GOP Candidates: America Unhinged

by hilzoy

(1): The Republican candidates for President seem to be engaged in some sort of arms race to see who can say the toughest-sounding things on foreign policy. Since very few of them seem to be constrained by any sort of realism (among the leading candidates, only McCain seems to retain some tenuous connection to the real world), this leads them to say things that are basically insane.

Fareed Zakaria, in an article that's worth reading in its entirety:
"More troubling than any of Bush's rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him.

"They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. In the last five and a half years, with bipartisan support, Washington has invaded two countries and sent troops around the world from Somalia to the Philippines to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain.

It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. It has set up secret prisons in Europe and a legal black hole in Guantánamo, to hold, interrogate and—by some definitions—torture prisoners. How would Giuliani really go on the offensive? Invade a couple of more countries? (...)

The competition to be the tough guy is producing new policy ideas, all right—ones that range from bad to insane.

Romney, who bills himself as the smart, worldly manager, recently explained that while "some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo, my view is we ought to double [the size of] Guantánamo." In fact, Romney should recognize that Guantánamo does not face space constraints. The reason that President Bush wants to close it down—and it is he who has expressed that desire—is that it is an unworkable legal mess with enormous strategic, political and moral costs. In a real war you hold prisoners of war until the end of hostilities. When does that happen in the war on terror? Does Romney propose that the United States keep an ever-growing population of suspects in jail indefinitely without trials as part of a new American system of justice?

In 2005 Romney said, "How about people who are in settings—mosques, for instance—that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping?" This proposal is mild compared with what Rep. Tom Tancredo suggested the same year. When asked about a possible nuclear strike by Islamic radicals on the United States, he suggested that the U.S. military threaten to "take out" Mecca."

"Take out Mecca." That's the ticket. I wonder who will be the first to suggest preemptively turning the entire Middle East -- or, better yet, the entire rest of the world -- into radioactive glass on the grounds that we can't wait for Muslims to become terrorists; we have to nip them (all of them) in the bud? Surely that's the logical endpoint of this little bidding war.

(2) They say things that are flat-out wrong, and very few people call them on it. Atrios notes one example:

"MITT ROMNEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS: Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that -- or a null set -- that is that if you're saying let's turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in.

But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in."

Um: no. No, no, no. (Good for Paul Begala for bringing this up on CNN: "You can't get something like that wrong. I mean, that's like -- that's like saying the Mexicans bombed Pearl Harbor."

Scorn and contempt for Mike Murphy, "Republican strategist" (according to Anderson Cooper), who tries to say that Romney was actually right.)
Matt Yglesias spots another:

"It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States."

Do I even have to bother refuting this one? For all its awfulness, Iraq was not harboring terrorists before we invaded. (Preemptive note: Ansar al-Islam was in a part of Iraq that Saddam did not control.) It was not going to harbor terrorists. Saddam's involvement with terrorists was minimal: he sheltered some aging ex-terrorists, and paid some suicide bombers' families. Now, it's a recruiting tool and training ground for terrorists, and the likelihood that it will become a base for al Qaeda is much, much greater than it ever was before.

And that was just the first five minutes.

These are serious issues. It matters to have a President who understands the most basic facts about them. And yet two of the three leading Republican candidates make huge mistakes in the first five minutes of the debate, and most of the press doesn't seem to notice.

(3) Some rather significant members of the press choose to spend their time talking about the virility and vigor of the Republican candidates instead. Politico's Roger Simon on Mitt Romney:

"FIRST PLACE: Mitt Romney
Analysis: Strong, clear, gives good soundbite and has shoulders you could land a 737 on. Not only knows how to answer a question, but how to duck one. Asked why he was so late in deciding to oppose abortion, Romney smoothly replied: “I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I became pro-life.”

His strongest line came about his being a Mormon: “I also believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping that I’ll distance myself from my church so that that’ll help me politically. And that's not going to happen.”

Romney does well in these debates but he is still languishing in the national polls. In the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted May 29-June 1, Romney was still in single digits, tied for fourth place with Newt Gingrich, who may not even run. Romney can’t debate his way to the White House. He needs something more and he better find it before Fred Thompson gets in the race for real and starts using up all the oxygen.

Score: 82.346 (out of 100.)"

Nothing, zero, nada, on whether he would in any way make a good President. Nothing on any position he took, or any proposal he made. Politico might as well be commenting on a fashion show.

Of course, no one can top Chris Matthews in the bizarro comments about candidates' toughness and virility sweepstakes. Here's one of my recent favorites:

"MATTHEWS: Who would win a street fight? Rudy Giuliani -- just think of a street fight now over in Queens somewhere. It's a dark night, it's about 2 in the morning. Two guys are out behind the building, right? On a vacant lot. Rudy Giuliani or President Ahmadinejad, who would win that fight?"

And, via Digby, this, about Giuliani:

"FINEMAN: He doesn‘t—he looks like a guy who, if he had had the opportunity to grow up as a hunter, would have been a great one.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

FINEMAN: He just gives off the aura of a guy who wouldn‘t be afraid to use a gun, you know? That‘s just—and that‘s the record that he had in New York."

If Giuliani had grown up as a hunter, he would have been a great one. If I had wheels, I would be a trolleycar. A trolleycar who could beat Ahmedinejad in a street fight!

Honestly: sometimes I just despair.

Digby and Atrios are puzzled by this. I share Digby's utter bafflement on one point:
"When they start going on and on about the babe magnet Fred Thompson or the hunky Giuliani I have to shake my head in wonder."

Me too. And I do think that Chris Matthews has some sort of bizarre fascination with the sex appeal of various candidates. But there's one part of this that I think is fairly straightforward, namely: contempt for their audience. I think they really believe that one of the things their audience is most interested in is who comes off as tough and masculine, where 'tough and masculine' doesn't mean anything genuinely interesting, like the toughness McCain would have had to have to stick out torture, but some degenerate version, the sort that means nothing more than: who seems like he would have been a good hunter, if only he had ever learned to hunt, or who would win a brawl with Ahmadinejad, in the imaginary world in which Giuliani isn't thirteen years older than Ahmadinejad.

Rich Lowry thinks they're right. In one of his most disturbing Corner posts ever, he wrote:
"Have been talking to some smart people today about Giuliani. Two of them said independently that the appeal of Giuliani is he'd be “a tough SOB—for you,” and that he'd be “a d—head—for you.”

Another said (and he hadn't seen Kate's e-mail post yesterday) that a Giuliani supporter he knows considers the nasty divorce a kind of asset because it speaks to his toughness."

If we have reached the point at which it's an electoral asset that a candidate chose to tell his wife of sixteen years that he was divorcing her in a press conference -- if more voters approve than disapprove of gratuitous cruelty to a person one once loved who is the mother of one's children -- then I really will -- well, OK, I won't actually despair, but I'll be pretty seriously troubled, and I'll admit that Simon, Matthews, et al are right to hold their audiences in contempt. In the meantime, I just wish they'd try to care a little about who would actually make a decent President.


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.