A Little Intelligence, Please

Can't they just kiss and make up?  Wait, they have- though from the looks of it (below, photo from Getty), neither is comfortable, which is to the credit of each.

Politico ignores, as Politico does (after all, it's not named "policy-o") the policy and speculates about the politics:

Hillary Clinton called President Barack Obama on Tuesday to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him” when she recently discussed her views on foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic, according to a statement from a Clinton spokesman.

The statement comes amid tension between the Clinton and Obama camps in the wake of the interview. It also comes as Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state, are due to cross paths at a social gathering Wednesday night in Martha’s Vineyard.

In the interview, Clinton dismissed the Obama administration’s self-described foreign policy principle of “Don’t do stupid stuff.” And while she also praised Obama several times, Clinton nonetheless called his decision not to assist Syrian rebels early on a “failure.”

Earlier Tuesday, longtime top Obama aide David Axelrod took a swipe at Clinton on Twitter, writing: “Just to clarify: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ means stuff like occupying Iraq in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision.”

Was this really necessary? Probably not, when

The statement from Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill noted that although Obama and Clinton have had disagreements, she has discussed these differences publicly before, including in her memoir, “Hard Choices.”

“Secretary Clinton was proud to serve with President Obama, she was proud to be his partner in the project of restoring American leadership and advancing America’s interests and values in a fast changing world,” said the statement, shared with POLITICO. “She continues to share his deep commitment to a smart and principled foreign policy that uses all the tools at our disposal to achieve our goals. Earlier today, the secretary called President Obama to make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him, his policies, or his leadership.

It continued: “Secretary Clinton has at every step of the way touted the significant achievements of his presidency, which she is honored to have been part of as his secretary of state. While they’ve had honest differences on some issues, including aspects of the wicked challenge Syria presents, she has explained those differences in her book and at many points since then. Some are now choosing to hype those differences but they do not eclipse their broad agreement on most issues. Like any two friends who have to deal with the public eye, she looks forward to hugging it out when ... they see each other tomorrow night.”

Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is not President Obama's foreign policy, reduced to "Don't do stupid stuff." In the medical profession, that's referred to as "first, do no harm" and has proven unassailable (albeit slightly contrived) as a motto, though in practice violated regularly. It is unknowable what would have followed if the President had audaciously opted for Clinton's neo-conservative approach rather than his more cautious angle.

Asked whether "we could have built up a moderate Syrian opposition," Clinton first conceded "well, I don't know the answer to that" before adding "I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad... the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled."

By contrast, in an interview with New York Times' columnist Tom Friedman conducted after The Atlantic's interview with Clinton (but made public later), Obama argued

This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.

But there is a more important issue relating to the U.S. government which the media is missing. The former Secretary of State believes there is a reasonable chance the USA could have accurately identified a credible, moderate rebel group(s) but Obama is far more skeptical. In an apparently- but not actually- unrelated story, The Washington Post reports

The U.S. government has begun to funnel weapons directly to Kurdish forces fighting Islamist militants in northern Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday, deepening American involvement in a conflict that the Obama administration had long sought to avoid.

The decision to arm the Kurds, via a covert channel established by the CIA, was made even as Pentagon officials acknowledged that recent U.S. airstrikes against the militants were acting only as a temporary deterrent and were unlikely to sap their will to fight.

“I in no way want to suggest that we have effectively contained, or that we are somehow breaking, the momentum of the threat,” said Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The reporters add

American officials have tried to expedite the transfer of arms from the government in Baghdad to Kurdish fighters in the north. But that process has gone slowly, prompting Washington to open a direct pipeline to the Kurds via the CIA, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the spy agency has not publicly acknowledged the operation. The CIA declined to comment.

A U.S. military official said that the Pentagon and the State Department are discussing other possible ways to deliver weapons to the Kurds through open channels, but that they would need the legal authorization to do so. U.S. arms sales normally are restricted to sovereign or central governments. 

In what is probably a good cause, the CIA is sending weapons to another party on a covert basis.  Digby recognizes "that's the CIA for you. It used to be an intelligence service. Now it's a secret army.  But without all those unpleasant military rules.  And it operates with a secret budget. Very convenient."

Perhaps if the Central Intelligence Agency were still an intelligence service instead of a military force, we would know whether in Syria "we could have built up a moderate opposition" or we would have been sending weapons to doctors, farmers, and pharmacists.

So instead of obsessing over the difference between a center-left foreign policy and a center-right orientation, the media might consider two issues that actually matter. A United States Senator, popular with that same media, recklessly asks of the President of the United States "Do you really want to let America be attacked? and little notice is taken.  Little light has been cast also upon why the Central Intelligence Agency is an agency and centralized but at least in the Middle East, apparently delivering relatively little intelligence.
 

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Graham Following The Playbook

If you're a Republican there no longer is any penalty you will pay for making outrageous, irresponsible remarks.  Appearing on Fox News Sunday on- wait for it- Sunday, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham commented (video, below)

I'm saying Iraq and Syria combined represent a direct threat to our homeland. The day the president raised his right hand to become president for a second time, his constitutional responsibility as commander-in-chief trumps any political promise.

What is going on in Washington when the FBI director, when the head of national intelligence, the CIA, the homeland security secretary tells every member of Congress, including the president, we're about to be attacked in a serious way because of the threat emanating from Syria and Iraq?

His responsibility as president is to defend this nation. If he does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you want to call these guys, they are coming here. This is not just about Baghdad. This is not just about Syria. It is about our homeland.

And if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.

According to the South Carolina senator, it's Obama's fault because "three years ago, Mr. President, you were told by your national security team,get involved, armed (sic) the rebels because this problem will grow. You said no."  But far more responsibility is owned by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condoleezza Rice, and the rest of the Bush gang. As I quoted Max Fisher a few days ago

The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago."

When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.

So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces.

The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.

Obviously, though, that's not the major problem with Graham's rant, for everyone is allowed his/her own opinion.  His major sin is frightening people for political profit.  They are coming here. Be very, very scared.

But irrespective of the rise of ISIS or President Obama's policy, there always has been a threat to the USA. That's why there is a Department of Homeland Security.This is a Republican game.  Under a Republican President (or this one), Democrats did not raise the bloody flag for political fun and profit, not even when President Bush was informed "Bin Laden Determined to Strike inside U.S." and went about his business clearing brush on the ranch.  A terrorist attack inside the nation is an ongoing possibility, as it is- to a far greater extent- to our European allies, which Graham notably ignores.

With the Senator raising the specter of an attack on American soil "because he has no strategy to protect us," Steve Benen recognizes

In this case, Graham seems to be laying down a marker: if members of the Islamic State, at some point in the future, execute some kind of terror strike on Americans, Lindsey Graham wants us to blame President Obama – because the president didn’t stick to the playbook written by hawks and neocons.

The tipoff may be that Graham lacks the courage to predict we'll be struck, instead cowering behind "if we get attacked."  If there is no attack, he can't be criticized for being wrong.  Similarly, Repubs long ago gave up defending the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq and instead hold up the surge as a success in American foreign policy, notwithstanding that both strategies set into motion the current disaster there. Though wrongheaded, it coincides with Beltway wisdom and allows the GOP to blame Democrats for the conflagration in the Middle East.

And that really is the objective, isn't it? Approvingly quoting Benen, Steve M. adds

Notice who all but disappears from this line of argument? Notice whom Senator Graham all but absolves from guilt if an attack happens?

The people actually doing the attacking.

Whether or not it's realistic to believe that ISIS could attack America in the foreseeable future, Senator Graham, if it happens, wants you to blame President Obama before you blame ISIS -- or perhaps instead of blaming ISIS at all.

But that's no surprise. I've said this on the blog since the Bush years: Republicans despise their domestic political enemies far more than they do any international enemy. Ginning up anger against a foreign enemy used to be an indirect way of rousing the populace against allegedly evil peacenik/appeaser/fifth-columnist Democrats and liberals. But now Republicans barely take the trouble to demonize foreign foes. Those guys are just acting in accordance with their inner nature. It's Obama who has agency, so he's the bad guy who's endeavoring to get us all killed.

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Obama Thinks It's Real. Kilgore Called It The "Phony War."

If one is running for a Democratic nomination for governor, it is wise not to offend a large swath of potential primary voters by blasting the President of the United States of your own party.

And so Zephyr Teachout, running a righteous campaign against the legally endangered but politically powerful and popular governor, Andrew Cuomo, avoids picking a fight with President Barack Obama.

Of course, picking a fight with President Obama is not the danger; Obama is loathe to strike back at his enemies. But there are still many Democratic primary voters who believe he really, really is a Democrat, just as they believe in Bill Clinton and the tooth fairy.

Teachout aims to stop the anti-consumer, anti-worker acquisition by Comcast Cable of Time Warner, "at least in New York," and notes her opponent "takes a lot of money from large powerful interests and then hands out tax credits to them. It's a Reagonomics model of financial monopoly capitalism." But then she excludes Obama, probably wisely, from her list of co-conspirators when she remarks

But the problem here isn't just Cuomo, it's that people like Cuomo dominate the Democratic establishment. Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, and so on and so forth, these people believe in a world where powerful economic interests control our lives and fate through monopoly power,and their partners in government help structure those monopolies. Political corruption and economic monopoly are two sides of the same coin- too much concentrated power in too few hands.

The phrase "political corruption and economic monopoly" defines the Cuomo Administration about as well as does anything, and the Cuomo Administration as well as any other.  So, too, as Zephyr obviously understands, have Emanuel, Geithner, Summers, and Rubin damaged the lower and middle classes. And they all have connections to both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, though more so to the latter. Nonetheless, President Obama is capable of recognizing, as he did in an interview early this month with the Economist, that when

corporate CEO's come and they have lunch with me—which they do more often than they probably care to admit (laughter)—and they’ll say, you know what, we really care about the environment, and we really care about education, and we really care about getting immigration reform done—then my challenge to them consistently is, is your lobbyist working as hard on those issues as he or she is on preserving that tax break that you’ve got? And if the answer is no, then you don’t care about it as much as you say.

But then he adds

Now, to their credit, I think on an issue like immigration reform, for example, companies did step up. And what they’re discovering is the problem is not the regulatory zealotry of the Obama administration; what they’re discovering is the dysfunction of a Republican Party that knows we need immigration reform, knows that it would actually be good for its long-term prospects, but is captive to the nativist elements in its party.

Undoubtedly, Barack Obama knows why corporate heads "step up" on immigration reform, and it's not because they have an Emma Lazarus-like vision of a multicultural nation. As Sam Ro of Business Insider (in a different context) notes

Ever since the financial crisis, corporations have managed to deliver robust profit growth by offsetting the drag of weak sales growth with widening profit margins. These fatter profit margins come from cutting costs, which usually means getting more productivity out of a fewer number of workers.

Income growth of these dwindling number of workers has stagnated as the labor pool has grown. It's really quite simple, for workers in a wide array of industries know there are others behind them waiting to pounce on any available job. The motive of (many corporations) in supporting immigration reform, is not merely academic because as Congress seeks compromise, business leaders, unlike the left, may urge legislation that provides legalization without citizenship.

The agenda of those corporations Obama enjoys doing lunch with is laid bare when the supportive President adds

And the same I think goes for a whole range of other issues like climate change, for example. There aren’t any corporate CEOs that you talk to at least outside of maybe—no, I will include CEOs of the fossil-fuel industries—who are still denying that climate change is a factor. What they want is some certainty around the regulations so that they can start planning.

Back in April, 2011 Paul Krugman took on the "economic uncertainty" myth when he explained

The reasons that business are not investing is that they have tons and tons of excess capacity. There is a very clear relationship historically between the amount of unemployment and the amount of business investment. When unemployment is high capacity is low, investment is low. There’s nothing. All of this stuff about uncertainty is just myth being made up to blame this on Obama. There’s nothing in there. It is exactly what you would expect.

It may seem a paradox that the charge of economic uncertainty is used to blame President Obama, who now de facto endorses the notion of regulatory uncertainty. But then the President also has promoted the myth that a lack of skills contributes more to the unemployment problem than does a lack of jobs.   And that a large federal workforce, and deficits in an economic downturn, are harmful.

Nevertheless, the larger message from Obama, who touts the acceptance of immigration reform and climate science among corporate chieftains, is that the latter are really a whole lot different than the populist base of the Republican Party, those pitchfork-wielding, uneducated masses. They don't even call him a Kenyan or a Muslim!   But Ed Kilgore (nearly two years ago) saw through this conceit, pointing out

Yes, years from now conservatives will sit around campfires and sing songs about the legendary internecine battles of late 2012, when father fought son and brother fought brother across a chasm of controversy as to whether 98% or 99% of abortions should be banned; whether undocumented workers should be branded and utilized as “guest workers,” loaded onto cattle cars and shipped home, or simply immiserated; whether the New Deal/Great Society programs should be abolished in order to cut upper-income taxes or abolished in order to boost Pentagon spending. There’s also a vicious, take-no-prisons fight over how quickly to return the role of the federal government in the economy to its pre-1930s role as handmaiden to industry. Blood will flow in the streets as Republicans battle over how to deal with health care after Obamacare is repealed and 50 million or people lose health insurance. Tax credits and risk pools or just “personal responsibility?”

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About Syria

At first read Hillary Clinton (photo below from Jonathan Ernst/Reuters), in an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, strikes a hawkish note and one not very favorable toward President Obama.  Responding to two separate questions about Syria, the former Secretary of State remarked

Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground. Two, we would have been helped in standing up a credible political opposition....

I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.

They were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming....

But she also hedged her bets, pulled her punches, and hesitated to mince words (end of cliches).  She added "I totally understand the cautions that we had to contend with, but we’ll never know. And I don’t think we can claim to know."  Asked whether- given her advocacy within at State of a more active role supporting Syrian rebels- whether the Obama administration has been "one of underreach," Clinton recognized "You know, I don’t think you can draw that conclusion. It’s a very key question. How do you calibrate, that’s the key issue. I think we have learned a lot during this period, but then how to apply it going forward will still take a lot of calibration and balancing. "

She's right on both:   the USA probably should have more precisely identified the pro-western rebels in Syria and armed there. Nonetheless, as Clinton explained the prevailing sentiment inside the Administration, "It's messy, it's complicated, we're not sure what the outcome will be."

Clinton observes "I think we’ve learned about the limits of our power to spread freedom and democracy. That’s one of the big lessons out of Iraq." However, she should have stopped there before adding "But we’ve also learned about the importance of our power, our influence, and our values appropriately deployed and explained." And a moment later, she would compare the lack of an "overarching" foreign policy under Obama with "what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it."

But the world has changed, a reality Mrs. Clinton is reluctant to concede and which most Repubs completely refuse to acknowledge.  Clinton rips Obama's "Don’t do stupid stuff” as "not an organizing principle," then claims it is "a political message. It’s not his worldview."

There are, however, worse worldviews than "don't do stupid stuff" for a world that isn't bipolar.  In what he views as a "symbol of how disastrous the last 15 years of US Iraq policy have been," Max Fisher explains

....  in the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more.

But the Iraqi army has been largely a failure. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.

So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces.

The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.

It keeps going: the US is intervening on behalf of Iraqi Kurds, our ally, because their military has old Russian-made weapons, whereas ISIS, which is America's enemy, has higher-quality American weapons. "[Kurdish forces] are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it," Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, told the New York Times.

More: One reason that ISIS has been so successful at conquering northern Iraq is that it has a huge base of operations in Syria, where it had exploited the civil war to overtake huge swathes of Syrian territory. One reason that ISIS was so successful in Syria is that the US refused to arm moderate Syrian rebels, for fear that the weapons would fall into ISIS's hands. So that made it easier for ISIS to overpower the under-funded moderate rebels, and now ISIS has seized, in Iraq, much better versions of the weapons that we were so worried they might acquire in Syria. So now we're bombing the guns that we didn't mean to give ISIS because we didn't give guns to their enemies because then ISIS might get guns.

This demonstrates also the complexity of foreign policy alternatives- especially, but not exclusively, in the Middle East. The U.S. intervened in Iraq on the side of Shiite Muslims, overthrowing Sunni tyrant Sadaam Hussein and fighting the Sunni forces of al-Qaeda. Partly as a result, the offshoot of al-Qaeda, ISIS, has grown in strength and threatens western interests in the Middle East.  Arming anti-Assad rebels may have prevented this- but it also may have triggered the law of unexpected consequences.  It appears that "don't do anything stupid" may be both wiser- and more difficult- than it is politically correct to acknowledge.

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Kick Me In The Rear, Again!

You know Republicans have gotten a bit ridiculous (analogous to slightly pregnant?) when, as Think Progress reported a little over a week ago,

Hours before Congress broke for the August recess, House Republicans claimed that the President could use executive action to fix the border situation with unaccompanied children fleeing violence in the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In a press statement released Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and other House Republican leaders indicated that President Obama could address the crisis “without the need for congressional action,” a statement tinged with some irony given that just the day before, House Republicans had slammed the President with a lawsuit claiming executive overreach.

It is, additionally, a lawsuit claiming the President exceeded his authority by delaying the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act, a provision bitterly opposed by the Party which bitterly opposed the legislation itself. But there is a way to gain Republican cooperation, even turning them into metaphorical cute little puppy dogs.  CNN reveals

The former Republican presidential nominee will team up with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for a fundraiser benefiting the New Jersey Republican Party next month, sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

The event is billed as a birthday celebration for Christie, who turns 52 next month.

The September 10 fundraiser — co-hosted by Christie allies Bill Palatucci, New Jersey GOP Chairman Sam Raia, state Sen. Tom Kean and Assemblyman Jon Bramnick — will take place in East Brunswick.

Romney is listed as a "special guest."

It’s the latest high-profile political move for Romney, who is asserting himself on the 2014 campaign trail as a surrogate in key Senate and House races, and burnishing his reputation among Republicans in the process.

Romney’s appearance alongside the New Jersey governor, who is laying groundwork for a 2016 presidential bid, could also signal to Romney’s network of financial supporters that Christie remains a viable choice for the Republican nomination in the wake of the Bridgegate scandal that engulfed his administration earlier this year and continues to bubble beneath the surface. It's not the first time the two men have shared a stage together this year - Christie was invited to address a Romney-hosted donor retreat in Park City in June.

While the Republican donor class hasn't fled from Christie en masse, the scandal tarnished his his early frontrunner status and wounded Christie's golden boy status among establishment money-men.

The birthday fundraiser might also heal some bad blood left over from 2012. Christie and Romney — and their respective loyalists — had a sometimes fraught relationship at times during the presidential race. Christie publicly mulled running against Romney for the GOP nomination, and later infuriated some Republicans just days before the election by teaming up with President Obama for a tour of New Jersey storm damage after Hurricane Sandy, giving the president some important bipartisan luster in full view of the national media.

This is great reporting. We all witnessed at the convention set to nominate Mitt Romney for president a keynote speech by Chris Christie extolling the virtues of Chris Christie.  Too seldom is noted the photo tour of Hurricane Sandy damage conducted by a then-wildly popular Republican governor and the man facing off against Romney in the presidential election.  The image of seeming bipartisanship was a boon both for Christie, seen collaborating with a President popular in New Jersey, and for the incumbent President, whose bipatisanship credentials were greatly enhanced by his appearance with the GOP governor.  It was a win-win for guys whose personal ambitions greatly exceed their interest in the fortunes of their party.

In plain English:  Chris Christie sabotaged Mitt Romney.  And now Romney is doing whatever he can to help the Governor, himself lusting for the presidency.

A similar dynamic is taking place in Michigan. There, Republican Representative Justin Amash scored a victory in Tuesday's primary, after which

Amash targeted Michigan’s former Republican congressman Pete Hoekstra, a longtime Chamber-backed candidate himself, now a Chamber-funded political lobbyist and supporter of Amash’s Republican opponent Brian Ellis. “I want to say to lobbyist Pete Hoekstra,” Amash told the crowd, underscoring the L-word to much applause, “you are a disgrace. And I’m glad we could hand you one more loss before you fade into total obscurity and irrelevance.”

Ouch. As “The Fix” notes, “Hoekstra lost the state’s 2012 Senate race — and in the 2010 gubernatorial primary.”

And then Amash zeroed in on his direct opponent, businessman Ellis: “You owe my family and this community an apology for your disgusting, despicable smear campaign. You had the audacity to try and call me today after running a campaign that was called the nastiest in the country. I ran for office to stop people like you. To stop people who were more interested in themselves than in doing what’s best for their district.”

A disgrace who will fade into total obscurity and irrelevance- how would a proud man respond?  We found out when during a Newsmax panel (video, below) Hoekstra declared

I congratulate Justin, he won a good victory on Tuesday. As Republicans, most of us are united, there's a lot of opportunities in Michigan. We've got a good opportunity to re-elect the successful Governor. We have an opportunity to pick up a Senate seat. We have to win 3 new Congressional seats where the existing Republicans are either retiring or one incumbent was defeated in a primary. So, we've got a lot of work to do, that's kind of what I am focused on.

The Congressman can deal with his victory, and that’s something he has to deal with. I can’t have any control over that. My response to the primary on Tuesday is let's get together and let's focus on what we need to accomplish in November.

When the surprised conservative host asked Hoekstra to elaborate, the latter responded

Yeah, I mean, you know, the Congressman is entitled to his own opinions. So we disagree on who the best candidate was for the third district of Michigan. I supported his opponent, and I feel very comfortable and confident that the decision that I made in supporting Brian Ellis. Brian Ellis is a very talented individual, he's a successful businessman. I thought he would have been a very successful and a very constructive governing Congressman if he had had the opportunity to serve in Washington.

Congressman Amash's response to those who disagree with him, you know, that's his perspective. I really can't respond his feelings or his attitudes.










The ex-Repub congressman could have denounced Amash for his intemperate remarks, even suggesting that they revealed why he would prove to be a weaker general election candidate than Ellis.  If that were excessively bold, he might at least have withheld, however temporarily, offering his support for Amash's re-election.  Instead, it was "we have an opportunity to pick up a Senate seat" so "let's get together and focus on what we need to accomplish in November. "

Evidently, anyone who condemns Peter Hoekstra will pay as severe a price as someone metaphorically sticking a knife in the back of Mitt Romney.  Or perhaps less a price than a reward, something akin to winning the lottery.

It's the way they roll, witnessed after GOP Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled "you lie" at President Obama during the latter's 2010 State of the Union message, a horrifying infraction against the imperial presidency which has gradually taken hold in the nation the past few decades.  ("Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names..." oh, never mind).  House Democrats threatened to censure Wilson; a few Republicans threatened retaliation. The Democrats censured Wilson; Republicans did.... nothing.

It's a lesson President Obama only recently has begun to learn. But, in all fairness, it's a lesson Democrats have failed to understand for decades.





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Perhaps Parmesan Would Go Best With That Whine

One of the fifteen most common defense mechanisms, writes John M. Grohol, Psy.D., is projection, which

is the misattribution of a person’s undesired thoughts, feelings or impulses onto another person who does not have those thoughts, feelings or impulses. Projection is used especially when the thoughts are considered unacceptable for the person to express, or they feel completely ill at ease with having them. For example, a spouse may be angry at their significant other for not listening, when in fact it is the angry spouse who does not listen. Projection is often the result of a lack of insight and acknowledgement of one’s own motivations and feelings.

If there actually is such a phenomenon, rarely has it been so vividly displayed in public as by the National Review editor Rich Lowry, who recently dragged the impulse to new depths in an article in Politico magazine.

Lowry is free to maintain "It’s certainly true that the president is much further left than he’d ever admit," though under closer examination this suggests a meaning far different than what the he evidently assumes.  If the President's policies were not middle-of-the-road but rather liberal/progressive, he would in effect be admitting he were a leftist. Hence, Lowry is (though he'd never admit it), acknowledging that Barack Obama is governing from the center, a conclusion he wishes the reader overlook.

Elsewhere, Lowry's piece is rife with ad hominem attacks. While conceding Obama's "rousing words" as a campaigner, his "truly inspired convention speech in 2004," and "a few defining campaign speeches in 2008, Lowry nonetheless slams the President as "glib without being eloquent." Self-awareness is not this conservatives's strong suit.

Lowry claims also President Obama is a

celebrity without being interesting. He’s callow. It’s a trope on the right to say that Obama has quit, that he’s not interested in the job anymore. It isn’t true. If you are smug, overly self-impressed and unwilling to bend from your (erroneous) presumptions of how the world works, this is what presidential leadership looks like.

The guy who is "unwilling to bend" from his "presumptions of how the world works" must not be the same one The New York Times noticed

As a young lawmaker defining himself as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama visited a center for scholars in August 2007 to give a speech on terrorism. He described a surveillance state run amok and vowed to rein it in. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” he declared. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.”

More than six years later, the onetime constitutional lawyer is now the commander in chief presiding over a surveillance state that some of his own advisers think has once again gotten out of control.

In a similar manner, Obama as a candidate also opposed the individual health care mandate, which he later found essential to his Affordable Care Act.  He has since delayed the employer mandate, once vociferously opposed by the GOP, and for which the Party's congressional leadership is suing the President for delaying.

"What Churchill was to thundering statements of resolve," Lowry argues, "he (Obama) is to snotty put-downs," itself a transparent snotty put-down. (Oh, to be a professional journalist able to turn such a well-crafted phrase).  Lowry contends "The man who once promised to transcend political divisions is an expert at the stinging partisan jab."   Yet, faced with a GOP House (one who passes as reasonable and "moderate," below) that votes in lockstep against him and a Senate minority which endlessly filibusters, the President during most of his tenure took to blaming "Congress" or "Washington."

Lowry may have a hard time accepting the very legitimacy of Obama's presidency and weeps over the President's criticism of those opponents.   He  conveniently forgets, as Ezra Klein explained shortly before the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the ACA

The Republicans have made the individual mandate the element most likely to undo the President’s health-care law. The irony is that the Democrats adopted it in the first place because they thought that it would help them secure conservative support. It had, after all, been at the heart of Republican health-care reforms for two decades.

Embellishing a reputation for incisive analysis and sharp-edged wit, Lowry says Obama "partisans" at fund-raisers and campaign rallies

soak up his faux folksy, g-droppin’ assurances that he’s working for ordinary “folks,” and laugh at anything they suspect might be one of his brilliant barbs. Not since Jefferson took snide swipes at the Federalists …

The president’s constant complaints about everyone else in Washington playing politics while he high-mindedly devotes himself to substance have all the maturity of Holden Caulfield’s plaints about “phonies.” Please, grow up.

"In terms of his sensibility," the NR editor claims, Barack Obama is "about what you'd get if you took the average reader of The New Yorker and made him president of the United States."    Given the eight years which preceded the Obama Administration, that would be a demonstrative improvement. However, Lowry does approach substance upon remarking "He evidently has no conception of the national interest larger than his ideology or immediate political interests."

This could be disputed by the al-Jazeera reporter who last September wrote

The United States has informed the UN Security Council that it has neutralised about 60 percent of Syria's most toxic chemicals.

Mark Lyall Grant, the British ambassador to the UN and the current president of the Security Council, said that the US made the report after a video-conference briefing by Sigrid Kaag, who heads the international effort to rid Syria of its chemical weapons.

He said Kaag reported that a meeting was held in Beirut on earlier Tuesday to work out methods to destroy the 12 chemical production facilities that Syria has declared. She said it will take about six months to complete.

Lyall Grant said he reported to the closed council meeting that Britain will complete its destruction of Syrian chemical precursors intended for the production of chemical weapons and hydrochloric acid "in the course of this week."

"So, good progress on the destruction of chemicals outside Syria," he said.

Syria agreed to surrender its chemical arsenal last year when the US threatened missile strikes in retaliation for a chemical attack on a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. The attack is believed to have killed more than 1,000 people.

Adopted by the UN Security Council, the deal reached, President Obama commented at the time, "not only deters and prevents additional chemical use but actually goes beyond what could have been accomplished to any military action, and that is the removal of chemical weapons, one of the largest stockpiles in the world, from Syria so that they can actually be destroyed.” If either the Obama Administration had not threatened bombing raids or congressional Democrats had not urged caution, the USA either would have become involved in another war in the Middle East or Bashir Assad further emboldened in the brutal war he is waging against citizens of his own nation.

After 2010, Lowry asserts, the President could have chosen to "work with the opposition... or crush it," but instead chosen to "whine."  Confronted with the possibility of another military conflict, Barack Obama opted for leadership while Rich Lowry opted for the whine.

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We'll Call It Genocide If We Want To

The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has failed dramatically.  The nation's military forces may not have eliminated the tunnels of destruction from Hamas-controlled Gaza into Israel proper, nor have they deterred Hamas sufficiently from firing missiles into Israel on a regular basis.

No, instead Israel has been remarkably unsuccessful because it has failed to destroy the Palestinian people. Or so that is the implication of Salon contributor Patrick L. Smith, for whom a lasting peace based upon justice for all sides in the conflict is nary a passing concern.

Smith begins with "Now that Israel has finally let up on what looks like a genocidal campaign against Gaza," and goes downhill from there. Having accused Israel by implication of genocide, he goes on to write "the question of a genocidal campaign arises" and "the savagery of the Gaza campaign..."   He also links to a piece by one Luke Peterson, with "a Cambridge doctorate in Midddle Eastern Studies," who "appears to have a thorough grasp of the legal and technical questions at issue" and whmo Smith approvingly quotes as maintaining "Yes, Israel is committing genocide."

Peterson finds that Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide considers “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:”

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The esteemed Mr. Peterson mentions the word "Palestinians" 14 times. Add the word "Palestinian" and, between the two, there are 19 times.

This is not mere semantics. If Mr. Peterson were arguing that Israel were committing genocide against Gazans, it might also be untrue, though that would remind readers that the government of Israel is, in fact, engaged in a war with the government of Gaza, and the actions of the combatants would likely be viewed in that context.  The word "Gazan" is avoided, further, because it does not have the same emotional impact as "Palestinian."

If one wishes to level the charge of "genocide," he at least ought to clarify the target of the genocidal behavior.  That Mr. Peterson (surprise!) does not do, for it would necessitate noting that the modern nation-state of Israel sits on the land historically known as Palestine, to which both Arabs and Jews legitimately lay claim (photo below from Bahrain News Agency, inadvertently acknowledging Israeli Jews as Palestinians). For thoroughness, it would require adding that Palestinians exist in the Middle East outside of Israel proper and the Gaza Strip.

The West Bank and Jordan are two of those areas, the latter boasting a population which is (barely) majority Palestinian. The governments of both those entities, significantly, supported the cease-fire proposed by Egypt, which was considered somewhat favorable to the Israelis, who understandably backed it.  Hamas did not, inspiring Secretary of State Kerry to pursue an alternative in order to assuage Hamas.

If Israel is indeed guilty of genocide against- well, against someone- under the expansive definition favored by Mr. Peterson and Mr. Smith, it is clear the charge applies also to Hamas, which has been at it for longer than the Israelis (less than two months) and has pursued it with all the will the organization can muster. In fairness, genocide also would apply to the government of several nations at one time or another, as well as to an individual who kills more than one person while committing a bias crime in the USA.

The armed forces of Israel have been imprecise and careless, killing far more civilians than it wishes and far fewer than it is able. But if Israelis are targeting Palestinians as a group, the practice of dropping leaflets on a neighborhood to warn residents of an upcoming bombing raid, however inadequate, is not only foolish. It is a case of massive malpractice and failure on an unprecedented scale.

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