Politics of Fear – Page 29 – The Wrongologist

Monday Wake Up Call – October 26, 2015

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.

Comey is lending his support to a meme called the “Ferguson Effect”. As the “Ferguson Effect” theory goes, police have slowed down enforcement due to public scrutiny, which has led to more crime, including homicides. In the absence of tough policing, chaos reigns.

Ever since Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO last year, people across the country have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and the mistreatment of black men and women. At the same time, police officers and pundits began arguing that demonstrators are jeopardizing community safety, pointing to rising violent crime rates.

This theory for the uptick in violence in some cities is partly based on a cherry-picking of violent crime data, since some increases actually occurred BEFORE the Ferguson demonstrations, and in general, the data are unclear. We know that far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years. And to be clear, the increases are largely among people of color, and it’s not cops that are doing the killing.

Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being in America—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas.

So something big is happening, but what? Comey thinks he knows, and in Chicago, he floated the same idea as Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently floated, that cops are not doing their job because people have started taking videos of police interactions with their smart phones.

Here is snippet of what Comey said:

I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars. They told me, ‘we feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of our cars.’…I’ve been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.

If Comey’s impression both of the Ferguson Effect, and the role of cameras is correct, cops have stopped doing the job we pay them to do because they’re under amateur surveillance.

If Comey’s right, what he’s describing is the chilling effect of surveillance, the way in which people change their behavior because they know they will be seen on camera. That the Director of the FBI is making this claim is more striking, since the surveillance cops are undergoing is targeted, and by the public. It is not the total government surveillance (such as the use of small planes and stingrays to surveil the Baltimore and Ferguson protests), which both the FBI and NSA use in inner cities.

Comey can’t have it both ways. Since he said in Chicago that surveillance has a “chilling effect”, that it makes cops feel under siege, maybe he should consider the implications of what he is saying about surveillance by his own agency and the NSA of all Americans.

If the targeted surveillance of cops is a problem, isn’t the far less targeted surveillance conducted on Americans a much larger problem?

And why can’t Americans hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their minds at the same time? We love the police, and want them safe. But, the real problems in US law enforcement have to be addressed.

And why does Comey imply that we need to accept a trade-off between a brutal police state and weakened policing? Why can’t we have civilized police who focus on getting the real bad guys, instead of choking a man to death for selling loose cigarettes?

So, wake up Mr. Comey! Show us data that support your feelings, or get in line with the data we have. To help you wake up, here is Humble Pie doing “30 days in the Hole”, from their 1972 album, “Smokin’”. The song was featured in “Grand Theft Auto V”:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

America’s “Fill in the Blanks” Middle East Policy

(There will be no further posting until Monday 10/26, since Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right are attending a weekend family reunion)

We have been talking about our failed strategy in the Middle East for several days. Here is a great observation by Tom Englehardt that summarizes our all-too-true ME reality:

Sometimes I imagine the last 14 years of American war policy in the Greater Middle East as a set of dismal Mad Libs. An example might be: The United States has spent [your choice of multiple billions of dollars] building up [fill in name of Greater Middle Eastern country]’s army and equipping it with [range of weaponry of your choosing]. That army was recently routed by the [rebel or terrorist group of your choice] and fled, abandoning [list U.S. weaponry and equipment]. Washington has just sent in more [choose from: trainers/weaponry/equipment/all of the above] and [continue the sentence ad infinitum]. Or here’s another: After [number, and make it large] years and a [choose one or more: war, air war, drone assassination campaign, intervention, counterinsurgency program, counterterror effort, occupation] in [Greater Middle Eastern country of your choice] that seems to be [choose from: failing, unraveling, going nowhere, achieving nothing], the [fill in office of top U.S. official of your choice] has just stated that a U.S. withdrawal would be [choose from: counterproductive, self-defeating, inconceivable, politically unpalatable, dangerous to the homeland, mad] because [leave this blank, since no one knows].

Englehardt’s blog, TomDispatch, has an important article by Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, who spent a year in Iraq. The article is entitled: What If They Gave a War and Everyone Came? − What Could Possibly Go Wrong (October 2015 Edition)

You should read it all, but here are some extensive quotes:

In March 2003, when the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq, the region, though simmering as ever, looked like this: Libya was stable, ruled by the same strongman for 42 years; in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had been in power since 1983; Syria had been run by the Assad family since 1971; Saddam Hussein had essentially been in charge of Iraq since 1969, formally becoming president in 1979; the Turks and Kurds had an uneasy but functional ceasefire; and Yemen was quiet enough, other than the terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Relations between the U.S. and most of these nations were so warm that Washington was routinely rendering “terrorists” to their dungeons for some outsourced torture.

Soon after March 2003, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, neighboring Iran faced two American armies at the peak of their strength. To the east, the U.S. military had effectively destroyed the Taliban and significantly weakened al-Qaeda, both enemies of Iran, but had replaced them as an occupying force. To the west, Iran’s decades-old enemy, Saddam, was gone, but similarly replaced by another massive occupying force. From this position of weakness, Iran’s leaders, no doubt terrified that the Americans would pour across its borders, sought real diplomatic rapprochement with Washington for the first time since 1979. The Iranian efforts were rebuffed by the Bush administration.

There hadn’t been such an upset in the balance of power in the Middle East since, well, World War I, when Great Britain and France secretly reached the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which, among other things, divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Because the national boundaries created then did not respect on-the-ground tribal, political, ethnic, and religious realities, they could be said to have set the stage for much that was to come.

And more:

What if the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraq in 2003? Things would undoubtedly be very different in the Middle East today. America’s war in Afghanistan was unlikely to have been a big enough spark to set off the range of changes Iraq let loose. There were only some 10,000 America soldiers in Afghanistan in 2003 (5,200 in 2002) and there had not been any Abu Ghraib-like indiscriminate torture, no equivalent to the scorched earth policy in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, nothing to spark a trans-border Sunni-Shia-Kurd struggle, no room for Iran to meddle. The Americans were killing Muslims in Afghanistan, but they were not killing Arabs, and they were not occupying Arab lands.

And finally: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The invasion of Iraq, however, did happen. Now, some 12 years later, the most troubling thing about the current war in the Middle East, from an American perspective, is that no one here really knows why the country is still fighting. The commonly stated reason — “defeat ISIS” — is hardly either convincing or self-explanatory. Defeat ISIS why?

What are we doing in the ME?

Why are we doing it?

What end state do we want?

Reframing Jeb’s “He Kept Us Safe” Framing

This week, Jeb Bush said that his brother George W. had “kept us safe” when he was president. And given opportunities to walk that back, he doubled-down on the message. Donald Trump didn’t let him get away with that. Paul Campos at Salon:

For years, W. got a pass from his party. Questioning him meant questioning our foreign policy. Those days are over.

Campos asks us to imagine that the Republican presidential primary race is a Thanksgiving dinner, and that Donald Trump is the crazy old uncle who says outrageous things that embarrass everyone at the table. Sometimes those things are embarrassing because they are not true.

But occasionally, Uncle says something that’s embarrassing, precisely because it’s true.

The Donald’s tweaking of Jeb Bush’s W. kept us safe claim falls into the latter category. Trump’s mockery is justified. On its face, Jeb’s claim about W. is analogous to Exxon boasting about its record of keeping the Alaskan coastline “mostly free” from oil spills.

The meme of “he kept us safe” uses the technique that sociologists call “framing.” Wikipedia calls framing a process of selective influence over the individual’s perception of the meanings attributed to words, phrases or memories.

The cultural frame that the Republican Party has so successfully managed to build up since the days of Ronald Reagan says that Democrats are weak-kneed appeasers and pacifists, while the GOP is the party of Big, Bad, War Daddy figures, who deal with foreign threats with realism and ruthlessness.

You might think it would be impossible to fold the 9/11 terrorist attacks to this frame, but you would be wrong. Such is the power of this pre-ordained narrative that, when America suffered a terrorist attack under a Republican president, this inconvenient fact was magically disappeared down a collective memory hole for huge numbers of Americans.

Jeb’s defense of his brother repeats years of GOP messaging. The idea that George W. Bush kept the nation safe from terrorism is something that Republicans repeated constantly when he was in office, and since. The core of the argument was that W. shouldn’t be held responsible for the terrorist attack, even though his administration was warned about it in advance, because he only had nine months to do something about it, and al Qaeda was already around at the time he took office, (i.e. al Qaeda should have been taken care of by Clinton).

The power of this frame is evident if we use a thought experiment: Imagine that the 9/11 attacks happened during Obama’s first term. If 3,000 Americans had been murdered on US soil by foreign terrorists nine months into the Obama administration, no one would claim that Mr. Obama had “kept us safe,” because the claim wouldn’t be supported by any equally powerful Democratic cultural framing. Instead, the political fallout would have been Benghazi x 750!

Or, you could imagine Mr. Obama sending US troops into a civil war in Lebanon, and 241 of them being killed in a terrorist bombing ordered by Iran. And, imagine if a few years later, that it was senior members of Obama’s administration, not that of Ronald Regan, who were discovered sending Iran weapons in exchange for hostages. Democrats would still be paying for that at the polls.

Framing explains why Republicans give Jeb’s older brother a mulligan on terrorism, to the point where it was their family member Crazy Uncle Donald who had to state the obvious.

It’s understandable that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, almost no one wanted to consider assigning responsibility for the attack. Fourteen years later, we no longer have an excuse not to, and that applies especially to today’s GOP presidential candidates, including Jeb Bush.

Now, everyone is ducking and covering. To assign some responsibility to the Bush administration for letting 9/11 happen could lead to uncomfortable questions of what we knew, when we knew it, and what we did with that knowledge.

Undressing the 50 year Big, Bad, War Daddy perception that supports/excuses W.’s Iraq adventure could represent an existential threat to the GOP in 2016, particularly if the attack comes from the Right instead of the Left.

That is why it’s a strategic imperative for them to pursue Benghazi-gate to the end, even if it’s off a cliff.

If the War Daddy framing is lost, they could be left touting Reagan’s winning in Grenada.

And how would Republicans spin THAT as this country’s finest hour?

Why Are Neocons So Afraid of Russia?

Russia moved rapidly to prop up the Assad regime. They bombed the so-called “moderates” who were waging a war of attrition against Assad’s army. With air support from Russia, Assad’s army is trying to retake territory seized this year in Idlib and Hama Provinces by insurgent groups that include the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, and American-backed units.

So, we countered, saying that Russia was killing our guys on the ground:

‘Our guys are fighting for their lives’ said the official, estimating up to 150 CIA-trained moderate rebels have been killed by the Russians.

“Our guys”? The unnamed DC official is referring to the CIA mercenaries who are fighting under al-Qaeda’s command. If the CIA is so concerned about the fate of its “assets”, then all it has to do is to order these moderate head chopper clowns to withdraw back to Turkey or Jordan.

The predominantly neo-con US Foreign Policy elite sees the reemergence of Russia along with the emergence of China, to the status of superpowers as a zero sum game. Therefore, specific, event-limited multi-polar cooperation with these global competitors is considered impossible.

What irritates Washington more than anything else is a display of Russian military prowess that we thought was relegated to 20th century history. Moreover, Russia showed up and started shooting with impressive speed and efficiency. Note that Russia didn’t require that the local military undergo multiple years (and $ Billions) of military training in order to get busy. In addition, they created an active coalition with Iranian and Hezbollah forces who coordinate action on the ground in real time with the Russians and the Syrians.

Russia has given Syria an air force, which we couldn’t do effectively in Afghanistan or Iraq, because their armies, despite all of our training, are weaker than Syria’s.

All of this has enraged the neo-cons and the media. They cannot believe Russia’s temerity, or that Mr. Obama has allowed the US to look weak and feckless. But weakness should be understood, since the US strategy has no clear goals, and is increasingly incoherent. We have a hodgepodge of “allies”, all with competing and often diametrically opposed agendas.

It is not so much a question of which US ally is the most dependable, but which is the least duplicitous.

While we mount a PR campaign to denigrate Russia’s motives, we are simultaneously taking steps to impede their efforts in Syria by arming Assad’s enemies, setting up a likely proxy war with possibly, more than one adversary.

Why are we doing this? We can never underestimate the extent to which the neo-con foreign policy elite believes in American Exceptionalism. It sustains a collective and individual need to appear to win today without giving a thought to tomorrow.

So what do we really have to fear from Russia?

• Russia has a GDP smaller than Italy’s. In fact, its GDP is about a tenth that of the US.
• Its population is currently about 143 million, but this is projected to fall to less than 130 million by 2050. That would be less than the 2050 population of any two of: France, Germany, or the UK.

Basically, Russia has a small window through which it can conduct force projection in the ME. Unless things change drastically, that window will effectively close sometime within the next 10-20 years. So, maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid.

But, they seem committed to using smarts, deep understanding of the local situation, and detailed planning to achieve their goals, while the US uses tactical thinking and blunt force.

And the US needs to remember that it was a Sunni force that became al-Qaeda. It was al-Qaeda that attacked the US. The simple fact is that the direct descendants of Al Qaeda (AQ) in Iraq are Al Nusra (AN) and ISIS. These are the people we are backing inside Syria, even as we attempt to fight ISIS in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

Russia is forming an alliance of Shia nations, including Iraq. They will ultimately tackle ISIS.

The US tries to square the circle, attacking the Sunni ISIS, while considering most Shia nations as enemies.

Sunnis comprise the largest anti-Assad forces in Syria. Therefore, if the Assad government fell, it would fall to Sunni Jihadists. We should understand if that is what our government is wishing for: Russia beaten. The Syrian government shattered. The flags of ISIS, AQ and AN flying over Damascus.

That is a nihilist viewpoint, and a prescription for endless war in the ME. The neo-cons may want that, but the rest of us, not so much.

What has happened to America’s foreign policy is a form of dementia brought about by an almost complete disregard for truth, honor, decency or honesty by the neo-con elite and many others in the political class.

Our wrongheaded Middle East policy is but a symptom, the neo-con dementia extends throughout our society and our economy.

Special Privilege for Cuban Immigrants

Ever heard of the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) of 1966? It says that Cuban citizens don’t have to follow US immigration laws in the same way as other nationalities. If they pass a background check at the point of entry, Cubans are free to stay in the US, get jobs and pursue legal permanent residence after just one year.

The law has been maintained by nine US presidents and 25 Congresses, based on the argument that Cubans had to flee communism, making them political refugees in need of added protection. Although it has been reviewed by many presidents, including Mr. Obama in 2014, it remains in place.

But the special status for Cubans isn’t limited to a free pass into the country. In an example of anti-communism run amok, Florida politicians have gotten Congress to pass legislation that increased US government assistance to Cubans from handouts of powdered milk and cheese, to a multi-billion dollar entitlement.

Aid to Cuban immigrants — who are granted immediate access to welfare, food stamps and Medicaid — has ballooned from a $1 million federal allocation in 1960 to $680 million a year today.

How did Cubans become the only nationality with unfettered access to US government benefits? Florida’s Sun Sentinel has been writing investigative reports about Cuban privilege for some time. Today, we focus on their three-part series on extra benefits that accrue to Cubans. Part 1, Welfare to Cuba, covers the hidden news that Cuban immigrants are cashing in on US welfare and returning to Cuba, making a mockery of the premise that they are refugees fleeing persecution. Part 2, Cubans retire to Florida – with help from US taxpayers, covers the untold story of Cubans coming to Florida to retire. When they get here, they qualify immediately for food stamps and Medicaid. If they are over 65 with little or no income, they also can collect a monthly check of up to $733 in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) even though they never lived or worked here.

Part 3, Florida politicians protect special status for Cubans, shows how over the years, Florida politicians protected the special status given to Cuban immigrants, transforming US government assistance into a multi-billion dollar Cuban entitlement:

• Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-FL) successfully pushed an amendment guaranteeing Cuban immigrants’ eligibility for SSI, when Congress created the program in 1972.
• During the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, Florida’s congressional delegation got Congress to authorize $100 million in financial aid to the 125,000 Cuban migrants. And they also got Congress to create a special category for Cuban immigrants that made new arrivals eligible for government benefits for decades to come.
• Cubans were able to dodge the Clinton welfare reform in the 1990s. While other immigrants were barred from benefits for five years, Cubans could collect aid upon arrival. This was orchestrated by Miami’s Cuban-American members of Congress at the time, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, (R). Ros-Lehtinen is still in Congress. BTW, Diaz-Balart’s uncle is Fidel Castro.

One of Florida’s justifications was that it should not have to shoulder the total costs of educating, housing and providing health care to thousands of new immigrants each year. So, after enshrining in law a mass migration to Florida, they outsourced the costs of the Cuban benefit program to taxpayers throughout the US.

The scamology is demonstrated by the Sun Sentinel’s investigation that found that Cubans are disproportionately represented among foreign-born recipients of SSI. In 2013, one in 10 Cubans was collecting SSI, compared to one in 25 immigrants from all other nations.

The Sun Sentinel found that the US policy of treating Cubans as refugees who require special treatment endures even as the rationale for it fades with the restoration of US-Cuba diplomatic relations. Many Cubans now come to America for economic opportunity, but they’re granted public support as victims of oppression, while frequently returning to Cuba, often staying there for months, while We the People keep paying.

Some elderly Cuban migrants move in with their grown children or relatives already here, but still receive US aid even though their families have the means to support them. The Sun Sentinel found:

• A couple with a toddler in south Miami-Dade County, with a combined annual income of $125,000, brought over the husband’s 67-year-old father, who then collected food stamps and $8,400 a year in SSI.
• A Miami Lakes woman and her husband took in her aging parents, who qualified for $7,200 a year in SSI. The family’s household income: $144,200.

Indications are that these are not isolated cases. Miami-Dade leads the nation among large counties in the percentage of people over 65 receiving SSI. About two-thirds of Miami’s elderly SSI recipients are Cuba natives.

You have probably noticed that the majority of Republicans (including all of the presidential candidates) are completely silent on this, a subject they would howl about if it were a preference for different immigrant group. And Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been direct beneficiaries of this law.

While Florida Dems also support the CAA, it is the Republican Party who defends it, and who does a good job of keeping public awareness the Act below the radar. That will continue, since Republicans hope to see Cubans vote as a bloc to help win Florida in 2016 and secure a GOP presidential win.

Enabling the Tea Party Revolution

Tuesday is the first Democratic Presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle. It is 100% certain that you will not hear any one of the Democratic hopefuls discuss how the Democrats in the House of Representatives have enabled the current chaos in the House by Republicans.

How have they enabled Republicans? Democrats routinely save them from their dysfunction. On Sunday, we discussed that raising revenues and deciding where to allocate funds was the primary task of the party that controls Congress.

That would be the Republicans.

We also said that whenever John Boehner has tried to pass his own spending bills using just Republican votes, he’s failed. He then goes to Nancy Pelosi and asks her to get some Democrats to vote to keep the government open, and the Democrats then vote for a Continuing Resolution, or a short-term Debt Limit increase. This is enabling bad behavior.

Enabling is doing certain things for someone that they could, and should be doing themselves.

They enable Republicans by bailing them out when they have painted themselves into a corner on fiscal matters, in the same way that people help alcoholics continue to (ab)use their drink of choice, by allowing them to avoid the full consequences of their actions.

When John Boehner can’t keep the government open or pay our bills and protect our nation’s credit rating, his party should crash and burn. Instead, his “friend” Pelosi does the equivalent of hiring a high-priced lawyer to quash Boehner’s drunken driving arrest. Boehner drives on, but his party doesn’t govern on its own.

And when the smoke clears, the Republican leadership extracts no price from their Republican Revolutionaries, who are allowed to keep their committee assignments, and receive campaign funds from the National Republican Campaign Committee.

So, there is no political price that the Republican Revolutionaries have to pay for bad behavior.

Democratic enabling has allowed a minority of Republicans to not just persist with their brinksmanship, but along the way, they have vastly strengthened their political power. There is no reason why Dems should vote for Republican appropriations bills, that is the job of the majority. The GOP needs to act like a majority party, which means they must learn how to fund the government on their own, or share power with those who will work with them to fund it.

The value to Democrats for their enabling is that they can say they are saving the country from the Republican Revolutionaries. But, the opposite result has actually happened. Democrats have enabled the Republicans to badmouth Washington DC and Congress, to bluster about how they can insist on defaulting on our debts, or about shutting down the government.

This has allowed Republicans to develop an increasing tolerance for avoiding basic political realities. Now, the Republican Party has snapped its moorings. Now, they have to dig out of the hole they have spent time and effort digging, all the while “supported” by the Democrats.

There are two possible outcomes. First, the Republicans could elect a Speaker that they agree to follow, but that seems to be the opposite of what the Republican Revolutionaries want, which is a Speaker who will follow their demands. The link details the 21 demands of the Freedom Caucus, including that the Speaker candidate must agree to shut down the government until some of the legislative achievements of the Obama Administration are repealed. Otherwise, the Caucus will deny their votes to that candidate.

The second possible outcome is a bipartisan coalition that will keep the government open and pay our bills.

Since we definitely need to do that, then that coalition should elect the next Speaker. Given the makeup of Congress, that Speaker ought to be a Republican. But for Democrats to enter a coalition, they need to extract concessions: The Republican Speaker needs to bring some Democrats onto the leadership team, demoting recalcitrant Republicans.

We could be at a turning point in the House’s process. It has been a two-party place for most of its history, with the majority party electing the Speaker. But there was a four-party stalemate of the House during the Eisenhower administration. The Democrats split along FDR/Farm-Labor/Dixiecrat lines, while the Republicans were split between the Old Guard Republicans who supported big business and dismantling the New Deal; and the Modern Republicans, who supported individual freedom and the market economy, but thought the government should provide necessary social welfare assistance.

That split was the start of the modern conservative movement’s push for ideological purity, that push and the Democrats’ recent enabling has given us the three party split we now see in the House of Representatives.

The Republicans could elect a Speaker at any time, and restore the two-party process.

Otherwise, we could be in a three-party scenario that might function like a parliamentary system, with occasional votes of “no confidence”, and the formation of a new coalition that elects a new Speaker, and then, new committee chairs.

If a coalition happens, it will happen because the Republicans realize that they cannot elect a Speaker on their own who hasn’t promised to deliver a global economic catastrophe in early December when we have to raise the debt ceiling.

Interesting times, eh?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 11, 2015

The Freedom (!) Caucus wants things its way. They didn’t want Boehner as Speaker, and Rep. McCarthy either jumped, or was pushed off the platform when his turn to be Speaker arrived.

The Freedom (!) Caucus intends to block both an increase in the debt ceiling and virtually all fiscal appropriations as a way of reigning in the power of our mad usurper, Barack Obama. But, they are nominally Republicans and Republicans are in the majority in the House and Senate. The most important responsibility of the majority in Congress is to raise the money we need to operate the government, and to then figure out how to spend that money.

This is the appropriations process.

One of the advantages of controlling the appropriations process is that you get to add money to the budget to keep the A-10 aircraft, or rebuild a crumbling bridge, or to subtract money from programs you think are immoral, like Planned Parenthood.

But, with today’s fractious Republican Party, no one will get elected Speaker without doing one of two things: Either they promise NOT to pass the appropriations bills, or raise the debt ceiling; or they have to ask for the Democrats’ help in getting the votes they need to avoid a government shutdown.

Whenever John Boehner tried to pass spending bills using just Republican votes, he failed. So he then went to Nancy Pelosi and asked her to get some Democrats to vote to keep the government open, and the Democrats supplied the votes. But, the Freedom (!) Caucus is done with Republicans who do not demonstrate the right level of ideological purity, so they will search for a Speaker who will make a show of not passing appropriations bills, while they wait (and hope) that the Democrats cave in to their demands, like defunding Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act.

The Nobel Prize for small particles was awarded, but the GOP is still experimenting:

This week was the first time a Nobel Peace Prize Winner (Obama) bombed another Noble Peace Prize Winner, Medcin Sans Frontières. And you thought it would be Kissinger!

A week with three more mass shootings. How much longer America?

And the mess in Syria gets messier:

The Editorial in the NY Times on Saturday hit the nail on the head:

The Obama administration’s $500 million initiative to train and arm so-called moderate rebels to take on the Islamic State never seemed promising when it was rolled out last year. Having acknowledged that this plan has failed — largely because Syrian opposition groups are more interested in taking on President Bashar al-Assad — the White House on Friday unveiled a plan that is even more incoherent and fraught with risk.

The Pentagon will stop putting rebel fighters through training in neighboring countries, a program that was designed to ensure that fighters were properly vetted before they could get their hands on American weapons and ammunition. The new plan will simply funnel weapons through rebel leaders who are already in the fight and appear to be making some headway.

The initial plan was dubious. The new one is hallucinatory, and it is being rolled out as the war enters a more perilous phase now that Russia has significantly stepped up its military support of Mr. Assad’s forces.

We have no strategy for Syria, and never have had one. Obama was hoodwinked by the Saudis, the Gulf States and our domestic neo-cons into supporting the Free Syrian Army option, followed by the “moderate” Islamist option.

Now, the strategy is to just flood the zone with arms. This by a guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize. Pathetic.

Hillary?

An important survey by Pew released this week says that Republicans are looking for “New Ideas”: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Since March, the share of all registered voters who say it is more important for a presidential candidate to have “new ideas and a different approach” has surged – with virtually all of the increase coming among Republican and Republican-leaning voters. Today, by more than two-to-one (65% to 29%), Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters say it is more important that a candidate have new ideas than “experience and a proven record.”

(The survey was conducted on Sept. 22-27 among 1,502 adults, including 1,136 registered voters.)

Pew reports that Democrats have less interest in new ideas: 50% say it is more important for a candidate to have experience and a proven record, while 42% view new ideas and a different approach as more important. This is little changed from March (46% experience, 49% new ideas).

And Pew reports that Hillary has a bigger lead over Sanders than other polls show. Their poll includes Biden:

This is a very different result from other polls which tend to show Sanders just a few points behind Clinton, (at least in New Hampshire) and which say that Biden hurts Clinton enough to open a path to the nomination for Sanders, should Biden enter the race.

But despite the Pew results, many Democrats think 2016 looks grim. Here is the Denver Post reporting that Colorado’s Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper used those exact words:

Gov. John Hickenlooper on Thursday became the latest Hillary Clinton supporter to express doubt about her candidacy for president, telling a Denver audience that the 2016 election is ‘kind of grim, to be blunt’.

The Denver Post also quoted former Democratic Gov. Dick Lamm, who (speaking about the email issue) said he believes:

There’s a one in three chance that if something worse does happen, that will cost her the nomination.

From 30,000 feet, the presidential race includes Hillary, a person many people don’t trust, who seems to lack the vision thing, and Bernie Sanders, who self-describes as a democratic socialist when he’s merely an FDR Democrat.

It just shows how ingrained the memes of the right are in our society, when a New Deal Democrat honestly believes that he is a Democratic Socialist.

Bernie should call himself an FDR Democrat, since he has to deal with corporate media in order to win. The Democratic Socialist label easily morphs into socialist, and then on to Marxist by our media elite. This means that intellectually lazy voters will misunderstand what Sanders is really about. Better for him to conflate his candidacy with a period of American economic recovery than for him to get twisted by the media echo chamber into a second coming of Lenin, or a Jewish Fidel.

And right now, Pew says that the Republican voters are more engaged in the process:

This shows that Dems are about as engaged as they were when Barak Obama was running against Hillary for the nomination, but Republican engagement has increased steadily since 2007.

Considering that the Democratic base seems mostly on auto pilot, it could be a lot worse, particularly since the Democratic National Committee is headed by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who gave us a Republican House and Senate.

The key question is which candidate can keep the Obama coalition together. Today, it seems to be Hillary:

• If Bernie is the candidate, money is going to be a huge problem and not just for him. How does the DNC raise money? How do other Democratic candidates raise money with Bernie running against the big money donors? It’s all well and good to rail against the campaign financing laws, but Senate and Congressional candidates have to raise money too.
• Can the Dems win the White House AND the Senate on $30 individual donations?

If Hillary is the candidate, the issue will be Hillary making the case that she won’t preside over a third Obama term. Or, the central issue in Hillary’s candidacy could be her husband Bill, and a third Clinton term.

The assumption by Democrats in the primary contests should be that Republicans will still control the House. Even with a Democratic win, neither Hillary nor Sanders would be able to get much of a domestic agenda passed.

Either way, 2016 will be a repeat, more or less, of 2012, with the significant addition of Iran, Russia, and ISIS on the foreign policy front. That may make 2016 more of a balanced issue election.

All Dems can reasonably expect from a presidential win in 2016 is Supreme Court nominations, holding on to the Obama gains, and pushing the country to return towards more economic equality than in the years since 2008.

Monday Wake Up Call – October 5, 2015

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Saturday that he opposes a unilateral American no-fly zone in Syria. This differentiates him from Hillary Clinton who wants to create one. Mr. Sanders:

We must be very careful about not making a complex and dangerous situation in Syria even worse…I support President Obama’s efforts to combat ISIS in Syria while at the same time supporting those in that country trying to remove the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad.

Ms. Clinton’s position is the same as Republican contenders Florida governor Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and failed CEO Carly Fiorina, making all of them the “Quagmire Candidates”. Think about it: A US enforced no-fly zone over northern Syria could mean starting a war with Russia, who now controls that air space.

The Quagmire Candidates are ok with possibly attacking Russian forces in order to defend al-Qaeda?

Remember, our CIA and our Gulf State allies are funding al-Qaeda-affiliated groups. The NYT says: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The fighters advancing on that [northern] front were not from the Islamic State but from the Army of Conquest, a group that includes an affiliate of Al Qaeda known as the Nusra Front and other Islamist groups, including several more secular groups that have been covertly armed and trained by the US.

A second NYT article on 10/1 about the Army of Conquest: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The alliance consists of a number of mostly Islamist factions, including the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate; Ahrar al-Sham, another large group; and more moderate rebel factions that have received covert arms support from the intelligence services of the United States and its allies.

Clinton, Fiorina, Bush and Kasich have all endorsed the idea of forbidding Russian use of air space and operations in Syria and a willingness to fight the Russians to enforce such a thing. So, we have SEVERAL presidential candidates who should never be allowed near the position of Commander-In-Chief.

And why? What is there about (or in) Syria that is worth the risk of nuclear war to America? The Russians would have to agree to any US “no-fly zone” and it is difficult understanding how they would agree to it. Would we really engage Russia in an air war to settle the point about who controls the skies over Syria?

Will the main stream media even ask Hillary, Jeb, Carly or Kasich why they want to start World War III? Or, why America is supporting Jihadists in Syria?

This is potentially more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it is beyond aggravating that these candidates can’t see it.

Our national security policy skews macho, and has since the 1950s. And the chest-beaters in Congress want Mr. Obama to appear weak, while our media continues to stir up trouble to keep these contradictions on the front burner.

This is why some Democrats have problems with Hillary Clinton. Her foreign policy position is “Republican Lite.” She consistently holds a near-bellicose position, similar to many Republicans. She supported our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Apparently quagmires poll well.

So, our wake-up is for the America voter: Here are Lords of the New Church doing “Open Your Eyes (to the lies right in front of you)”. Their line, ‘the acting’s lousy but the blind don’t know’ is as true today as it was in 1982 when this was recorded:

The Lords were fronted by the late Stiv Bators, who previously fronted the Dead Boys. Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right hosted Mr. Bators and crew at our place in 1978. But, talk of recording an album there never materialized.

Sample Lyrics:
Video games train the kids for war
Army chic in high-fashion stores
Law and order’s done their job
Prisons filled while the rich still rob
Assassination politics
Violence rules within’ our nation’s midst
Well ignorance is their power tool
You’ll only know what they want you to know
The television cannot lie
Controlling media with smokescreen eyes
Nuclear politicians’ picture show
The acting’s lousy but the blind don’t know

Open your eyes see the lies right in front of ya.

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Why the Hysteria about Russia and Syria?

Tom Friedman gets it right:

Today’s reigning cliché is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart.

The hysterical neocon viewpoint was amply represented by who else but John McCain, who told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he could confirm that Russia’s initial strikes were:

Against our Free Syrian Army (FSA) or groups that have been armed and trained by the CIA, because we have communications with people there.

There was no similar howl of angst when NATO member Turkey started bombing the West’s friends the Kurds, instead of ISIS. So, no hypocrisy here.

And McCain calls them our FSA? We have no FSA, although the CIA trains a few groups. The prevailing neocon fantasy, that we could have prevented the Syrian mess by training and arming a bigger, badder “Free Syrian Army”, continues to pollute the Syrian issue, preventing honest debate. We trained and armed a million soldiers in Vietnam, 300,000+ in Iraq, and tens of thousands in Afghanistan. How did those efforts work out?

And our training of Syrian “moderate rebels” has been a total bust.

But, the Russians’ first foray didn’t hit ISIS, they hit other groups. Word is they hit targets north and west of Homs (al-Rastan, Talbisah and al-Zafaraaneh). This is an area controlled not by ISIS, but other rebel groups. And right on cue, we heard that they hit the Syrian “moderates”.

Imagine, the US couldn’t find “moderate” rebels for 3 years, but the Russians found them in 24 hours!

McCain characterized the Russian air strikes as:

An incredible flouting of any kind of cooperation or effort to conceal what their first — Putin’s priority is. And that is of course to prop up Bashar al-Assad.

It’s time for the US to move on. We need to accept the reality that Assad won’t be dealt with until the Islamist threat in Syria and Iraq is contained. It’s also time to let the Russians have a shot at containing the Islamist threat. Whatever Russia’s entry into Syria does for the confrontation with ISIS, it has clarified our thinking. Our strategy says we can’t work with Assad and Iran to attack ISIS. Putin’s strategy says work with Assad and Iran to attack Assad’s enemies and ISIS simultaneously:

• Putin’s first priority will be to secure the Russian base at Tartus and its air base at Latakia. That is what he has done with his initial strikes, as some insurgents have already tried to hit the Russian air base with rockets.
• After securing western and central Syria, Russia will work to take out ISIS, starting with eliminating a few ISIS groups that threaten Russian territory.

So, what should we be doing? Col. Pat Lang has a few ideas:

1. Obama should act as if Russia and Iran are more than just rivals and adversaries. This will take courage and leadership on his part to explain to the American people.
2. Obama must fully coordinate operations, intelligence analysis sharing and logistics with Russian and Iran.
3. We should forget about positive contributions to the ISIS fight from Turkey. Turkey is a major part of the problem.
4. We should ignore Saudi Arabia’s wishes with regard to Syria, since they support the jihadis.

Friedman describes the big advantage to letting Putin take the lead in Syria:

Let’s say the US did nothing right now, and just let Putin start bombing ISIS and bolstering Assad. How long before every Sunni Muslim in the Middle East, not to mention every jihadist, has Putin’s picture in a bull’s eye on his cellphone?

No one is arguing that Bashar al-Assad is a benevolent leader, but when US media and analysts at some think tanks start describing al-Qaeda as “moderate”, we need to rethink our strategy. Again.

You can’t go into Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS and simultaneously try to depose Assad, only to gripe when Russia also goes into Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS and props up Assad.

That sword cuts both ways.

The bottom line is that the US, and its ME and European allies are going to have to admit that getting rid of Assad is a secondary priority to our absolute requirement to contain and ultimately eliminate the threat from ISIS. They also must admit that none of the groups that the CIA and our ME allies have trained and supported represent a viable alternative to the Assad regime.

The sooner we do, the sooner Syria will cease to be the jihadi chessboard du jour, on which ISIS and a civil war in Syria have left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead.

We need to turn a corner. Our current thinking has failed.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Politics of Fear