Month: January 2012

Fareed checks in on the new Nazi Germany:

Iran is weak and getting weaker. Sanctions have pushed its economy into a nose-dive. The political system is fractured and fragmenting. Abroad, its closest ally and the regime of which it is almost the sole supporter — Syria — is itself crumbling. The Persian Gulf monarchies have banded together against Iran and shored up their relations with Washington. Last week, Saudi Arabia closed its largest-ever purchase of U.S. weaponry. Meanwhile, Europe is close to approving even more intense sanctions against Tehran. The simplest measure of Iran’s strength is its currency. When Barack Obama became president, you could buy 9,700 rials with one dollar. Since then, the dollar has appreciated 60 percent against the rial, meaning you can buy 15,600 rials … The price of food staples has soared 40 percent the past few months, Reuters reported this week.

This is a result of Obama's foreign policy strategy. Fareed rightly worries that pushing Iran into a corner could be dangerous. But isn't this careful, relentless strategy of isolation and delegitimization from within and without easily the most sensible option? The GOP alternative is to pick the one issue which brings the regime and its opposition together, and make it non-negotiable.

Bob Wright says Gingrich "deserves to be remembered as one of America's most gifted harnessers of hatred":

I think viewing an anti-Romney holy war as the capstone of Gingrich's career gives short shrift to Newt's skills as a hatemonger. After all, Mitt Romney is only one person, and Gingrich has reason to be mad at him. The hallmark of truly vintage Gingrichian toxicity is the fomenting of hatred toward whole groups of people whom Gingrich has no personal reason to dislike. It isn't that he wishes these people ill; it's just that he would profit politically if they were hated more deeply by more people.

Take gay people. When Gingrich said that "there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us," I doubt he actually feared the coming tyranny of fascist homosexual atheists. But he knew there were voters so creeped out by homosexuality that they could be made to fear such a regime–at which point they would be indebted to the political leader who first alerted them to this peril.

Gingrich is a festering white-head of loathing. Which is why his smile looks so terrifying and false.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich speaks to supporters after speaking at the Wakonda Club on December 30, 2011 in Des Moines, Iowa. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Suffolk University's new poll has Romney at 41 percent, Paul at 18 percent, and Santorum at 8 percent. Ed Morrissey analyzes:

If Republicans had a few weeks to campaign in New Hampshire, one or more of them might break through that and seriously challenge Romney, but the primary is five days from now.  Absent an uncharacteristic and game-changing error from Romney in the debates the next few days, the best that anyone can hope to do is change the order of finish below Romney.  Santorum could use a second-place finish above Ron Paul, but ten points is going to be a tall order this week.

Sabato agrees that the timing helps Romney:

[I]n 1980 there was more than a month between Iowa and New Hampshire. That allowed Ronald Reagan, who surprisingly lost Iowa to George H.W. Bush, to reset that race by clobbering Bush in the Granite State. With such little time, can Santorum and the others significantly cut into Romney’s big polling lead? It’s not likely, but it’s not impossible either, particularly with two debates this weekend.

Gallup points out that the Republican frontrunner post New Hampshire has an extremely good chance at becoming the nominee. More on Mitt's dominance in that state here.

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We've been so used to the weirdness of the island of misfit toys that is the GOP primary season that we may have missed the real story: the weirdest man in the whole race might actually be … the one not supposed to be weird. I remember vividly David Brooks' description of Romney's 2008 Convention speech as "borderline insane." His humor is, well, very Disney Channel, which is still better than Huntsman's, which is Disney Channel trying to be Spike.

I once noted that Romney made plastic look real. Dana captures one soupcon of that truth in a hilarious dispatch from what looked like an excruciating endorsement from McCain, who checked his watch during Romney's stump speech:

[Romney's] staff applauded dutifully when he got on his plane (a Miami Air 737 named “Diane” on the fuselage but labeled Hair Force One by others), and he went up and down the row congratulating each staff member with a “nice work” and a “thank you.” The grin he wore when he boarded remained throughout the flight — even when he entered and exited the lavatory.

This is a very weak candidate. Some believe that he has had trouble getting past 25 percent outside New Hampshire because of his flip-floppery or moderation. I suspect many Republican voters just realize he is their John Kerry. Because he is. Without the ideological consistency.

Ezra Klein believes that the candidate's surge says very little about him:

Santorum’s finish doesn’t say much about his ideology, or his campaign skills, or his endorsements. Quite the opposite, in fact. In a race where a large number of anti-Romney voters were desperate to find a candidate, Santorum was unable to attract significant support until the very end, when the anti-Romney vote literally had nowhere else to go. If he had been a better candidate, he would have crested earlier.

That's a bit dismissive of Santorum's dogged, old-school, truck-based campaign, which, to my mind, was exemplary and deserves praise. Ditto Santorum's "concession" speech: moving and smart, compared with Romney's deranged recitation of "America The Beautiful". But I suspect Ezra's right. In this game of musical chairs, if the music had stopped earlier, the nod would have gone to Newt or Ron. But that's politics. Timing is everything.

And so the vetting gets more serious. Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross remind us that Santorum was ranked, in 2006, as one of the three most corrupt Senators in Washington, mostly for doing things like this:

Perhaps the most jarring detail from his tenure in office is the unorthodox $500,000 mortgage that Santorum and his wife secured on the home in rural Virginia they had purchased for $643,361. According to a series of reports in the Philadelphia Daily News, the mortgage came from Philadelphia Trust Company, a fledgling private bank catering to "affluent investors and institutions" whose officers had contributed $24,000 to Santorum's political action committees and re-election campaign.

In advertising, the lender said it only offered its preferred rates to well-heeled borrowers who also used their investment services. But Santorum's public disclosure forms showed he did not have the required minimum $250,000 in liquid assets and was not an investor with Philadelphia Trust. His ability to secure the five-year loan led [Melanie] Sloan to file a complaint under a Senate ethics rule that specifically prohibits members from accepting a loan on terms not available to members of the general public. At the time, a Santorum spokeswoman told the Daily News that the mortgage terms were set at "market rates," but did not provide further comment.

You can read Sloan's press release from 2006 (via her organization, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) about the complaint here. CREW also has [pdf] an extensive report on Santorum's misbehavior justifying his top three corruption ranking. One particularly odious nugget:

Compassionate conservatism redux.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. Sen Rick Santorum speaks during a 'Faith, Family and Freedom' Town Hall at Merrimack Valley Railroad on January 5, 2012 in Northfield, New Hampshire. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Uh-oh.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

A reader writes:

A key factor left out of the debate over why terrorists are not hitting soft targets is the impact on fundraising and recruiting. There is no softer, more panic-inducing target than to attack a few kindergarten classes like the Chechen rebels did several years ago. However, I imagine it does not play as well with potential donors as would knocking down a tall building or blowing up an airplane.  Movie theaters and shopping malls are probably less off-putting than schools to potential donors, but they also would not likely arouse the passions of potential recruits.

Another writes:

Terrorists have not attacked public places like movie theaters, malls, or grocery stores in the US. 

When I was in Israel, there was an army of elderly men checking every single bag before allowing anyone into any public building of a decent size.  On popular Ben-Yehuda Street, groups of volunteers patrolled with rifles in hand on Thursday nights (the beginning of the weekend in Israel) to keep an eye out for terrorists. I had my backpack checked before I could go into grocery stores, movie theaters, shopping malls, museums, or really any shop large enough to hold a crowd, precisely because suicide bombers have stricken those places in the past.  

However, what this says to me is that your reader is right; there really aren’t that many terrorists out there.  We are fortunate enough to live in a country where movie theaters search your bags for outside food, not bombs, but unfortunate enough to live in a country where too few people realize this is so.

But according to Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, the very survival of the US is at stake. And Ron Paul is the nut?

It's worth a brief mention that no op-ed page or newspaper has been more ferociously hostile to Ron Paul than the Washington Post, cementing its evolution into the mouthpiece of the Washington establishment, rather than any independent counter to it. No columnist had anything good to say about Paul (there was a token outsider op-ed from Nick Gillespie), and many piled on with rhetoric of an extreme version. Michael Gerson wrote of Paul's Republican supporters that "they prefer their poison pill covered in glass and washed down with battery acid". Richard Cohen merrily played the Nazi card:

This is pretty much what used to be called isolationism, and it allowed Hitler to presume, quite correctly as it turned out, that America would not interfere with his plans to conquer Europe, Britain included. 

Where, exactly is Hitler today, a fascist leader commanding a first-world economy with a massive military? Oh, yes, a tin-pot dictatorship of religious nutballs with a GDP lower than Norway's and missiles that cannot reach Bahrain. Marc Thiessen insists that Paul's "are not conservative positions. They are not libertarian positions. They are nutty positions." Jennifer Rubin in one of her milder attacks, argued: 

Perhaps it is time for the Iowa’s governor, as a service to his party and the state, to issue an “anyone but Paul” endorsement. It might be the best thing he could do for his state’s continued political influence.

Every one of these columnists has a right to these opinions. My point would simply be that the Post has several cookie-cutter statist, neoconservative, pro-war, pro-torture columnists, but not a one who could be called a libertarian or someone who can get outside the conventional wisdom of the Village. And their response to a figure of genuinely fresh ideas is not to explore them, even when they are putting a candidate third in national polls, nor to engage them, but to declare them simply "out of bounds" or ignore them completely.