reflectivepundit

Senator McCain and his Cabal’s Attack on Ambassador Rice

 By Brigitte L. Nacos

You would think that the very politicians who hype the “fiscal cliff” and claim to do the business of the people would have more pressing problems to concentrate on than the non-issue of UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s role in what Senator McCain and his cabal try to elevate to a Watergate-like scandal.

To be sure, the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11^th of this year raised legitimate questions about the protection of American facilities in Libya and other volatile areas in the region.

Those questions are rightfully asked and must be answered as result of an ongoing State Department investigation. UN ambassadors are not at all charged with the security of US missions abroad.

Yet, McCain and his allies single out Ms. Rice for her role as chosen administration spokesperson who explained the Benghazi attack afterwards according to information provided by the CIA.  

If President Obama nominates Rice to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Senators threaten, they will not confirm her.

Perhaps there are better candidates for State than Ms. Rice. But to oppose her on account of her bit part in the post-Benghazi explanations is utter nonsense.

Explaining the Benghazi strike as spontaneous uprising or a planned act of terrorism after the event did not change the outcome: the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

The death of any American caused by senseless violence is regrettable. In her column today, Maureen Dowd piles on when she characterizes the events in Libya as “slaughter in Benghazi” in a piece critical of Rice.

Senators McCain and his side-kick Lindsay Graham are staging nothing more than a farce that is contrary to their behavior in the face of real deceit of Congress, the public, and the international community: the role of then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration’s selling cooked intelligence about alleged weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein as reason for the Iraq War.

Senator McCain and his colleagues did not hesitate a moment to confirm the much adored Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State in spite of her compliance in the big Iraq lie.

Here is the death toll for the Iraq War: A total of 4,804 coalition troops were killed, 4,486 Americans. Many, many more were injured—physically and/or emotionally. And then there are tens of thousands of Iraqi victims.

Mind you, Ambassador Rice had absolutely nothing to do with the death of four Americans in Benghazi. The same cannot be said of her namesake with respect to the high cost of the Iraq war in human and financial terms.  

The so-called Fiscal Cliff is a Red Herring

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The “fiscal cliff” that according to conservatives and Wall Street types will plunge the country’s economy and fiscal system into a deep crisis is nothing more than a red herring.

After they failed to buy the presidency and the majority in the U.S. Senate, the same billionaires and corporate advocacy groups in cooperation  with their GOP allies in House and Senate try now to blackmail the reelected President Obama and Democrats in the Congress to agree to their fiscal rescue plan.

Their old and new position is simply this: No higher tax rates for high and highest incomes!

Yes, the Republican leaders plead for cooperation and non-partisanship for the best of the country.

But their idea of cooperation means agreement to their unfair tax policies.

Last week, a strong majority of voters rejected that GOP’s tax agenda.

According to exit polls, 47% of voters want higher tax rates for incomes of $250,000 and higher; an additional 13% wants across the board tax increases.

Although all the talk is about tax increases, at risk here is the end of the tax cuts, mostly for the rich that were adopted during George W. Bush’s presidency. Those tax cuts—along with two costly wars—are responsible for our high budget deficits in the last decade.

It cannot be disastrous to return to the tax rates of the Clinton years, when the country enjoyed an economic boom period, high employment, and a balanced federal budget—indeed, a budget surplus.  

The president does not want a whole sale return to the Clinton tax rates but insists on higher rates for the high and highest income strata.

That is the right position. And the one he promised during the campaign.

On this, President Obama cannot compromise.

Rather, as Senator Patty Murray has suggested, going over the fiscal cliff than giving in to GOP pressure.

If all taxes go up this coming January because of the GOP and its super-wealthy masters, the vast majority of Americans with low and middle incomes will rightfully blame the protectors of the super-rich.

The Tea Party Is Not Over

By Brigitte L. Nacos

While President Barack Obama won reelection and the Democrats additional seats in the U.S. Senate, some of the Tea Party’s high profile candidates lost their races for the Senate (Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock) and the House (Joe Walsh, Allen West).

Some observers concluded that the election results signaled the beginning of the end for the Tea Party movement and its political influence. According to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s web site, “The 2012 elections have been the undoing of the 2010 Tea Party tsunami that crashed upon Washington. The Tea Party is over.”

That seems more wishful thinking than reality based on actual election results. Borrowing from Mark Twain I believe that reports of the Tea Party’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Beginning with Congress’s upper chamber, the number of Tea Party endorsed U.S. Senator’s will increase at least from four Tea Party Caucus members in the current Senate (Jerry Moran of Kansas, Mike Lee of Utah, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Rand Paul of Kentucky) by three (Ted Cruz of Texas, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Deb Fischer of Nebraska) for a total of seven. This is hardly a weak result for the Tea Party movement.

Of the 60 House members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, six did not run for reelection, 47 were reelected, six lost their races and one race seems not decided yet.

Besides the 47 reelected Tea Party Caucus members, there will be additional GOP Representatives endorsed by some Tea Party or Tea Party-like group. For example, a number of the “strong conservatives” endorsed by Rick Santorum’s Patriot Voices PAC were elected to the House, among them Missouri’s Ann Wagner and Montana’s Steve Daines.

There is no official record of Tea Party endorsements for all candidates. The Tea Party Express, one of a few national Tea Party organizations, officially endorsed a number of candidates. But so did many of the local groups. But we do not have complete numbers. Nor do we have complete numbers for the total number of Tea Party endorsed members in the current House since not all joined the Tea Party Caucus.

All told, this is the conclusion based on data, not on wishful thinking: The increase of Tea Party endorsed members in the next U.S. Senate and the far from devastating decrease in the House based on Tea Party Caucus members do not justify to declare the Tea Party movement dead.

Time for President Obama to Use the Bully Pulpit and Assert Strong Leadership

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Thanks to his clear victory this week President Obama has replenished political capital to assert the same strong leadership he displayed in reaction to Hurricane Sandy.

To be sure, Republican leaders in Congress have shown none of the qualities that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie demonstrated when he abandoned partisan politics and cooperated closely with the president in the face of a horrendous crisis for the benefit of the many hard hit hurricane victims in his state.

President Obama must nevertheless strive to install the bipartisan Obama-Christie cooperation model in Washington in order to find agreements to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. Never mind that Republican leaders, who might want to cooperate, will continue to feel threatened by the wrath of uncompromising Tea Partiers and Grover Norquist, the unelected ruler of the GOP’s no-new-tax dictate.

The president’s stump speeches in the last phase of the campaign underscored that he is an excellent communicator if he so chooses.

Unfortunately, the great communicator Obama was mostly absent from the political arena for most of his first term. Had he explained, for example, in plain language the provisions of the “Obamacare” package, he could have enlisted solid public support.

He left it to the opposition to fill the gap with misinformation.

This must change. In today’s mass society with its many forms of mass communication and mass self-communication a strong leader must constantly inform and engage the people rallying their support for policies benefiting the vast majority and opposition against those measures designed for the super-wealthy 1 percent.

First of all, and before the new congress convenes, the so-called fiscal cliff must be dealt with decisively. Unless there is finally a fair agreement on how to handle the expiring tax cuts adopted during the George W. Bush presidency, there will be across-the-board spending cuts in Pentagon and domestic programs.

President Obama must insist on doing away with all of the favorable tax rates for the rich and super-rich while preserving those for the lowest and middle income groups. He should muster all his communicative qualities to lead a vigorous public discourse on good and bad ways to deal with the fiscal crisis.

And he should try to win former President Bill Clinton to be his negotiator-in-chief with congressional leaders in the upcoming struggle to avoid going over the financial cliff.

But ultimately it is the presidential bully pulpit that matters most.

With the Core of his Economic Growth Policy Refuted, Mitt Romney is Like the Emperor Without Any Clothes

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) withdrew an economic report that “found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.”

No wonder that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell did not want the report to see the light of day. After all, the findings of the non-partisan congressional research unit unmasked the centerpiece of the GOP’s and presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic policy as divorced from reality. Contrary to claims that lowering the tax rates for the highest incomes allows “job creators” to give rise to a wonderful job market, economic data of the last eight decades do not confirm those claims. According to the withdrawn CRS report,

“Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. The share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. The evidence does not suggest necessarily a relationship between tax policy with regard to the top tax rates and the size of the economic pie, but there may be a relationship to how the economic pie is sliced.”

In other words, while lower top tax rates will not magically turn the super-rich into job creators, they surely will increase their own wealth—at the expense of the rest of us.

Without the campaign promise that his policies will create 12 million new jobs, presidential candidate Romney is like the emperor without any clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale.

The problem is that in his campaign appearances Mr. Romney continues to tell his fairy tale again and again. According to public opinion polls about half of the electorate buys his story.

Obviously, Mitt Romney has taken flip-flopping and lying to a new art form.  

Today’s Washington Post’s editorial suggests that Romney “seems to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove him wrong.“

If Romney wins next Tuesday, his fool-the-voters strategy might well become the predominant campaign model of the future.

What a prospect!