Q JINN
2012-01-13 15:47:10 UTC
<html>
<A
href='http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/teaparty/153587?page=entire"'>http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/teaparty/153587?page=entire</A>
<BR><BR>
<H1><FONT size=4>Glenn Greenwald: The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a
Pathetic, Incompetent Clown Show</FONT></H1>
<DIV>Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs --
particularly in the realm of foreign policy -- the Republican race is a
shambles. </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV><I>December 27, 2011</I> | </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
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<DIV><I><SMALL><FONT size=2></FONT></SMALL></I> </DIV>
<DIV><I><SMALL><FONT size=2>Photo Credit:
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<P> American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable
from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both
are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the
winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more
tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates
one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its
most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into
the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in,
immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing
he would not join the show.</P>
<P>The Republican presidential primaries "shortly to determine who will
be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next
November" has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has
devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with
the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free,
anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of
defeating the president.</P>
<P>In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless
(not to mention <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~reuters~com/article/2011/11/23/us-usa-campaign-romney-poll-idUSTRE7AM1N920111123">less
Mormon</A>), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous
candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment
they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's
ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been
repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters
are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant,
supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.</P>
<P>In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable
hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of
their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as
a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate
seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger.
Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP
candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so
far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they
fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic
sanity.</P>
<P>In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy
pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a
"<A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/krugman~blogs~nytimes~com/2011/07/27/obama-the-moderate-conservative/">moderate
conservative</A> in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that
"progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge
act of self-delusion", because the president "once you get past the
soaring rhetoric" has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".</P>
<P>Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists
point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides "his
healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the
private health insurance industry" was designed by the Heritage
Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was
advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to
be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of
Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the
difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).</P>
<P>How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has
stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last
campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and
presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the
nation suffered economically?</P>
<P>But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic
policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm.
The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package
"tepid and inadequate though they were" are genuinely at odds with
rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent)
positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and
protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually
plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the
outcome of the 2012 election.</P>
<P>It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties
where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP
politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling
America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use
violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and
leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.</P>
<P>But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when
Obama has <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~tnr~com/article/politics/the-cheney-fallacy">embraced
the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies</A>; waged a war
against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive
secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs;
extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge
numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim
countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the
Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an
unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of
indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/motherjones~com/kevin-drum/2011/10/obama-defends-awlaki-assassination">claimed
and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens</A> far from any
battlefield and without due process?</P>
<P>Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former
Bush officials, including <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~salon~com/2011/01/18/cheney_72/">Dick
Cheney</A>, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for
continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In
the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found
themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~salon~com/2011/11/13/gop_and_tp_on_obamas_foreign_policy_successes/singleton/">foreign
policy</A> question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already
doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked
about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the
due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar
Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties
values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only
candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul,
who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without
oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties
assaults in the name of terrorism.</P>
<P>In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim
intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases
extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core
problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable
Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position
occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render
themselves inherently absurd.</P>
<DIV>Glenn Greenwald is a Constitutional law attorney and chief blogger
at <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~glenngreenwald~blogspot~com/">Unclaimed
Territory</A>. His forthcoming book, <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~amazon~com/gp/product/097794400X/sr=8-1/qid=1144875908/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-2353391-0014250?%5Fencoding=UTF8"><I>How
Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run
Amok</I></A> will be released by <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~workingassets~com/publishing">Working
Assets Publishing</A> next month.</DIV></DIV> </html>
<A
href='http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/teaparty/153587?page=entire"'>http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/teaparty/153587?page=entire</A>
<BR><BR>
<H1><FONT size=4>Glenn Greenwald: The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a
Pathetic, Incompetent Clown Show</FONT></H1>
<DIV>Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs --
particularly in the realm of foreign policy -- the Republican race is a
shambles. </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV><I>December 27, 2011</I> | </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><IMG
src="http://www.skweezer.com/s.ashx/-/images~alternet~org/images/managed/storyimages_1318184898_romneyvvsscreenshot20111009at2~21~38pm~png_640x419_310x220">
<DIV><I><SMALL><FONT size=2></FONT></SMALL></I> </DIV>
<DIV><I><SMALL><FONT size=2>Photo Credit:
C-SPAN</FONT></SMALL></I></DIV></DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?</DIV>
<DIV>Join our mailing list:</DIV>
<H3>Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Tea Party and the Right
headlines via email.</H3>
<FORM method=post action=newsletter/subscribe/><INPUT value=26451
type=hidden name=group[]> <INPUT value=storybody_teaparty type=hidden
name=refcode> <INPUT value="E-mail address" name=email> <INPUT border=0
alt="Submit Form"
src="../../../s.ashx/-/images~alternet~org/images/site/submit_arrow_yellow.jpg"
type=image> </FORM></DIV>
<P> American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable
from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both
are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the
winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more
tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates
one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its
most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into
the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in,
immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing
he would not join the show.</P>
<P>The Republican presidential primaries "shortly to determine who will
be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next
November" has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has
devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with
the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free,
anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of
defeating the president.</P>
<P>In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless
(not to mention <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~reuters~com/article/2011/11/23/us-usa-campaign-romney-poll-idUSTRE7AM1N920111123">less
Mormon</A>), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous
candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment
they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's
ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been
repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters
are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant,
supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.</P>
<P>In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable
hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of
their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as
a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate
seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger.
Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP
candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so
far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they
fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic
sanity.</P>
<P>In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy
pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a
"<A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/krugman~blogs~nytimes~com/2011/07/27/obama-the-moderate-conservative/">moderate
conservative</A> in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that
"progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge
act of self-delusion", because the president "once you get past the
soaring rhetoric" has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".</P>
<P>Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists
point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides "his
healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the
private health insurance industry" was designed by the Heritage
Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was
advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to
be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of
Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the
difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).</P>
<P>How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has
stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last
campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and
presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the
nation suffered economically?</P>
<P>But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic
policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm.
The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package
"tepid and inadequate though they were" are genuinely at odds with
rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent)
positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and
protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually
plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the
outcome of the 2012 election.</P>
<P>It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties
where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP
politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling
America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use
violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and
leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.</P>
<P>But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when
Obama has <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~tnr~com/article/politics/the-cheney-fallacy">embraced
the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies</A>; waged a war
against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive
secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs;
extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge
numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim
countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the
Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an
unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of
indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/motherjones~com/kevin-drum/2011/10/obama-defends-awlaki-assassination">claimed
and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens</A> far from any
battlefield and without due process?</P>
<P>Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former
Bush officials, including <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~salon~com/2011/01/18/cheney_72/">Dick
Cheney</A>, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for
continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In
the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found
themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~salon~com/2011/11/13/gop_and_tp_on_obamas_foreign_policy_successes/singleton/">foreign
policy</A> question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already
doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked
about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the
due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar
Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties
values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only
candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul,
who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without
oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties
assaults in the name of terrorism.</P>
<P>In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim
intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases
extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core
problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable
Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position
occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render
themselves inherently absurd.</P>
<DIV>Glenn Greenwald is a Constitutional law attorney and chief blogger
at <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~glenngreenwald~blogspot~com/">Unclaimed
Territory</A>. His forthcoming book, <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~amazon~com/gp/product/097794400X/sr=8-1/qid=1144875908/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-2353391-0014250?%5Fencoding=UTF8"><I>How
Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run
Amok</I></A> will be released by <A
href="http://www.skweezer.com/s.aspx/-/www~alternet~org/www~workingassets~com/publishing">Working
Assets Publishing</A> next month.</DIV></DIV> </html>