Month: May 2013
Ignorance of History Is No Excuse
At nearly every speech I give, someone asks about President Obama’s failure to lead. Of course, that question has been driven largely by the media, perhaps most by Bob Woodward. When Woodward speaks, Washington listens, and he has pushed the idea that Obama has failed in his fundamental leadership task–not building relationships with key congressional leaders the way Bill Clinton did, and not ‘working his will’ the way LBJ or Ronald Reagan did. Now, after the failure to get the background-check bill through the Senate, other reporters and columnists have picked up on the same theme, and I have grown increasingly frustrated with how the mythology of leadership has been spread in recent weeks. I have yelled at the television set, ‘Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?’ But the issue goes beyond that, to a willful ignorance of history.
— Norm Ornstein, writing in National Journal.
Republicans are in Trouble Because White Voters are Becoming a Minority
17%
Percentage of the non-white vote Mitt Romney received in last year’s presidential election, Pew Research finds. “Non-whites were 26.3% of all voters in the 2012 election, a record high share. But they compose an even higher share of all U.S. adults age 18 and older — 33.9%. By 2020 this share will rise to 37.2%, and by 2060 it will be 54.8%, according to Census Bureau projections. If the racial voting patterns from the 2012 election persist, the electoral playing field for future Republican presidential candidates will become increasingly difficult.”
Republicans Use Benghazi Attack to Snipe at Clinton
I think the dam is about to break on Benghazi. We’re going to find a system failure before, during, and after the attacks.
We’re going to find political manipulation seven weeks before an election. We’re going to find people asleep at the switch when it comes to the State Department, including Hillary Clinton.
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), posting on his Facebook page in an amazing show of prescience about what the Republican-led Congressional committee would find in its “open-minded” investigations of the 2012 attack on the American embassy in Libya. Graham made sure to single out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, since the point of the hearings is to ruin the popular Clinton’s chances for president in 2016.
Sanford Win Proves South Carolina is Still One Whacked State
I want to acknowledge a God not just of second chances. But a God of third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth chances because that is the reality of our shared humanity.
— Rep.-elect Mark Sanford (R-SC), quoted by The State, in his special election victory speech last night.
Republicans Kick off 2016 Presidential Campaign Today with Fox News Generated Hearings on Benghazi
Basically all you need to know about the Fox News-sponsored hearings on the Benghazi attacks scheduled for today is that two of the “whistleblowers” — Gregory N. Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of attacks, and Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine who is now the deputy coordinator for Operations in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau — are being represented, reportedly pro bono, by Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, a husband and wife team of lawyers who are longstanding political apparatchiks for the Republican Party.
The role played by Toensing and DiGenova in the hearings is damning evidence, if any were needed, that the “scandal” around the terror attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last September is what it appears to be: a bogus political ploy fabricated by Fox News and its allies on the Hill intended to damage the Obama administration politically in the short term — perhaps opening the way to impeaching the president, as right-wing talk show host Mike Huckabee predicted it would yesterday — and, over the longer term, to weaken the prospective candidacy of Hillary Clinton should she decide to run in 2016.
The presence of Toensing and DiGenova is also likely a sign that all the high-powered nonpartisan attorneys in D.C. declined to take the case.
NRA Closes Its 2013 Convention with Speech by Vietnam War Draft Dodger
Why does the NRA hate America? The final speaker at the gunmakers’ convention in Texas last weekend was Ted Nugent, who, during the Vietnam War, conned his way out of conscription by defecating in his clothing and not bathing before going in for a physical examination at the Draft Board.
Nugent was last seen when he was the guest of a Texas tea bagger congressman at the State of the Union speech in February.
Kurtz’s Work Hurts
Last Sunday 360,000 people watched Howard Kurtz’s apology.
For his inaccurate tweet, he said he was really truly sorry.
Some say that at the least,
Now he’s left the Daily Beast,
Tina Brown won’t have to pay his $250,000 salary.
