During the presidential campaign nutty right-wing rumors about Barack Obama swamped the Internet. Via mass e-mails, fearful conservatives were told that the Democratic nominee was a dangerous radical and a secret Muslim who would take the oath of office with his hand on the Koran. A whole conspiracy cult embraced the belief that Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen and was thus ineligible for the presidency. The Obama campaign had to build a Web site just to debunk the viral mythmaking.
After winning the election, President Obama, who was born in Hawaii (see his birth certificate here) was sworn in on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible. He went to church on Easter Sunday. The supposed Manchurian candidate can’t even get Gitmo closed properly, much less lead the Senate in a chorus of “The Internationale.”
But the mythmaking has not stopped. The wheels of rumor grind fast, but they grind exceedingly dumb. Marooned on a grassy knoll of the mind, the right has spun new and scarier fantasies about the president, tales that would send any patriotic, gun-toting Christian fleeing across the border to Canada, if only the Canadians weren’t so damn socialist. We present for your inspection, and then debunk, or paw at in desultory fashion, a dozen of the choicest conspiracy theories to gain traction since Jan. 20. We could print more, but we grow weary. (And by the way, Obama is still a Muslim foreigner.)
Myth: Obama can’t function without a teleprompter, even uses it for answers at press conferences.
What they believe: “Barack Obama’s use of teleprompters is becoming legendary. He doesn’t go anywhere without them and rarely, if ever, speaks without their assistance.” This has been a theme of Rush Limbaugh’s since early in the campaign last year. Sean Hannity has joked, rather ickily, on Fox News about whether Obama sleeps with the teleprompter between him and Michelle. Right-wing bloggers argue Obama is totally incompetent without the prompter and can’t speak off the cuff. The theory is widespread enough that a Web site has been devoted to it: TeleprompterPresident.com, which not only studiously collects Obama’s bloopers but also retails other preposterous Obama conspiracies. (Note the nice Photoshop job in this “picture” of Air Force One flying over New York City’s skyline.)
What is real: Presidents have been using teleprompters for more than 50 years, and notecards for even longer. It’s true that Obama uses the prompter, specifically, more than most of his predecessors. He uses them for casual announcements and the lead-ins to press briefings, and on the campaign trail last year, he even set his teleprompter up in the ring of a rodeo. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen recently started reading from Obama’s script, after an aide mixed up the two leaders’ speeches.
But charges that he is “incapable of forming his remarks and speeches without reading them verbatim,” or that he avoided one-on-one contact with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown because the teleprompter would have made it awkward, are insane. Obama has written two books, given hundreds of unscripted speeches and interviews on the campaign trail, and even now goes on in great detail, and great length, during question-and-answer sessions with voters, lawmakers and reporters.
“Whether he’s using notecards or a different method of reading his notes, I don’t think anybody cares,” a White House aide told Salon, after asking incredulously why this article was even being written. In fact, listening to Obama speak without notes, it’s tempting to think his advisors want him to use the teleprompter in part because it keeps him from getting too involved in what he’s talking about, rather than because he can’t speak without it. At his first prime time presidential press conference, his answers dragged on so long he had time for only a handful of questions. But the aide wouldn’t concede that his boss is — left to his own devices — a little wordy.
Myth: Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
Who’s spreading it: Get in line. If you have an idea for a “Barack Obama is the Antichrist” Web site, the URL is probably already taken (www.barackobamantichrist.blogspot.com; www.obamaantichrist.blogspot.com; www.beastobama.com). It’s also hard to blame any particular individual for preaching the bad news about Barack Obama being the Antichrist when a Google search for “Barack Obama is the antichrist” gets you nearly 800,000 hits and just searching for “Barack Obama” and “Antichrist” together gets you 2.2 million.
The evidence? Why, Nostradamus predicted his coming. Obama bears traits resembling the Antichrist, according to former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and current Christian wactress Victoria Jackson. He sends subliminal messages to his minions and to his master, Satan. Also, Jesus’ biblical prediction of the coming of the Antichrist describes him as coming as “lightning from heaven”; that translates to “baraq o bama” in Hebrew. And if Obama were not the Beast foretold in Revelation, why would the nickname for his presidential limo be — the Beast? And, why, on the day after his election, was the winning number in the Illinois lottery 6-6-6?
What’s real: The winning number in the Illinois Evening Pick 3 Lottery on Nov. 5, 2008, was6-6-6. And his armored-plated 2009 Caddy is nicknamed the Beast. But Obama is probably not the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, the First Horseman, or the Seed of Satan. If he is, well, then we’re wrong about a whole lot of other things too.
What they believe: Obama’s support for embryonic stem cell research and abortion rights are all part of a nefarious plot to eliminate undesirables and create the master race through population control. The real mission of Planned Parenthood is the extermination of minorities before they make it out of the womb, and Obama, as an African-American, helps make this racist plan palatable to the targeted communities.
What is real: Obama supports abortion rights, stem cell research and international family planning. In January, he lifted restrictions on funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling overseas, repealing the so-called global gag rule, but he also angered Planned Parenthood by removing a family-planning provision from the stimulus. In March, Obama overturned Bush’s ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, shared some views with the eugenics movement of her day, but broke with others. Abortion opponents use this legacy to try to maintain that Planned Parenthood’s mission is racist and eugenicist to its core, even though its more than 850 health centers provide services to people of every race and those people voluntarily request those services.
There’s no evidence that Obama’s stances on stem cell research or reproductive health means he’s participating in a plot to eliminate any race or creed, including those with which he, his wife and his daughters share a history.
Myth: Obama plans to resettle hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the United States.
Who’s spreading it: One of the original sources of the belief might have been this Feb. 7 article. New Media Journal is a news site run by a nonprofit group called BasicsProject.org, which states that its mission is to “re-introduce the American public to the basic elements of our constitutional heritage while providing non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country, specifically, but not limited to, the threats of aggressive Islamofascism and the American Fifth Column.” The diatribe below, posted on Snopes.com, seems to have started as a post on Wizbang that picked up the claims in the New Media Journal article. It also turned up here and here.
What they believe: “President Barack Obama has signed an executive order … allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to resettle in the United States. Sure, what can go wrong when we allow hundreds of thousands of people who have been, as Mark Steyn memorably described, ‘marinated’ in a ‘sick death cult,’ who voted for Hamas, and 55 percent of whom support suicide bombing [to] live here and at the American taxpayers’ expense.”
What is real: Per Snopes.com, just after Obama took office, the United Nations asked member nations for more than $600 million to pay for humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza. The president authorized $20.3 million from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund to pay for the “humanitarian needs of Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza.” About one-third of that money went to the Red Cross, two-thirds to U.N. relief agencies. It differed little from an authorization of nearly $30 million in aid made two years earlier by President George W. Bush. Those funds went toward relief in Darfur, Somalia, Gaza and the West Bank.
Myth: Led by Obama, Democrats are planning to reinstitute the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, eviscerating right-wing talk radio in the process.
What they believe: The government used to require radio and TV broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to public policy discussions, and to provide “contrasting views” on the matters discussed. The FCC abolished the rule in 1987, under President Ronald Reagan. The next year, America was first treated to the dulcet tones of Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show, thus ushering in a golden age of broadcast wingnuttery, interspersed with ads for mattresses. So now that a Democrat — and one as suspicious as Obama is, to boot — is in the White House, conservatives are certain that a nefarious plot to undo Reagan’s handiwork is underway. There’s also a more generalized paranoia that sweeping media reforms will be implemented under the guises of “localism,” “media diversity,” and “community interests,” which, in the right-wing imagination, can have but one purpose: to muzzle conservative voices. The terror this appears to be striking in the hearts of the right is almost charming: “As a candidate, Barack Obama was mostly relegated to filing complaints, threatening lawsuits and organizing angry mobs to intimidate dissenters,” one piece on NewsBlaze warns. “As President, Obama now has unbridled power to systematically destroy the only source of checks and balances to his radical policies: talk radio.”
Obama is allegedly going to clamp down with backdoor policies determining whether or not talk radio stations offer voices that are in the “public interest”; they’ll refuse to renew licenses to those that don’t fit their standards. World Net Daily has written that it’s even possible Obama wants to go further — by nationalizing the newspaper industry, in order to control it. “It’s a program worthy of the old Soviet Union — where the old joke noted there was no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia,” WND contributor Joseph Farah wrote, adding a nice communist twist to the myth. (Note to Farah: The joke works only if people know “Pravda” is Russian for “truth,” and “Izvestia” is Russian for “news,” which you didn’t mention.)
What is real: Yes, many Democrats like to grumble about talk radio, and yes, some have said they’d like to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. But even Fox News has reported that the White House has no plans to do that. Obama “does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated,” a spokesman told the network less than a month into his term. Going the belt-and-suspenders route, the Senate has also passed a bill by South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint, which would ban the return of the doctrine. (Lawmakers also approved a proposal by Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat, to affirm existing FCC policy that encourages diversity in media ownership, though, which has made conservatives antsy.)
Still, the Republican agitation about the alleged return of the policy is way overblown; they’re so busy opposing it that they’ve skipped right past the fact that no one is really trying to do it. As Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told the Washington Times in January, “We have enough real problems facing this country that we don’t need to invent ones that don’t exist.” That may be true if you’re trying to govern. But it’s not true if you’re trying to scare the right-wing masses.
Myth: Obama’s stimulus provided cash for a “levitating train” between Disneyland and Nevada brothels.
What they believe: That Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid included an earmark in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that would pay for a “pie in the sky” science fiction train that would whisk people from the gates of Disneyland to Nevada whorehouses.
What is real: The stimulus included $8 billion for high-speed rail, but to this date the projects that the money will be spent on have yet to be chosen. The myth began when right-wing bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, seized on a sentence from an Associated Press story declaring that “[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid’s office issued a statement noting that a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas rail could get a big chunk of the money.” Reid’s statement, however, somehow never made it to Reid’s congressional Web site. It is true that Reid has, in the past, supported the construction of a “maglev train” that would take Southern California tourists to Las Vegas, but such technology is neither “pie in the sky” nor science fiction. It’s real. What’s not real, however, is any earmark in the stimulus that directs taxpayer dollars to be spent on the project.
.
Myth: Obama is a socialist.
Who’s been spreading it: The loudest prophets of panic include a certain bald plumber, Michele Bachmann, who warned that we’re “completely socializing the American economy,” and Mike Huckabee, who scoffed that “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” referring to Obama’s proposed budget.
What they believe: Roughly since Nixon called Helen Gahagan Douglas “pink right down to her underwear” nearly 60 years ago, conservatives have worried that anyone left of Dwight Eisenhower was a Comintern stooge. With populism loose in the land and industry nationalization in the air, Republicans look at Obama, and they see red. With his talk of political transformation and his whiff of messianism, Republican fears about Obama exceed the usual grousing about “socialized medicine” After all, during the campaign, Obama said he wanted to “spread the wealth around.” As Sarah Palin summed up, “There are socialist principles to that, yes.”
Who’s been spreading it: Glenn Beck, but especially Jonah Goldberg. His revisionist history book, “Liberal Fascism,” re-shelves European fascists as inveterate leftists and insinuates that vegetarian, organic-eating Hitler was some kind of proto-hippie.
What they believe: So you think Obama is cool? Hold on there, liberal mushhead, Mussolini was cool too. He had the worshipful crowds, the admiring world leaders, the good public transit — the whole nine yards. Hence the insistence, in certain quarters of the right, that we keep a close eye on hipper-than-thou President Obama for hints of fascist instincts. It’s the surreal, looking-glass version of “Obama is a socialist.” “We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism,’” says GOP operative Saul Anuzis. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” The government is bossing around corporations, the president is the subject of a cult of personality, and there’s a bundle of rods pictured on the back of the dime called the fasces in Latin. It’s all evidence that our first black president is a brownshirt. “People are once again feeling oppressed by an out of control state,” wails Glenn Beck. “Like it or not, fascism is on the rise.” Of the quasi-nationalization of GM, pundit Goldberg said ominously to Beck, “I’m not calling Barack Obama a Hitler and I’m not calling him Nazi and all the rest. But, you know, in fascism, we saw the people’s car. We call it the Volkswagen.”
What is real: Bush-era torture, surveillance and aggressive warfare do not meet the standard for fascism, but bailing out a bankrupt car company apparently does. If this is the road to fascism, the American people aren’t feeling oppressed — they’re riding shotgun. Also, the fasces have been on the dime — as well as on all the rest of our symbols — since before the term “fascism” came into English.
Myth: Republican Chrysler dealers were targeted for closure.
Who’s spreading it: Michelle Malkin, World Net Daily, Doug Ross, the Washington Examiner, the Zero Hedge blog
What they believe: The Obama administration told Chrysler which of its dealerships needed to be closed — and they wielded that power for political ends, punishing dealers who donated to Republicans while protecting Democrats. And the numbers prove it: The vast majority — nearly all, in fact — of the closed dealerships were owned by Republican dealers.
What is real: This one actually deserved looking into. After all, when the government takes over a major car company and starts having a hand in its business decisions, there’s the possibility for all sorts of malfeasance. But it just didn’t turn out to be true.
The reason so many of the closed dealerships were owned by Republican donors? Well, almost all car dealerships, period, are owned by Republicans. What statistical evidence there is to back up the hypothesis is flawed and basically meaningless. And Chrysler, not the administration, decided which dealerships to shutter.
However, now, like all good conspiracy theories, the proponents of this one have refused to let it die. One mathematical analysis showed no favoritism toward Democrats, and no targeting of Republicans — but it did seem to indicate (if you’re a little rusty on your statistics) a trend toward favoring Clinton donors. So now the hypothesis has shifted, and to back it up, the people advancing the theory are pointing to one dealer group in particular. Owned by people like Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson, a major backer of Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Mack McLarty, who served as White House press secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration, it didn’t lose a single dealership.
Sure, that might seem at first like an indication of something nefarious. But if you seriously think the Obama team is risking everything to protect a guy who brought up their candidate’s drug use on the trail during the Democratic primary, well, we have an American car company we’d like to sell you.
Myth: Obama has created his own version of the Hitler Youth.
What they believe: Again with Hitler! Even by the rather baroque standards of the Obama conspiracy theorists, this one’s a tad wacky. It stems from a bill that Congress recently passed and Obama signed into law as the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The law allegedly contains “disturbing” language forcing young people into mandatory national service. Ratcheting up the fear, some conservatives are calling it “coercive servitude” and “statist indocrination.” “At best, this reprise of Hitler Youth will nationalize charitable work, using slave labor to help the State to further marginalize Christianity, which is one of the few remaining obstacles to totalitarianism,” Right Wing News seethed. “At worse, this and Obama’s Serve America Act are part of his stated plan to create a race-based, Gestapo-style ‘Civilian National Security Force’ as large and well-funded as the military.” Evidently, Obama wants to conscript 1 million young people into “youth brigades,” and they’d be barred from attending church services while they were enlisted. “This has serious Nazi Germany overtones to it.” In a nice twist, some bloggers are calling the alleged brigade “Obama Ujana” — using the Swahili word for “youth.”
What is real: Don’t start goose-stepping yet. The legislation doesn’t involve conscription, Obama Youth or anything else of the sort. It expands AmeriCorps and other existing volunteer programs, devoting $6 billion over five years to creating 175,000 new service jobs and creating new volunteer corps to deal with energy, education and healthcare. It does set up a commission to investigate whether mandatory national service would make sense for America down the line, but chances are its findings — whatever they are — won’t exactly set the political world on fire. There’s no ban on attending church services, no racial component at all, and no reason to be alarmed. Unless you’re a Republican who looks at exit polls showing two-thirds of voters under 30 supported Obama.
Myth: The president wants to raise my taxes.
What they believe: No matter what he may have said on the campaign trail, many conservatives are convinced President Obama’s secret agenda now that he’s in office is to suck every last cent out of hard-working Americans through tax increases. The anti-tax tea parties on April 15 vividly displayed this widely held belief. Granted, some who attended the events exist on the political fringes, but many notable Republicans, such as Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, were also big tea-party supporters.
Who’s spreading it:CNBC’s Rick Santelli won fame for his trading-floor conniptions, but he didn’t start the tea-party movement or the post-inauguration antitax groundswell. (A whole cadre of conservatives has been warning about Obama’s desire for higher taxes. In addition to Gingrich, Perry and Sanford, other right-wing luminaries such as Michelle Malkin and Dick Armey have also propagated the tax myth. However, give credit where credit is due: Unquestionably, the unofficial sponsor of the “Obama is going to raise my taxes” movement has been Fox News. Fox on-air personalities such as Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, and Sean Hannity steadily promoted the tea party demonstrations with unbridled gusto and Fox Business has warned their audience of the impending Obama tax hike.
What is real:Obama will raise taxes — just not on most of the people who are worried about it. For those who make under $250,000 a year (the vast majority of Americans), Obama’s tax plan will either lower income taxes or leave those taxes unchanged. The tax increases, which by most estimates amount to $1 trillion over 10 years, are targeted at the incomes of top-tier earners, as well as their capital gains and itemized deductions, such as charitable donations. Obama wants to use the increased tax revenues to pay for healthcare, as well as the soaring national debt and the two wars his predecessor started. Making the myth even more ridiculous is that even with Obama’s tax raise on the wealthy, the top tax rate in the nation will still be far lower than it was during the reign of Ronald Reagan, that great beacon of conservative economic policy.
Myth: The president is taking aim at the Second Amendment and wants to take our guns away.
What they believe: The Obama administration has given bailouts to the auto industry and Wall Street, but perhaps no one has benefited more from the change in White House leadership than the gun industry. People are running scared to the gun store and sales have skyrocketed. Many gun-owners believe that the president and Attorney General Eric Holder are going to mount a campaign to enact more stringent regulations on gun ownership by linking the arms trade in American with the drug war in Mexico.
Who’s spreading it: Though this meme has been around since early in the 2008 presidential campaign, a few big players have done more to spread this myth than others. These include the usual suspects when it comes to fears about gun regulation, with the NRA leading the charge. Local gun clubs, gun rights advocacy clubs and right-wing Web sites have also played a part. Fox News has also been spreading fear about gun control, especially Glenn Beck, but so too have Michele Bachmann and Chuck Norris. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has said the administration has the goal of “disarming us”. Even Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor has triggered a boost in gun stocks. This is one myth that, regardless of its merits, is believed by a significant chunk of the population.
What is real: Obama has supported gun control in the past, but since he’s taken office and during the campaign, his main concern has been reinstituting the ban on assault weapons that was allowed to lapse during President Bush’s administration. Yet Obama acknowledges that putting the ban back in place isn’t politically viable right now and gun control was absent from his first-100-days agenda . Obama and Holder have said they believe reducing the gun flow through North America would help to alleviate the drug violence in Mexico, but that hardly means they’re planning to take guns away from Americans. Obama has largely ignored the issue since taking office, and when he has spoken about gun control, his rhetoric on the issue has been noticeably conciliatory, with a focus on improving the enforcement of existing laws.
In the trio of unalienable rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, the reason “life” was listed first should be obvious: If you aren’t alive, you can’t have liberty or pursue happiness (or much of anything else, for that matter). That’s why this week’s revelations about President Obama personally overseeing a “Kill List” is so significant — the president’s extralegal actions undermine the very right from which all other rights exist. And it’s why I launched an official White House petition asking the president to create a “Do Not Kill” list that would at least allow Americans to protect themselves from being deprived of their lives at the hand of the president.
Following the lead of other government-administered lists like the “Do Not Call” list and the “No Fly” list, the petition’s proposal is straightforward. It reads:
The New York Times this week reports that President Obama has created an official “Kill List” that he uses to personally order the assassination of American citizens. Considering that the government already has a “Do Not Call” list and a “No Fly” list, we hereby request that the White House create a “Do Not Kill” list in which American citizens can sign up to avoid being put on the president’s “Kill List” and therefore avoid being executed without indictment, judge, jury, trial or due process of law.
Sadly, the need for the government to create a “Do Not Kill” list is no longer theoretical. As the Times (and other media) have reported, the president ordered the execution of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without so much as charging him with a single crime, much less convicting him of one. The Times reports that in doing so, the Obama administration issued a memo claiming that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process (i.e., a right to formal charges and a trial by a separate co-equal branch of government) can now “be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” As if underscoring the extrajudicial nature of the actions, even the memo remains secret.
Today, this kind of execution has become the norm. According to the Times, since the al-Awlaki killing, the White House now convenes “Terror Tuesday” meetings attended by various agency officials and President Obama’s top reelection strategist, David Axelrod. These meetings are specifically focused on deciding which American citizens and foreigners will next face due-process-free assassination. The newspaper additionally reports that the administration’s official rationale is that anyone the president orders killed is, by definition, “up to no good.” As Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch notes, that’s the same word-for-word rationale George Zimmerman used to justify hunting down Trayvon Martin.
This all underscores why we need a “Do Not Kill” list — and thanks to the White House’s new petition system, there’s a chance we can make that a reality. If we get 25,000 signatures, the administration will have to consider the proposal and issue a public response to it. I hope everyone reading this will click here to sign the petition, forward it on to your friends, post it on your Twitter feed and post it on your Facebook page.
If we want the most unalienable of rights to survive, we must speak out now and force the president to at least give us one way to avoid his execution orders.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
More David Sirota.
President Barack Obama points to the audience as he and first lady Michelle Obama leave the stage after a Memorial Day ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, Monday, May 28, 2012, in Washington. (Credit: (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster))
- 47th out of 50 in job creation: That’s what the Obama campaign wants you to know about Mitt Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts. Chicago is rolling out a new line of attack against the Republican today, focusing on his tenure in the Bay State. Like its previous campaign against Bain, the Mass. attack features a website and video that include interviews with lawmakers who served with Romney criticizing his record in the state.
The campaign has also organized a press conference with Massachusetts lawmakers that will take place on the steps of the statehouse in Boston later today. Obama political svengali David Axelrod will be on hand.
- Scott Walker pours in more cash to legal defense fund: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his staff have been under a “John Doe” investigation for three years looking into his time as county executive in Milwaukee. And just ahead of next week’s recall election, the governor transferred $100,000 to his legal defense fund from his campaign account. The two transactions of $70,000 and $30,000 are a major escalation from Walker’s camp, which has so far tried to pretend the probe does not exist.
- Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett face off in final debate: With the recall election on Tuesday, tonight’s debate will be one of the last chances for the candidates to sway undecided voters — if there are any left in the state.
Democratic Governors Association (DGA) chairman Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland and an early favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination (seriously), will campaign for Barrett today, according to the DGA. But the race is not looking great for Democrats, as a new poll shows Barrett down 7 points. The RNC says it is “very confident” about the race.
- Chamber pulls trick to hide donors to campaign ads: Faced with a court ruling that would make them disclose the funders behind their political ads, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — which plans to spend more than $50 million during the 2012 election cycle — has announced they will merely tweak their ads’ content to get around the disclosure order. “By changing the focus of its ads to specifically support or oppose candidates, it will not have to disclose any of its donors,” the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen reports.
While the move will prevent the Chamber from disclosing, some watchdog groups think it may help Americans understand just how political the Chamber has become. Unlike local chambers of commerce, the U.S. Chamber is essentially is an independent GOP electioneering outfit, not unlike Karl Rove’s Crossroads groups.
- Is Mitt Romney too hawkish for Henry Kissinger?: The former secretary of state has failed to endorse Romney, like other top Republican foreign policy figures. The New York Times reports: “As Republican leaders fell in behind Mr. Romney this spring, many members of the party’s foreign policy establishment have been more muted. Reluctance by this group to come forward for Mr. Romney more quickly reflects an unease over some of his positions, including his hard line on Russia and opposition to a new missile treaty … [and] Mr. Romney’s aggressive statements on trade policy toward China.”
- Mitch McConnell has made his picks: The Senate minority leader has selected which Senate races he thinks will help him become the Senate majority leader, telling Roll Call:
The Senator said he sees three different levels of competitiveness in 2012 races where his party could add seats. The races that represent the best chance for GOP pickups are the open seat in North Dakota, Sen. Jon Tester’s (D) very competitive race in Montana, the open seat in Nebraska, Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D) uphill re-election bid in Missouri and the marquee matchup between former Govs. Tim Kaine (D) and George Allen (R) in Virginia.
McConnell’s “tier two” races include Sen. Sherrod Brown’s reelection effort in Ohio and the open seats in Wisconsin, New Mexico and Hawaii.
Then there are states less likely to lead to GOP pickups this cycle. “Maine, Pennsylvania, Florida are examples of ones you take a look at later,” said McConnell, who was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the 1998 and 2000 cycles. “Sorta see what develops.”
- Senate candidate defends call for national “birther office”: Former congressman Pete Hoekstra, who is now challenging Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., defended yesterday his recent comments that the U.S. should create a national office to verify the birth certificates and other citizenship materials of candidates for federal office. Earlier this month, he criticized Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for not making a bigger issue of President Obama’s birth certificate in 2008.
Yesterday, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin took the Senate hopeful to task for the comments, but Hoekstra stood by them, calling the birther office a “simple,” commonsense solution. He insisted his proposal had nothing to do with Obama, though acknowledged that, “For someone else, it might be about President Obama. So be it for them. For me, it’s not.”
Unlike lots of other birther candidates, Hoekstra should really know better. He served nine terms in the House and was even the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee (though Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is also on that committee, so… ). Hoekstra the Senate candidate is perhaps most well known for running an ad during the Super Bowl that featured a stereotypical representation of an Asian woman thanking Stabenow for sending jobs to China. The ad was produced by Fred Davis, the man behind the recently exposed proposal to run ads hitting Obama on his connection to Reverend Wright.
- Romneys collect cash poolside with CEO laying off thousands of workers: Romney is on a West Coast fundraising jaunt, including a stop at the home of Meg Whitman, the former California gubernatorial candidate who, as CEO of HP, announced recently that she was preparing to lay off as many as 30,000 workers. Whitman co-hosted a “poolside ‘ladies lunch’ Wednesday honoring his [Romney’s] wife at the Palo Alto home of Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and his wife, Elaine.”
- VoteForEddie.com gets a website: An independent congressional candidate in Florida legally changed his name to his campaign website so his URL could appear on the ballot. Eddie Gonzalez, who says he has an innovative plan to lower energy prices, went before a Miami-Dade judge in January to rename himself “VoteforEddie.com.” But in that case, shouldn’t his website instead be VoteForVoteForEddie.com?
The main reactor at the Bushehr nuclear facility in Iran. (Credit: Reuters/Raheb Homavandi)
The nuclear summit that concluded last week between Iran and six world powers was a ridiculous charade. The Obama administration never intended it to succeed. Its sole purpose was to placate hawks in U.S. Congress, ensure that Democratic donors keep writing checks during election season, and buy another month of time during which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be able to bomb Iran. In the meantime, American drivers can sit back and enjoy more $4-per-gallon gas.
The talks failed because the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1 (Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) refused to take yes for an answer. The key issue on the table was Iran’s accumulation of uranium enriched to 20 percent – not a high enough level to make a nuclear weapon, but close enough that it would be much easier for Tehran to do so. Iran made it clear that it was prepared to stop enriching to 20 percent and to even ship its stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country, if the U.S. and the other powers agreed to relax the draconian sanctions they have imposed on the country.
This deal would have been a major diplomatic breakthrough. It would have greatly reduced Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, defused tensions in the region, calmed the oil markets, driven prices at the pump down and made it impossible for Netanyahu to attack Iran. In a presidential campaign as tight as this one, a significant drop in gas prices could be the difference between Obama being reelected and Romney defeating him. So why didn’t the Obama administration take the deal?
The ostensible reason, piously mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that the U.S. believes that the upcoming, even harsher round of sanctions on Tehran will generate even further concessions. According to this line of reasoning, Iran only came to the bargaining table because of sanctions, and more sanctions will produce better results.
But this justification is transparently false. First, Iran has made it clear again and again that it will never allow itself to be seen as folding under U.S. pressure. It is prepared to negotiate, but successful diplomacy requires not just sticks but carrots. The carrot the P5+1 offered at Baghdad was ridiculous: If the Iranians agreed to suspend 20 percent enrichment, what they would receive in return was not a reduction in sanctions, but rather spare aircraft parts. For Tehran, accepting this deal would have been tantamount to surrendering. As Iranian analyst Hasan Abadini said, “Giving up 20 percent enrichment levels in return for plane spare parts is a joke.” These are not arcane diplomatic mysteries. As Iran expert Gary Sick pointed out in an interview on NPR, what it will take to reach a resolution of this issue is clearly understood by all the players involved. It is no more possible that the Iranians would have taken that deal than that the Palestinians would agree to establish their state in Jordan.
Second, Clinton’s argument that the Iranians will make more concessions begs the question: what concessions? The only remaining significant concession Iran could make would be to agree to give up enriching uranium altogether – and it has made it clear that it is never going to give up that right, which it is guaranteed as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Agreement. In an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, former Iranian negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian made it clear that Iran would be prepared to give up 20 percent enrichment if its rights to enrich uranium were recognized.
All of this makes clear that the U.S. knew going into the negotiations that they were not going to succeed. The entire process was an elaborate ritual whose dual purpose was to inoculate President Obama against charges that he was “soft on Tehran” and to make it impossible for Netanyahu to go postal.
In fact, despite the conventional wisdom, it is extremely unlikely that the far-right Israeli leader will attack Iran. His constant threats to do so were the reason that Congress imposed the latest round of sanctions, against the Obama administration’s wishes. But despite Congress’s lockstep support for Netanyahu and anything he decides to do, up to and including an attack on Iran, it would be far too risky for Netanyahu to actually do it. The American people, unlike their bought-off, coerced and/or ideologically myopic political representatives, are sick of Middle East wars. Many, including increasing numbers of American Jews, are growing weary of Israeli intransigence and extremism. They’re also broke. An Israeli attack on Iran would draw in the U.S. and plunge the world into a depression – and the American people would hold Israel to account. Netanyahu may, as the former head of Israel’s spy service said, be “messianic,” but even he knows better than to jeopardize his country’s relationship with America. However, in order to manipulate America, it is essential that he constantly give the impression that he is about to attack Iran.
The Obama administration probably knows that Netanyahu is bluffing. But it has to play out this farce to placate Congress, keep pro-Israel Democrats writing checks, remove a Romney attack line and generally appear tough on Iran.
The irony is that the U.S. and Israel are always claiming that Iran uses negotiations over its nuclear program to play for time while it works feverishly to develop a bomb. But playing for time is precisely what the U.S. just did.
Obama is trying to run out the clock on Iran before the November election. He adroitly stalled the nuke-Iran hysteria that built up during the AIPAC conference in March, but he did so at a price, painting himself into a corner with tough rhetoric denying that containment of a nuclear Iran was an option and threatening to use military force. The negotiations in Baghdad had to fail in order for him to maintain that posture.
His strategy may work. He may stumble over the finish line in November, still dragging out negotiations. And he may overcome the serious headwind of high gas prices and beat Romney. But there is nothing good to be said about his weak and pandering approach. It will not stop the Iranian nuclear program, it is causing the Iranian people to suffer, and it hurts the average U.S. citizen. At bottom, it is an approach predicated not on achieving real progress in dealing with the Tehran regime but on overthrowing it. As such, it is antithetical to Obama’s proclaimed desire to reach out to Iran and to reset America’s relationship with the Middle East. In the long run, he will have to decide whether he really wants to continue a brinkmanship game that locks the U.S. into the self-defeating Middle East policies it pursued during the Bush years.
For the truth is that Obama’s Iran policy represents the last vestige of Bush-era neoconservative extremism. The moralistic, shrill, militaristic Manichean worldview that brought us the “Axis of Evil” and the Iraq war is gone – except when it comes to Iran.
Obama’s schizoid foreign policy – extreme and ideological on Iran, pragmatic and flexible everywhere else — was brought into sharp relief this week. Even as the Baghdad summit broke down, events elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia demonstrated the utter failure of Bush’s approach – and provided a cautionary warning to Obama of the follies of continuing it with Iran.
Start with Iraq, where Bush’s nine-year-long military adventure is coming to an inglorious end. That unprovoked invasion was supposed to bring an end to an evil regime and transform the Middle East – the same reasons neocons now give for attacking Iran. It left an ethnically fractured, horribly wounded land in the grip of a strongman that is just now emerging from a nightmarish civil war and is still plagued by sectarian violence and terrorism. Our moral responsibility predates the war: America’s crippling pre-war sanctions devastated Iraq’s entire society, and they were one of the reasons why it was so difficult to rebuild it. Congressional proponents of sanctions against Iran should take note.
Then there’s Afghanistan, where after 11 agonizing years we have essentially given up. Afghanistan has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even a superpower cannot always succeed in imposing its will, that cultural and anthropological differences are critical, and that trying to combine nation building and counterinsurgency in one of the most backward and impoverished places on Earth is a recipe for disaster. The best we can hope for now is that not too many more U.S. troops are shot dead by the Afghans they are training – and that the Taliban does not roll into Kabul the moment we roll out.
Next there’s Syria, where an appalling regime is locked in a brutal struggle with a murky opposition and where all the options are so bad that we have no choice but to remain on the sidelines.
Finally, there’s Egypt, where a nascent democracy is fighting to be born. Everything about this inspiring, painful and threatened revolution, culminating in this week’s elections, was generated by the Egyptian people themselves. America had nothing to do with it. Contrary to claims made by Bush apologists, the appalling example of Iraq was actually a disincentive to throw off Mubarak’s tyranny. As for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, that dire event so feared by neoconservatives and Islamophobes, they may turn out to be the stable, conservative, don’t-rock-the-boat party.
The lessons these different situations hold for our dealings with Iran are very simple. First, we have far less ability to control what happens in the Middle East than we think. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to impose our will directly and failed. In the other two, we either do not have the ability to intervene (Egypt) or the risks of doing so would be too high (Syria). Second, none of these situations are susceptible to the kind of good-and-evil moralizing that characterized Bush’s approach to the Middle East. Individually they are incredibly complex, and as a whole they are even more complex. There is no simple way to approach any of them. Basing our policy toward them on a Manichaean, good guys vs. bad guys worldview is self-defeating. Bashir Assad is a bad guy, but if we sided with the rebels, we could unleash a civil war even more catastrophic than the one going on now. Some of the Salafis in Egypt may be planning to ban beer and abrogate the Camp David treaty, but if we tried to prevent them from taking power, we would be thwarting the will of those Egyptian people who want those outcomes. Nouri al-Maliki may be a sectarian thug, but the alternative could be worse. Hamid Karzai may be a corrupt, drug-addled charlatan, but he’s the guy who’s there.
And so on, down the list, from Pakistan to Hamas to Netanyahu to Libya. The real world, as opposed to the black-and-white world of the neocons, is all about complexity, grey areas, compromises, diplomacy, flexibility. It’s about accepting that America will have to deal with regimes that do not toe our line. It’s about realizing that our soft power is more effective than our military power. It’s about putting down the Big Stick and trying to actually listen to what the people in the region are saying. It’s the opposite of the Bush Doctrine.
Obama knows this, but the dead hand of neoconservative ideology still drives his Iran policy. Until he shakes it off and accepts that Iran is a regional power and must be dealt with realistically, even though it does not always share our interests, his Middle East policy will continue to resemble that of his predecessor.
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, looks out the campaign charter airplane window during the flight between San Diego and Hayden, Co., Monday, May 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)(Credit: AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is releasing a television advertisement accusing Mitt Romney of failing to stand up to “the voices of extremism” in his party.
The ad was released Tuesday as Romney was poised to clinch the Republican presidential nomination in the Texas primary. It takes the former Massachusetts governor to task for failing to speak out against real estate mogul Donald Trump, a supporter who has consistently charged that Obama is not a U.S. citizen.
The commercial opens by showing 2008 nominee John McCain brushing aside a woman who raised the citizenship issue at a town hall-style meeting, and asks, “Why won’t Mitt Romney do the same?”
A Romney aide is shown telling a TV interviewer that “a candidate can’t be responsible for everything a supporter has said.”
Emmy Award-winning actress and comedian Judy Gold is best known as the star of her two critically acclaimed off-Broadway shows, "The Judy Show - My Life As A Sitcom," and "25 Questions For A Jewish Mother." Judy has had her own comedy specials on HBO, Comedy Central and Logo. She appears regularly on Tru TV's World"s Dumbest. Check out www.JudyGold.com and follow her on Twitter at @JewdyGold.
More Judy Gold.
Barack Obama 
(Credit: AP) 
President Barack Obama points to the audience as he and first lady Michelle Obama leave the stage after a Memorial Day ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, Monday, May 28, 2012, in Washington. (Credit: (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)) 
The main reactor at the Bushehr nuclear facility in Iran. (Credit: Reuters/Raheb Homavandi) 
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, looks out the campaign charter airplane window during the flight between San Diego and Hayden, Co., Monday, May 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)(Credit: AP) 
