Month: November 2012
Why Kasparov Won’t Run for Political Office in Russia
In chess you have fixed rules and unpredictable results. In [Russian politics] it’s the opposite.
— Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, quoted by the Daily Beast, on why he’s not running for political office.
TV Killed Republican World View
Republicans are searching for an explanation as to why voters rejected their vision of America. The answer may be on their television screens, where an ever-expanding, bluer definition of family values makes their nostalgic idea of family values feel like a foreign world.
— The Daily Beast.
Meghan McCain Threatens to Leave Republican Party
Times are changing. The face of America is changing and we as Republicans stand at a crossroads. Are we going to accept the changing face of America and change with it? Or are we going to continue to become more isolated and irrelevant? It’s possible to maintain the core values of this party and evolve when it comes to social issues. Quite frankly, I don’t see any other path to success. … I’ve spent most of my adult life fighting for change from inside the Republican Party… And if we don’t move forward, adapt, and become relevant again, the Republican Party isn’t going to survive. It will just continue to alienate more moderate voters like myself. If I don’t see some changes in the next four years, I’m going to consider registering as an Independent in 2016.
— Meghan McCain, who is famous for being Sen. John McCain’s daughter, threatening to contaminate the Independent Party if the GOP doesn’t change.
McCain Goes Off When a Reporter Asks Why He Skipped a Hearing on Benghazi to Hold a News Conference to Complain about Lack of Info on Benghazi (Transcript)
On Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., Sen. John McCain of Arizona and his two top lieutenants in the Senate’s Obama Derangement Caucus, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (who has replaced Sen. Joe Lieberman, now retired, in the caucus) held a news conference in which they demanded the convening of a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi earlier this year in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three presumed CIA agents were killed.
“I’m not gonna comment on how I spend my time in the Senate.”
– McCain to reporter
– McCain to reporter
According to the Associated Press, “The three Republican senators argued that numerous questions about the attack remain unanswered, among them what Obama’s national security team had told him about security in Libya, what steps were taken by Clinton and the roll [sic] of the U.S. military.”
But at the same time McCain was promoting Fox News-driven conspiracies about Benghazi to reporters in one part of the Capitol, he was supposed to be participating in a hearing on the attacks by the administration before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that was underway in another room in the building. McCain is a senior member of the committee.
Romney’s Last Gaffe
To Mitt Romney it’s self-evident:
Obama bribed voters with entitlements.
He really believes
The Dems are vote thieves,
Which is another good reason he’s not president.
Romney: We Need to Get Somebody in Here to Come Up With Something.
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
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.
