary news, this man once came close to the presidency.

You knew this had to happen

Film/TV, Humor, Politics, , , ,

The inevitable David Petraeus/Mean Girls analogies:

Mean Girls, that true classic of modern cinema, introduced America to a catty social undermining technique known as the “three-way calling attack”: A teen girl phones a friend to engage in some gossip, neglecting to mention that a third friend is listening silently on another line. It’s casual entrapment, a surefire way to gin up controversy in a small, closed social circle. But there are usually unforeseen consequences.

One week in, with more backstabbing details emerging every day, the Pentagon affair scandal has begun to seem like a giant three-way (or five-way) calling attack staged by a D.C.-military-elite version of the Plastics. The split-screen mayhem looks like this: General David Petraeus has a long-simmering affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, who gets jealous of Petraeus’s acquaintance Jill Kelley and sends her threatening, anonymous e-mails. Broadwell also dials in General John Allen, another acquaintance, sending him e-mails that describe Kelley “as a ‘seductress’ and warn[ing] the general about being entangled in a relationship with her,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Then Kelley gets an anonymous FBI agent on the line, intending that he only hear Broadwell’s attacks. But while he’s eavesdropping on that interaction, he overhears dirt that Kelley didn’t mean to expose — namely, that she was exchanging her own sexy e-mails with Allen. Oh, and that anonymous FBI agent was hot for Kelley and had sent her shirtless pics of himself. As the Plastics would say, “OMG.”

Oh, and it continues.

Probably not the best post-election approach

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Utah Senator Orrin Hatch clarifies Mitt Romney’s 47% comments:

Mitt Romney got it wrong: It’s not 47 percent of the nation that is not paying federal income taxes.

“It’s 51 percent!” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said Wednesday.

Hatch, who often talks about the percentage of Americans who don’t have to pay Uncle Sam — aside from payroll taxes — offered that clarification after he was asked whether he has concerns about fallout from a losing presidential campaign in which Romney’s use of the 47 percent figure played a prominent role. Romney argued at a secretly recorded fundraising event that he wasn’t concerned about the 47 percent because they wouldn’t vote for him.

Hatch argued that Romney’s comments “had an effect, but I don’t think much of an effect,” so he was not worried.

He also clarified what he thinks Romney meant and should have said.

“It was distorted because Romney did not explain it right,” Hatch said. “All he had to say was ‘Look, when 51 percent of all households — not just individuals — don’t pay a penny in income taxes, it shows that we’ve got too many people riding in the wagon.’ What he should have said is, ‘I want to get them out of the wagon in good jobs where they can also help pull the wagon.’

“That’s what he meant to say, but he didn’t say it,” added Hatch, who once suggested the poor should pay more taxes. He later clarified that he did not want to tax the “truly poor.”

My humble suggestion to the Republican Party: kindly drop the percentages talk. For a group of people so preoccupied with enumeration, you’d think they’d understand the drop in their own polling percentages.

Another Senate race in Massachusetts?

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Speculation is heating up that Massachusetts U.S. Senator John Kerry may be named to a Cabinet-level post in Obama’s second term: most likely either State or Defense. This has prompted a cascade of worries that the Democrats are making an unforced error and may lose a Senate seat if they can’t field an able candidate to replace Kerry in Massachusetts. (This is especially concerning given recently defeated Senator Scott Brown’s persistent popularity.) Dan Amira at New York Magazine makes this point:

As everyone is aware, Kerry’s elevation to a cabinet post would open up a Senate seat in Massachusetts, providing the just-defeated Scott Brown with an opportunity to rejoin the Senate without even having to take on an incumbent. Why would Republicans do anything to dissuade Obama from setting this chain of events in motion? Do they have a personal vendetta against Brown, despite his unique position as the only Republican in the entire state of Massachusetts capable of winning a Senate seat? First, GOP senators blocked Elizabeth Warren’s confirmation to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, thus freeing her up for an ultimately successful run against Brown. And now the potential opposition to Kerry’s nomination, Brown’s only route back to the Senate for the foreseeable future.

Of course, any discussion of the hypothetical nomination’s bad political strategy can’t exclude President Obama, who should be hesitant about the idea of Secretary Kerry for the same reason that the GOP should be thrilled. Yes, the Democrats gained two seats last week, bumping their majority up to 55. According to the Washington Post, administration officials believe that the gains “provided a cushion that allowed them to consider Kerry’s departure from the chamber.”

But why risk diminishing the Democratic majority at all when there are plenty of other suitable would-be defense secretaries who aren’t sitting senators? Just to reward a friend? That probably won’t seem worthwhile if an important piece of legislation ever falls one vote short of passage and Scott Brown is the deciding no vote — an admittedly unlikely but hardly impossible scenario.

Alec MacGillis at the New Republic, however, says Democrats shouldn’t be quite so concerned:

As the Democrats try to game out the risk of opening up the Kerry seat, the key factor to consider is context—that is, the circumstances in which the election to replace him would be held. Martha Coakley lost to Brown in 2010 in part because she was a deeply underwhelming candidate and because Brown offered a certain boy-next-door appeal. But she lost mainly because she was running in a low-turnout special election at a very improprituous moment for Democrats. Likewise, Warren knocked off Brown last week not just because she was a more feisty candidate than Coakley was, but because she was running in a general election where the state’s natural Democratic dominance would assert itself. This was what I kept hearing from veteran Democrats when I went up to Massachusetts to report on Warren’s midsummer struggles—even if she was having trouble finding her footing as a candidate, they said, one had to assume that she would benefit from high Democratic turnout in a presidential year. Yes, Brown would be able to peel off some of Barack Obama’s voters, but only so many.

And that’s just what happened. When Brown beat Coakley in 2010, 52 to 47 percent, there were barely more than 2.2 million votes cast. When Warren won 54 to 46 percent last week, there were more than 3.1 million votes cast. The contrast is particularly stark in the urban centers where Democrats rack up big margins. In Springfield, some 28,000 people voted in 2010 and Coakley netted about 7,000 votes. Last week, nearly twice as many voted there and Warren netted almost 25,000 votes. In Boston, she netted 120,000 votes where Coakley had netted less than half that amount. Turnout in the city was 65 percent—way above the 43 percent turnout in 2010, and higher even than the 62 percent who turned out for Obama’s first election.

What does this mean for a possible Kerry replacement? Well, on the one hand, that Democrats do need to worry about special elections, when the broader party base is less likely to turn out. But one also needs to keep in mind that the context for this special election (which would likely be held around June) would be much friendlier than the one in January 2010. Unless the tax and “fiscal cliff” negotiations go horribly awry for Obama, he and his party will be in a more favorable spot next spring than they were in late 2009 and early 2010. There is a chance that this time around, Patrick will not decree that his interim appointment to the open seat be forbidden from running in the special election, as he did in 2009 when he appointed longtime Kennedy aide Paul Kirk as interim after the senator’s death. This would allow the interim Democrat to run with a slight sheen of incumbency and, perhaps, even preclude a costly primary. Finally, there is the fact that the state electorate would be coming off a recent election where Warren and other Massachusetts Democrats drilled into the state’s many Democratic-leaning independent voters the importance of putting party over personality—even if voters liked Brown fine, they needed to consider the ramifications of giving Mitch McConnell another vote in the Senate. Presumably, this lesson would maintain a greater hold on voters next spring than it did in early 2010.

The hidden election

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Today’s Bloomberg has an analysis of what voters were trying to say this election. (Most likely: Stop. Talking. Both of you.) This part was, to me, the most striking:

Any resolution of the negotiations is likely to have more of a Democratic stamp, with the party’s victories this year extending beyond Obama’s re-election.

Democrats expanded their majority in the Senate by two members in a year in which 23 of the 33 Senate seats up for election were held by the party, meaning it was vulnerable to significant losses.

While Republicans maintained a majority in the House, Democrats picked up seats. And as of yesterday, Associated Press tallies showed Democratic House candidates got about 900,000 more votes nationally than Republican contenders. Republicans are able to keep control of the chamber because the geography of House district boundaries favors the party.

I’d read earlier that the popular vote differential had been somewhere around 500,000 votes, but apparently now it’s almost one million. It’s pretty incredible that our weird gerrymandering-happy electoral system produces a House of Representatives in which there are now approximately 36 more Republicans than Democrats — when voters actually cast almost one million more ballots for Democrats than for the GOP.

Similarly, the note about the Senate — that of the 33 seats, 23 were held by Democrats, and the Dems actually managed to pick up two seats — puts in perspective just how good a night November 6th was for Team Blue.

Irrational exuberance?

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[hulu http://www.hulu.com/watch/423753]

Frank Rich thinks so. Echoing his comments from mid-October (which I covered here), Rich insists that the post-election Democratic triumphalism is misguided, and that nothing has substantially altered the long-term prospects for Tea Party-style conservatism:

More seriously, if you look at the GOP’s suicidal talk right now, and the Democratic and liberal triumphalism, it’s very much a replay of what I wrote about in last month’s piece. After LBJ beat Goldwater in a far bigger victory, an out-and-out landslide, in 1964, Republicans moaned about being consigned to minority party status and possibly oblivion; Democrats talked about having won the war of ideas and demographics as well as the politics. (Goldwater only carried his home state of Arizona and a swath of the Confederate South.) Two years later, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and four years later Richard Nixon became president. The core small-government credo of conservatives has been remarkably consistent and resilient ever since and still commands a majority following according to last week’s exit polling. What’s more, the GOP bench — Rubio (who’s very slick by the way), Ryan, Christie, Jindal, etc — is far younger than that of the Hillary-Biden post-Obama Democrats. This new Republican generation will find a way to put a kinder, gentler, Hispanic, female face on the GOP soon enough.

This is a depressing forecast. But it’s a useful counterpoint to jubilant predictions of Republican moderation (which I’ve expressed as recently as yesterday). Jonathan Cohn is on roughly the same page regarding the mindset of the American right:

It’s basically another version of the 47 percent argument—i.e., that 47 percent of the country is dependent on the rest of the taxpaying public. It was kicking around in conservative circles even before Mitt Romney invoked it at that now-infamous Florida fundraiser. And judging by recent commentary, it’s going to keep kicking around for a while longer. Last week, National Review’s Kevin Williamson concluded that “offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives.” Just today, Washington Post conservative writer Jennifer Rubin wrote that the Democratic Party won by “feeding its base cotton candy.”

It’s true that Americans, on the whole, are more enthusiastic about receiving public services than they are about paying for them. They always have been. And it creates real policy dilemmas, particularly as an aging population makes services more expensive. Do we scale back these programs or raise taxes to pay for them? Do we trust the marketplace to find efficiencies, or turn to the government? Conservatives need to be more forthright than they have been about their proposed answers to these questions: We can’t cut Medicaid by a third, as Paul Ryanproposed to do, without seriously harming low-income people. But liberals also need to confront some unpleasant realities. Over the long run, we can’t sustain the current level of benefits without asking the middle class to pay at least a little more in taxes.

But sometimes the argument about free stuff has a more insidious meaning—and you don’t have to strain to hear it. During the Fox News broadcast on Election Night, Bill O’Reilly declared, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.” In case the reference to “traditional America” was too subtle, O’Reilly went on to talk about Obama’s strong support among blacks, Latinos, and women.

Tangentially, this “maker vs. taker” paradigm is no longer restricted to the United States: it’s taken on a global appeal. Fellow blogger Max Marder notes a very 47%-esque comment coming from a member of Israel’s new Yisrael Beiteinu-Likud party:

An article from Haaretz this afternoon quoted Likud-Beiteinu Knesset member Faina Kirshenbaum  Romneyesque’s diatribe against Israeli-Arab citizens:

“The Arabs are an economic burden on the state. They barely pay taxes and receive enormous budgets from the state,” Kirshenbaum told a German-Israeli sister cities conference held in Jerusalem by the Union of Local Authorities in Israel.

“The Arabs in the State of Israel pay NIS 400 million in taxes, but receive benefits worth at least NIS 11 billion,” she said.

“The Arabs in the State of Israel want equal rights, but they don’t contribute to the state. In order to receive equal rights, they must contribute to the state like every other citizen and serve three years, either in national service or in their communities.”

“Only 38 percent of Israeli citizens pay taxes, and a small portion of them are minorities. Tax-paying citizens of the state are carrying the rest of the population on their backs,” she added.

Kirshenbaum’s comments doubly mirror defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said both that a lack of Palestinian economic success vis-a-vis Israel was the result of cultural inferiority and that 47% of Americans were essentially moochers off of the state. What both Romney and Kirshenbaum miss, obviously, is that Israeli-Arabs are at best second-class citizens in the Jewish State. Israeli-Arabs, like African-Americans, are worse off than the majority because of historic discrimination, not laziness.

It’s a bitter irony that, following on the heels of one of the worst global recessions in modern history, the emerging narrative is that class warfare is being waged by the poor against the successful and wealthy. This seems odd, given the enormous bailouts staged in the United States and elsewhere simply to save this very same Team Successful from irreparable financial ruin. Clearly, no good deed goes unpunished.

I am becoming gradually convinced that one of the chief problems preventing genuine financial and tax reform in the U.S. is the massive blindspot that lower- and middle-class Americans have about…themselves. No one thinks of himself as a taker, but millions think that half the rest of the country is. How convenient, then, that all these nameless, faceless takers all turned out to have voted for Barack Obama. Maybe Frank Rich has a point.

(Video at the top is only marginally related to anything in this post, but I couldn’t let the opportunity to sneak it in slip away.)

Hurricane Syria continues to expand

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And is threatening not just Lebanon, but Turkey and now Israel as well:

Syria pulled both Turkey and Israel closer to military entanglements in its civil war on Monday, bombing a rebel-held Syrian village a few yards from the Turkish border in a deadly aerial assault and provoking Israeli tank commanders in the disputed Golan Heights into blasting mobile Syrian artillery units across their own armistice line.

he escalations, which threatened once again to draw in two of Syria’s most powerful neighbors, came hours after the fractious Syrian opposition announced a broad new unity pact that elicited praise from the big foreign powers backing their effort to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

“It is a big day for the Syrian opposition,” wrote Joshua Landis, an expert on Syrian political history and the author of the widely followed Syria Comment blog. Mr. Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, wrote that the “Assad regime must be worried, as it has survived for 42 years thanks to Syria’s fragmentation.”

There has been speculation that Mr. Assad, feeling increasingly threatened, may deliberately seek to widen the conflict that has consumed much of his own country for the past 20 months and left roughly 40,000 people dead. Although there is no indication that Mr. Assad has decided to try to lure Israel into the fight, any Israeli involvement could rally his failing support and frustrate the efforts of his Arab adversaries.

The attack on the Turkish border, by what Syrian witnesses identified as a Syrian MIG-25 warplane, demolished at least 15 buildings and killed at least 20 people in the town of Ras al-Ain, the scene of heavy fighting for days and an impromptu crossing point for thousands of Syrian refugees clambering for safety into Turkey.

At this point, I’d be most worried about Israel and Lebanon. Turkey may be upset but is unlikely to do something disproportionately aggressive without some semblance of international acquiescence (or, at least, ambivalence). Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel, on the other hand, is in a hostile and unpredictable mood (as it has been since he took office in 2009), especially now that the extremely hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu-Likud connection has been solidified into an actual coalition. And Lebanon continues to fulfill its role as a propane gas tank just waiting to burst into flames.

The ingredients for massive chaos to boil over are all there. Now all it might take is a little something extra to turn up the heat.

Replacing Hillary

Humor, Politics, , , , , ,

Regarding possible successors to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel can’t resist a little snark:

Among the maybe-candidates are Massachusetts Senator ex-Presidential nominee John Kerry and former Utah Governor, ambassador to China, and too-reasonable-to-survive-the-primary Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman. While Huntsman and Kerry have both demonstrated that they have foreign policy chops, the US hasn’t had a white male Secretary of State since 1997. Is America ready?

The Secretary of State job requires both tenacity and restraint, both of which may be difficult for a man’s unique chemical constitution. The male hormone testosterone, while responsible for such wondrous miracles as back hair and upper body strength, is also responsible for an increase in male aggression, anger, and even violence. Diplomacy is a difficult enough task without having to temper a man’s natural tendency to throw chairs through windows when angered by gridlock.

Further, it’s a well-known fact that men’s lack of intuition and emotional intelligence has translated into a troubling inability to cry under appropriate circumstances. War, death, and destruction are horrifying realities that Secretaries of State from Madeleine Albright to Condoleezza Rice have had to face, and an insufficient emotional response to tragedy will reflect poorly on our country. Do we want our allies to think we’re a bunch of callous jerks who are totally unmoved by the death of innocents?

Yes, Huntsman has been a career diplomat who has managed to avoid punching foreign leaders in the face out of anger during his work for four different Presidential administrations or inappropriately smiling during serious discussions because he’s excited that the Utah Utes football team won. And sure, John Kerry’s tenure as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been remarkably free of in-chamber shootings, but any testosterone-producing, low emotion man is a ticking time bomb. If either Jo(h)n ends up accepting an appointment as Secretar of State, let’s hope the Obama administration is smart enough to recommend he always travel with a trusted female chaperone who can help him navigate the volatile male hormonal landscape.

The beginnings of a thaw

Media, Politics, , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Oa4gB28Co]

The Huffington Post reports on an unlikely ally for Obama’s attempt to allow the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire:

Conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Sunday the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much-criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the wealthy.

“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”

“Really? The Republican Party is going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile?” he asked.

One of the biggest fights as Congress returns will be over taxes, as cuts put in place by former President George W. Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans want to extend those tax cuts for all income brackets, while Democrats want to raise revenue by allowing them to expire for wealthy Americans.

Earlier, FOX News talk show star Sean Hannity underwent a sudden conversion:

We’ve gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether. It’s simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don’t say you gotta go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what–it just–it’s gotta be resolved. The majority of people here–if some people have criminal records you can send ’em home–but if people are here, law-abiding, participating, four years, their kids are born here… first secure the border, pathway to citizenship…then it’s done. But you can’t let the problem continue. It’s gotta stop.

A presidential mandate?

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The Economist digs into the question of whether Barack Obama now has a mandate and concludes that there’s really no way to know:

Wittgenstein is helpful here. Consider proposition no. 114 in his “Philosophical Investigations”: “One thinks that one is tracing the outline of a thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” So in claiming that President Obama “has” a mandate or “lacks” one, we are just giving voice to our conception of what a mandate is and whether we’d like to confer one on a given president. The mandate is in the eye of the beholder.

Presidents have mandates, then, if we perceive them as having mandates, and don’t if we don’t. Which means that President Obama has one and doesn’t have one. And nailing down the matter is even more problematic than that. When we perceive a president as having a mandate, we are making a claim about what the American people meant when they cast their votes. To be a little too obvious: there is no “mandate” box to check on electoral ballots. You just vote for a candidate. There is no formal or informal way for the people to “give” a president a mandate. So when journalists and politicians weigh in on the subject they are really psychoanalysing the electorate writ large. That’s no mean task.

The magazine goes on to note that even exit polls may not be sufficient to imply the contours of a possible mandate for specific policies:

Polls can tell us something about voters’ policy preferences, but they cannot affirm or disprove the existence of a mandate. Let’s take tax policy in this fall’s election as an example. A Washington Post exit poll showed that 59% of voters nationwide “said the economy was the biggest issue facing the country.” A similar proportion seemed to share Mr Obama’s stance on taxation:

Six in 10 voters said that taxes should be increased, including nearly half of voters saying that taxes should be increased on income over $250,000, as Obama has called for. Just over one-third said taxes should not be increased for anyone. But more than 6 in 10 voters said taxes should not be raised to cut the budget deficit.

This may be the best evidence available for the existence of sufficient popular support to raise tax rates for the upper brackets, but its strength withers when the numbers are analysed. First, if 60% of voters want higher taxes, and only a fraction over 50% voted for Mr Obama, that means at least one-sixth or so of voters seeking tax hikes did not, for one reason or another, vote for the president. And if “nearly half” of voters sign on to the Obama plan to increase taxes on those who earn over $250,000, this means that more than half of voters prefer a different proposal. Where does that leave Mr Obama’s purported mandate?

Meanwhile, the same magazine analyzes the new prospects for tax reform.