When Not Talking Is Cheap

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Demonstrating less common sense than your average eggplant, Sen. Lindsey Graham has declared that the U.S. should stop talking to Iran until it learns to behave. “The time for talking is over,” he said. He made no suggestion as to what we should do about Iran’s nuclear program, however.

Cheap, reckless, stupid demagoguery, say I.

In other news, three women are dead and four wounded in today’s gun violence in Wisconsin. The alleged shooter also shot and killed himself. His estranged wife worked at the spa, but police aren’t saying if she was one of the victims.

Nate Silver: Gender Gap Near Historic High

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Nate Silver keeps advising to not get excited over any one poll, and here is an example. A few days ago a Pew poll showed Romney closing the “gender gap” and drawing equal to President Obama in support among women. Much crowing came from the Right.

But Nate Silver says today that, in fact, the gender gap is almost as extreme as it has ever been. Even factoring in the Pew poll, women support the President over Romney by 9 percentage points. Romney is 8 points ahead of the President among men, however. So there’s a significant gap.

I’m getting really irritated whenever I see a headline declaring which candidate is up or down someplace, and it’s based on only one poll.

Why Benghazi Is Not a Scandal

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It’s been hard to sort out the claims and counter-claims being made about the attack in Benghazi and how the Obama Administration has responded. But here are some must-read backgrounders:

Kevin Drum, “The Benghazi Controversy Explained.”

Erich Lach, “How the Benghazi Attack Became a GOP Talking Point.”

I recommend reading both articles. Together, they provide a clear picture of what probably happened in Benghazi; what the Obama Administration said about it, and when; how the Right, and particularly Fox News, has fabricated information to blur the tragic event into a scandal to hurt the Obama Administration.

Kevin Drum’s summation:

Bottom line: There were conflicting reports on the ground, and that was reflected in conflicting and sometimes confused reports from the White House. I don’t think anyone would pretend that the Obama’s administration’s response to Benghazi was anywhere near ideal. Nevertheless, the fact is that their statements were usually properly cautious; the YouTube video really did play a role; the attack was opportunistic, not preplanned; and it doesn’t appear to have had any serious connection with al-Qaeda. It’s true that it took about ten days for all this to really shake out, but let’s be honest: ten days isn’t all that long to figure out what really happened during a violent and chaotic attack halfway around the world. I get that it’s a nice opportunity for Republicans to score some political points in the runup to an election, but really, there’s not much there there.

See also David Ignatius, “CIA documents supported Susan Rice’s description of Benghazi attacks.”

Related post: “Fox News cost Mitt the debate” by Jonathan Bernstein. Bernstein’s overall point is that Republicans have a “policy deficit” and must resort to running on scandals.

When Ronald Reagan took office, conservative think tanks were ready with a host of ideas for transforming what government did and the way it did it. As recently as the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush campaigned on, for example, No Child Left Behind and a faith-based initiative. Does Romney have anything similar he’s talking about during this campaign? Not that I’ve heard.

What he’s substituted for policy is scandal, on the one hand, and symbolism, on the other.

Republicans’ reliance on a scandal framework is most obvious in their attacks on Barack Obama. The stimulus is reduced in this point of view to “Solyndra.” Energy? One pipeline to Canada.

Most of the time, there’s almost no real attempt to construct an argument against actual policies, to treat government programs proposed by the president as policies that one might agree or disagree with. That’s not always true – a lot of the arguments against the Affordable Care Act, and some of the case against the stimulus, really were policy-based. But more often Republicans have tried to frame their attacks around scandal.

Even when Mitt says he has a plan, it’s a plan with no details. For example, the famous five-point economic plan isn’t a plan at all, but a list of five things that would be helpful to grow an economy, accompanied by only vague suggestions for arriving at those five things.

It’s not so much a plan as a gimmick intended to represent a plan. Sort of like the stacks of paper Republicans in Congress trotted out in 2010 to show that they had a health care plan. And do you remember George Bush’s “National Strategy for Victory” from 2005? Republicans don’t do plans; they do props.

George McGovern, 1922-2012

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“McGovern was a die-hard idealist. His electoral loss embittered him, but not for long. He never abandoned his optimism or his faith in humanity. Neither did he give up his devotion to liberalism or what colleagues called his extraordinary sense of decency.” (New York Times obituary)

We should have cloned him when we had the chance.

Darrell Issa and the House Witch-hunt Committee

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Rep. Darrell Issa dealt another blow to American security yesterday by compromising the identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government. Josh Rogin reports at Foreign Affairs that Issa, as Chair of the House Oversight Committee, released a “document dump” of State Department communications without consideration of the people named in the “dump.”

Issa posted 166 pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department communications related to Libya on the committee’s website afternoon as part of his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the administration’s statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. …

… But Issa didn’t bother to redact the names of Libyan civilians and local leaders mentioned in the cables, and just as with the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables last year, the administration says that Issa has done damage to U.S. efforts to work with those Libyans and exposed them to physical danger from the very groups that had an interest in attacking the U.S. consulate.

Way to go, genius.

One of the cables released by Issa names a woman human rights activist who was leading a campaign against violence and was detained in Benghazi. She expressed fear for her safety to U.S. officials and criticized the Libyan government.

“This woman is trying to raise an anti-violence campaign on her own and came to the United States for help. She isn’t publicly associated with the U.S. in any other way but she’s now named in this cable. It’s a danger to her life,” the administration official said.

Another cable names a Benghazi port manager who is working with the United States on an infrastructure project. …

… One cable names a local militia commander dishing dirt on the inner workings of the Libyan Interior Ministry. Another cable names a militia commander who claims to control a senior official of the Libyan armed forces. Other cables contain details of conversations between third-party governments, such as the British and the Danes, and their private interactions with the U.S., the U.N., and the Libyan governments over security issues.

Issa is turning into a one-man threat to national security. He’s so focused on trying to find dirt on the Obama Administration regarding national security that he is totally oblivious to, you know, actual national security issues. But you know GOP priorities — they’ll destroy Obama if they have to burn down the whole United States to do it.

A spokesman for the House Witch-hunt Committee said that the Obama Administration hadn’t protected sensitive documents within the Benghazi consulate when it was attacked, so nyah nyah nyah, they leaked first. The State Department says that Issa didn’t consult with them about releasing the documents and apparently gave no consideration to the consequences of the release.

Power Tool Shorts Out

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This is precious. Steven Hayward writes at Power Tools that news media are turning against President Obama.

As I predicted last week, the media are starting to turn on him. Right now it is mostly showing up on the editorial pages in the ranks of unsigned endorsement editorials. Papers that endorsed Obama enthusiastically in 2008, like the Orlando Sentinel, are coming out for Romney.

On Memeorandum, Hayward’s rant was grouped with the following editorials:

The Salt Lake City Tribune endorses … Obama.

The Denver Post endorses … Obama.

The Tampa Bay Times endorses … Obama.

What’s that you said, Hayward?

Hayward is very excited that the New York Observer endorsed Romney. This shouldn’t be surprising, however. The Observer was purchased by trust-fund baby Jared Kushner in 2006, after which its better writers — the ones I liked, anyway — walked out. It used to be an intelligent read; now it’s mostly an upscale tabloid.

But isn’t it just like a wingnut to see a couple of endorsements (or one poll) as the beginning of a tsunami.

Reality and Its Detractors

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There possibly is no clearer measure of the difference between the U.S. Right and Left than the way we react to bad news. Righties immediately scream that the whatever-they-don’t-like is a lie, because it doesn’t fit what they think reality is supposed to be. And they blame somebody else, usually news media, or Democrats, or anybody but them. The whatever-it-is is never their fault.

Lefties accept the reality, sometimes perceiving the reality as even worse than it is. Then we blame ourselves (or at least each other), and form circular firing squads.

(It really does resemble the dynamics of domestic abuse situations, in which the abuser is perpetually flying into rages because the world isn’t the way he (or she) wants it to be. And then he (or she) concocts some reason to blame the significant other, or the kids, and takes the rage out on them. The abusee, all too often, blames her/himself and accepts the abuse.)

This week a Gallup daily tracking poll showed a significant lead for Mitt Romney. Nate Silver calmly and rationally explains why there is reason to think the Gallup poll is wrong. In a nutshell, the Gallup daily tracking poll has a history of swinging wildly in ways that don’t show up in other polls, and whenever that happens Gallup usually is wrong. See Nate for the wonky details; Business Insider provides a simplified version of what Nate wrote for those of us who don’t speak wonk.

Predictable headlines from rightie blogs:

“Nate Silver Blows Gasket as Gallup Shows Romney Pulling Away in the Presidential Horse Race” (American Power)

“Nate Silver Asks: Whose Shark Is This, and Why Do I Feel a Need to Jump It?” (The Other McCain)

“Romney Surges In Polls, Nate Silver Hardest Hit” (The Lonely Conservative).

That last headline is especially off, because the other polls, as in plural, are mostly showing Obama making a small gain over Romney (see also Sam Wang’s latest figures). It’s just the Gallup poll that shows a “surge.” Oh, and a Pew poll taken before the Tuesday debate shows Romney looking better on foreign policy. But that’s about it.

Speaking of foreign policy, Mittens hasn’t been talking about Libya lately. I wonder why?