The Dish

Every now and again, an event happens that makes you see much more clearly how divorced from its previous ideals the GOP has become. Obama’s speech at Morehouse was something every conservative has always asked of African-American public figures. We have in Obama a black man raised by a single mother who is now, as even his critics acknowledge, a dedicated father to two daughters, whom he obviously adores. If the right is concerned about the black family, they should be falling over themselves to celebrate what Obama’s family is, and means. But they don’t. It would kill them to say anything gracious about this president.

Drudge yesterday cherry-picked only those parts of the speech that could divide people racially, only those moments when Obama dared to recognize the discrimination and difficulties of young black men – before urging them to overcome them. There’s a racial nastiness here that decent voters still hear and that Republicans have deployed constantly. Their historic refusal to cooperate even one iota with the first black president betrays, it seems to me, a staggering lack of grace and historical sense.

But as with everything Obama says, the speech balanced calls for equality with an admonition that personal responsibility is the inextricable complement to equality. And he did something more in the interstices. A member of the Morehouse faculty writes:

Morehouse is a college dedicated to African American men, the only one of its type in the country.  To hear the first African-American male U.S. president address a class of 500+ African-American men was moving, especially as he touched on his personal struggles of not having a father in the home.

But the reason I’m writing to you though is because he gave two shout-outs to gays.  He encouraged the young men to be a better husband to their wife but then added “or to your husband or partner”.  Later, he told them that their experiences as African-American men should make them more empathetic to others who feel left out, such as Hispanics because of their immigration status, gays and lesbians because of who they love, and Muslims because of how they worship. The ease with which he address gay issues now is striking to me.  Just like with the second inaugural address, it’s just a part of his normal speaking.  It is even more noteworthy because Morehouse once had a reputation as a homophobic place due to several factors, including a student beating about ten years back.

This speech reminded me once again why I supported this man and continue to do so.

Me too. While Washington obsesses over scandals that so far have no connection to him, the president stays calm and carries on.

Her column today is simply unhinged from the first sentence:

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.

Can she actually believe this? Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?

So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.

You have to bend yourself into several pretzels to even understand what the Benghazi thing is about. All the emails released show what amounts to a classic inter-agency conflict, resolved dispassionately by Ben Rhodes, in a period of considerable confusion. For the half-baked talking points, someone has been already fired. On the DOJ’s aggressive pursuit of a leaker who might have endangered national security, I thought Republicans like Noonan approved of that. But not when it’s Obama, when it suddenly becomes an “assault”.

The IRS story is a different matter and an entirely legitimate scandal at a lower level. I want those responsible to be fired or prosecuted.  But there is no proof whatever of any connection to the president, his campaign or anyone near the administration itself.  Sarah Hall Ingram, who was in charge of the office scrutinizing 501 (c) 4s has no business still working in the IRS, let alone on healthcare reform. She should be fired as well as her then-deputy, who is out the door June 3.

But how exactly is all this a crippling scandal for the president? He is not involved in any of these issues directly. In fact, it would be highly inappropriate for the president to be micro-managing the IRS or, for that matter, the DOJ. If he were, Noonan would be calling him Carter. At some very distant level, he is formally responsible – but not in the way that Reagan was directly responsible for Iran-Contra, or Clinton for lying under oath about his sex life, or Bush for making brutal torture his central strategy in the war on terror. That’s what makes a scandal a real scandal: the political involvement of a president or a key member of his administration in a cover-up or criminal offense or lie. That simply isn’t here – with the caveat that something may emerge later.

So what on earth is she banging on about? She cannot connect the president directly to this scandal – the first in his four and a half years in office (which must be a record). So she simply assigns blame to him because he is the president. Or this higher bullshit:

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What would normally be seen as good news for the president is now being spun into bad news. Given our current state of knowledge, it does not appear that the president had any direct role in the inter-agency tussle over how to describe chaotic events in Benghazi. Equally, there doesn’t seem to be – so far – any indication that the IRS Cincinnati office shenanigans reach to the Treasury, let alone the president. On the broad subpoenas for the AP in a leak investigation, the DOJ was being egged on by Congressional Republicans, although it is perfectly fair to say that the Obama administration has been far more focused on pursuing espionage charges than any recent administration.

The Watergate analogy, deployed rather cavalierly by George Will today, is the reverse of what we are seeing. The president was not directing any of this. The attorney general recused himself from the AP investigation. The IRS outrage came after repeated calls from Congressional Democrats for the IRS to give 501(c)4s extra scrutiny because they were – pretty obviously – campaign appendages. A flavor of one letter:

We strongly urge you to fully enforce the law and related court rulings that clearly reserve 501(c)(4) tax status for legitimate nonprofit organizations. And we urge you to investigate and stop any abuse of the tax code by groups whose true mission is to influence the outcome of federal elections.

On Benghazi, it seems to me we have a classic inter-agency tussle over how to present the facts – but also a reasonable process to hammer out a consensus. The Benghazi emails released yesterday do not seem that scandalous to me.

So the critique now is that the president is not sufficiently in charge, that he is a bystander to his own administration. I have to say this has some appeal as a general critique, but it isn’t borne out by these scandals. The IRS is rigorously independent of the White House – and the Cincinnati office was picked as a place to investigate the 501(c)4s because it was far away from Washington and therefore seen as more neutral. The reason to look closely at those new groups was perfectly legitimate, even if the partisan implementation is abhorrent. On the AP subpoenas, the decision was rightly made by the DOJ, independently of the president.

If we are to blame the president, are we really saying that we want a president involved in or directly monitoring these procedures?

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Perhaps it’s unfair, since this was said in the heat of a debate with Bill Maher. But this is how my friend Glenn Greenwald described the US last Friday night:

It’s amazing for you to say “Look at all these Muslims. The minute you give them a little freedom, they go wild and they start being all violent” … How can you be a citizen of the United States, the country that has generated more violence and militarism in the world over the last five or six decades and say “Look at those people over there? They are incredibly violent”?

I’m very much with Glenn on American denial about the consequences of our own actions. I’m with him in believing that we have a very dangerous capacity to whitewash our own sins and highlight those of others. I do think the US – mainly since 9/11 – has been generating violence on a large scale, most recently by invading and occupying Iraq and not providing minimal security for its inhabitants, leading to a sectarian bloodbath bigger even that Syria’s current horror.

But really: the US has generated more violence and militarism in the last sixty years than any other country? Has Glenn heard of the Cultural Revolution? Or the reign of Pol Pot? Or the brutal legacy of Stalin?

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David Barash reflects on our primate need for foes and our tendency to be ”especially prone to exaggerating them”:

“Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy,” wrote Nietzsche, “has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.” It is reported that at the end of the Third Punic War, after Carthage had finally been destroyed and pillaged, her people killed or enslaved, her land sown with salt, a kind of sadness came over the victorious citizens of Rome, an awareness that with their defining struggle behind them, they would never be the same.

All too often, nationhood, or even selfhood, is defined by one’s opponents. Imagine: Ahab without Moby Dick, the Hatfields without the McCoys. As each has been defined by the other, enmity has subtly been transformed into dependence. If Moby Dick had died of old age, or in the sweet embrace of a giant squid, or by someone else’s harpoon, Ahab would probably have mourned rather than celebrated. But Ahab was a fictional character, while the rest of us­—and our enemies—are very real. Equally real is the fact that sometimes these enemies go away, leaving us frustrated, empty, and strangely alone.

This is especially true about Americans and terrorism. The reaction to the home-grown pressure-cooker bombs by two losers in Boston reveals the degree of the 9/11 PTSD the country is still reeling from. And the panic and hysteria doesn’t actually help the war on Jihadist terror. We gave the Tsarnaev brothers what they craved: full metal media orgasm. They may have killed three people in a horrifying attack – but it led to saturation coverage (yes, we joined in) and to the publicity post-Qaeda Jihadists live for.

In that sense, Pete King is as big an unwitting recruiter for Jihadist terrorism as he was a very witting supporter of Irish terrorism against innocent civilians. He once gave mass-murderers money; now he gives them publicity. What we haven’t yet figured out is that once we have disabled the organized terror groups like al Qaeda, the best thing we can do with rogue Jihadists is to treat them with withering contempt.

At times, many Republicans like King almost seem unconsciously to want there to be another 9/11 – to justify their inability to move past that event.

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Well, they finally have something. The talking points provided by the CIA were pushed back against and effectively edited by the State Department’s spokesperson, Victoria Nuland. The key emails, it seems to me, are the following. Nuland showed classic bureaucratic in-fighting as the CIA sought to highlight its own warnings, ignored by State. The reference to elements of al Qaeda in the country, highlighted by the CIA:

“could be abused by members (of Congress) to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”

That’s prima facie evidence of politically spinning the facts. The “either”, however, refers to previously mentioned legitimate wariness of tipping off the Jihadists that the US was onto them. Notice how the second statement was utterly unnecessary – and purely political, defending State and Clinton. And even when the specific reference to Jihadist elements in Libya was removed, Nuland still cavilled:

“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings (sic) leadership.”

My building’s leadership? Who can that mean but Clinton?

As Joe Klein has noted, these are venial sins, not mortal ones. And the premise of the Republican argument that immediately including the possibility of a pre-planned Jihadist attack would have deeply wounded the Obama campaign seems ludicrous to me. He decimated al Qaeda in Af-Pak and killed bin Laden, but a minor, if foolish, attempt at unnecessary spin after an embassy siege would have undone this legacy in the eyes of voters? Come off it.

All of this is a grotesque over-reaction – for transparently political purposes. The GOP does not know any more how to propose constructive policies that actually might improve the lives of Americans. But they sure know how to construct a “scandal” into a mountain when it is only a bump in the tarmac.

It all reminds me of Whitewater.

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Fareed Zakaria is, as usual, a sane voice in the escalating crisis:

Would U.S. intervention–no-fly zones, arms, aid to the opposition forces–make things better? It depends on what one means by better. It would certainly intensify the civil war. It would also make the regime of Bashar Assad more desperate. Perhaps Assad has already used chemical weapons; with his back against the wall, he might use them on a larger scale. As for external instability, Landis points out that if U.S. intervention tipped the balance against the Alawites, they might flee Syria into Lebanon, destabilizing that country for decades. Again, this pattern is not unprecedented. Large numbers on the losing side have fled wars in the Middle East, from Palestinians in 1948 to Iraq’s Sunnis in the past decade.

If the objective is actually to reduce the atrocities and minimize potential instability, the key will be a political settlement that gives each side an assurance that it has a place in the new Syria. That was never achieved in Iraq, which is why, despite U.S. troops and arms and influence, the situation turned into a violent free-for-all. If some kind of political pact can be reached, there’s hope for Syria. If it cannot, U.S. assistance to the rebels or even direct military intervention won’t change much: Syria will follow the pattern of Lebanon and Iraq–a long, bloody civil war. And America will be in the middle of it.

Anyone who wants to insert the US into such a bloody, violent, increasingly sectarian civil war needs his or her head examined. We couldn’t control or even understand one while we were occupying Iraq – and, as Fareed notes, scores of thousands were murdered under our very noses, with millions of refugees. An entire country is afflicted with communal PTSD of the most severe kind. Last month, the deaths in Iraq’s continuing civil war reached a post-occupation record of 700. And that’s after we invaded, occupied and tried to set up a non-sectarian government.  What are the odds we can guide yet another sectarian civil war from the skies?

Brent Sasley claims that the recent Israeli strikes on Syria can succeed where the US can’t because their goals are pragmatic and limited:

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[Re-posted from earlier today]

The above video shows an Israeli airstrike in Damascus on Saturday night, reportedly targeting regime munitions bound for Hezbollah. It comes on the heels of another attack late last week, on missiles stored at Damascus airport. Assad’s regime now declares it will retaliate, and the IDF says this won’t be the end of the strikes:

Officials [in Israel] are concerned that as the Syrian state devolves into chaos, sophisticated weapons not previously available to Hizballah will make their way across the border to Lebanon, altering the military equation between Israel and the well-armed Shi‘ite militia sponsored by Iran and aided by the Syrian government.

We are told this was not an act of war. Why? Er, because Israel did it and therefore it is not an act of war. It may have killed close to 100 Syrian army soldiers, among many others; it may have been the biggest single explosion in Syria’s capital city throughout the entire conflict; it may have required entering another country’s airspace and bombing its capital city; but this is not a war. Moreover, this not-war is embraced by the US. Because Israel did it:

In a series of high-level meetings between U.S. and Israeli officials over the last year, the Israelis explained in detail the conditions that would lead them to attack targets inside Syria. Israel’s “red lines,” articulated in private and public, include the shipment from Iran of advanced anti-aircraft weapons, advanced missiles, and chemical or unconventional weapons to the Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah, according to public reports and U.S. officials. … President Obama signaled Sunday that the U.S. had no objections to the strikes.

Which begs the obvious question:

If Syrian planes bombed Israel’s Ramat David Airbase because it houses US-supplied weaponry, what would the appropriate Israeli reaction be?

— Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) May 4, 2013

Imagine a foreign military bombing Washington. Would we not regard that as an act of war? At what point are we going to admit that, in our view, all the rules of international law apply to every party but the US and its allies? Blake Hounshell considers the impact of the air strikes on all parties:

[W]ow, this is awkward for the Syrian opposition. The regime will seek to exploit the raids to tie the rebels to the Zionist entity, after spending two years painting them as an undifferentiated mass of “terrorist gangs.” (Syrian television is already testing out this line, according to Reuters: “The new Israeli attack is an attempt to raise the morale of the terrorist groups which have been reeling from strikes by our noble army.”)

But the propaganda can cut both ways. The rebels can point to the Israeli attacks as yet more evidence that Assad’s army is for attacking Syrians, not defending the country. It’s not clear to me which argument will carry the day.

The strikes also promise to hypercharge the debate over Syria in the United States. Advocates of  intervention will ask: If Syrian air defenses are so tough, as U.S. officials have been saying, why was Israel able to breach them so easily? Of course, a no-fly zone is a much more difficult and risky endeavor than a one-off raid, but you can expect that important distinction to get blurred.

It was, in fact, amazing to see how Israel’s complication of an already metastasizing conflict did not prompt concerns in the US about the war expanding – but immediately gave us commentary that this proves how easy war against Syria can be – and so why are we waiting? Yes, a decade after “Mission Accomplished” we are asking why not go to war in a Middle Eastern Muslim country racked by a splintering insurgency? Here’s why:

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Jon Favreau has a must-read in the Beast today. It pushes back against the infantile MoDo notion that the stalemate in Washington is a function of the president’s poor political skills, rather than a completely gerrymandered and dysfunctional Republican House, special interest group abuse of the system, and a nihilist GOP base that has basically decided to give up any thinking about policy in order to rely on opposition to anything the president does as one wing of a losing, bitter culture war struggle.

Favreau also notes the recurring rhetorical theme of this community-organizer president in Obama’s own words:

This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us—it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice—to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not.

There is another factor, I think. The president understands his role differently than his predecessor. He is not the “decider”; he is the catalyst for change that must come from below and from the other branches of government. He is not a legislator. And the Congress is the part of government that is currently failing us – not the president.

The blogger Smartypants also recognizes this:

I’ve often talked about the fact that in his days as a community organizer, President Obama studied and taught about power relations. Its clear to me that he has an understanding of the power of partnership and is constantly calling on us to join him in exercising that power.

Practicing leadership from a position of “power with” requires that you have an independently strong ego and don’t need to dominate in order to prop it up or feed it. And it also requires trust in the people you set out to lead. These are some of the characteristics I most admire about President Obama and ones that are often most misunderstood by his critics on the left and the right.

Its only natural that when people are so used to the power of dominance that they would dismiss the reality of the power of partnership. Its why we so often hear Obama criticized as weak and naive. But history tells us that all of the battles won by the left in this country have been based on a partnership model of power … enough people finally spoke up in ways that couldn’t be ignored. We see that in the battle for civil rights, unions, women’s suffrage, anti-war, etc.

The archetypal achievement of this president in that regard is his deployment of “power with” with respect to gay rights. The power to change came from below – but he masterfully guided it, nudged it, and helped without getting in our way. Ditto universal healthcare when he refused to impose a bill, but demanded that the Congress come up with one along similar lines.

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Another sign of an increasingly apartheid state:

The Knesset has approved a further extension of the “temporary” order known as the ‘Citizenship Law’ (83 votes for, 17 votes against). This temporary provision prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from attaining citizenship.

This “temporary” law is now more than a decade old. And, as you can see, the Knesset doesn’t seem likely to repeal it any time soon. I know what it’s like to be legally married to an American and yet denied citizenship because of my HIV status (a situation now mercifully over). It’s an attack on the family, a way to prevent Israeli-Palestinian understanding, and an effective second-class status for Arab spouses of Israeli citizens. It surely risks radicalizing Arab spouses, rather than helping to integrate them.

This kind of racial discrimination is also seeping into US law. Israel wants to join the 37 countries that allow travel to the US without a visa. But AIPAC wants this free visa exchange to be different than any other country’s. They want to retain an ability to discriminate against Arab-American or Muslim American citizens. Even the most loyal toadies for the Israel Lobby see this as a step too far:

“It’s stunning that you would give a green light to another country to violate the civil liberties of Americans traveling abroad,” said a staffer for one leading pro-Israel lawmaker in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Notice the anonymity of the quote. Not that they’re scared of AIPAC, of course. To say that would be “anti-Semitic.” And note the bipartisan nature of this AIPAC campaign.

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