Obama to Maliki: Drop Dead

President Obama:

“We will not be sending U. S. troops back into combat in Iraq.  But I have asked my national security team to prepare a range of other options that could help support Iraqi security forces and I’ll be reviewing those options in the days ahead.”

[As ISIS heads for Baghdad, exactly how many days does he think he has?]

“But understand that ultimately it’s up to the Iraqis, as a sovereign nation, to solve their problems.”

[Well, it’s pretty damn obvious the Iraqis can’t do that.]

“But this is a regional problem, and it is going to be a long-term problem.  And what we’re going to have to do is combine selective actions by our military to make sure that we’re going after terrorists who can harm our personnel overseas or eventually hit the homeland.”

[I’m just going to run out the clock here, so I don’t have to get involved trying to save that SOB Maliki, and then we’ll go after the terrorists with drones, like in Yemen and Pakistan.  More drones!  More cowbell!]

 

 

 

U. S. Makes American Drone Deaths Official

In a letter to Congress today, Attorney General Eric Holder officially acknowledged for the first time that the U. S. killed four American citizens in drone strikes in Yemen (Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan) and Pakistan (Jude Mohammed).

Of the four, only Anwar al-Awlaki was specifically targeted.

The acknowledgment comes a day before President Obama’s major address on national security related topics like drones and Gitmo.

Rand Paul Is Just Really Stupid

After the Obama Administration said they reserved the right to kill a terrorist American citizen on American soil with a drone under “extraordinary circumstances,” Rand Paul took to the Senate floor for a 13-hour filibuster.

Today he said, “If someone come out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.”

President Obama was talking only about terrorists, Rand Paul is talking about every petty crook in this country.  How incoherent and nonsensical is his position?  What was that filibuster all about?

It’s now pretty obvious that Rand Paul doesn’t hate drones, he just hates President Obama.

The Imaginary Drone Problem

“Getting Ridiculous,” Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

“A new Gallup poll shows that 66% of respondents do not believe drone strikes should be used against suspected terrorists within the United States. And an even larger number, 79% of respondents, don’t believe strikes should be permitted in the United States against suspected terrorists who are US citizens.

“In other words, we now know that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose a preposterous idea that no one had ever considered doing. Set aside any constitutional or moral questions about counter-terrorism or the rights of US citizens, the whole point of using drones is to mount attacks in areas where you have no pervasive and secure control over the ground — something that the US has everywhere inside the United States.

“Really, wholly apart from any constitutional or legal issue, why would the US government use a drone to attack a suspected terrorist in the US — as opposed to arresting them or in a more extreme situation attacking them in their compound/house like the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department did with Chris Dorner last month. And if things really got totally out of hand, why not a conventional bomber or fighter jet since there’s no anti-aircraft capacity in the US that the US military or US government doesn’t control?

“A real question is whether police and SWAT teams should use militarized tactics in raids within the US. That’s a real question. Whether we think drone attacks inside the US are alright or not is a silly one.

“The whole thing confirms my belief that in most cases the ‘drone issue’ is a distraction from actual civil liberties or war powers questions.”  Emphasis added.

We have so many real problems and face so many real threats, it just drives me crazy to see energy wasted on imaginary ones.

The GOP — Garbage In, Garbage Out

From “Paul Ryan’s budget:  Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction,” Ezra Klein, Washington Post:

“Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

“But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

“Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.”

“The problem is that these ideas are not, on their own, popular.  In fact, they’re deeply unpopular, and considered quite radical.  That’s why Newt Gingrich rejected Ryan’s initial budget as ‘right-wing social engineering’….  But presented on their own, Ryan’s plans scare people.

What Ryan has found is that the way they’ll get a hearing is if they’re presented as necessary, prudent measures to forestall an even more dramatic debt crisis.

“But whether these are good or bad ideas, they are not, under any reasonable definition of the term, necessary ideas.”

We’ve got Paul Ryan using phony scare tactics on the budget, and Rand Paul doing the same on the drones.  When I think of the GOP today, I think, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  We have neither a debt nor a drone crisis.  How can we solve  our real problems when one party is so focused on imaginary ones?

Rand Paul’s Dog Whistle

I think Josh Marshall makes an excellent point here*:

“But when Paul used the example of the President ordering a drone strike on someone sitting in a coffee shop or someone at home with their family, I think most people saw this as an outlandish and highly implausible example that nonetheless pointed to a very real issue:  where do the President’s powers stop?

“I’m not sure everybody saw it that way.

“I think there was another audience.  There’s a sizable subculture of folks on the far right — Paul’s political hunting ground, his dad’s political hunting ground — who are still in the mode of the people who in the 1990s were worried about the government sending those black helicopters to take them off to internment camps or take away their guns or whatever else.  Now it’s drones.”

I’m much more afraid of Rand Paul than I am of drones.

* “Rand Paul and the Black Helicopters,” Talking Points Memo

Why Do We Always Over-Correct?

Ok, so Dick Cheney was wrong about a lot on foreign and defense policy.

But that doesn’t make Rand Paul right.  He’s as misguided as Cheney, just in the opposite direction.

Too little engagement is as bad — worse? — than too much.

I want to get out of Afghanistan yesterday, but I want to continue our drone program, including against Americans if they choose to join the terrorists, and I want to make sure that Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons.  We should have stopped Pakistan and North Korea, but too late now.  Let’s not add Iran to that list of mistakes, which, aside from the threat to Israel, would set off disastrous nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East.

Both the White House and the GOP have handled Rand Paul clumsily.  I hope they’ve each learned a lesson.

 

The Great GOP Unraveling

No sooner was John McCain faced with Jeb Bush’s challenge on immigration from his right, as Jeb did an about-face on his past support for a path to citizenship, when he had to pivot and face Rand Paul’s challenge on drone policy from his left, as Paul filibustered John Brennan’s CIA nomination because he feared Obama was about to launch drone strikes on Americans sitting in cafes in San Francisco.

Today, McCain called Paul a “wacko bird,” along with his pals Ted Cruz and Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan.

Now you can say that John McCain is 76 and on his way out, but remember that his little sidekick Lindsey “Butters” Graham is 57, and their new amiga, Kelly Ayotte, who replaced Joe Lieberman, is only 44.

This isn’t a John McCain problem, this is a GOP problem.

The libertarian wing of the Republican Party has now latched on to the Tea Party element, strengthening both.  Paul and Cruz are both Tea Party guys and libertarians.

The GOP has taken up the Tea Party cry to cut government spending, while trying to protect defense spending.  But the Tea Party/libertarian types don’t want to spare defense any more than they want to spare social programs.  They want to cut the whole damn thing, which makes it impossible for them to co-exist with the neo-cons.

Interestingly, neither McCain nor Paul reflects where the country is.  Since we’re war weary, we’re not with McCain that we should have stayed longer in Iraq and should stay in Afghanistan forever.  But since we’re war weary, we like the drones, which keep the terrorists at bay, while allowing our guys to go safely home at night to their families after they’ve taken out a bad guy.  And while Rand Paul isn’t as extreme on foreign policy as his dad Ron, his lack of concern about Iran’s going nuclear isn’t where the country is either.  So in Goldilocks terms, neither McCain nor Paul is just right for the country, one is too hard and the other is too soft.  If the country is sick of the neo-cons, they don’t want them replaced by neo-isolationists.

Adding to the mix — and the mess — you’ve got the primaries of 2014 and 2016.  Immigration and drones are two very different issues, but having gotten blindsided by Jebbie, Marco Rubio felt he had to support Paul on the filibuster to placate the Tea Party people he will need for a 2016 run.  Similarly, Mitch McConnell felt compelled to praise Paul because he fears a Tea Party primary in 2014.

Then there’s  the money.  The Koch Brothers are libertarians first and Republicans second.  Their financial support will redound to those who spout the libertarian line.  By contrast, Sheldon Adelson, who basically bought Newtie a campaign in 2012, has said that he doesn’t care about gay marriage or abortion, he just cares about Israel.  So his money will go to those who toe the neo-con line.

The GOP is trying to accommodate some very strange bedfellows — and it looks as if no one will get a good night’s sleep anytime soon.

Brennan Confirmed for CIA

The Senate voted to confirm John Brennan as CIA Director, 63-34.

Meanwhile, Eric Holder wrote to Sen. Rand Paul, telling him that the President has no authority to use a drone to kill an American “not engaged in combat” on American soil.

The rationale for killing someone like American Anwar al-Awlaki by drone in Yemen was that he was an enemy combatant.  You can kill an enemy combatant anywhere, on U. S. soil or abroad.

Paul Ends Filibuster

Rand Paul has ended his filibuster blocking the vote on John Brennan to be CIA Director.

Why doesn’t somebody filibuster to get stronger gun and ammunition laws?  Our kids are bazillion times more likely to be killed by a nut with a gun than Obama with a drone.

And I don’t get this obsession with drones.  On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot 67 rounds in 13 seconds at Kent State University.  Four students died and nine were wounded.  Some of them were peacefully protesting the Vietnam War, others were watching the demonstration from a distance, and others just happened to be walking by.

I also feel that Rand Paul and Eric Holder have been talking past each other.  Paul keeps using the example of an American sitting in a cafe in the U. S. and getting blown away by a drone.  Holder made clear that would be an inappropriate use of lethal force.  Where Holder has left the door open a teeny, tiny crack for drone strikes within our borders has been in a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 situation — so an act of war against our country on our soil.  In that case, the President as Commander in Chief would be justified in using any weapons we have to defend against such an attack.