Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

What can I say? SEC_Chick is one of my favorite Imaginary Friends.

Speaking of Justice Scalia, I think that the GOP has made a mistake in making a categorical statement that they will not let a nomination go through before a name is even floated. I understand why the presidential candidates say that; they're all playing to the base to get nominated. But McConnell et al should know better. I think it plays into the Democratic Party's hands for the general election - there's quite a few senate seats in play, and this issue might hurt the GOP in swing states.

I've got no problem with the idea that the GOP-lead Senate can reject a nominee on any grounds they see fit. I just think it plays better when you say something like "we'll wait to see who is nominated and will perform our constitutional duty to advise and consent," and then pick the gal/guy apart during the hearings to show the country why the guy/gal is not fit to serve. (Credit this idea to @dick_nixon on Twitter. Dude is brilliant.)

I've also got no objection to a filibuster of a nominee, although as Slave and I agreed (I think) several years ago, the senate should require a *real* filibuster a la Strom Thurmond and Harry Byrd trying to stop the the Voting Rights Act, not the modern "oh dear, we didn't get 63 votes on this - too bad" version.

Go hard or go home.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

But this results in the delightful prospect of several months of talking about President Tyler, Henry Clay, and the last time a major American Party committed political suicide, in part by holding up the Supreme Court nominations of the guy it made President. Anything that results in a discussion of obscure antebellum history can't be all bad. Or in which the Republicans take as their hero a sectionalist faction of a doomed political party.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Apro ... uh, speaking of the antebellum era, I just read (finally) The Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson upon the recommendation of Ta-Nehisi Coates in one of his articles or Tweets or something. Good read on the lead-up to the war and the war itself.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I am aware of the events surrounding the McGovern nomination (and to a lesser extent Jimmy Carter) and how those events figured into the calculus of adding Superdelegates. I also know that a Sanders winning the popular vote/Hillary on SDs is not the most likely, or even a reasonably likely outcome (hence my mention of 'crossing my fingers' to indicate my wishful thinking).

It is possible, but I agree it in large measure would depend on the unlikely scenario of committed SDs sticking with Hillary if she looks like a loser. The thing is that the entire concept of Superdelegates is pretty elitist and undemocratic in itself, such that getting SDs onboard is a viable strategy for an otherwise mediocre candidate.


As to Scalia, I think Chuck Schumer would agree that any Obama nominee should be opposed. And it's not like Obama himself would ever vote against an SC nominee with whom he disagreed, or filibuster, or anything like that.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I hate that I have a tendency towards mansplaining. I apologize.

Agreed on the concept of super delegates being a bit anti-democratic.

No arguments - let them filibuster away. I just think the idea that Obama is somehow required to refrain from nominating someone because he only has 330 days left in his presidency is a transparent piece of disingenuous bullshit. Elections have consequences - in 2012, he won a second term. And in 2014 the GOP gained (or maintained - I forget) majority control of the Senate.

They each have a role to play under the Constitution. They should each play their roles as they see fit. I think if the GOP stands on the preemptive "no" it will hurt them in November, but what do I know?

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Right. If he's winning by a decent margin on regular delegates, the super delegates will go along. But if it's super close, they'll have to decide it and there will be uproar from the Bernie crowd.

Although the hand wringing about it is kind of funny, as the point of super delegates is to protect the party (none of this is democracy, btw) from outside influences. Like, perhaps, a candidate who spent years not being a member of the party and signing up solely for the purposes of running for president.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

It seems like a massive tactical mistake. McConnell has to know that Hillary is still the most likely next president. Heck, there's an argument that Bernie is second most likely. Betting on the chance that one of Rubio/Trump/Cruz occupies the White House a year from now over taking the substantial leverage he has right now to get a moderate nominee.

But maybe he will cave and to let the GOP nominee try to make it a big issue for them?

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I love the new GOP line of pointing to what Schemer said -- as opposed to what Dems in the Senate actually DID -- when Alito was nominated.

Today's GOP: "We can't be as reasonable and measured and bi-partisan as Harry Reid. We're only shooting to be as good as Chuck Schumer."

Schumer was an idiot to propose that the Senate prevent ANY nominee from going thru. Fortunately -- much as I don't like Alito - the Dems were not filled with idiot extremists. But it appears that the GOP is -- indeed, based on your post and many others like it, it appears that is what the GOP aspires to, and has achieved.


As for Obama -- he "voted against" a nominee. The horror. The GOP is too cowardly to actually have a vote.

Re: Cruz with the first cut, McConnell with the kaishaku
 

BUT BUT BUT you are ignoring the GREAT PRECEDENT when this was done during TYLER'S TERM - you know, the last time a major political party committed seppuku in the United States. Ah, those crazy Whigs!

Re: Cruz with the first cut, McConnell with the kaishaku
 

don't be discouraged that this isn't seeming to gain traction. Seinfeld was a bust until season 2.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

While I generally believe that the GOP should vote down the sort of person that Obama would be likely to nominate, and I wish Obama would not nominate, I understand why he would want to. I do think there should be an up or down vote, as putting the job of the Senate off to protect individual Senators from going on the record in a difficult vote is detestable. And I loathe it as much when McConnell does it as I did when Reid so frequently availed himself of that tactic (pretty much all of 2014).

As to what the Dems actually did with the Alito nomination? You mean the failed filibuster initiated by Kerry and joined by Obama? I guess you are correct in that all of the Dems were not idiot extremists at that time, but there was certainly a concerted effort to obstruct a SC nominee for political reasons. That was not an attempt where the majority voted to block a nominee; it was an attempt by a minority to obstruct.

And as for being as reasonable as Harry Reid, you do recall that Reid personally led the effort to prevent many judicial nominees from getting a hearing at all in 2005. Just ask Bill Frist.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Harry Reid didn't support the idea of preventing any Bush nominees. The Dems had enough votes to sustain a filibuster, but Reid and other refused to support that tactic.

But hey, the GOP can't be as reasonable as Harry Reid. How pathetic.

Iraq
 

Really interesting article in Vox about the the lead-up to the Iraq War. It wasn't lies or mistaken intelligence, this theory goes, it was driven by the views of the neoconservatives who viewed the American military as a means to overthrow authoritarian governments we disagreed with and spread democracy. Not bad in the abstract, but the devil is in the details.

And even if one agrees with the decision of GHWB/Cheney/Powell/Schwaezkopf to stop at the border after expelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, it's hard to argue with then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who wanted to shoot down Saddam's helicopters to keep the Republican Guard from crushing the Kurds and the Shiites in southern Iraq who took us at our word and rose up against Saddam.

Anyway, worth a read. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/1102210...oconservatives

Re: Iraq
 

It is a good article, and it demonstrates how the neo-con ideology overwhelmed all reason and rational thought -- from how evidence of WMD was interpreted, to how obviously flawed sources were credited, to how every aspect that might make the neocon goal difficult to achieve was simply dismissed (e.g.: If you believe that Shiites and Sunnis will start fighting each other, then the whole project gets very difficult. Ergo, there are no real divisions between them. See also, the will welcome us as liberators.)

But I disagree with your last point, sort of. The mistake Bush I made was not failing to take out the Republican Guard and the Iraqi air power. The mistake he made was encouraging Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein in the first place. It's really easy to say "if Bush had taken out the Iraqi air force, many thousands of Shiites would not have been slaughtered." Okay. But what would have happened next? Would Saddam simply have surrendered, or would the country have fallen in to a sustained civil war between government and rebel forces that were more balanced in their military power? (See, e.g., Syria) How long would that war have lasted? How many factions would the rebels have split into? How many more people would have died, from all the factors that a long and drawn-out civil war creates? Would a cycle of Shiites killing Sunnis and Sunnis killing Shiites have followed? (See, e.g., Iraq)

We went there with a clear and specific mission: End the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The war should have stopped once that mission was achieved, plus at most some additional degrading of Iraq's ability to lash out again (i.e., destroy much of their armored forces, which had already happened). The mission was not to overthrow Hussein, nor to support a rebellion against him, nor to do anything inside of Iraq's borders; it was solely to defend the sovereignty of Kuwait.

Bush should not have made promises that he did not intend to keep, and could not have kept. And for all the times that I've heard people say "he should have prevented Hussein from crushing the Shiite uprising," no one -- particularly Wolfie -- has given a credible analysis of what would have happened next.

I realize that it is cold-hearted as hell to say what I am, in essence, saying: That we should have let Iraqis deal with their own problems, even if that meant a lot of them died, so long as those problems didn't cross their borders. But unless we were prepared to do a hell of a lot more than just shoot down some helicopters, that is actually what we should have done.

Re: Iraq
 

I fully agree with this.

What do you know? We can agree on something!

Re: If you want to be friends, be friendly
 

There are ways to help them with their problems short of invading them and killing a bunch of people, of course.

Re: Iraq
 

But that's pretty much what we did do a little bit later - the no-fly zones in Northern Iraq allowed the Kurds to essentially set up their own little autonomous region. And we didn't have to occupy Baghdad or mediate between tribes and factions and sectarian groups.

And it's ok to use pre-limited military means - it sometimes even works. See e.g. the former Yugoslavia (bombing and cruise missiles got the Serbs to the table, not the 82nd Airborne). But even if shooting down Saddam's helicopters ended up not working, it would have been worth it. Maybe GHWB shouldn't have encouraged the Shiites to rise, but once he did, a no-fly zone was really a no-brainer.

Sometimes we have to make a gesture towards preventing slaughter. I mean, could Clinton have stopped the massacres in Rwanda? No, but he could have (and I think has said that he *should* have) taken doable military action - supporting the French with logistics and transport, jamming the airwaves to prevent the government's radio station inciting and directing the mobs. And I realize that our interests prevent us from doing this (too many examples to list, but let's include our current unwillingness to even mention our objections to ethnic cleansing to the newly democratic government in Burma), but in Iraq it was in our interest, and in Rwanda it was not against our interest to do something.

I'm fine with recognizing the limits of our power and the need to not put American lives at risk unless necessary. I just think it's a sliding scale - logistical support is low risk, smart bombs and cruise misses a little more risk, shooting down helicopters a little more (though Iraq's air defenses had been wiped out at that point) - and all are far less risky than sending in ground troops, which really should be avoided as much as possible. Afghanistan 2001? Absolutely. Kuwait/Iraq 1990? Strong yes. Peacekeeping in Bosnia 1996? Probably (it ended up not requiring combat, but that's ex post facto). Panama 1989? Maybe other options, but I thought it was a reasonable decision. Grenada 1983? Um, post-Vietnam muscle flexing, but at least the medical students were happy to see the USMC. Iraq 2003? Nope.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I can't believe this is even up for debate. McConnell is flat-out ignoring the Constitution by suggesting he won't even put a nominee to an up or down vote. This whole topic makes me furious. There is zero integrity in the Senate.

I disagree with voting against based on anything other than qualifications--and yes I understand that it's now impossible to divorce politics from how any of these assholes defines the term "qualifications." But to act like Obama can't nominate someone because he's in the last year of office is fucking ridiculous. If they don't put it to a vote, it will be the first step toward destroying this country, because the next step will be extending that period to the whole second term, and then it will just be pure politics. The only way to get someone confirmed will be to control both the Senate and Presidency. If that's how it's going to go, let's just do away with the Supreme Court.

I cannot identify one Republican in office who I respect. Someone help me. Who's worth more than a spit in the bucket on the right?

TM

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Pope says Trump is "not Christian"!

Trump tweets that Pope is "disgraceful"!

We are living in a cartoon reality. While politics in this country had long ago pushed so far past the absurd that it made one long for the comforting normalcy of an Ionesco play, we have now reached the point where our political system is unparodyable. It's pure dada, albeit an unspeakably vile and infected form of dadaism. Which is one of the reasons I never visit this board. Ever.

Re: Iraq
 

Apparently we can.

But if Obama did exactly what I said, you'd call him a coward, a weakling, an appeaser, blah blah blah.

Re: If you want to be friends, be friendly
 

Gosh, I had no idea that there were.

Re: Iraq
 

Kurdish autonomy has its own problems (just ask Turkey), but in any event there are significant differences. The Kurds were not seeking (or being asked to) overthrow Saddam, the Kurds did not have a natural ally next door that was a sworn enemy of Saddam, Kurdistan is much further away from where Iraqi armor and troops were, and (I believe) the Kurdish region is less intermingled than the region of the Shiite uprising. Saddam could tolerate Kurdish autonomy, but not anything resembling that among Shiites.


Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I thought we should have bombed Serbian artillery positions in Bosnia. But that looked much more like a military invasion. In Iraq, the result of using limited military means would likely have been a slower -- and, over time, much more significant -- slaughter, as Shiites killed Sunnis and Sunnis responded, without aircraft but with the other capacity of the Iraqi military.

You shoot down the helicopters. So the Republican Guard rolls out tanks and armored vehicles and artillery and machine guns. What then?

We should not have used any military means in Iraq --- either then or in 2003.


We could have had some minimal impact in Rwanda, but I doubt much more. I don't think it was against our interests at the time, but I do think that efforts like this can have unpredictable and unintended consequences that are often not considered. That is exactly my concern in Iraq: I think we would have been drawn into a situation were ultimately we were stuck guaranteeing Shiite safety -- without being able to control how that safety was used, including whether it was used to expand Iran's influence.


You are looking only at risk to American lives. I am looking at risk to American policy and interests, and the risks that putting our thumb on the scale in a nation creates to the people of that nation. We've seen so many examples in recent years of how an uprising against a dictator can turn into a civil war among multiple factions that range from mildly tolerable to fucking ISIS, that I have to reject the notion that just shooting down Saddam's helicopters would have accomplished much of any lasting value, absent a much longer and stronger commitment that no one wanted (or should have wanted) to make.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I'm thanking the baby Jesus right now that Penske no longer is here to read you denigrate dadaism.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

This is not a Pope.

Re: If you want to be friends, be friendly
 

I am glad I could enlighten you.

In further surprising news, it turns out Jesus wasn't a hater.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

OK, I'm going to take up this challenge. Who would have thunk.

Charlie Baker? By the way, I hate Charlie Baker. He is a namby-pamby born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his mouth brahmin yankee good old boy. I'm not sure he gives a shit about anyone whose family wasn't here before the revolution and hasn't been coupon-clipping for generations. But, with one or two exceptions (see Syrian refugees), he stays away from the crazy, he's fairly intelligent, and he tends to think before he acts (but see exceptions). And after landing GE for Boston, he can stay in office as long as he wants.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I'll take your word for it. Don't know a damn thing about him.

I was hoping someone would point to a Senator or Congressman who wasn't completely fucking crazy and who has the balls to not carry the Republican company line when they know it's batshit crazy. Obviously Cruz does not qualify because (i) he's completely fucking crazy and (ii) when he breaks from the Republican party, it's always to do something even crazier.

TM

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Is John Huntsman still a Republican? If it were pre-2000 he would be.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

John Kasich. Lindsay Graham. And although he's not a current or former presidential candidate, Peter King. I'm sure there are others, but not too many on the national level, alas.

I think they all have issues (but then again I would think that because I was raised in an Irish Catholic worship-the-Kennedys-and-the-unions kind of family, and then grew into the Obama-loving Fabian that you all know and roll your eyes at), but I think they all have moments of sanity in which they call bullshit on some of the GOP's nonsense.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I would anticipate that a Venn diagram set of Republicans acceptable to you would have a pretty high crossover with the set of Republicans I find repulsive. So I would totally agree with Kasich, Graham, McCain, Susan Collins.

Maybe former NM Governor Gary Johnson, but he's Libertarian now, and I kind of like him.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Members of The Tuesday Group and Republican Main Street Partnership.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I always had a soft spot for Bob Dole, too. The Bushes (well, at least GHWB and sometimes Jeb!) might qualify when in office, but not while campaigning.

And Warren Harding flat out knew how to par-tay, right? That lovable scamp was much better than that dour old Calvin Coolidge who followed him.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Huntsman was the first to come to mind for me, but TM was looking for office holders. So until he throws his hat in the ring for Mayor of NYC....

The list of Republicans I could see myself voting for is thin, but Huntsman and Colin Powell are at the top of it.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Nope. He's a piece of shit.

TM

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

The demise of the foreign policy/national security wing of the Republican party in the wake of Iraq has been a tragedy. Graham and McCain now spend most of their time saying things they know are stupid to curry favor with the xenophobes and hotheads. But, they are the ones who gave the neo-cons the keys to the toys, and look what they did with them.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Yeah, it surprised me he would make anyone's list.

His support for Sinn Féin doesn't get him any points with you lot?

As a lad, I remember going to NORAID fundraisers ("for bandages") at the Hibernian lodge that my dad and uncles belonged to. Not Kidding.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I voted for Bruce Rauner for Governor of Illinois (I voted for Obama twice). He's a socially moderate/fiscally conservative guy who doesn't particularly like unions (I don't either). The Democrats have absolutely destroyed this state. Run it into the ground. It may be past the point of recovery. I'm just waiting for Michael Madigan to go down like Sheldon Silver.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

He's got enough other demerits.

Back when I was young and a night on the town meant more than just the evening, and I was working for the Democratic Party in the Commonwealth, we hosted an Irish Catholic MP who actually sat in Parliament (the Sinn Fein do not sit, they get elected more to make a point). We took him out in Boston's Irish pubs. Our money was no good the whole night long, and if we crawled to a new pub, a whole crowd followed, we had our entourage in the street. That was a night.

If he were Sinn Fein, he would have been able to buy all the bandages his heart desired when he left.

Re: Mother should I run for president.