SALON

Sunday, Nov 25, 2012 5:25 PM UTC

McCain: GOP can’t attack reproductive rights

Republican senators edge away from hardline positions VIDEO

By

Topics: George Stephanopoulos, Dick Durbin, Sunday shows, Fiscal cliff, Video, reproductive, Grover Norquist, Media, Lindsey Graham, ,

McCain: GOP can't attack reproductive rights

On the Sunday morning shows today, the phrase “Republican moderate” no longer seemed like a complete oxymoron.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday that the GOP has to push for immigration reform and offer the middle class a more positive message. He also distanced himself from the social conservative wing of the party, saying that someone like him has no business imposing his pro-life views on female voters:

Over on ABC’s This Week, McCain’s buddy Sen. Lindsey Graham, R.-S.C.,  said that as the so-called fiscal cliff approaches, he is backing away from conservative activist Grover Norquist’s steadfast opposition to raising government revenues. Couching his position in concern about crippling the military, Graham explained:

I’m willing to generate revenue. It’s fair to ask my party to put revenue on the table. We’re below historic averages. I will not raise tax rates to do it. I will cap deductions. If you cap deductions around the $30,000, $40,000 range, you can raise $1 trillion in revenue, and the people who lose their deductions are the upper-income Americans.

But to do this, I just don’t want to promise the spending cuts. I want entitlement reforms. Republicans always put revenue on the table. Democrats always promise to cut spending. Well, we never cut spending. What I’m looking for is more revenue for entitlement reform before the end of the year…

So I agree with Grover, we shouldn’t raise rates, but I think Grover is wrong when it comes to we can’t cap deductions and buy down debt.

Graham continued to ride the Republican hobby horse of  blaming U.N. Ambassador and potential secretary of state candidate Susan Rice for something related to the September 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya which killed four Americans. Rice has come under fire from Republicans for characterizing the attacks as a response to an Islamophobic video rather then a terrorist attack in televised interviews. In a comment that is difficult to parse for those of us who aren’t GOP messaging professionals, Graham said:

Here’s what I want to know. Have the intelligence community, not the deputies, the people on the ground, put in one pile all the evidence of a pre-planned, coordinated terrorist attack with Al Qaida militia in one pot and put in the other pot the evidence that this was a spontaneous mob created by a hateful video.

I’ve seen no evidence — what did the FBI get from the survivors? They said there was never a mob to begin with. There were mobs in the — riots in the Mideast, but none of them have mortars, none of them lasted for seven hours. And why for seven hours could we not help these poor people? Where was the Department of Defense?

Graham did not, however, explicitly rule out voting for Rice for secretary of state, instead stating that, “There will be a lot of questions asked of her about this event and others.”

Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., responded by chastising Graham, “For goodness’ sake, she got the report from the intelligence community. She dutifully reported it to the public, just exactly what we expect her to do.”

 

Continue Reading Close

Alex Halperin is news editor at Salon. You can follow him on Twitter @alexhalperin. More Alex Halperin.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 7 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations