Day: November 15, 2012

Romney: We Need to Get Somebody in Here to Come Up With Something.

Trish

Going forward, clearly we have to have an immigration plan, this idea of just kicking this down the field until every four years the Democrats use it as an issue to hit us over the head with is nuts, we have to have an immigration plan and program, and I certainly hope that our leaders in Washington are willing to put that forward.

— Mitt Romney, in one of two calls to donors explaining his 2012 election loss. Romney’s statement makes clear what Democrats suspected all along: Romney had no plans, no coherent ideas on major issues. He simply asked voters to choose him and then to trust that he would make it up as he went along. But his statement about hoping “our leaders in Washington,” meaning the national GOP, will come up with something shows just how much Romney planned to delegate had he been elected.

In Politicizing Benghazi Attack, Republicans Ignore Their Own Terrible Security Record – 9/11 Happened on Their Watch, As Did Seven Attacks on U.S. Diplomatic Sites Overseas

Jon Ponder

The Fox News-generated hysteria among Republicans over the government’s handling of the Benghazi attacks relies heavily on the assumption that Fox viewers have incredibly short memories. Watching Fox present this issue, you might quickly assume that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was unique — that nothing like it had ever happened before. You might also assume that, if there had been other similar attacks in the past, American patriots and their representatives in Washington would be entirely justified in politicizing the attacks and using the failures that led to them, whether real or imagined, for partisan gain.

In the wake of the attacks on their country on Sept. 11, 2001, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.

In reality, of course, there have been many attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates — more than 40 in the past half century, according to The International News, a newspaper based in Pakistan.

The chart above from Mother Jones, for example, shows the frequency of attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites over the past 40 years. What Fox would like to erase from its viewers’ memories is that, as the chart shows, there were many attacks on U.S. missions overseas during the administration of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. It is crucial to Fox’s politicizing of Benghazi to make those attacks disappear down the memory hole, because there is an inconvenient fact associated with them: In the wake of the seven or more attacks on American overseas interests on Bush’s watch, Democrats did not politicize them the way Republicans are politicizing Benghazi today.

In particular, no Democrat ever suggested forming a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attacks during the Bush era, like the one Republicans are demanding now.

There was one full-scale investigation — the one that looked into the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which were the most egregious national security failure in U.S. history — but that investigation was outsourced to a bipartisan commission controlled by Republicans.

Speaking of 9/11, Republicans need to be reminded that after the attacks that September day, Democrats rallied around George W. Bush, a president they rightly viewed as an illegitimate Supreme Court appointee, because, in the wake of the attacks on their country, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.

[…]

Middle-Out Beat Trickle-Down Economics in Election

Buck Banks

Here’s something that happened in this election that has been largely overlooked but I think is a very big deal indeed. Trickle-down economics died last Tuesday. The post-election chatter has been dominated by demographics, Latinos, women, and the culture war. But economics played a strong and even pivotal role in this election too, and Reaganomics came out a huge loser, while the Democrats have started to wrap their arms around a simple, winning alternative: the idea that government must invest in the middle class and not the rich. It’s middle-out economics instead of trickle-down, and it won last week and will keep on winning.

— Michael Tomasky, in the Daily Beast.

The Insanity of the Sanctity of Lifers

Trish

This should never happen to another woman. Religion and medicine should never mix.

— A doctor in Ireland calling for an investigation into the death of a pregnant woman who was denied an abortion even though her life was at risk. Her husband said they were told, “This is a Catholic country,” and that doctors let his wife die in agony in the hospital as they watched for three days because they thought they could detect a fetal heartbeat.