Tag Archives: Washington Post

national news, political news

‘Failed presidency’? Hardly

3003122896_6fc69cb06e_o-998x656

Ed Rogers’s bias is crystal clear.

The Republican operative, writing in the Washington Post, calls Barack Obama a “failed president.” The president’s alleged “failures,” Rogers asserted, has led to the rise of Donald J. Trump and the crippling of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Read the essay here.

I am acutely aware that there are those who side with Rogers’s assessment of Barack Obama’s two terms in the White House. I also am aware that others disagree with him, who believe that the president’s tenure has been anything but a failure.

I happen to one of the latter.

I’m enjoying, however, listening to the field of Republican presidential candidates harp on the same thing. They decry American “weakness.” They blame the president for it. They say we’re weak militarily, economically, diplomatically, morally . . . have I left anything out?

I shake my head in wonderment at those assertions. Then I realize that they’re all politicians — yes, even Donald J. Trump, Carly FiorinaĀ and Ben Carson — seeking to score points.

That’s what politicians do, even those who say they aren’t politicians.

Democrats do it as well as Republicans.

However, I am going to let history be the judge about whether this presidency has failed.

So far, I’d say “no.”

The economy is stronger than it was when Barack Obama took office; we’ve continued to wage war against terrorists; our military remains the most powerful in the world; we’ve scored diplomatic victories, such asĀ securing a deal that prevents Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons — irrespective of what the critics allege; we’ve kept our adversaries in check; we’ve avoided a second major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Has this beenĀ a perfect seven years? No. Has any presidency skated to completion with a perfect score? Again, no. Not Ronald Reagan, FDR or Ike. All the great men who’ve held the office have endured missteps and tragedy.

However, this “failed presidency” talk comes in the heat of a most unconventional election year.

I will continue to keep that in mind as the rhetoric gets even hotter as the year progresses.

 

International news, national news, political news

Parker: How do you fight crazy?

k parker

I want to shake Kathleen Parker’s handĀ and tell her in person that I believe she is one of the country’sĀ most thoughtfulĀ political commentators.

She writes for the Washington Post and she calls herself a conservative, although I have doubts that today’s modern conservatives — if you want to call ’em that — would welcome her into their fold.

She has written another brilliant essay, this time about the war against the Islamic State.

How do you fight crazy?Ā she asks.

The path to defeating the Islamic State will take far more than “boots and bombs,” she says. It will require genius.

By that she means it will take a comprehensive combination of diplomacy, economic pressure and, yes, an application of military muscle.

It’s her belief, though, that bombs alone won’t do the job.

She writes: “What leverage does an army have against an enemy that welcomes death? We say: If you donā€™t stop murdering innocent people, weā€™re going to bomb you into oblivion.Ā They say: Bring it on. No, wait, weā€™ll do it ourselves. Boom.”

That is the nature of the enemy with whom we are at war and Parker is right to assert that our strategy cannot exclude other avenues.

Parker writes: “This is a call not to look away but to be solemnly cautious, thoughtful and creative. Is the Islamic Stateā€™s mission to establish a caliphate, thus to hasten the End Times, a mental disorder? Is it treatable? Is their tactical savagery pathological? Is there a doctor in the White House?”

Any ideas out there?

 

national news, political news

Memo to Marco: Quit your day job

Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., presides over Senate Foreign Relations Committee, subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, And Global Women's Issues hearing on overview of U.S. policy towards Haiti prior to the elections, Wednesday, July 15, 2015, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Marco Rubio doesn’t like his day job.

Too bad. He ought to quit and concentrate on the other job he is seeking.

He’s a United States senator from Florida seeking to become president of the United States.

Rubio told the Washington Post that the Senate frustrates him. His friends and close associates say he “hates” the Senate. It’s too slow. Too bound by procedure. Too this and too that. Rubio is a young man on the move and he wants a job that will enable him to get things done in a hurry.

Rubio wants outĀ of a job that pays him a pretty handsome salary, about 175 grand annually. But now that he’s seeking the presidency, he’s been off the Senate grid for most of the year.

His Senate absenteeism has drawn fire from the home folks. According to the Post: “On the campaign trail, Rubio comes under attack from rivals who say heā€™s become an absentee federal employee. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, in a less-than-subtle knock on his former homestate ally, has said senators who miss work should have their pay docked.

ā€œ’Itā€™s just, kind of, like, dude, you know, either drop out or do something,’ Bushā€™s son, Jeb Bush Jr., told New York University College Republicans earlier this month, in comments first reported by Politico Florida. The junior Bush, a Floridian, cast himself as an aggrieved constituent. ‘Weā€™re paying you to do something, it ainā€™t run for president.’ā€

I don’t begrudgeĀ the Republican senator forĀ wanting to seek higher office. I’ve noted already that other senators have done the same thing.

But the way I see it, if Rubio dislikes the job he has so much that he’s willing to admit it publicly, then perhaps it’s time for him to quit that job., let the governor of his state appoint a suitable successor — who’ll do the job and actually earn that six-figure salary — and then devote all his waking-hours energy to seeking that White House gig.

Rubio already has declared he won’t seek re-election to the Senate next year. He’s decided one term is enough.

Here, though, is a bit ofĀ history that Rubio should consider.

In the event he gets elected president next year, he’s likely to find that the presidency is hamstrung as well by certain processes. An anecdotal story has been bandied about Washington for the past 50-plus year about how another young, go-go senator got elected president and became frustrated that he couldn’t snap his fingers to get things done instantaneously.

President John F. Kennedy learned that his new job tied his hands on occasion and that he had to learn to work through the process. Then again, he hated the Senate, too.

Give up your day job, Marco.

national news, political news

Conspiracy comes back

conspiracy

Conspiracies never die. They’re immortal. They have more lives than thousands of cats.

Who killed JFK? What did FDR know about Pearl Harbor? Was 9/11 an inside job?

These things make me crazy.

Now comes the “vast right-wing conspiracy” put forwarded by Bill and Hillary Clinton. It’s back.

Bill Clinton to join the fight

The former president says all this talk about e-mails and whether his wife, the former secretary of state and current Democratic presidential candidate, is part of the “right-wing conspiracy” cooked up by his foes as he was considering a run for the presidency way back in 1991.

I wish he and his wife, Hillary Clinton, would leave that argument alone.

President Clinton told CNN about a menacing phone call he got from the White House as he was preparing to challenge President George H.W. Bush. The caller allegedly told the then-Arkansas governor he’d better not run, or else his foes would dig up tons of dirt on him.

Media officials — such as Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, no slouch as a journalist — said the call never occurred. Others have said the same thing.

Hillary Clinton coined the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” early in her husband’s presidency. She said conservatives conspired to cook up lies about the presidentĀ in an effort to destroy him.

There’s little doubt that some of the allegations of wrongdoing were bogus. Was it all part of a concerted conspiracy? No one has yet come close to proving that to be the case.

The conspiracy theory, though, is back.

Oh, brother.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Woodward knows a ‘scandal’ when he sees one

Bob Woodward knows his way around a political scandal.

He once was a young police reporter working for the Metro desk at the Washington Post. Then some goofballs broke into the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, another young reporter, began smelling a scandal in the works.

It turned out to be a big one. President Richard Nixon ended up resigning when it was learned he ordered the cover-up of the burglary.

Woodward sees a similarity between then and what’s happening now with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail controversy. The e-mail matter deals with messages Clinton sent on her personal server that might have contained highly classified information while she was serving as secretary of state.

According to The Hill: ā€œ’Follow the trail here,’ Woodward said on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ noting that emails erased from Clintonā€™s private server when she led the State Department were either sent or received by someone else, too.”

Clinton erased the e-mails, just like those audiotapes were erased back in the 1970s as the Watergate scandal began to creep up on President Nixon. That’s according to Woodward.

The man knows what a scandal looks like. The Clinton e-mail controversy isn’t a scandal. At least not yet.

national news, political news

What has become of Hillary the Invincible?

hillary

There once was a time — not that long ago — when Hillary Rodham Clinton was considered a shoo-in not just for her party’s presidential nomination, but for the office itself.

She was Hillary the Invincible. The 2016 Democratic presidential nomination was, to borrow that clichĆ©, “hers to lose” — although I’ve never quite understood what phrase actually means.

Then came some nasty stuff.

The Benghazi matter doesn’t count. I do not consider the Benghazi tragedy to be a “scandal,” as some media blowhards on the right have called it.

Here’s what is more troubling in my view: the e-mail matter.

The former secretary of state revealed some months ago that she used her personal e-mail server to communicate with others about, um, State Department business. That disclosure troubled me when I heard and I troubles me even more now. Why? Because of reports that — as some have feared — messages sent out into the public domain contained classified information.

The Justice Department has now ordered Clinton to turn over her personal e-mail server to the spooks at DOJ, who’ll look over all the material that went out on it. But as the Washington Post’s Chis Cillizza notes: Ā “It’s impossible to see this as anything but a bad thing for her presidential prospects.”

The trustworthiness issue is beginning now to dog the former first lady/U.S. senator/secretary of state. Is she for real? Is she authentic? Can she be trusted to tell us the truth all the time?

Yes, I am having doubts about all of that, right along with a lot of other Americans.

The Democratic field already has three other candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination. I’m waiting to hear whether a fourth non-Clinton will jump in … that would be Vice President Joe Biden, about whom much has been written during his lengthy career in government.

He’s become the target of late-night comedians’ jokes because of his occasional gaffes. No one, though, doubts his authenticity or his motives for seeking a career in public service.

Whether he runs, though, likely might depend on how much damage gets done to Hillary Clinton’s once-seemingly invincible image.

 

national news, political news

Nixon could have squashed scandal … easily

2 Comments

Forty-three years ago today, President Nixon missed an opportunity to squash what had been termed a “third-rate burglary.” All he had to do was deliver a brief speech on national television that went something like this:

My fellow Americans. Good evening.

By now you’ve heard about the break-in at the Watergate office complex and hotel in Washington, D.C. Several burglars were apprehended by the D.C. police and arrested and charged with breaking and entering.Ā 

You also have heard that the men apparently were working at the behest of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. They broke into the Democratic National Committee offices and allegedly rifled through some files, looking for papers relevant to the Democrats’ campaign they intend to launch against me this fall.

I called DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien and expressed my deepest regret for this intrusion into the Democratic Party’s office.

It doesn’t stop there. Today, I fired the head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President and his senior staff. I informed all of them that this kindĀ of chicanery will not be tolerated by me, my closest advisers, and anyone associated with my re-election campaign.

Accordingly, I have instructed the attorney general, the director of the FBI and have asked local police to do all they can to get to the bottom of this caper and to ensure that anyone caught is brought to justice as quickly as possible.

I want to apologize as well to the American people for this shameful criminal act.

Thank you and good night.

That event didn’t happen on June 17, 1972. What did happen is that President Nixon launched the Mother of All Cover-Ups. He instructed the FBI to stonewall the investigation into what happened. He told his senior White House staff to do all it could to block any and all inquiries.

He abused the office to which he had been elected and was about to be re-elected later that year in historic fashion.

Contemporary politicians today keep yapping about the “lawlessness” of the current administration. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is among those who toss around the “lawless” label a bit too carelessly.

Back when young Teddy was in diapers, the Nixon administration set the standard for lawlessness that hasn’t been met since. If he wants to see how an administration can flout federal law, he need look no further than what the Nixon administration did in the name of the man at the top.

So … there you have it.

The Watergate break-in occurred 43 years ago. It could have been put aside and relegated to the kind of story it was in the beginning: a minor cop story covered by the Metro desk of the Washington Post. Then two young reporters — Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward — began smelling a rat.

They found it — in the Oval Office.

 

 

political news

What? Dr. Carson’s campaign flames out?

What in the world is happening to Ben Carson’s presidential campaign?

Four senior aides have quit. Political action committees designed to raise money for the candidate are raising dough against him.

This doesn’t look good for the TEA party darling.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ben-carson%e2%80%99s-2016-campaign-rocked-as-top-aides-depart/ar-BBkKqsZ

Honest to goodness, this disappoints me.

I really want Carson — the renowned neurosurgeon — to stay the course. I want him in the crowded field of Republican Party presidential candidates. I want him to mix it up with the more seasoned pols who are lined up alongside him in the race to defeat presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the autumn of 2016.

Is it because I like his ideas? Umm, no.

It is because I want to see this man test the system that seems to reward veteran politicians and seems to discriminate against novices. (As an aside, allow me to add that another possible GOP novice, Donald Trump, fits into a category all by himself; therefore, he’s exempt from my charitable view of presidential campaign newcomers.)

Here’s how the Washington Post reported the tumult within the Carson campaign: “Carson is a hot commodity on the right-wing speaking circuit and has fast become a leading candidate, winning straw votes at conservative gatherings and rising in public polls.

“But his campaign has been marked by signs of dysfunction and amateurism, alarming supporters who privately worry that Carsonā€™s sprawling circle of boosters is fumbling his opportunity. And, they argue, the candidate has been nonchalant about the unrest.”

My advice to Dr. Carson is that he’d better get less nonchalant and more engaged if he’s seriously running for the presidency of the United States.

His TEA party faithful are counting on him. So are those of us who want to see a political amateur make a dent in the good ol’ boy system.

national news

'Government ethics' takes another hit

Government ethics has taken another punch in the chops on Capitol Hill.

Imagine that.

It turns out several members of Congress went on a junket in 2013 paid for by the government of Azerbaijan.Ā Four of them are from Texas: Democrats Ruben Hinojosa and Sheila Jackson Lee, and Republicans Ted Poe and Steve Stockman (who’s no longer in Congress).

http://www.texastribune.org/2015/05/13/four-texas-members-congress-took-trip-secretly-fun/

The Azerbaijanis showered the members with gifts, wined and dined them and apparently tried to purchase some influence regardingĀ energy policy.

The Washington Post reported: “Lawmakers and their staff members received hundreds of thousands of dollarsā€™ worth of travel expenses, silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani rugs valued at $2,500 to $10,000, according to the ethics report. Airfare for the lawmakers and some of their spouses cost $112,899, travel invoices show.”

The host government paid for every penny of it, according to the Post.

The ethics investigation is the most extensive since the congressional ethics office was created in response to the Jack Abramoff scandal involving payoffs, bribes and assorted influence-peddling deeds perpetrated by the one-time wheeler-dealer.

Most damning of all is that it was done under the radar. The Post reported: “The State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, known as SOCAR, allegedly funneled $750,000 through nonprofit corporations based in the United States to conceal the source of the funding for the conference in the former Soviet nation, according to the 70-page report by theĀ Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative arm of the House.”

Gosh. If it was OK to do this, why do you suppose the Azerbaijanis sought to hide it from congressional ethics investigators? Hey, maybe it was illegal. Right?

Here’s the question: Did the members of Congress who took the money know it was being hidden?

We have laws that prohibit foreign governments from trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. There well might have been more a few of those laws broken here, not to mention serious violations of congressional ethics rules.

Don’t these people get it?

business news, national news, political news

Estate tax is worth keeping on the books

Time for a confession, which some of you might already have suspected.

I used to write editorials for daily newspapers that ran counter to my own beliefs and principles. Why? Well, as a former colleague once told me: If you take the man’s money, you play by the man’s rules.

So, there you have it. I was getting paid to write editorials for newspapers that had different slants than mine, so I wrote the words, gritted my teeth on occasion — and then accepted the paycheck.

One issue with which I had a disagreement with our newspaper’s editorial policy was the estate tax, or “death tax,” as some have called it. My bosses wanted it repealed. My former publisher at the Amarillo Globe-News (not theĀ guy who runs the place now, but his predecessor) was adamant that we repeal the estate tax. Why punish heirs to estates, he argued, when the person who built the wealth wants to be able to hand it down to his or her heirs?

I’m sure my ex-boss is happy with the U.S. House of Representatives voting this week to repeal the estate tax.

I am not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/04/17/why-are-republicans-pushing-estate-tax-repeal-its-their-nature/

As Paul Waldman writes in the Washington Post: “Republicans say that they arenā€™t really trying to help wealthy heirs; instead, this is motivated by their deep concern for the fate of family farms and small businesses. But today, the first $5.43 million of any estate is exempt from taxes. Thatā€™s the single most important fact to understand about this tax.”

Did you get that? Nearly $5.5 million of any estate is tax exempt!

My congressman, Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, Texas, has been at the forefront of the estate tax repeal effort since joining Congress in 1995. He’s got a dog in that hunt. His family owns a lot of ranch land in Donley County and he doesn’t want any of it taxed when the day comes to hand it over to his heirs. I understand Thornberry’s interest in repealing the estate tax.

Here’s a bit more from Waldman: “According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, ‘In 2013, the most recent year for which final numbers are available, there were 2.6 million deaths in the United States, and 4,700 estate tax returns reporting some tax liability were filed. Thus, taxable estate tax returns represented approximately one-fifth of one percent of deaths in 2013.’ā€

One-fifth of one percent!

Is that enough of a tax to call for its outright repeal? If yes, then who benefits from it? I reckon it’s the extremely wealthy who have estates valued at far more than $5.43 million, which already is exempt from taxes. Remember?

What will be the fate of this repeal effort? If the Senate approves it as well, President Obama will veto it.