Month: January 2012

Philip Klein thinks the flip-flopper charge will be more problematic for Romney in the general election: 

During a primary, there’s a certain political balancing act to flip-flopping. On the one hand, changing positions makes a candidate seem inauthentic, but on the other hand, people like it when you agree with them. … But should he be become the nominee, Romney will have to earn the votes of a lot of people who don’t necessarily agree with him. So he’ll essentially get all of the political downside of being a flip-flopper with none of the offsetting benefits. On top of this, he'll have less leeway to shift positions during the general election than typical nominees, because even the slightest change would reinforce the charge.

That's how Romney frames debates about inequality in America:

Dan Amira expects this message to flop:

This is not a gaffe, really, just a particularly stark reflection of Romney's true beliefs as he's repeatedly expressed them. Still, it's a ballsy way to handle issues of income–power inequality, particularly when he's already being portrayed as an unfeeling, opulently wealthy corporate monster by Democrats and Republicans alike. And Romney might soon find that the 77 percent of Americans (including 80 percent of independents) who believe there is "too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations" and the 61 percent (including 61 percent of independents) who say that "the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy" don't find his ideology very relatable. 

Ryan Avent likewise questions the wisdom of Romney's argument:

[I]t seems strange to me to refuse to acknowledge that what has happened [with inequality] has happened, and stranger still to lack any sensitivity to this divergence in outcomes. After all, it is those who have benefited most from recent labour-market developments that have the most to lose from a breakdown in the system. One would think that if a return to Clinton-era top tax rates was what it took to purchase the quiescence of the 99%, that it just might be worth it to avoid any broader populist movement. That doesn't seem to be how the 1%'s political leadership views the issue, however.

A reader watched the above segment:

I honestly could not believe what I was hearing. In no way did Romney attempt to find some middle ground and admit that perhaps, just perhaps, there was some truth in the claims that the income distribution in this country is unfair. And then he doubled down, seeming to say that public discussion on the matter was not OK, that it was something to be discussed only in private. This man is completely tone deaf to the needs and opinions of most informed Americans. I don't blame the majority of the Republican Party seeking a different candidate; they are sharp enough to know this guy is not a winner.

Magnus Nordenman plays a funeral dirge for Bush's foreign policy:

The war on terror is largely over for four different reasons: the killing of Osama bin Laden, the apparent inefficacy of counterinsurgency, the stunning costs of the war on terror, and the Arab Spring. While it may never be stated in plain English by anyone in Washington, these factors have largely persuaded the Washington policy community that it is time to end the war on terror and to find a new priority list for America’s foreign policy.

Cullen Murphy connects the original Inquisition, initiated by the Church in the 13th century, to torture under Bush:

The Inquisition, with its stipulation that torture and interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable harm, actually set a more rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now. The 21st century’s Ad extirpanda is the so-called Bybee memo, issued by the Justice Department in 2002 (and later revised). In it, the Bush administration put forth a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To place this in perspective: the administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.

(Image: "Reliquaries," one of many houses of worship made from ammunition and firearms, by Al Farrow)

Flip-flop!

Grover Norquist thinks the stakes are high: 

Ron Paul is the only candidate for the Republican nomination whose endorsement will matter to Mitt Romney. It is the only endorsement that will bring votes and the only endorsement, if withheld, that could cost Romney the general election. If Ron Paul speaks at the GOP convention (as he was not invited to do in 2008), the party will be united and Romney will win in November 2012. If Ron Paul speaks only at his own rally in Tampa, Florida (as happened at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota) the party will not be at full strength.

Don't do it, Ron.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

I do not know the life, background or motivations of one Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who was killed, along with another passenger, when a motorcycle rider out of a Bourne movie stuck a plastic explosive on his car door and blew him to smithereens. What I do know is that he was a scientist working, we're told, as a procurer in Iran's nuclear power/arms program. Does he make the decisions in this theocratic tyranny? Is he responsible for the policy? Maybe he is an adamant Khamenei supporter. Maybe not. But he has been assassinated by someone. How should we respond?

Here's how Rick Santorum responded to these kinds of killings:

On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.

There is no way in Catholic – or indeed any moral – teaching that such assassinations can be celebrated as "wonderful". The person saying so is attacking some of the core truths of Christianity. Here's the response from the Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai:

I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear.

Not even for his fatherless child? Or wife? Here's Greenwald's account of one of the previous assassinations:

In November, 2010, two separate car bombs exploded within minutes of each other on the same day, one that killed nuclear scientist Majid Shahriar and wounded his wife, and the other which wounded another nuclear scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, along with his wife. Then, in July of last year, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead and his wife was wounded by two gunmen firing from motorcycles outside of their daughter’s kindergarten.

I fear sometimes that we have badly lost our way here. When Americans rejoice in the assassination of scientists, they have lost their moral compass. When they cannot shed a tear for a dead man's wife or child, they are becoming dangerously close to the barbarians they claim to be fighting.

Greenwald calls out the liberal blogosphere for ignoring the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists. The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, is above, with his young child, now deprived of a father because he worked for his own government in a despotic regime. Paul Campos admits he'd tuned out the assassinations:

I didn’t follow this story because, at bottom, this story puts “my team” in a bad light. Now again, this wasn’t a conscious decision. I’ve leveled plenty of criticisms at the Obama administration, on all sorts of issues. But I have no doubt whatsoever that, if the serial murder of Iranian scientists had been happening in the course of the McCain administration, I would have been all over this story, in part because, given the sources of opinion I read regularly, I would have been much more aware of that story, which, for the same reasons I haven’t been paying attention to it, hasn’t been prominently featured by those sources.

Bob Wright assumes that Israel is behind the killings. That certainly seems a reasonable inference from the vehemence of the US denials:

“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

Among other motivations, Wright thinks, as I suspected, that Israel might be trying to goad Iran into war:

Israel presumably prefers that America do the lion's share of the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, since the U.S. has deeper strike capabilities. If Israel launched strikes on Iran out of the blue, while the U.S. still considered a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff possible, Israel couldn't count on the U.S. joining in. But America would certainly spring to Israel's defense if Israel found itself in an escalating war with Iran that Iran was blamed for starting. And once America was involved in hostilities, it would probably take the opportunity to set back Iran's nuclear program.

Frum, on the other hand, is unsure of the culprit:

Analysis of these killings is a little like Agatha Christie's murder on the Orient Express: the target has made himself so dangerous to so many people that almost anybody in the carriage could be the culprit—and perhaps to some degree or another, everybody in the carriage is.

Suddenly, David gets naive.

Now Palin goes for Romney's jugular:

I love it when Palin demands full disclosure from other candidates. The woman who never had an open press conference in her vice-presidential campaign and refused to release medical records, apart from a vague note from her physician hours before the polls opened … is now demanding Mitt's tax returns and proof of a net gain of 100,000 jobs at Bain. Well, no one ever accused her of lacking opportunism. Money quote:

“Governor Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain, and people are wanting to know: is there proof?” Palin told Sean Hannity on Fox News. Rick Tyler, former Gingrich aide and head of Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC, has already accused Romney of having created those 100,000 jobs in Asia and Mexico. Earlier this week, Big Government pointed out that Romney’s claim to have created 100,000 jobs contrasts with claims he made during his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign, when he claimed to have created 10,000 jobs at Bain. Romney retired from Bain Capital in 1999.

Could this be the one election when economic populism trumps "values" populism? Maybe if Romney becomes the nominee – and a symbol of what so many have come to hate about Wall Street and the very, very rich – history truly will be made.