Lindsey Graham: If Obama defeats GOP obstructionism on health care, the GOP will obstruct even more!

Apparently President Obama and Congressional Republicans are interested in reforming the nation’s immigration system. Time for some bipartisan agreement! Well, yes and no:

(Lindsey) Graham, in a statement, said he had told Mr. Obama “in no uncertain terms” that the immigration debate “could come to a halt for the year” if the president moved to pass health care legislation by a method known as reconciliation, which requires a majority of 51 senators instead of 60 and would in practice require no Republican votes.

And Graham is one of the reasonable Republican senators, supposedly. But the GOP has apparently never heard of “you win some, you lose some.” They either win everything, or they shut down the system — even on areas where they disagree with Democrats. It’s a good way to attract votes, I suppose, but a damn poor way to actually get stuff done for the American people.

Does Glenn Beck think Mennonites are Nazis? (Or: Of liberal churches and freedom of religion)

The Mennonites I grew up among had a consistent “pro-life” ethic that didn’t place them easily in the service of either major political party: Most of the folks I knew were very much against abortion — but they were also anti-war, anti-death penalty and for helping the poor. A number of them didn’t like to pay taxes, but not for any Ayn Rand-inspired reason; they just didn’t want their money used to pay for America’s wars. A lot of the church’s missions abroad have been done under the umbrella of the Mennonite Central Committee, which has — sometimes controversially within the churches — focused more on helping people and less on evangelizing.

Over the years, there was a phrase I heard used to describe this overall approach to the world: “Social justice.” And until this week, I had no idea that it meant that the Mennonites are secretly in league with the Nazis. Thank goodness we have Glenn Beck to set us straight.

On his daily radio and television shows last week, Fox News personality Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that “social justice,” the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a “code word” for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice.

“I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. “Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ’social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.”

I’ll let Mennonites and other Christians decide if they really want to take theological advice from Beck, a Mormon whose adopted theology many mainstream Christians consider heretical, at best. I’m certainly not going to try to argue theology with the likes of Beck. And in any case, I doubt many adherents of churches that espouse “social justice” are taking their cues from Fox News, anyway.

Suffice it to say, though, I doubt that the answer to “WWJD?” would ever be to “Go Galt.”

What’s more disconcerting, though, is Beck’s framing device. He’s not merely asserting that left-leaning churches are wrong — that’s his right, though I think he’s mistaken. He’s suggesting that Americans, broadly, are about to see their freedom of religion come under assault. What’s his basis for this? He doesn’t have one, as far as I can tell. Is there some Bible-censoring program underway that I don’t know about?

Probably not.

And that’s what bugs me about Beck. It’s not that he has spectacularly wrongheaded opinions – it’s that he proceeds from spectacularly incorrect facts. And that he disseminates those spectacularly wrong facts from one of the highest-profile slots on television. It’s a real disservice to his audience, and to the country that has to put up with a debate influenced by so many of his acolytes.

Some of my conservative friends tell me they think Glenn Beck is full of crap. Obviously he is. But he’s influencing a large swatch of the conservative movement. And he’s doing so in a way that wrongly sows panic and fear among his audience, not thoughtfulness and vigorous debate. Glenn Beck, not churches who believe that pursuing “social justice” is the calling of Christ, is the real danger to our country.

Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Iran and the 9/11 conspiracy theories

Mitt Romney is on television today, asserting that President Obama’s efforts at diplomacy are giving comfort to 9/11 conspiracy theorists like Iran’s Ahmadinejad. What Romney said today:

ROMNEY: It also adds fuel to the fire of those who are apart of the blame America crowd. I saw even Ahmadinejad is even saying 911 is a fabrication. These sorts of voices should not receive any kind of support from the words of the President of United States.

It’s a good thing those sorts of voices haven’t received support from the president, then! In fact, during President Obama’s Cairo speech — one of the stops on his supposed “apology tour” that conservatives have so derided — the president specifically spoke out against 9/11 conspiracy theories that have so much currency at home and abroad:

“But let us be clear: Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet al Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with,” he said.

We can have disagreements on the best way to approach the world. But Mitt Romney’s making up stuff, and does so habitually. Let him critique the president’s actual policies instead of some straw man that exists only in a GOP nightmare-fantasy world.

Andy McCarthy, KSM and military commissions for terrorists

National Review’s Andy McCarthy essentially concedes this morning that he doesn’t really believe in the rule of law:

Furthermore, the public strongly opposes a civilian trial for the 9/11 plotters. There is only so much an administration can do against the will of the American people.

Supposedly in America we don’t do our justice system through polling. Why not just put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a stadium and let the crowd decide his fate with outstretched thumbs? I somehow doubt McCarthy would have any problem with that.

The problem, though, is that his larger point this morning is somewhat correct: The Obama Administration might as well cave on using military commissions instead of civilian trials because the administration has already conceded it must use the tribunals on terror suspects it doesn’t think it can convict in a regular criminal court.

Military commissions didn’t exist when the jihadists carried out the Cole attack in October 2000. For years, moreover, there has been a pending civilian indictment in the Cole case. Yet, despite these facts, the Obama administration called for a military commission for the Cole bombers. Once they did that, there was no longer any coherent rationale for giving the 9/11 plotters a civilian trial. The only predicate for trying the Cole bombers by commission is the 9/11 attacks — so how do you do the 9/11 plotters in civilian court if the Cole bombers have to go to military court?

McCarthy’s right: There isn’t much coherence in the administration’s plan to give civilian trials to some terror suspects, military tribunals to others and indefinite detention without charge to others. Which is why I can’t get worked up about the latest news: The key decisions were  made a long time ago.

As I’ve said before, the whole thing is a kangaroo court:

Te Obama Administration will sort out the guilty from the innocent. It will assign life sentences to the guilty. And only then will it allow trials for some of the guilty — those few it feels it can reliably convict, I’m sure. This is more about putting on a show than it is about either protecting Americans or standing up for our civil libertarian traditions. And that’s kind of ugly.

It still is.

Is the Weekly Standard more interested in winning political fights or fights with terrorists?

The newest Weekly Standard cover story does something weird: It praises Barack Obama for his administration’s aggressive campaign of using Predator drones to assassinate Al Qaeda and Taliban extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And then it does something even weirder: It demands that Barack Obama mount a high-profile public defense of the legality of the Predator program. Here’s Kenneth Anderson, the writer:

In fact, the administration’s top lawyers should offer a public legal defense of its policies, and congressional Republicans and Democrats should insist on such a defense. This is partly to protect the full use-of-force tools of national security for future administrations, by affirming the traditional U.S. view of their legality. But it is also to protect and reassure the personnel of the CIA, NSC, and intelligence and military agencies who carry out these policies that they are not just effective but lawful policies of the U.S. government and will be publicly defended as such by their superiors.

Here’s the thing: Such a robust public defense of the program would necessarily make it much less effective.

Why? Because, where Pakistan is concerned, we’re engaged in a series of polite-but-necessary fictions. The United States is clearly operating the Predator program from Pakistani soil — but nobody has ever officially acknowledged that, and in fact there’s a been a great deal of kabuki theater in which Pakistani officials get very angry about Predator attacks while supporting them. Why? Because the formal acknowledgment and high-profile hearings would greatly anger a huge chunk of the Pakistani population … and probably force the government there to expel U.S. forces conducting the program.

So much for the terrorist-killing program, then. Kenneth Anderson surely knows that. So why call for the hearings? I’ve only got one good guess: to get President Obama on record as endorsing a Bushian view of international law (not so important) and executive power (expansive and important) in the “war on terror.” That such publicity would actually undermine that war is apparently less important than cornering the president politically.

Which is funny. Back when the New York Times exposed the terrorist tracking programs, Standard honcho Bill Kristol said the paper should be prosecuted for treason. Apparently he’s against using sunshine to undermine the struggle against terrorists — unless it’s a Democrat running the war.

Will Bart Stupak kill the health reform bill over abortion?

Looks like it could happen:

A dozen House of Representatives Democrats opposed to abortion are willing to kill President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plan unless it satisfies their demand for language barring the procedure, Representative Bart Stupak said on Thursday.

“Yes. We’re prepared to take responsibility,” Stupak said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” when asked if he and his 11 Democratic allies were willing to accept the consequences for bringing down healthcare reform over abortion.

“Let’s face it. I want to see healthcare. But we’re not going to bypass the principles of belief that we feel strongly about,” he said.

This, of course, is the corrosive and corrupting way that the abortion issue affects our politics and policy debates: Bart Stupak is so pro-life that he’s willing to kill a bill that will help millions of Americans stay alive and healthy. It’s infuriating.

At this point, Stupak’s position amounts to little more than grandstanding. Never mind that the Obama Administration is promising that federal money won’t be used to fund abortions; Stupak might think about Congress itself. Simply put, we’re a couple of decades into a rough-but-by-n0-means-complete consensus that federal money not be used to pay for abortions. Given that plenty of Democrats in Congress feel this way, it’s unlikely we’ll see a sudden rush of tax dollars to abortion clinics, no matter how strict the safeguards in the bill.

Stupak is playing defense against an improbable scenario, in other words. And he’s willing to kill the health reform bill over this fantasy. It’s dumb and irresponsible.

RNC: The Democrats are evil

Shortly after the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean came to Lawrence, KS in his role as newly installed chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He went straight to a fund-raiser in one of the city’s tonier precincts where I — a lowly reporter for the local newspaper — was not allowed in.

But Dean gave his speech to donors in the back yard of the house where the fund-raiser was held … because Democrats are so smart. I leaned up against the fence and took notes on his “secret” message to Dems, which included the following line:

“This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

Quoting that particular line gave me my first experience with the Drudge Report. His link to the “evil Republicans” quote (and yes, that’s how it was played) brought a ton of traffic to the newspaper site — and a ton of condemnations from Republicans nationwide. “My immediate reaction to that whole dialogue is, it’s full of hatred,” one party leader said. “The Democratic Party has elected a leader that’s full of hatred.” The “controversy” struck me as a bit of faux naivete, but it also seemed like a great deal of fun.

All of which makes me chuckle a bit at this revelation of GOP fund-raising activities:

Democrats on Wednesday sharply criticized a Republican National Committee fundraising document that caricatured President Obama as the Joker, while Chairman Michael S. Steele sought to distance himself from it.

Also depicted were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid(Nev.), presented as Cruella de Vil and Scooby-Doo, respectively. The three Democratic leaders were gathered under the heading “The Evil Empire.”

The Democrats are the ones tut-tutting this time, but really: Is anybody surprised? This is what political parties do: They paint themselves as valiant defenders of light and their opponents as avatars of darkness. It’s considered bad form to use the word “evil” I guess, but painting your opponents as un-American terrorist-loving baby-killers is well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. Taking offense at the word “evil” is … theatrical to say the least. There’ll be a brouhaha today, and tomorrow the Dems and the GOP will go back to calling each other nasty names again.

Politico is taking Mitt Romney’s slam of Barack Obama at face value. It shouldn’t.

I’m not sure what to make of this Politico piece which doesn’t even rise to the level of two-dimensional “he-said-she-said” analysis. It recounts Mitt Romney’s slams on Barack Obama in Romney’s new book, No Apology, without any context or response from the Obama camp. It’s one-dimensional “he-said” reporting, and it’s lame.

Anyway, here’s the core of Romney’s critique of the president on the world stage:

“Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined,” Romney writes of Obama’s overseas trips. “It is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable.”

“There are anti-American fires burning all across the globe; President Obama’s words are like kindling to them,” the former GOP presidential candidate adds.

I’ll take the second part first: The idea that President Obama is “kindling” anti-American sentiment across the globe is demonstrably untrue. Just last month, Gallup released a poll showing that America’s standing in the world is actually improving pretty significantly under Obama’s leadership:

Perceptions of U.S. leadership worldwide improved significantly from 2008 to 2009. The U.S.-Global Leadership Project, a partnership between the Meridian International Center and Gallup, finds that a median of 51% of the world approves of the job performance of the current leadership of the U.S., up from a median of 34% in 2008.

Which takes us back to the first part of Romney’s critique: That Obama has been on an “apology tour” that signals the president’s disdain for American exceptionalism. Republicans really seem to have convinced themselves of this, but it’s a damnable lie. Here’s what Obama said during his trip to Europe last year that Romney and other conservatives say smack of weak-willed anti-Americanism:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

If that’s weak-kneed apologia, I’d hate to see Obama when he gets to bragging.

Spencer Ackerman eviscerates Romney on this count:

He imagines Obama taking an “American Apology Tour,” a staple talking point on the right to describe Obama’s 2009 trips abroad in which the president showed a conciliatory face to foreign leaders and publics. It is telling that Romney produces not a single quote from Obama deriding America, protecting himself from the inevitable charge of caricaturing Obama by saying the president, “always the skillful politician, will throw in compliments about America here and there.” The dishonesty of that statement is demonstrated by the most cursory glance at Obama’s major foreign speeches, fromPrague (”Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century”) to Cairo(”America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God”) to Oslo (”Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”). Romney is offended by Obama’s U.N. speech that “power is no longer a zero-sum game,” writing, “that by necessity means America does not have the ability to maintain a dominant position in the world.” Any first-year logic student can correct Romney on that.

Like I said: Damnable lies.

All of this would, presumably, be valuable context and information for Politico’s readers. They get none of it, just a straightforward recitation of what Romney says in his book. It’s not so much “journalism” that’s being committed here as it is a “Romney For Dummies” summary.

And it took two people to write it. Really?

Torture advocate and Inky columnist John Yoo is a big fat liar

Torture advocate (and Inquirer columnist)  John Yoo takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to crow about his “vindication” in a Justice Department investigation that decided he was merely incompetent, not willfully unethical, in signing off on the Bush-era torture memos. And true to Yoo’s style, he distorts and politicizes the situation to create an entirely false narrative of his own victimization.

Obama came to office, he said, planning to break sharply with Bush-era precedents on torture:

In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco.

This would seem to suggest that Obama launched the OPR investigation of Yoo and Bybee. But that’s not true: Yoo’s work was so bad that the OPR investigation started during the Bush Administration — and the initial, much more devastating findings, were also reached during the Bush Administration, as Yoo himself demonstrates when talking about the timeline:

Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we’d been promised.

Get this straight: The so-called “smear job” came under the Republican president. The so-called “vindication” came under the Democratic president. I have my disagreements with that, but for Yoo to portray this process as “fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president” is purely and completely dishonest.

The Wall Street Journal declares an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page shouldn’t be expected to ever give President Obama an easy time, or the benefit of the doubt. But it’s amazing the levels of hypocrisy they’re willing to shoulder in order to castigate the president. Take, for example, today’s editorial on the president’s bipartisan commission on deficit reduction.

Having proposed peacetime records for spending as a share of the economy—more than 25% of GDP this year and next—Mr. Obama now promises to make “the tough choices necessary to solve our fiscal problems.” And what might those choices be? “Everything’s on the table. That’s how this thing’s going to work,” Mr. Obama said.

Peacetime records? Peacetime records? This is amazing to hear, because in almost every single other context the Wall Street Journal has usually joined the conservative howls that President Obama isn’t treating the struggle against terrorists like a “war.” And it ignores that we have two wars — two very expensive wars — going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and they might be contributing a little bit to that massive deficit. Those two wars, in fact, have cost the United States a total of $1.05 trillion through the end of 2010. The $150 billion cost of the two wars in 2009 alone amounted to 1 percent of the country’s $14 trillion GDP.

You can argue those wars are necessary — and for the purposes of this particular debate, I won’t dispute the point.  The point is that the Wall Street Journal, in its ongoing effort to paint the president in the worst possible light, has decided to apply peacetime spending standards to his record. You can argue that President Obama is spending too much money otherwise, but any honest accounting of “spending records” must take those wars into account. To do otherwise is dishonest political hackery.