Dr. Evil is Back … With Mini-Dickless-Jr.

Dick Cheney has emerged from his evil lair to spew more hate and vitriolic, misleading critiques at a sitting President. After probably the worst eight years in the recent history of the country, the Vice President has the gall to now claim that it is President Obama who is ruing the standing of America in the world. Is this Freudian projection? Is it a desperate man trying to restore his legacy beyond the echo chamber of right-wing pundits? Or is he really this delusional? Let’s take a look at the Op Ed, which was published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, titled “The Collapsing Obama Doctrine: Rarely Has a President Been So Wrong About So Much at the Expense of So Many.”

The most ironic element of this Cheney-family early Christmas card is, if we replace “Obama” with “Bush,” the Op Ed actually would have made sense, about six to eight years ago. After an opening parlay on Iraq and Syria, the father and daughter write: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.” Who was it that got us into this war again? Who kept us there for so long? Who failed to meet ever realize their ultimate goal, having to wait for Obama to finally get Osama? Oh, yeah. But reality is a simple inconvenience for these terrorists of truth.

Then he actually claims that the Iraq war was a success when he and Bush finally left office, only eight years to late: “When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.” Seriously?

After then arguing for several paragraphs that we must stay at war with Afghanistan and Iraq for the foreseeable future, he claims “It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not "end" wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own security at risk.” The Cheney dynamic duo then conclude as follows: “In 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, "If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”

A willful blindness to the fact that he and Bush oversaw the worst administration since Herbert Hoover 70 years earlier is understandable, given the implications. The innocent civilians and American soldiers who died for a lie, the tens of millions that lost their homes or savings in 2007-08, the decimation of America’s reputation around the globe, the failure to address global warming and environment degradation, a worsening economic circumstance for the majority of Americans that looks unlikely to improve anytime soon, a Supreme Court that consistently choses corporations and the wealthy over the people and human rights, serious challenges to democracy and civil liberties that continue to confront us and the inculcation of hate, victimhood and malicious attacking as the GOP platform are less so. These are the legacies of eight Bush/Cheney years. The joke of having to listen to him slander our President is only tempered by the fact it was in the worst Op Ed section among major newspapers in the country. Who owns that again?

GOP Rape Obsession

Far too many state and federal representatives in the Republican Party have been engaged in a war on women that makes Iraq seem like a minor tussle. These are often the same group so appalled by the non-existent “war on Christmas,” the “war on conservatives,” the “liberal media monopoly,” “the war on religion,” etc. This is nothing new for a party that prides itself on its desire to return us to a pre-New Deal, 50s inspired-Utopia, but the level of vitriol has certainly escalated in the past few years, often manifesting itself in slut-shaming, abortion-shaming, contraception-use-shaming and the like. But the most troubling among these trends may be the countless ways that right-wing GOPers try to justify rape as a backlash strategy against the successes of feminism – and their apparent sense that, together with affirmative action, government intervention and taking “God out of schools and society,” it has led the moral and somehow economic collapse of the country (particularly for white, working class males).

A perfect example of this comes from Republican Maine State representative Lawrence Lockman, who loves to make offensive comments to the media about rape, abortion and homosexuality. As pointed out by Daily Kos (who also provided the funny infographic below), the most inflammatory of these comments came in 1995, when he claimed: ““If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.” Sure, and if a policeman tries to arrest me, shouldn’t I be able to shoot him before he gets the handcuffs out? If a girlfriend tries to sleep with me when I’m not in the mood, shouldn’t I be able to beat her senseless? If a women I asks to marry me says no, shouldn’t I be able to club her over the head and drag her to the altar? I assume you get the point, namely the fact that we have far too many politicians with low IQs and the ethics of prehistoric man. Of course the GOP is well aware of these huffing and puffing men, but like to use them as part of their continued attack on women and the liberal policies that actually gave them some freedom and power. Back to the Middle Ages they appear to say, while really just engaging in more Realpolitik maneuvering. So here is the aforementioned chart, providing a nice summary of this strategy in action:

The War that Just Won't Quit

Bush Fatigue Reverb in Iraq

Three Meet the Press Quotes and the Beating Drum

Today, I thought I would include three short quotes from the Sunday Morning talk show Meet the Press, that to me exemplify everything that is wrong with media today. The first came in a nice piece remembering the beloved Tim Russert, who died in 2008. To honor his memory, David Gregory brought out his son (now a reporter at NBC News) to talk about a new introduction he wrote to his dad’s book about his grandfather and their special relationship. After talking about the major effort his father made to see him, even as he worked long hours seven days a week, he made the following comment, “You don’t have to be rich to try. You don’t have to be rich to care.” Seriously? So now rich fathers are implicitly better than everyone else’s? I’m sure he didn’t really mean anything by the comment, but it’s just the bizarre nature of the contemporary moment, when polls find that the rich these days really do think they are superior to everyone else and can thus talk down to the public with a paternalism that seems to predate the French revolution and guillotine.

Earlier on the same show, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt spoke rather articulately on the problem of conservative immigration rhetoric and its relationship to a viable run at the Presidency: “It’s impossible for us to build a coalition to win the presidency with less than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Mitt Romney is at 27 percent, the electorate is going to be two percent less White. We don’t have an opportunity to make our case, deliver our message, make the case that our policies are good for 100 percent of the people until we can effectively deal with this issue.” While he is obviously right, the most compelling thing to me about this statement is the absurdity that any political agenda could serve even close to “100 percent” of the population. If that were true, we wouldn’t even need democracy – we could just have a host of experts, a philosopher king or even a coterie of selfless Plutocrats that could enact the policies that help us all. The funny thing is I think he actually believed the BS he was shoveling; showing the general degradation of not only conservative thinking, but thinking in general.

That thought was further exemplified by columnist Ruth Mark of the Washington Post who continued the discussion with this gem, “There is an easy road ahead for the Republican party.” She went on to highlight a fascinating Pew Research Institute poll that claimed both Liberals and Conservatives have gotten more liberal on the issue of immigration. But as the great cynic H. L. Mencken once said, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all times; there are always well-known solutions to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” Because while it might be true that there has been a movement to the left on immigration, there has also been a movement to the left on economic issues, on corporate and high income taxation, on equality and gay rights. But she is speaking of a party that works against all these popular opinions and feeds on the fear and hatred of a base that gets older and older and whiter and whiter over time. This easy way forward is one of the reasons Cantor lost and it would leave the entire party without a key element of their platform – blaming everyone for the decline of America except for the fat cat capitalists they serve.

Ignored by most was the heart of the matter, as highlighted by Eurasia Group analyst Sean West: “"Cantor was the hub for finance, the hub for a host of big corporations that could trust him to get things done. He was the one standing between the conservative pitchforks and the business community on a whole host of issues." It appears that he lost not only because of his more moderate stance on immigration, but because his ambition, ideological flexibility and policy of serving the power elites of the country simply turned off his constituents enough to go for the unknown “conservative populist” that seemed to at least listen to their concerns. And thus one of the real movers and shakers in DC had so forgotten that he was supposed to actually care about the people he represented, they finally said “enough!” That is a much more interesting take on his upset loss and might actually scare some politicians straight on both sides of the aisle.

Missing from the show in a general sense is a deep level of criticality beyond the Realpolitik strategy of the moment. They speak of how Hillary Clinton can overcome the fact that she is rich, how a Republican presidential candidate can overcome the stigma of their anti-immigrant attitudes, how the Republican party can do a complete about face on immigration without any ramifications and how the wealthy television personality should apparently be considered the “model father” we should all aspire to emulate. At the heart of it, is the simple problem that the media – particularly on television and the in the elite print newspapers and magazines – has substantially more in common with the politicians, celebrities and businessmen than the people they are supposed to be informing. Since almost all of them now work for big corporations themselves, make huge salaries, add supplemental money from book deals and speaking fees and thus live the lives of the top 10 (if not 1) percent, can we really expect them to be more critical. The answer to that question is clear and thus the bind we find ourselves in today, seeking out a representative, any representative, that might actually not only hear what people say, but work to see that they fight for what those people want, need and desire.

Romney Resurrection?

In a week when a majority leader lost in a primary for the first time ever, more bizarre news emerges from the GOP. This time around rumors are swirling that top GOP fundraisers want good-ole Mitt Romney to run for president again in 2016 (WP). Seriously? Arguably losing an election that was ripe for the taking, Romney found a way to alienate minorities, immigrants, the lower 47 percent of the population and much of his own base all within a year. His aloofness, ideological flexibility, tendency to play fast and loose with the truth and history and general disregard for the hard work of campaigning, makes it hard to believe anyone would be silly enough to give him another shot. And yet that is exactly what Joe Scarborough among others intend to push, with a “Draft Romney campaign.”

This may be good news for the Democrats, particularly given the current alternatives Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, the severely damaged Chris Christie (the ultimate fat cat) and Jeb Bush, who appears unlikely to run. It is yet another year without a quality candidate from the right and, as one looks over their period of relative dominance starting in 1980, it’s hard to find one among the bunch, other than the charismatic, though obviously deeply flawed, Ronald Reagan. The interesting question that would emerge is whether the country would want a super-rich president in the current climate and whether they can really erase the defeat of four years ago. Early indicators would seem to lean toward a Hillary Clinton landslide in that case, but early predictions are, as always, perilous at best. But as the right tries to find a viable candidate that can address the changing demographics of the country, the democrats should be trying to find a way to recuperate some public trust in the wake of a fading Obama presidency.

If the GOP does decide to pull Romney back out of the shadows, I would assume most Dems would say: bring him on!