This Week in America

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 22)

 

 

This Week in Facts

We here at TWiA have written a lot of books, and over many years in the book/publishing/etc. industries, have become pretty familiar with the process.

An important part of that process includes checking facts. That's especially true with nonfiction books, but even in fiction, if an author were to write that McDonald's logo is crimson arches, a copy editor would pen a note asking if the author meant "golden arches."

But the Hachette Book Group--one of the world's largest English-language publishers--appears to have let Sen. Rand Paul's (R/KY) new book slip through the process without even rudimentary fact-checking. That would be a problem with any author, but when the author is Rand Paul, to whom facts appear to be occasionally convenient but otherwise easily ignored, it's a serious problem.

Perhaps the most egregious factual lapse is this one. In the midst of a description of the Benghazi attack--about which Paul uses long-discredited ideas to attack then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, without bothering to mention that committee after committee has studied these things and found them to be untrue--Paul writes, "When the secretary of state answers a question concerning the murders of six Americans, including an American ambassador, by saying, ‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’ I think that’s a pretty clear indication that it’s time for that person to go."

We have never worked with a copy editor or a fact checker who would have let that slide. Four Americans, not six, died in that attack. It was a tragedy (one probably more meaningful to Secretary Clinton, who was friends with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, than to Paul, who seems to have only ever cared about it as political ammunition). For Paul to misstate the number of Americans cheapens the sacrifices made by the real four Americans. Does he think four isn't enough, so he has to inflate the number to make the event look worse? Does he genuinely not know, after all this time? What could he have been thinking? And how could Hachette not catch that?

Hachette say they'll correct the error on the next printing. If that's indicative of the book's overall worth, there should never be another printing--they should recall it and pulp it now. Let the paper be recycled into something that adds to the national discourse, instead.

The other major problem with Paul's line is the context of the quote he uses from Secretary Clinton. She was not saying "What difference does it make?" with regard to the deaths of four Americans. She was answering questions from a badgering Sen. Ron Johnson (R/WI) about whether the attack came about as part of a protest against an anti-Muslim movie. After going over and over the same points, Clinton, frustrated with Sen. Johnson's obtuseness, said "With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator."

Ultimately, we learned that there was, in fact, a protest at the compound in Benghazi, which was staged as cover for the attack. Early intelligence had not yet arrived at that subtle point. There was a demonstration; why it had come about was, in fact, beside the point.

* * *

As far as we know, it has not yet been revealed who actually wrote the book with Paul's name on the cover. We assume his ghostwriter this time out isn't a well-known white supremacist who thinks John Wilkes Booth acted heroically that night at Ford's Theatre. But we wouldn't put any money on it. We're also anxiously awaiting news of which passages are outright plagiarism.

* * *

Rand Paul has much in common with his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R/TX), but we think what they have most in common is that the more we come to know about them, the less respect we have for them. Rand Paul's presence in the United States Senate is like a 6-year practical joke played by Kentucky voters on the rest of the country. It stopped being funny a long time ago.

Below the fold: SCOTUS, kibbutzes, the Fox Effect, and--because you demanded it--the return of bears!

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 21, Memorial Day Weekend Edition)

We're late getting TWiA posted this week, mostly because sometimes life--and technology--interferes with everything else. We'll try to keep to the regular schedule next week.

This Week in Iraq 

Over last weekend, presidential candidates were still wrestling with the correct answer to the question of whether, in hindsight, invading Iraq was the right thing to do. The answer most have settled on seems to be, "Maybe not, but the world is better off with Saddam Hussein gone, and the Bush administration only invaded because the intelligence he saw was wrong."

Anybody giving any version of that response should be eliminated from contention for the presidency immediately, because that displays either a willful ignorance of history, or an intentional lie about it.

There are two parts to the answer, so let's take them one at a time. Is the world better off without Saddam? He was a vicious tyrant who didn't mind killing Iraqis (albeit mostly Kurdish ones) when it suited him. He looted his own country for his personal benefit. We're pretty sure no one would call him a role model or a nice guy. But let's start locally and work outward when addressing the above question. Is Iraq better off now?

Saddam was a tyrant, but he had achieved a kind of stasis that kept Iraq whole despite the longstanding schism between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. The invasion tore apart that stability, aggravating those old differences, to the point that the country is now effectively three countries (or four), with sometimes overlapping geographical boundaries.

Estimates of Iraqi dead as a result of the invasion and the sectarian violence it unleashed vary, but the number is at least 100,000, and maybe closer to 200,000. Who do we suppose the families and friends of those dead blame? Saddam? Of course not. They blame the US, because it was our invasion that enabled the carnage.

The problems with war planning, and especially postwar planning, are well known by this point. We went into Iraq with too few troops--a shortcoming recognized by many outside the administration but apparently very few inside. Without a serious plan for how to restructure Iraq post-Saddam, we let Ambassador Paul Bremer make too many decisions, sometimes with administration consultation and sometimes not. The result of that was de-Baathification, which caused the country's security system, its courts, virtually its entire government, to collapse. Everybody who really ran things was suddenly not to be trusted. Being stripped of their jobs radicalized many. Military officers were sent packing with their dignity shredded but their weapons intact, and when they were radicalized, they had military experience, leadership experience, guns, and hatred of the US and of Shiite Iraqis. Civilians were swept up in huge numbers and sent to places like Abu Ghraib, where, even if they were later released as innocent, they were radicalized.

We went into a semi-cohesive country and we tore it apart from the inside out, but we didn't know what to replace that structure with. Should we have been surprised that the people we had given reason to hate and fear us banded together against us? That Sunnis summarily ejected from their lives and livelihoods were likely to take it out on Shiites? That Shiites would respond in kind? Of course not--many predicted sectarian strife before the invasion (Colin Powell's Pottery Barn analogy comes to mind), but the war's architects within the administration wouldn't hear of it.

Before we invaded, al-Qaeda had no presence inside Iraq. Saddam was a secular ruler, his government a secular one. Osama bin Laden and his hardcore faithful were trying to rid the Middle East of secular governments, to replace them with strictly Muslim ones. By demolishing the strongest secular government in the Middle East, we did bin Laden's work for him, even while weakening our own efforts in Afghanistan by dividing our focus and our resources. In the vacuum that followed the invasion and de-Baathification, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) started out as a jihadist group formed by Abu Musad al-Zarwaqi in 1999 (after our first invasion of Iraq--the one that radicalized bin Laden and led to--among other atrocities--the 9/11 attacks on America). In 2004, in the postwar chaos, that group declared allegiance to al-Qaeda, and AQI was born. In 2006, AQI merged with other groups to form the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), headed by Abu Abdullah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

Today, the Republican presidential candidates like to say that ISIS came about because President Obama withdrew US troops from Iraq. Jeb Bush said this week that ISIS didn't exist during his brother's administration. Yet, they've been in existence since 2006, long before Obama even started running for the presidency, making that yet another deliberate misrepresentation.

Which is not to say that the current administration hasn't made mistakes in its Middle East policy. It inherited a chaotic situation in which there were no good choices, only bad ones and slightly less bad ones, and little way to tell them apart. Getting involved in the Libyan uprising might have been a mistake. Not getting involved early in the Syrian uprising might have been a mistake. There are no good answers, and no good paths for moving forward. It might be useful to remember that the nation we think of as Iraq is a European construct from 1920, only becoming independent of British rule in 1932; the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds sharing that construct don't all feel as driven to hold it together as we do. Prime Minister Maliki, the Bush administration-installed figurehead, exacerbated the problem by favoring his Shiites while pushing Sunnis even further from power. There are still Iraqi Sunnis willing to fight for their country--even against the Sunni ISIS--but if Maliki had been a better leader, Iraq would be in better shape to defend itself.

Before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney--the two human beings most directly responsible for the invasion and the regional chaos that followed--left office, they were unable to secure a Status of Forces Agreement with Maliki. Without that agreement, the sovereign Iraqi government could, and did, tell us to get out. The Bush administration created a timetable for doing so. After entering office, Obama tried again to get a Status of Forces Agreement, and again was rebuffed, so he kept to Bush's existing timetable. To blame him for the new surge of violence that came about after American withdrawal is to ignore at least 2/3 of the truth.

The war did more than destabilize Iraq, it did the same for the entire Middle East. Iraq and Iran had been checks on one another's regional power. With Iraq suddenly gone, Iran became the big kid on the block--more powerful than even Saudi Arabia, our supposed ally. The Arab Spring swept through the region, in most cases replacing secular governments with religious ones.

And of course, the spectacle of supposedly Christian America invading a Muslim country--and all that followed from that--created ever more terrorists.

In 2013, in that destabilized Middle East, with Syria's Assad busy fighting insurgents in his own country, ISI expanded across the border into Syria. Now that it held turf in two countries, it changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That's how they're known today, and with increasing power, with military weapons and tanks captured from ill-prepared Iraqi soldiers (much of the hardware US-supplied), the Islamic State has grown and grown. Despite a US-led coalition involving ground troops (mostly not ours) and air support (mostly ours), IS has made headway in some areas while losing ground in others. They've become the face of jihadism, supplanting al-Qaeda as our greatest enemy. But to forget that they long preceded the Obama administration is to ignore an important, fundamental truth.

The other piece of the current argument--the intelligence was flawed--is also long since discredited. We knew Iraq had no nuclear capability whatsoever. We knew they had deployed chemical weapons in the past (sometimes with US assistance), but those weapons--even if they did still exist--were no threat to us. Iraq had been struggling under strict economic sanctions for years. It had no money for weapons programs, Saddam didn't trust his own military, and before our invasion, not only were there weapons inspectors in the country confirming the lack of WMDs (inspectors the Bush administration told to leave because we were getting ready to attack), but Saddam's government had handed over a full accounting of what weapons it had originally had, and how they'd been disposed of. Bush and Cheney chose to ignore the inspectors and Saddam's accounting, which turned out to be far more accurate than the picture our leaders painted.

President Bush told us during a State of the Union speech that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium for its nuclear program. That was a myth that had already been proven wrong by Joe Wilson, sent to Africa by the administration to investigate. Bush knew the allegation was false, but he repeated it anyway, and when Wilson complained that his work had been ignored, the administration's response was to out Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, an undercover CIA agent working on WMD issues, in an attempt to discredit her husband. When Dick Cheney told us that aluminum tubes were for Saddam's reconstituted nuclear program, he had already been told by every expert in and out of the administration that they couldn't be used for that purpose. When Condoleeza Rice, Cheney, and Bush all warned about Saddam's capability to strike in America with nuclear weapons, they knew there was no such capability. When Cheney insisted that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague in April 2001, he already knew that wasn't true. When attempts were made to link Iraq and 9/11 in various ways, those links were known to be false.

American intelligence has often been wrong (Bay of Pigs, anyone?), and in some respects it was here. But what we know now shows us that most of the specific bits of "intelligence" used to sell the war to Congress and to the American people were either manipulated, or were outright lies. Bush and the neocons he'd surrounded himself with--Cheney foremost among them--wanted to invade Iraq, to finish what the first President Bush had left unfinished. Four days after 9/11, they were already working toward it. To get their war, they were willing to do almost anything. They got the war they wanted, and it was an unmitigated disaster that has made the world considerably less safe. They transformed America from the moral example it had been into a nation that attacks others without provocation or cause, a nation that condones torture, a nation that ignores the Constitutional protections it offers mass murderers in the case of people who might or might not have taken up arms against us in defense of their own country.

The damage that war did to America is still unfolding today, and will be for years to come. And Republican presidential candidates are pretending they don't know that. 

Monday, May 25 is Memorial Day. We don't honor our fallen by forgetting why they fought, or by rewriting history to protect the reputations of those who sent them into harm's way. We honor then by acknowledging that they went where they were told and did their duty, trusting that the nation would make the right decisions and that its civilian leaders would not choose war if there were other options. That's not what happened here. Let's not allow the truth of history to be whitewashed out of existence.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana famously said. Now that we have Republicans in Congress trying to scuttle a nuclear deal with Iran and pressing for military action there, and arguing in favor of sending troops back into Iraq and into Syria, we especially need to hold the truth close, so we have the moral and historical arguments against such action on our side. And we need to know that whoever is elected to the White House next will appreciate the real history of our last war, rather than the made-up version.

This Week in Incarceration

In similar manner, Republicans who wanted to be seen as "tough on crime" in the 1990s are now blaming President Clinton, not themselves, for the mass incarceration we see today. Three strikes laws, mandatory sentencing, etc., mostly came about at the state level, and were ideas mostly championed by conservatives. Now they want to distance themselves from responsibility, the same way Republicans are trying to dodge the truth about Iraq.

This Week in Publicity Stunts

Presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R/KY) took to the Senate floor this week to launch another phony filibuster. At the same time, his campaign sent out fundraising email blasts and tweets implying that Paul was standing up for freedom, when in fact he was standing up to get his name in the papers and expand the family mailing list, which has already been a steady source of income for Ron Paul.

A real filibuster blocks action on a real bill. Paul's stunt interrupted Senate debate on the pending trade bill, but had no impact on the Patriot Act reauthorization he claimed to be opposing. It might have had a slight procedural impact if he had kept it up until after midnight; instead, he ended the stunt shortly before midnight, guaranteeing that it would not affect the reauthorization in the slightest.

There are many reasons to oppose a straight reauthorization of the Patriot Act, a bill passed by a frightened nation after 9/11. It does infringe on our civil liberties. The NSA's bulk collection of data is not particularly harmful--they're scooping up data based on algorithms and looking for patterns, not listening in on our phone calls--but it's a disturbing specter of government overreach. We're glad Paul and other senators raised the same objections that the majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress have already raised (along with enough House Republicans to pass the USA Freedom Act, which puts much stricter controls on NSA data mining), since Senate Republicans appear ready to pass the reauthorization without much genuine consideration.

But Paul's hours-long diatribe accomplished nothing. The Washington Post describes the scene: "The chamber was nearly empty, save for a few staffers seated in the back and a security guard standing near the door. Five Senate pages sat on the steps of the dais, looking directly at Paul. One young woman twirled the end of her hair. A young man picked at his cuticles."

We should keep our labels straight. A filibuster is a filibuster, but a publicity stunt is a publicity stunt, and should not be mistaken for anything like statesmanship.

This Week in Big Government

Is big government necessarily bad, as the conservatives like to tell us? Not if you like broad prosperity. It's no coincidence that the world's richest countries tend to be big-government countries.

This Week in Inequality

The bottom 40% of Americans, in terms of wealth, have a negative net worth. The top 10% possess 76% of all the wealth in the country. Here's an easy explanation of wealth inequality, with charts.

This Week in Bad "News"

A new paper reports on multiple studies that show that Fox "News" has managed to push the country to the right, not just in terms of supporting conservative policies but in actual voting behavior.

That's bad news, because plenty of other studies show that people who rely on Fox as their main news source are more misinformed than people who don't. Fox pretends to be a journalistic effort, but--as these studies clearly demonstrate--it's really a propaganda effort designed to push that particular ideological agenda. Also clearly, that agenda--from long-discredited "trickle-down" economics theories to climate change denial to warmongering to voter disenfranchisement to bigotry against gays, Muslims, immigrants, and more--is bad for America. Fox is accomplishing its propaganda goals, but they're pushing the country toward a cliff.

* * *

When watching Fox is literally dangerous to others...

This Week in Arizona

How do you make up a huge budget shortfall when you refuse to raise taxes? In TWiA's home state of Arizona, legislators have come up with an answer: punish the poor even more than you already are. After all, it's their fault they're poor. After all, as State Sen, Kelli Ward (R) says, "As a society, we are encouraging people at times to make poor decisions and then we reward them."

* * *

Also in Arizona, America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM continues to make headlines, though not always in the ways he'd like. Press investigation finds that he's cost the taxpayers between $44 and 51 million just to deal with his decision to ignore a federal judge's ruling that his department stop its rampant racial profiling. AMCS^TM's racism is expensive, and getting more so. Now, because he has to pay some legal fees on his own (on top of what he's raked from the taxpayers), he's begging his supporters for personal contributions to his defense. (His pleas don't seem to mention the legal costs incurred by people he's targeted for various political reasons.)

And those millions are, of course, on top of the millions he's already cost his constituents for other offenses, like the $3.5 million recently paid out to one victim among the 400 cases of sexual abuse against children AMCS^TM decided weren't important enough to investigate, because after all, some of those children had brown skin, and going after other brown-skinned "troublemakers" was a higher priority. (Under AMCS^TM, the percentage of Hispanic and black men in Maricopa County jails has shot up dramatically--well above the demographic makeup of the county)--while the percentage of jailed white men has gone down.)

In the latest demonstration of his astonishing cynicism, he's demanding that the judge overseeing the current case recuse himself, because AMCS^TM's office tried to find dirt on that judge. He's done the same before, with judges and other political enemies, but this time is particularly egregious--AMCS^TM sent people to investigate that judge, and now he wants that judge to step down because he's in charge of a case involving someone the plaintiff had investigated.

There are those in Maricopa County see this pathetic thug as some kind of hero. Those people are called suckers, and AMCS^TM has taken advantage of them for far too long. Any human with a conscience would resign and beg the forgiveness of the people who elected him. In his case, that forgiveness has not been earned and would not be deserved.

This Week in Kansas

Speaking of punishing the poor, Kansas has dreamed up the most sinister method yet.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 20, Supplement)

In this week's post, we wrote, "What we now know tells us that the war was a mistake, start to finish. The intelligence wasn't just faulty, it was intentionally, dishonestly manipulated by his brother's administration to create a pretext for a war they wanted to have from the start." This has been proven so many times, in so many ways, by so many people, we didn't even bother to back it up with references. But conveniently, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has just published a long piece explaining what actually happened, and why it wasn't a question of "faulty intelligence" leading the White House astray. It was a war of choice, one that didn't need to be fought, and shouldn't have been.

Marshall writes, "Looking back and looking at the time it has always been somewhat difficult to find the bright line where flagrant lying met willful self-deception. But the truth is painful and clear: Iraq wasn't a good faith mistake. It was a calamity based on lies and willful deceptions. Much of that was clear at the time. It's all clear now."

It's important to keep the facts straight about things like this, not to let those who'd like to massage history to protect their reputations get away with it. We know what happened. We need to remember, and not let it happen again.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 20)

TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word.

(Note: due to travel, we had an early deadline this week. Events from Thursday and Friday meriting discussion will be covered next week.)

 

This Week in 2016 (Part We've Already Lost Count of Infinity)

We've written before about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's (and current declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination) unfortunate tendency to elevate his income by pitching questionable products and selling his mailing list--developed for political purposes; it's not a list of people who knew going in that they were going to get bombarded with phony cancer cures and the like--to other companies.

This week, he was asked on Face the Nation about his bogus diabetes cure:

 

SCHIEFFER: Well, Governor, I have diabetes, and I agree with you, and most doctors will tell you, you have to lose weight. You have to have a nutritious diet. But you were also selling pills of some sort, were you not?

HUCKABEE: No. No. There was not – that’s a misnomer. One of the elements of the plan was dietary supplements but it is not the fundamental thing. The fundamental thing is always as you and I both know, it’s exercise it’s good eating habits, it’s maintaining sugar levels, it’s not eating a bunch of junk food, processed food, lots of carbs, sugar those type of things.

 

What's that, Mike? No, it's not a pill, but it's dietary supplements. In the form of a pill. Makes sense.

Elsewhere in the infomercial, Huckabee says his viewers should ignore the advice of real doctors. “They’re only going to keep you a loyal, pill-popping, finger-pricking, insulin-shooting customer so Big Pharma and the mainstream medical community can rake in over $100 billion a year annually.”

So medical professionals aren't to be trusted. They just want to sell you pills. As opposed to his plan, untested by medical science, that sells you pills, only they're okay because they're called dietary supplements and are therefore not subject to FDA quality controls.

In days gone by, folks like this were called snake oil salesmen, and worse. They were frauds and swindlers. They weren't to be trusted.

Huckabee has clearly demonstrated that he's not to be trusted, either.

* * *

How much damage did as-yet-undeclared candidate Jeb Bush do to himself this week? That's yet to be calculated, but it looks like maybe a lot.

Bush is trying to present himself as the mainstream choice--a conservative Republican who can nonetheless win the hearts and minds of the vast middle and thereby win the presidency. To pull that off, he has to come across as smarter than his brother George and less far-right than most of the field.

This week, he made himself look like neither of those things were true.

The question from Fox "News" host Megyn Kelly was a softball: "On the subject of Iraq, very controversial, knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"

Kelly probably asked it to allow Jeb to put some space between himself and brother George W. Instead, Jeb's answer was "I would have."

It doesn't take a genius to know how dumb that was. Knowing what we know now? That there were no WMDs. That Saddam had no connection to 9/11, no working relationship with Al Qaeda. That the war would drag on for a decade and cost trillions of dollars. That it would destabilize the Middle East and create all kinds of new problems. That it would strengthen Iran. That it would make room for Al Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into ISIS. That it would divert attention and resources from Afghanistan, allowing that situation to get worse, causing that war to also drag on, and letting bin Laden escape. That the war itself, and particularly incidents like Abu Ghraib, would shred America's reputation abroad. That thousands of American service members would die, and tens of thousands more would come home physically and mentally broken.

Knowing all that, he would still have invaded Iraq? Why?

Jeb's advisors must have smacked him around as soon as he got out of the studio, because soon enough spokespeople were insisting that he misheard or misunderstood the question. The next day, Bush tried to clarify. On the air with Sean Hannity, he said, "I interpreted the question wrong, I guess. I was talking about given what people knew then, would you have done it? Rather than knowing what we know now. And knowing what we know now, clearly there were mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence in the lead up to the war and the lack of focus on security."

If he's going to run for president, he should probably practice answering the question that's asked, rather than the question he's practiced for, if that answer is going to make him look like a fool.

But Jeb wasn't finished shooting himself in the foot. Hannity asked him to take another crack at the original question, and he came back with this: "Yeah, I don't know what that decision would've been. That's a hypothetical but the simple fact was mistakes were made, as they always are in life and foreign policy. So we need to learn from the past to make sure we're strong and secure going forward."

"I don't know" is just as bad an answer in this case as "I would have." How can he not know? More than ten years after the invasion, how can a would-be president not have formulated a coherent answer to such an obvious question?

And how does "I don't know" make the slightest bit of sense? What we now know tells us that the war was a mistake, start to finish. The intelligence wasn't just faulty, it was intentionally, dishonestly manipulated by his brother's administration to create a pretext for a war they wanted to have from the start. Planning ranged from abysmal to nonexistent. We went in with far too few resources to accomplish the mission. The Iraq War was one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of the country, cementing George W. Bush's reputation as one of our worst presidents ever. It cost us far too much in treasure, blood, and worldwide respect.

He doesn't know? He thinks maybe--given what we know now--it would be a good idea to duplicate that disaster? What is he thinking? What does he believe we gained from that war?

"I don't know."

Astonishing. In a few words, Jeb managed to make himself look weak, foolish, confused, and unserious. Given the chance to correct a dumb answer, he made it even worse. Even his fellow conservatives piled on. The attack ads are already being written.

In two Fox appearances, he might have killed his chance at the nomination. He definitely demonstrated to the nation that he's unsuited for the White House.

* * *

We thought this story was finished, at least for this week. Wrong. On Wednesday, Jeb tried again, saying he didn't want to answer the question at all. "Talking about the future is more than fair. Talking about the past - and saying how would you have done something after the fact is a little tougher. And it doesn’t necessarily change anything. That was my point.” But on Thursday, he said, "I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq."

Consistency? Not his hallmark.

Can he recover from this? We don't see how. He has a ton of money, so he can stay in the race a long time, and maybe wear the other candidates down, one by one. But he has certainly made a fool of himself--and for the most part, in the right-wing media, so the people he needs to vote for him in the primaries have seen him make a fool of himself. Whether they agree with any one of those four positions doesn't matter--they don't agree with all four, and they know he can't possibly mean all four. And the hardcore conservatives--the ones who turn out for primaries--didn't like him much to begin with.

Sorry, Jeb. We think you're toast. When the history of this campaign is written, this week will be the one that ended your chances. (And somewhere, Scott Walker is rubbing his hands together and cackling with glee.)

* * *

In the best decision thus far among the Republican 2016 field, John Bolton--the worst UN ambassador in history, bar none--announced that he won't be running. This is good news, because it saves some billionaire somewhere a lot of money that could have been spent on winning absolutely no primaries. Though it would have been fun to see primary results in which one of the challengers received absolutely no votes.

 Below the fold: "Affirmative action," supporting the troops, trains, high-level conversation, craziness, and bears.

 

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 19)

 

 

This Week in 2016

We give up. We hoped to be able to offer a somewhat comprehensive look at each candidate who entered the 2016 presidential race. That plan fell apart the week Hillary Clinton (D) and Marco Rubio (R) both jumped in. We've been too busy to perform the necessary research to go beyond the surface.

This week was another crowded week for the Republicans. First, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy. Not only has she never held elected office, but she's been labeled one of the worst American CEOs of all time. According to this CNBC profile, "A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs." Actually, it was tens of thousands, but who's counting? During her disastrous tenure, HP stock lost half its value. Why's she running? She's wealthy, but she's been out of work for a while. A presidential run will boost her national profile, and thereby inflate her speaking fees. And running for the Republican nomination is a good way to get book deals, Fox "News" gigs, and comfy positions in right-wing "think tanks."

Also, for a tech company CEO, she's not necessarily on the ball, technology-wise. For confirmation of that, check out CarlyFiorina.org.

* * *

Another new contender was Dr. Ben Carson. We've written multiple times about Carson surfing to right-wing popularity on a wave of hate speech. He's compared contemporary American life to Nazi Germany--a despicable comparison. (Personal note: my father served in WWII. He was one of the first GIs into a concentration camp from which the guards had fled. He did not find conditions there to be anything like 21st century America, Dr. Carson, and for you to make that comparison makes you the worst kind of hate peddler.) Carson says the Affordable Care Act (ACA)--which is helping improve the health and financial stability of millions of Americans--is the worst thing to happen to the country since slavery. He has compared gay Americans to pedophiles and people who practice bestiality, and said that homosexuality is a choice, because people go into prison straight and come out gay.

Perhaps the most recent demonstration that he doesn't even understand the system he hopes to lead is his insistence that the president doesn't have to follow what the Supreme Court says. This week he said, "First of all, we have to understand how the Constitution works. The president is required to carry out the laws of the land, the laws of the land come from the legislative branch. "So if the legislative branch creates a law or changes a law, the executive branch has a responsibly to carry it out. It doesn’t say they have the responsibility to carry out a judicial law. And that's something we need to talk about."

He was talking about the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage coming down the pike. Should he ever again be caught mentioning the US Constitution, someone should remind him that he fails to grasp one of its most basic tenets. Our federal government, Doc, has three branches, not two. The judicial branch interprets the constitutionality of the laws passed by Congress. Just because Congress says that's how something should be, that isn't necessarily how it should be. If the Supreme Court rules against Congress, Congress can try to rewrite its law in a manner that will pass Constitutional muster. But neither Congress nor the president gets to pretend that what the Court said doesn't count. That's just not how it works. The fact that Carson prefaced his remarks with "We have to understand how the Constitution works" adds extra richness to his inanity.

Fiorina is a failed businesswoman who made herself rich while driving her company into the ground and threatening the livelihoods of thousands of workers. But Carson is beneath contempt, and his popularity on the right only serves as a vivid example of the power of hatred in that political philosophy. A vote for Carson is a vote in favor of ignorance and hate.

* * *

Finally, the familiar face and aw-shucks manner of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has returned to the race. He's been here before, and he's never gained national acceptance. His record as governor was too pragmatic and not ideological enough for the religious extremists who might otherwise support him. His utter lack of familiarity with even the basics of foreign policy make him unattractive to the hawks and the neocons. And by downplaying his record and reaching for the religious extremist vote, he alienates the vast middle--the financially conservative but socially moderate Republicans, the right-leaning Democrats, and the independents--necessary to win a national election.  Huckabee may be running to be able to command higher rates when he rents out his mailing list to people promoting phony cancer cures and the like, but we don't expect him to win a single primary, and the nomination is completely out of his reach.

* * *

Every time another one of these candidates who are never going to score above single digits at the polls enters the race, Jeb Bush smiles a little more broadly and cashes another check. He loves watching all these people who are going to split the right-wing vote and leave the mainstream Republican path to the nomination wide open for him.

Below the fold: Redistribution, Corruption, Liberty, Crazy, Bears, and more.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 18)

It's been a busy week in the news, but also a busy week at TWiA World Headquarters, hence this somewhat abbreviated edition. Among the stories we didn't have time to touch on were the entry into the presidential race of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I/VT), running for the Democratic nomination (though as an Independent--Vermont doesn't have party registration). We're looking forward to the fireworks. Also, his competition, Hillary Clinton, gave an impressive and  important speech on justice and race--a speech that opened distance between her and her tough-on-crime husband.

 

This Week in Marriage Equality

The Supreme Court heard arguments on marriage equality this week. While it's impossible to know how the Court will decide, they would have to make a considerable stretch to deny marriage equality across the board. Marriage is not just a religious issue or a state issue, it's a federal issue (see: Married Filing Jointly on your income tax forms), and a patchwork of different laws around the country makes no sense from a pragmatic or a moral view.

Abraham Lincoln made clear, 150 years ago, that if a right didn't apply to everyone, then it couldn't be called an equal right. Lincoln was a big fan of the Declaration of Independence (as we all should be), and considered it the lens through which the Constitution should be viewed. The Declaration begins, of course, with one of the most famous phrases in the English language: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." (Never mind that the phrase was probably written by Thomas Jefferson, who owned plenty of slaves; thankfully we have since, as a society, come to agree that people of non-European descent are also people.) If Lincoln could argue, convincingly and rightly,  that people who had been private property one day were free the next, how can we today justify having different sets of laws for different people based on who they love?

Society finds value in committed marriage between consenting adults. It ought not be restricted to certain groups, or denied to others. If it's an institution we value, it should be available to all. As this writer observes*, denying marriage rights because two people are of the same gender reduces those people to a sex act, or "labeling a complex, fully formed human being as merely a performer of intercourse." Same-sex marriage isn't destructive to opposite-sex marriage, to society as a whole, or to the people involved in that loving relationship.

As for those Santorum-style extremists who claim that same-sex marriage will lead to man-on-dog marriage or pedophilia, those ideas deserve to be treated with the contempt they've earned, because animals and children cannot give consent. That's an absurd argument made by people who can't come up with a legitimate reason for their opposition.

During oral arguments on Tuesday, some of the SCOTUS justices came up with equally silly objections. Justice Alito asked if it would mean that four people could marry, instead of just two (maybe if there were a national outpouring of support for polygamous marriage, which seems unlikely--none of the cases before the Court have to do with numbers above two), and Justices Roberts, Kennedy, and Scalia were concerned that marriage had previously been defined as opposite-gender only. One would think these august personages would remember back as far as 1967 and Loving v. Virginia, before which states were able to deny interracial couples the right to marry. Changing the rules is not unprecedented, and when it's in the service of allowing loving couples to enter into committed, lasting relationships acknowledged by the state, it's the right thing to do.

Nine Republican candidates or probable candidates were in Iowa over the weekend, competing to be the most strongly opposed to same-sex marriage. We declare Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) the winner, for his comment about Democrats' "devotion to mandatory gay marriage in all 50 states." Contrary to Ted's belief, Democrats believe who one marries should be up to the individuals involved, and there's no "mandatory" about it. We wonder what Ted's nightmares are like."
(*Thanks to special church-and-state correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)

* * *

Speaking of Rick Santorum, he's gone off the deep end again.

This Week in Freddie's Dead

Freddie Gray was arrested on April 12 and died on April 19, his spinal cord nearly severed while in police custody. His funeral was held on April 27. That afternoon, despite pleas for calm, nonviolent demonstrations by his family and other speakers at the funeral, riots broke out.

One of the country's best writers on the enduring subject of race, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic--who comes from the area in Baltimore where the trouble began--explains why they're not just a reaction to Gray's death, but to decades of strained relations between police and the community.

"When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is 'correct' or 'wise,' any more than a forest fire can be 'correct' or 'wise.' Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves."

Baltimore journalist-turned-TV writer and producer David Simon (whose TV credits include Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill, and Treme, making him one of the keenest observers of American life to emerge in a generation or more, also wrote about the riots on Monday. "But now — in this moment — the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease. There was real power and potential in the peaceful protests that spoke in Mr. Gray’s name initially, and there was real unity at his homegoing today. But this, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man’s memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death."

Here's a white journalist describing the white/black, rich/poor polarization of Baltimore as he sees it.

Other, less helpful voices weighed in, too. Fox "News" personalities decided President Obama was at fault. National punch line Donald Trump declared that he would "fix it fast," though he didn't say how.

If there's a lesson here, it's probably something like this: violence begets violence. Distrust spawns distrust. When two communities each look at the other with suspicion, with fear--and especially when one of those has the power of the state behind it and the other feels largely powerless--there's going to be trouble. The nation's law enforcement community--particularly in urban areas--needs to be more deeply involved in the lives of the citizens, not just in their deaths. And communities of color should encourage such efforts, while stressing to their own--especially the young--that taking to the streets can be a good way of making their voices heard (as can political organizing and voting), but that looting stores, throwing bricks at police officers, and torching businesses rarely leads to desired outcomes. Those things are crimes, and deservedly so.

* * *

On Tuesday, President Obama spoke about the situation in Baltimore and elsewhere. Here's some of what he had to say:

"In those environments, if we think that we’re just gonna send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there, without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not gonna solve this problem. And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets. And everybody will feign concern until it goes away and then we go about our business as usual.

"If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to think about what can we do, the rest of us, to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids, to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons, so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a non-violent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs.

"That’s hard, that requires more than just the occasional news report or task force, and there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that. Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference around school reform and around job training and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities and trying to attract new businesses.

"But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant, and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets short or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids and we think they’re important and they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence."

 * * *

On Friday, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the six police officers who arrested and transported Freddie Gray had arrested him without probable cause--even the "switchblade" he was said to have turned out to be a perfectly legal pocketknife, which wasn't found until after his arrest--and they're being charged with a litany of crimes, from second-degree homicide to aggravated assault. We're glad to hear there will be accountability. The wheels of justice are turning, at last.

* * *

For some historical perspective, here's a piece from last November on the history of "race riots," which originally were started by white supremacists rampaging through black communities, then blaming the blacks for the troubles. Today, much of the public still blames the blacks, without recognizing the role played by a system skewed against them in so many ways.

This Week in Bridgegate

Speaking of the slow wheels of justice, indictments in the New Jersey Bridgegate case. More fallout to come from this. Stay tuned.

This Week in Southern Prisons

Incredible photographs from southern prisons in the 1960s and 1970s.

This Week in Tax Cuts

Seemingly continuing his series of articles focusing on topics TWiA has been arguing for all along, this week the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien looks deeper at the Republican fascination with tax cuts (by which they really mean spending cuts, a.k.a. tax cuts for the rich but not for the rest of us). His takeaway echoes something we've been saying for years: "But if tax cuts for the rich were going to save the economy, they'd have saved the economy."

This Week in Reading

President Obama wants to spread "the joy of reading to more children and young adults." We wholeheartedly support that idea.

This Week in Gun Safety

Roll Call reports: "A 7- or 8-year-old child visiting the Capitol with his parents found the next loaded Glock lost by a dignitary protection officer, according to the source. A member of the security detail for John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, allegedly left the firearm in the bathroom of the Speaker’s Suite on March 24."

Oops.

This Week in Pretend Patriotism

We've written a few times recently about efforts by Senate Republicans to convince various outside entities that President Obama is not to be trusted. Sen. Tom Cotton (R/AR) and his 46 colleagues did it by trying to blow up the Iranian nuclear weapon negotiations (thereby ensuring that Iran would proceed with its nuclear program as fast as possible), and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R/KY) by suggesting to governors around the country that they ignore EPA rules on reducing carbon emissions.

Now Senate Republicans are trying to persuade other countries that President Obama can't make any lasting climate change agreements; therefore, nobody should bother trying.

It's a sad, bizarre spectacle. Members of what's often been termed the world's greatest deliberative body are intentionally undermining US foreign policy, weakening the nation in the eyes of the world and harming the global perception of the American presidency. To what end isn't entirely clear--to make sure Iran arms itself with nuclear weapons? To guarantee a bloody and brutal ground war with Iran, which would make the world an even more dangerous place and spawn new generations of terrorists? To make sure Miami sinks beneath rising floodwaters while California's farmland withers away? Do they hate the president so much that they direct their hatred toward America itself?

Voters who elected Republicans to the Senate, this is what you've wrought. You've put into office people who despise government so much that they can't tolerate the system of government we've lived by all these years. Rather than trying to govern, they're focusing their efforts on destroying governance. They're throwing bombs instead of doing their jobs. It's the opposite of patriotic--it's the work of people who care not one whit for the country or its people, with the possible exception of those citizens worth a billion dollars or more. It's a dangerous game they're playing, and if they keep it up the consequences are likely to be tragic ones for America and the world.

This Week in the Crazy

We find it bizarre and disturbing that a person who takes the wackiest conspiracy theories seriously--not just once, but over and over--could be considered a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States. Here's just the most recent.

This Week in How You Can Help

Though TWiA is usually focused on America, this week the earthquake in Nepal deserves our attention. You can help by donating to CARE.