Matt Yglesias

Cantor vs Limbaugh, Nazi Analogies

Should we start the clock on how long it takes Eric Cantor to apologize?

“The Republican Party in its roots is a party of inclusion and we ought to be promoting that and making sure that voices are heard,” Cantor, of Virginia, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.

Cantor, when asked about Limbaugh’s comments that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate” and his comparison of the administration’s health-care logo to a swastika, said Limbaugh was wrong.

“Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?” Cantor said. “No, I don’t, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

I wonder if that applies to members of the conservative grassroots who analogize health care reform to concentration camps? There’s research which indicates that diverse groups make better decisions than homogeneous ones. And I think the fact that the one Jewish Republican in congress can see that there’s a problem here, despite being a stone-cold right-winger, illustrates some of the issue. Put that guy in the room, and there’s someone to raise a note of caution. But in a lot of rooms, there’s no one from outside the pretty narrow circle of middle-aged white male goyim who dominate the party and that brings with it a certain loss of perspective. That’s a good enough demographic for a popular radio show, but it’s not big enough for a political party.

Imperial Russia Only Had One Czar Because It Was a Centralized Autocracy

For a couple of months now, conservatives have been launching nonsensical attacks on the Obama administration for having too many “czars” and darkly warning of incipient dictatorship. In fact, “czar” is not an official position in the government, and the president can’t do anything about the fact that people in the media may or may not refer to a given executive branch official as a “czar.” Now the nonsense really hits the big-time with a dishonest and absurd Washington Post op-ed that, sad to say, fits in the best tradition of that section of the paper. For example, Cantor writes that “Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”

Now, Cantor is a practical politician. Lying about his political enemies when he can get away with it is what he does. In theory, the Post has editors to prevent their pages from being used as a vehicle for such lies. In practice, the Post seems to feel that its op-ed pages should be used to mislead people. Thus, though my colleague Amanda Terkel was able to verify that many of these alleged “czars” have, in fact, been confirmed by the Senate nobody on the staff of the Post was able to do so.

Meanwhile, as a basic point of logic what’s with this complaint:

At last count, there were at least 32 active czars that we knew of, meaning the current administration has more czars than Imperial Russia.

The thing about Imperial Russia is that as a centralized autocracy it only had one czar. Having multiple people in positions of authority makes a political system less, rather than more, autocratic. Consider, “under Hitler, Germany had only one Fuhrer, but in the contemporary United States there are dozens of important political leaders.” Do you find that idea alarming? Are we worse than the Nazis? Of course not.

The US-Israeli Alliance, Beyond Blood and Soil

Eric Cantor, token Jewish Republican, was naturally a featured speaker at Christians United for Israel’s big event yesterday. He offered the view that while “reaching out to the Muslim world” is all well and good we need to make sure that “as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded.” It’s not totally clear to me what this means beyond Cantor trying to build Jewish-Christian solidarity on a solid foundation of anti-Muslim sentiment, but Jon Chait thinks we should understand it as meaning something more particular, namely that “he wants the United States to treat Israel the way Russia treats Serbia — an ally based on common cultural heritage.”

Chait further comments:

It’s also perfectly nuts. The basis of the U.S.-Israel alliance is, and should continue to be, Israel’s democratic character and desire to live in peace, in contrast to the eliminationist intentions of its neighbors. Cantor is saying that Israel deserves America’s support merely because of its Jewish quality. So if, say, Israel were to become a fascistic state bent on the destruction of its neighbors*, then the case for the U.S.-Israel alliance would be no less strong, because of a shared religious heritage. It’s a rancid, illiberal, primitive way of thinking about foreign policy.

*Yes, left-wingers, I know you think this is already the case. Take your comments to Stephen Walt’s blog.

The footnote gives us a caricatured view of a liberal critique of the U.S.-Israeli status quo. But surely we can admit that there’s some middle ground between “a fascistic state bent on the destruction of its neighbors” and a state with a “democratic character” possessed of a “desire to live in peace.” The Bibi Netanyahu administration does not appear to have any interest in destroying Egypt or Syria or Jordan or Lebanon but it also doesn’t appear to have any interest in living in peace with the Palestinians. Nor does it even have any interest in ceasing to expropriate Palestinian land. And while certainly not a fascistic state, it is a state where in the West Bank the level of rights one has is determined by whether one is Jewish or not.

Americans, especially liberal American Jews, have tended to gloss over that situation noting that Israel is operating from a position of some duress. What’s more, the fact that Israel exercises sovereignty over a population of millions of non-citizens is deemed to be a temporary situation rather than an integral characteristic of the Israeli state. This, however, is where the question of the settlement freeze really comes into play. The more settlements grow and expand, and the more the Israeli government characterizes any limits on settlement expansion as an intolerable violation of settler rights, the more the situation in the West Bank ceases to look temporary. And when viewed as a non-temporary situation, the idea of a patch of territory in which citizenship is differentiated by ethnicity, with segregated roads and walled-off townships and differential access to water looks less-and-less like a democracy.

Eric Cantor’s Selective Embrace of Human Rights

Torture for me, but not for thee.

Eric Cantor loves human rights:

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip who has put out blistering statements about the White House’s response, spoke loudly and emotionally about “America’s moral responsibility to speak out on the protection of human rights wherever they are violated” — hint, hint. “I urge President Obama to follow the lead of this House,” Cantor said.

Adam Serwer wonders where this commitment was when “Cantor voted against the military appropriations bill that banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror detainees.”

Specifically, according to the State Department’s official human rights brief on Iran:

Common methods of torture and abuse in prisons included prolonged solitary confinement with sensory deprivation, beatings, long confinement in contorted positions, kicking detainees with military boots, hanging detainees by the arms and legs, threats of execution, burning with cigarettes, sleep deprivation, and severe and repeated beatings with cables or other instruments on the back and on the soles of the feet.

Now to be clear, neither the scale of abuses nor the intent of the abuses is equivalent in the United States and Iran. But when it comes to techniques, it’s hard not to notice the fact that several of the methods condemned here, most notably including sleep deprivation, stress positions (”long confinement in contorted positions”), and shackling (”hanging detainees by the arms and legs”) were specifically authorized by the Bush administration. Many of the others, though not specifically authorized, appear to have become widespread in several detention facilities in part as a result of the administration’s general habit of throwing out the human rights rulebook. These bad actions don’t justify bad actions on the part of the Iranian regime. But whenever you read about these kind of techniques being applied in Iran or North Korea, it’s immediately apparent to everyone that it’s torture, it’s cruel, it’s inhumane, and it’s wrong. It’s also cruel, inhumane, and wrong when authorized by Dick Cheney.

Rahm and the Israelis

Very interesting Newsweek article on Rahm Emannuel’s role in Barack Obama’s push for Middle East peace:

Emanuel’s status as a near-native son gave some Israelis and Jews the impression he would be their guy on the Obama team—the pro-Israeli with the receptive ear. He had those golden Zionist credentials, after all: His father, Benjamin, had been a member of the Irgun, the right-wing Jewish militia that existed before Israeli independence. His Uncle Emanuel had been killed in a skirmish with Arabs back in the ’30s, prompting the family to change its name from Auerbach to honor him. But some in the Jewish community have been disappointed. Even his own rabbi, Asher Lopatin, has doubts about his absent congregant. “There is a lot of disappointment,” says Lopatin, who presides over the Modern Orthodox Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago. “In some ways there was a heightened expectation because Rahm is so connected to Israel and the Jewish community. Instead what we’ve seen is more of the tough Rahm Emanuel. Not the warm Rahm.“

There’s also this warning of dire political consequences:

All that will present political problems for Obama at home as well—with Emanuel playing his familiar role of fireman for his boss. Rep. Eric Cantor, the only Republican Jewish member of Congress, says the Obama administration is taking a position “that’s vastly different from the mainstream American Jewish community” in trying to engage with Iran. “The pro-Israel community has consistently been for keeping sanctions pressure on the terrorist regime in Iran … The administration has indicated in all ways I can tell that we ought not to be pursuing sanctions while talks go on.” (Administration officials deny they intend to let up on sanctions if talks go forward.)

I think the fact that Cantor is “the only Republican Jewish member of Congress” should tell you must of what you need to know about what mainstream American Jewish opinion is.

House GOP Proposes Hundreds of Billions in Useless Budget Gimmicks

Eric Cantor (R-VA)

CNN reports on House Republicans’ efforts to get serious about cutting the budget:

The House Republican leadership upped the ante Thursday in the ongoing debate over the size and scope of the federal budget, unveiling a proposal to cut spending by $375 billion over the next five years. [...] President Barack Obama “challenged us to come up with budget savings, and today House Republicans encourage him to not only look over our proposed … common-sense taxpayer savings, but to join our effort,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, said in a statement.

It turns out, however, that there’s no real proposal here. Instead, “The bulk of the GOP’s proposed savings would come from capping non-defense discretionary spending at the level of inflation.”

A blanket cap in spending is not a good idea. For one thing, it’s incredibly indiscriminate. For another thing, it’s oddly un-inclusive. If we’re just going to reduce outlays in an arbitrary, across-the-board way, why should defense and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid be left off the table? Well, presumably they don’t want to cut the defense budget because they think it’s important. But isn’t the FBI important? Prisons? If Medicare’s important, isn’t the CDC important? What would be helped by slashing Pell Grants? When the Obama administration proposed $17 billion in federal spending cuts, the announcement was generally met with mild derision at what a small share of the overall pie that is. But the point is that they found $17 billion dollars worth of cuts that there are actual reasons to believe are worth making. It’s easy to generate a high headline number by being arbitrary. But it’s also easy to do devastating damage to the country.

A much better AP story gets that there are only about $5 billion a year in actual cuts here. And just to piss me off personally, one of the the specific items they want to cut is federal support for bicycle routes. I’ll be the first to admit that not that many people use a bicycle as their primary means of conveyance, but there are about fourty times more of us than George Will realizes, and we’re using a commuting method that’s good for the environment and helps reduce traffic congestion for everyone else. Conservatives seem to have decided that bicycles are funny and un-American, like Puerto Rican food and volcano monitoring, but I don’t really see what their reasoning is.

Cantor, Hoyer Forget to Take “AIPAC” Off Their Letter’s File Name

One reason I always try to talk up the virtues of Nancy Pelosi is that I know what the likely alternatives look like in terms of House leadership:

Speaking of Iran and that region, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a “Dear Colleague” e-mail Tuesday asking for signatures “to the attached letter to President Obama regarding the Middle East peace process.”

The letter says the usual stuff, emphasizing that Washington “must be both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” and noting: “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.”

Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

Seems as though someone forgot to change the name or something.

Of course at the end of the day it’s not as if Hoyer or Cantor actually have much to fear from being so unsubtle about who makes their Israel policy. It is worth noting, however, that while public talk at the AIPAC conference was about devotion to peace, the substance of this letter is to try to make people think there will be a domestic price to be paid for any serious effort to push for a solution. This is similar to how Israel’s land grabs in-and-around Jerusalem are at odds with the Israeli government’s public presentation of itself as interested in peace and disturbed by the lack of a credible partner.

Here’s Cantor and Hoyer teaming up in The Washington Times during the Gaza War, and here’s MJ Rosenberg on the substance of the latest Cantor/Hoyer letter.