Tag Archives: GOP

Political Rants

Points made.

Think of this as a slow-motion commentary on the Republican debate from last week. None of this is particularly in-depth, but I think it’s worth raising a few points about certain participants.

(Late) King of JordanLindsey loves Georgie. At the kid’s table, Lindsey Graham got a little carried away over his bro-mance with ex-president and hopefully future convicted war criminal George W. Bush, saying in essence that he misses W and wishes he were still in office to handle the big-as-the-sky threat known as ISIS, which Lindsey previously said wants to “kill us all!!” Not hard to work out why Senator Graham’s poll numbers, even in a highly reactionary GOP primary race, hover somewhere between zero and zero point five. Not a majority position.

War of the Cubans. Whoa – someone waved a red rag between Senators Cruz and Rubio. Either that or somebody called somebody else’s mommy a commie. Fascinating how the supposedly “establishment” candidate Rubio is working hard to outflank Cruz on the right (!) with appeals to nativism and McCain/Graham-like warmongering.

Meet the King. Note to the often wrong, never in doubt Chris Christie: King Hussein of Jordan is long dead. It helps to know these things when you’re running for president. I still think anyone who wants to be president should have to fill in the names of countries on a blank map on live television, then tell the audience some relevant thing about our foreign policy with respect to each one they name.

He said what? It’s the law of a stopped clock being right twice a day. Trump’s comments about the Iraq war – at least the first portion of them, before he talks about “taking the oil” – were hard to argue with. It’s interesting that the majority of Republican party voters seem to back candidates who are skeptical of the notion of regime change. Carpet bombing, sure, but no regime change. (Interestingly, Cruz appears to think you can selectively carpet bomb combatants, as if they will voluntarily stand out in the open when your bombers fly by.)

That’s all I’ve got. This is kind of long in the tooth, but again … it’s been a long ten days. More later.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Faith and politics.

I’m guessing you don’t need my opinion on Donald Trump’s proposed ban of all Muslims from entering the United States – you’ve probably heard the full gamut, from Steve King to Bernie Sanders. My first thought was for all of the Muslim students I have known and met, both natural born U.S. citizens and visa holders from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and others. I hear this insane rhetoric, growing louder by the day, and I think of a young fellow from Afghanistan – about the nicest person you could hope to meet – and what his thoughts might be about the people who “liberated” his country, then overstayed their welcome for 14 years.

Christian jihadistThis is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.

There’s a push, primarily by Republicans but with Democratic assent as well, to view international terrorism and specifically ISIS as a grave, even existential threat to citizens of the United States. Opinion polls have been showing that this is paying off – people are good and scared, which is music to ISIS’s ears. But what the hell – thousands of people in America are killed by the domestic terror of gun violence every year, some of it motivated in part by extremist religion. I would say that that was more unambiguously the case in the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting than in the San Bernardino attack, just on the basis of the rantings of the shooter, Robert Dear. We are far more likely to be shot by someone like Dear than by someone like Farook.

So … why are we encouraged to fear the lesser danger? It’s the political magic of otherness. Always a winner in America.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Stirring the pot.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump recalls seeing footage of “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Fellow candidate Ben Carson briefly claimed to have seen the same inspiring vision in his mind’s eye, too, then backed off. (He seems to be recalling the clip of five Palestinians jumping up and down that was most likely a hatchet job.) Trump’s claim is the ideal bookend to his recent suggestion of maintaining a federal database of Muslims in America, a component in his new post-Paris attack national security platform. It’s a simple, time tested formula: call out a domestic population that you can term a fifth column and associate with a foreign enemy, then repeat your rhetoric and watch your polling numbers rise. Oldest trick in the book.

Look in the mirror, America.The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as Sam Seder and others have pointed out. This is a mostly white minority of virulently anti-immigration, nativist, evangelical Christian Americans who are attracted to Trump for the time being because he arrogantly articulates their hatred of the “other” and gives voice to their sense of outrage over being relegated, however temporarily, to opposition party status. I have heard commentators blame this constituency on Obama – the nauseating former Bush adviser Nicole Wallace, for instance – but it’s useful to remember that even in the depths of his second-term unpopularity, Wallace’s former boss retained a solid core of conservative support, including the same crackpots that showed up at McCain/Palin campaign rallies in 2008. That was the nascent “tea party”, the constituency that has kept Trump in the high twenties for months now.

Stirring up racist or bigoted sentiments is always a dangerous game, but it’s one that remains popular with politicians who have no real value to offer the constituencies they seek to serve. We white people tend to think of non-white, non-European, non-Christian people as different. We see this in the response (or lack of same) to the Beirut bombing, compared to the near media obsession over Paris. Even the President does this. When he talks about Paris, he refers to the fact that we see ourselves in the sidewalk cafes; that Parisians are like us. There is a deep reservoir of anti-foreign, anti-other sentiment in our society. It is hard to avoid this mentality when you become an imperial power. You can mask it, conceal it, but it tends to bob to the surface.

We’ve all seen this movie before. I like to think that there are enough decent people in this country to overcome this type of ugliness, but if there is some kind of attack in the United States over the next year, all bets are off.

luv u,

jp