Tag Archives: israel

Look at the Difference in Trump and Obama’s Notes for Israel’s Holocaust Memorial

Mother Jones

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Before leaving Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump continued the tradition of US leaders who have visited the memorial before him, including former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, by writing a message in the Book of Remembrance.

“It is a great honor to be here with my friends!” Trump’s signature read. “So amazing and will never forget!”

The president’s note quickly attracted criticism for its strangely upbeat tone, with many mocking the message for appearing out of step with the memorial’s somber setting, especially when compared with former president Barack Obama’s 2008 message when he was still a senator.

The note on Tuesday is the latest in a series of awkward moments for Trump during his first overseas trip as president. The day before, while addressing reporters at a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump appeared to inadvertently confirm that Israel was the source that provided the intelligence he shared with high-ranking Russian officials in the Oval Office last week.

Trump’s unusually lighthearted Book of Remembrance message is only the most recent example of tone deafness coming from the administration regarding the Holocaust. In February, the administration sparked by the ire of Jewish groups when it released a statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention the word Jews. White House press secretary also once called Nazi concentration camps “Holocaust centers” while positively comparing Adolf Hitler to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.

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Look at the Difference in Trump and Obama’s Notes for Israel’s Holocaust Memorial

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Presidenting Is Hard

Mother Jones

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Poor Donald Trump. Being president is harder than he thought:

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” Trump told Reuters in an interview. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”…Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map.

“Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers,” the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. “It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”

There are three takeaways from this. First, Trump’s old life was pretty easy because other people ran his companies and he didn’t really do much. Second, he thought presidents just consulted their guts and made decisions, sort of like Celebrity Apprentice, and then stuff magically happened. Third, he still can’t maintain discussion of a real topic (Chinese President Xi Jinping) for more than a few moments before getting sidetracked by one of his obsessions (his huge victory in November). Here are the maps he handed out. He obviously had copies made just for the occasion:

But Trump still hasn’t learned his lesson. I’ve dealt with lots of people who will regale you endlessly with tales of how complicated their own business is, but the less they know about some other business the easier they think it is to fix. For example:

Sure, Donald. You can’t even get Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon to stop squabbling, but the Middle East? Piece of cake. There’s no reason to think this is a difficult problem that requires a lot of hard work. It’s just that all the presidents before you have been really, really stupid.

Still, they were all bright enough to know that if you want to get things done, you need to get people who support your agenda running the bureaucracy. Trump still hasn’t figured that out:

It’s hard to find Republicans to work in the federal government in the first place, and harder still to find Republicans willing to work for a man-child like Trump. Even at that, though, he’s barely even trying. Not counting cabinet positions, he’s managed to nominate about three people per week. That’s pathetic.

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Presidenting Is Hard

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Trump on Israel: Whatevs

Mother Jones

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So does President Trump support a two-state solution in the Middle East, which has been US policy for decades? Or has he given up on that and now endorses a one-state solution? Here’s his answer:

So I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like. Netanyahu laughs. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two, but honestly, if Bibi and the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

Translation: I couldn’t care less. I’m not even sure what all this one-state and two-state stuff is about. I just want to make a deal.

I wouldn’t blame Trump if he ignored Israel entirely. It’s pretty obvious that no peace deal is anywhere on the horizon, and there’s nothing much the United States can do about it. But if he is going to talk about it, is it asking too much that he demonstrate even a minimal understanding of what the two sides disagree about?

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Trump on Israel: Whatevs

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Trump Backs Off Torture Because a Guy Named "Mad Dog" Doesn’t Like It

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump on torture, February 6:

I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

Donald Trump on torture, yesterday:

So, I met with General Mattis, who is a very respected guy….I said, what do you think of waterboarding? He said — I was surprised — he said, “I’ve never found it to be useful.” He said, “I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.” And I was very impressed by that answer….It’s not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think. If it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that. But General Mattis found it to be very less important, much less important than I thought he would say. I thought he would say — you know he’s known as Mad Dog Mattis, right? Mad Dog for a reason.1 I thought he’d say “It’s phenomenal, don’t lose it.” He actually said, “No, give me some cigarettes and some drinks, and we’ll do better.”

How about that? It turns out that someone just needed to tell Trump that torture doesn’t work very well. Who knew?

Of course, Trump also said about his conversation, “I’m not saying it changed my mind.” So torture is still on the table. In fact, it’s not really clear what the worst part of this monologue is. I have three candidates:

All it took was one guy with an anecdote to persuade Trump that torture isn’t all that great.
Nonetheless, he’s still willing to do it “if it’s so important to the American people.” WTF?
He just assumed a guy with the nickname “Mad Dog” would love torture. I wonder if this is literally the only reason Trump wanted to meet with him?

Really, state-sponsored torture is a pretty easy thing to figure out. In movies, you can pretty reliably tell who the bad guys are because they torture their prisoners. I think that’s true in real life too.

1Not really. He’s a plenty tough guy, but he doesn’t like his nickname. Mattis is a fan of Marcus Aurelius, owns a huge personal library, and is famous for telling his troops, “You are part of the world’s most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.” He has also called Israel’s occupation of the West Bank “apartheid” and added, “I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel.” I wonder what Trump thinks of that?

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Trump Backs Off Torture Because a Guy Named "Mad Dog" Doesn’t Like It

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How I Came to Grips With My American Exceptionalism

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The fluorescent circus of Election 2016—that spectacle of yellow comb-overs and orange skin and predatory pussy-grabbing and last-minute FBI interventions and blinking memes hewn by an underground army of self-important internet trolls—has finally come to its unnatural end. I had looked forward to this moment, only to find us all instantly embroiled in a new crisis. And unfortunately, it’s easy to foretell what, or rather who, will move into the bright lights of our collective gaze now: Americans are going to continue to focus on…well, ourselves.

We are obviously not, for instance, going to redeploy our energies toward examining the embarrassing war that we’re still waging in Afghanistan, now in its 16th year—something that went practically unmentioned during election season even as fighting heated up there. (You can be sure that Afghans have a somewhat different perspective on the newsworthiness of that war.) We are also not going to spend our time searching for the names of people like Momina Bibi, whom we’ve—oops—inadvertently annihilated while carrying out our nation’s drone program.

For his part, Donald Trump has pledged to “take out” the families of terrorists, a plan that sounds practically ordinary when compared to our actual drone assassination program, conceived by President George W. Bush and maintained and expanded by President Barack Obama. And while I don’t for a moment pretend that Trump’s electoral victory is anything less than an emergency for our republic—especially for the most vulnerable among us, and for every American who believes in justice, equity, or basic kindness—it’s also true that some things won’t change at all.

In fact, it’s prototypically American that an overlong and inward-looking election spectacle (which will, incidentally, have “big-league” international implications) will be supplanted by still more inward-looking. And this jogs my memory in a not-very-pleasant way. I can’t help but recall the moment, years ago and 8,000 miles away, when I was introduced to my own American-centered self. The experience left an ugly mark on my picture of who I am—and who, perhaps, so many of us are, as Americans.

Eight years before I heard about a guy in Yemen whose cousins were obliterated by an American drone strike in a procession following his wedding celebration, I gleefully clicked through the travel site Kayak and pressed “confirm purchase” on a one-way ticket to Kathmandu. This was 2008, shortly before Barack Obama was elected, and my boyfriend and I—a couple of twentysomethings jonesing to see the world—were about to depart on what we expected to be the adventure of our lives. Having worked temporary stints and squirreled away some cash, we stashed our belongings into my mom’s damp basement and prepared for a journey meant to last half a year and span South Asia and East Africa. What we didn’t know as we headed for New York City’s Kennedy Airport, passports zippered into our money belts, was that, whatever we’d left behind at my mom’s, we were unwittingly carrying something far heftier with us: our American-ness.

Adventures commenced as soon as we stepped off the plane. We glimpsed ice-capped peaks that rose majestically out of the clouds as we walked the lower Everest trail. And then—consider this our introduction to the presumptions we hadn’t shed—we ran into a little snafu. We hadn’t brought along enough cash for our multiweek mountain trek—apparently we’d expected Capital One ATMs to appear miraculously on a Himalayan footpath.

After we dealt with that issue through a service that worked by landline and carbon paper, we took a bumpy Jeep ride south to India and soon found ourselves walking the sloping fields of Darjeeling, the leaves of tea shrubs glinting in the afternoon light. Then we rode trains west and south, while through the frame of a moving window I looked out at fields and rice paddies where women in red or orange or turquoise saris worked the land, even as the sun set and the sky turned pink and reflected off the water where the rice grew.

Things would soon get significantly less picturesque—and in some strange and twisted way, the farther we traveled, the closer to home we seemed to get.

We arrived in Mombasa, Kenya, in January 2009, on a day when thousands of people had flooded into the streets to protest a recent and particularly bloody Israeli attack on Gaza. Hamas, firing rockets into southern Israel, had killed one Israeli and injured many others. Israel retaliated in an overwhelming fashion, filling the Gazan sky with aircraft and killing hundreds of Palestinians, including five girls from a single family, ages four to 17, who were unlucky enough to live in a refugee camp adjacent to a mosque that an Israeli plane had leveled.

As I hopped off the matatu, or passenger van, into the scorching Kenyan heat, I was aware that 50,000 angry protesters had gathered not so far away, and certain facts became clear to me. For one thing, the slaughter of hundreds of civilians, including several dozen children, in what was to me a faraway land, was a big effing deal here. That should probably go without saying just about anywhere—except I was suddenly aware that, were I home, the opposite would have been true. Those deaths in distant Gaza (unlike nearby Israel) would barely have caused a blip in the American news. What’s more, if I had been at home and the story had somehow caught my eye, I knew that I wouldn’t have paid it much mind. Another war in a foreign country is what I would’ve thought, and that would have been that.

At that moment, though, I didn’t dwell on the point because—let’s be serious—I was scared poopless. There was a huge, angry protest nearby and we’d just gotten word that the crowd was burning an American flag. Israel, it turned out, had used a new US-made missile in its assault. According to the Jerusalem Post, it was a weapon designed to minimize “collateral damage.” (Tell that to the families of the dead.) The enraged people who had taken to the streets in Mombasa were decrying my country’s role in the carnage—and I was a skinny American with a backpack who’d arrived in the wrong city on the wrong day.

We got the hell out of there as soon as we could. Early the next morning we climbed aboard a rusty old bus bound for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I felt a wave of relief once I’d settled into my seat. I was looking forward to a different country and a new vista.

That new vista, it turned out, materialized almost at once. Our bus was soon barreling along a rutted dirt road, the scenery whipping by the window in a distinctly less-than-picturesque fashion. In fact, it passed in such a blur that I realized we were going way too fast. We already knew that bus accidents were common here; we’d heard about a recent one in which all the passengers died.

When we hit what undoubtedly was a yawning pothole on that none-too-well kept road, the windows shook ominously and I thought: we could die. By then, my slick hands were gripping my shredded vinyl seat. I could practically feel the heat of the crash-induced flames and had no trouble picturing our charred bodies in the wreckage of the bus. And then that other thought came to me, the one I wouldn’t forget, the one, thousands of miles from home, that seemed to catch who I really was: No not us, we can’t die! was what I said to myself, pressing my eyes shut. I meant, of course, my boyfriend and I. I meant, that is, we Americans.

It was then that I felt an electric zap, as the events of the previous day had just melded with the present dangers and forced me to see what I would have preferred to ignore: that there was an unsavory likeness between my outlook and the American credo that thousands had been protesting in Mombasa. We can’t die, was my thought, as if we were somehow different—as if these Africans on the bus with us could die, but not us. Or, just as easily, those Palestinians could die—and thanks to US-supplied arms, no less—and I wouldn’t even tune in for the story. Clutching my torn bus seat, I was still afraid, but another sensation overwhelmed me. I felt like a colossal jerk.

Of course, as you know because you’re reading this, we made it safely to Dar es Salaam that night. But I was changed.

I’d like to say that my egocentricity about which lives matter most is uncommon among my countrymen and women. But if you spool through the seven-plus years since I rode that bus, you’ll notice how that very same mindset has meant that Americans go wild with panic over lone wolf terror killings on our soil, but show scant concern when it comes to the White House-directed, CIA-run drone assassination campaigns across the world, and all the civilian casualties that are the bloody result.

The dead innocents include members of a Yemeni family who were riding in a wedding procession when four missiles bore down on them, and Momina Bibi, that Pakistani grandmother who was tending to an okra patch as her grandchildren played nearby when a missile blasted her to smithereens. And don’t forget the 42 staff members, patients, and relatives at a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killed in an attack by a US AC-130 gunship. Depending on which tally you use, since 2009 we’ve killed an estimated 474 civilians, or perhaps 745, outside of official war zones—and far more civilians, like those dead in that hospital, within those zones. The horrifying truth is that the real numbers are likely much higher, but unknown and unknowable.

Meanwhile, duh, we would never fire a missile at a suspected terrorist if innocent US civilians were identified in the vicinity. We value American life far too highly for such wantonness. In 2015, when a drone struck an al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan, it was later discovered that two hostages, one of them an American, were inside. In response, President Obama delivered grave remarks: “I offer our deepest apologies to the families…I directed that this operation be declassified and disclosed… because the families deserve to know the truth.”

But why so sorry that time and not with the other 474 or more deaths? Of course, the difference was that innocent American blood was spilt. We don’t even try to hide this dubious hierarchy; we celebrate it. In that same speech, President Obama reflected on why we Americans are so darn special. “One of the things that makes us exceptional,” he declared, “is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”

If you hailed from any other country, it might have seemed like an odd, not to say tasteless, time to wax poetic about American exceptionalism. The president was, after all, confessing that we’d accidentally fired missiles at two captive aid workers. But I can appreciate the sentiment. Inadequate though the apology was—”There are hundreds, potentially thousands of others who deserve the same apology,” said an investigator for Amnesty International—Obama was at least admitting that the United States had erred, and he was pointing out that such admissions are important. Indeed, they are. It’s just…what about the rest of the people on the planet?

The Trump administration will probably espouse a philosophy much like President Obama’s when it comes to valuing (or not) the lives of foreign innocents. And yet there’s part of me that must be as unworldly as that twenty-something who flew into Kathmandu, because I find myself dreaming about a new brand of American exceptionalism. Not one that gives you that icky feeling when you’re riding a speeding bus in another hemisphere, nor one at whose heart lies the idea that we Americans are different and special and better—which, history tells us, is actually a totally unexceptional notion among powerful nations. Instead, I imagine what would be truly exceptional: an America that values all human life in the same way.

Of course, I’m also a realist and I know that that’s not the world we live in, especially now—and that it won’t be, for, at best, a very long time.

Mattea Kramer is at work on a memoir called The Young Person’s Guide to Aging, which inspired this essay. Follow her on Twitter.

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How I Came to Grips With My American Exceptionalism

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

Mother Jones

Donald Trump used the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey to amp up his call for profiling of Muslims. “You know, our police are amazing—our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, referring to terrorists. But, he said, “they’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling, and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”

Only a few days after picking up the endorsement of the nation’s largest police union, Trump was, without evidence, making an incendiary accusation about some of his most important supporters—that police are knowingly letting terrorists walk free because they’re too politically correct. (In reality, the Elizabeth, New Jersey, police department that apprehended the alleged bomber was not familiar with the suspect, although the family’s chicken shop had received noise complaints.)

Just as notable is what Trump proposed instead. As an example of what more effective policing would look like, the Republican presidential nominee pointed to Israel. “You know, in Israel they profile,” he said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do.” If a person looks suspicious in Israel, “they will take that person in.” He added, “They’re trying to be politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse.”

There are many components to Israeli-style profiling, but a key aspect is racial profiling. Being of “Arab nationality” is enough to get you flagged by screeners, interrogated, and maybe strip-searched at an Israeli airport. The US State Department’s travel advisory page for Israel even includes a warning about the country’s racial profiling: “Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.” Case in point: Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, was detained and interrogated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2010, despite having just returned from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump, for his part, has previously made clear that he’s interested in profiling Muslims specifically. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he told Yahoo News in November when asked if he’d consider warrantless wiretapping of American Muslims. He added, “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” In that same interview, he declined to rule out creating a database of Muslims in the United States and suggested the government should conduct more surveillance of mosques. He proposed hiring ex-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose department’s “Demographics Unit” spied on select “ancestries of interest” and even infiltrated a Muslim Students Association rafting trip. (For its years of work, Kelly’s Demographics Unit produced a total of zero terrorism indictments and was ultimately shut down as a result of a lawsuit.) Trump even entertained the idea that the government could shut down mosques.

A few weeks later, Trump took his religious profiling several giant steps further, unveiling his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump has never clarified how such a ban would be enforced, but it would by definition entail wide-scale profiling by customs officials. That proposal is still posted on his website. Trump revisited the subject in June, after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said, invoking Israel as an example of a successful program. He has repeatedly cited racial profiling—or fear of being accused of racial profiling—in his discussion of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack, alleging that neighbors of the couple had seen bombs scattered across the floor but not done anything. This was, again, baseless; there is no evidence that anyone ever saw the bombs.

Trump’s positions on many issues have fluctuated wildly. But his solution to threats against Americans has been uncharacteristically consistent, if alarming to many observers: an expanded, unconstitutional police state targeting a religious minority.

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

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Congressional Committee Says We Should Draft Women

Mother Jones

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Last year, the Pentagon announced that women would be allowed to join men in front-line combat positions in the military for the first time. This year, women may also have to join men in registering for the draft.

The House Armed Services Committee narrowly passed an amendment to the 2017 defense spending bill on Wednesday that would require women to register with the Selective Service System, the federal agency that administers military drafts. A draft hasn’t been held since the Vietnam war, but all American men between the ages of 18 and 25 are still required to register. Some members of Congress now want women to share the burden.

“If we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, then we should support a universal conscription,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), according to The Hill. The Army and Marine Corps’ top generals have already endorsed making women register. Most countries that draft soldiers only do so for men, but a handful, including Norway and Israel, also conscript women.

The amendment, introduced by former Marine officer Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), essentially backfired for him. In fact, Hunter does not support drafting women or allowing them to serve in jobs like the infantry, but has said that Congress should debate the issue of women in combat instead of allowing the Obama administration to simply change the military’s regulations. This amendment was his attempt to push the issue to the limits and thereby dissuade others from supporting putting women on the front lines. “The draft is there to get more people to rip the enemy’s throats out,” Hunter said. “I don’t want to see my daughters put in a place where they have to get drafted.”

Other members want to do away with draft registration altogether, saying a volunteer military is more effective. “The bar would have to be dramatically lowered if we were to return to conscription again,” said Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), according to the Washington Post. Coffman co-sponsored a bill introduced in February that would end Selective Service altogether. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who also sponsored the bill to end selective service, argues the draft also needlessly punishes those who don’t register by cutting them off from federal aid and jobs. “It’s mean-spirited, stupid, unnecessary, and a huge waste of taxpayer money,” DeFazio told Mother Jones.

The Selective Service System currently costs about $23 million dollars per year. Lawrence Romo, the director of the Selective Service System, estimates the agency would require another $8 million per year if women were included in the draft.

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Congressional Committee Says We Should Draft Women

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Why Do We Put Up With Saudi Arabia? Maybe We Don’t Have Much of a Choice.

Mother Jones

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Responding to reports that Pakistan’s intelligence service funded a deadly 2009 Taliban attack on a CIA outpost in Afghanistan, National Review’s David French says we should release the secret 28 pages of the 9/11 report that describe possible Saudi involvement:

We’ve long known that our “alliance” with Saudi Arabia has put us in bed with the devil. It’s time for us to find out how evil that devil truly is.

….I recognize that the needs of war sometimes require our nation to ally itself with dangerous regimes (see World War II for the most salient example), but there is still a difference between a shaky or temporary ally and an actual enemy — a nation that is trying to undermine American interests and kill Americans. In other words, there is a line, and it is worth asking (and re-asking) if Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are on the right side.

This is one of those remarkable issues that unites far right, centrists, squishy left, and far left. We all think pretty poorly of Saudi Arabia, and we’d all like to know what’s in those 28 pages. The fact that no one in the federal government wants to oblige us just adds to our conviction that these pages contain something pretty damning.

Still, this raises a difficult question, especially for conservatives: who do you want the US to ally with in the Muslim world? The basic power blocs in the Middle East are the Sunni gulf states led by Saudi Arabia and the Shiite bloc led by Iran. Obviously Iran is out. So does this mean conservatives want to dispense with allies altogether? Give lots of arms to Israel but otherwise just pull out of the Middle East altogether? Launch periodic wars against whoever happens to be the greatest perceived threat at any given time?

My loathing of Saudi Arabia is pretty boundless on all sorts of levels: religious liberty, treatment of women, encouragement of Wahhabi intolerance throughout the Muslim world, geopolitical treachery, general tribal assholishness, human rights in general, and plenty of other things I’ve probably forgotten. At the same time, Iran is hardly a sterling citizen. They lack some of Saudi Arabia’s vices, but make up for it with others (less proselytization, more export of terrorism). And at least Saudi Arabia cooperates with us some of the time. Iran wants nothing to do with us.

This is all pretty obvious, but I guess it’s why I go off on rants about Saudi Arabia only occasionally. It’s easy to do for someone like me, who has no influence over anything. But if I were president, and I had to choose from a steaming pile of seriously ugly choices—with American interests, American lives, Mideast stability, and the threat of global terrorist surges all on the line? Well, I might look at everything, hold my nose, and play nice with the Saudis. I don’t know. But that’s apparently the choice that President Obama made, even though it’s pretty clear he didn’t like it much.

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Why Do We Put Up With Saudi Arabia? Maybe We Don’t Have Much of a Choice.

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Obama Says He Would Have Bombed Iran

Mother Jones

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Here’s another excerpt from Jeffrey Goldberg’s essay on President Obama’s foreign policy:

One afternoon in late January, as I was leaving the Oval Office, I mentioned to Obama a moment from an interview in 2012 when he told me that he would not allow Iran to gain possession of a nuclear weapon. “You said, ‘I’m the president of the United States, I don’t bluff.’ ”

He said, “I don’t.”

Shortly after that interview four years ago, Ehud Barak, who was then the defense minister of Israel, asked me whether I thought Obama’s no-bluff promise was itself a bluff. I answered that I found it difficult to imagine that the leader of the United States would bluff about something so consequential. But Barak’s question had stayed with me. So as I stood in the doorway with the president, I asked: “Was it a bluff?” I told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon.

“That’s interesting,” he said, noncommittally.

I started to talk: “Do you—”

He interrupted. “I actually would have,” he said, meaning that he would have struck Iran’s nuclear facilities. “If I saw them break out.”

He added, “Now, the argument that can’t be resolved, because it’s entirely situational, was what constitutes them getting” the bomb. “This was the argument I was having with Bibi Netanyahu.” Netanyahu wanted Obama to prevent Iran from being capable of building a bomb, not merely from possessing a bomb.

“You were right to believe it,” the president said. And then he made his key point. “This was in the category of an American interest.”

But is he bluffing even now? We’ll probably never know.

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Obama Says He Would Have Bombed Iran

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We Are Live-Blogging the GOP Debate in Houston

Mother Jones

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Well, that was bracing. Rubio and Cruz obviously both decided to take on Donald Trump at the same time, and they actually gave Trump some trouble. Aside from simply attacking him more than usual, they adopted the Trumpian tactic of interrupting at every opportunity so he had a hard time responding coherently. The downside is that it made the whole debate look a bit like kindergarten play time. The upside is that they finally got under Trump’s skin.

Trump ran into a couple of land mines tonight. Asked about his tax returns, he made up a feeble excuse about how he’s always being audited and that’s why he can’t release his returns. He could release them anyway, of course, and he can certainly release returns from a few years ago, since presumably those audits are done. He’s going to have to address that, though he can probably bluster his way past it long enough to get through Super Tuesday. In any case, Trump tried to make it look like he’s being persecuted by the IRS with all these audits, but Rubio and Cruz now have a really good attack line: If Trump is being audited, maybe there’s something fishy going on. Shouldn’t the public know about that?

The other land mine was on health care. Dana Bash joined Cruz and Rubio in pressing Trump on whether there was anything more to his health care plan than simply allowing insurance companies to compete across the entire country (in debatespeak, this was “getting rid of the lines”). Oddly enough, Trump allowed himself to get pressured into saying that this was literally his entire plan, which even for Trump strains the boundaries of idiocy. “Getting rid of the lines” might or might not be a good idea (it’s probably a good idea if it’s properly regulated), but its effect on health care costs would be quite modest. Beyond that, suggesting that insurance companies would all be happy to insure people with pre-existing conditions if the lines were eliminated—well, I’m not sure what to say about that. It’s fantasy land.

Trump had a minor hiccup when he claimed that the US has the highest taxes in the world. He probably meant to say that we have the highest corporate rates—which is close to true if you look at statutory rates—but instead he insisted that this applied to everything: “We pay more business tax, we pay more personal tax. We have the highest taxes in the world.” That’s basically the opposite of the truth. But I suppose this is the kind of flub that never seems to hurt him.

Best line of the night: After Trump reminded everyone about Rubio’s repeat-o-matic meltdown a couple of weeks ago, Rubio produced the night’s best zinger: “I see him repeat himself every night, he says five things: everyone’s dumb, he’s gonna make America great again, we’re going to win, win win, he’s winning in the polls, and the lines around the state. Every night.” It’s funny because it’s true! And I’m not even sure if it was rehearsed.

Scorecard: I think Trump took some real hits tonight. He could start to lose a few points in the polls, especially if he spends the next week fending off questions about his tax returns and his $1 million fine and his health care plan. Rubio and Cruz both did well, but I give Rubio the edge. His attacks were a little sharper and the rest of his debate performance was a little better. Carson and Kasich were, of course, nonentities. Never has it been so obvious that no one cares about them anymore.

Debate transcript here.


10:53 – And that’s a wrap.

10:52 – Trump: Politicians are all talk, no action. Vote Trump!

10:51 – Cruz: Blah blah blah. He’ll do everything.

10:50 – Rubio: The time for games is over. We need to bring an end to “the silliness, the looniness.”

10:50 – Kasich says he has loads of experience. He wants people to “think about” giving him their vote.

10:49 – Closing statements! Carson says his hands have saved lots of lives.

10:44 – When are we going to get a question about general relativity?

10:39 – Kasich thinks President Obama should have brokered an agreement with Apple. You bet. That would have worked great.

10:36 – Rubio says the government isn’t asking Apple to create a backdoor for the iPhone. In fact, that’s exactly what they’re asking for. Rubio clearly has no idea what a backdoor is.

10:34 – Wolf has completely lost control of this debate. In fairness, I’m not sure anyone could do any better.

10:32 – Cruz does an extended riff on Trump being a liar. Trump responds with an attack on Cruz for his Iowa shenanigans.

10:30 – Trump, Cruz, and Rubio are now in a three-way fight. Trump: “He’s a joke artist Rubio and he’s a liar Cruz.”

10:25 – Donald Trump is not just criticizing the Libya war, he’s literally praising Qaddafi.

10:21 – Carson whines about not getting called on. This is true, but it’s because no one cares about him anymore. Now that he finally gets some time, he complains that the IRS suddenly started auditing him after he began criticizing President Obama. The IRS is corrupt and it should be eliminated.

10:17 – Wolf asks about North Korea. Trump wanders off on the $21 trillion deficit. “We can’t afford to defend everyone.” Japan, Korea, Europe, they should all be paying us to defend them.

10:15 – The Rubio-Cruz-Trump fights have been great! The gloves are finally off, I guess. I wonder if it’s doing Trump any damage?

10:10 – Trump says he doesn’t want to take sides between Israel and the Palestinians. “But I’m totally pro-Israel.” Okey doke.

10:07 – Cruz asks again why Trump won’t release past tax returns. Trump: I’m being audited. Cruz: How many years? Trump: Four or five. (It was two or three ten minutes ago.) Unfortunately, Wolf goes to a commercial just as it gets good. Trump really has no excuse for not releasing returns from before the years he’s being audited. He blew it big time on this. He should never have used the audits as an excuse.

10:05 – Marian is distracted. She says the debate background looks like a hot dog.

10:03 – Cruz: The only reason Trump isn’t releasing past returns is because there’s something bad in them.

10:01 – Cruz says Trump needs to release his taxes because he’s being audited. Public needs to know if there’s some kind of fraud the government is investigating.

9:57 – Trump says you don’t learn anything from tax returns. Now he says he’ll release his tax returns when the audit is done. Uh huh. Hugh Hewitt says Trump promised to release his tax returns on his radio program. Trump says no one heard that because no one listens to Hewitt’s program.

9:53 – Now Wolf pushes Trump on what he’s going to cut to make up for his $10 trillion tax cut. Trump: “Waste fraud and abuse.” That’s it!

9:52 – Trump says we have the highest taxes in the world. Naturally Wolf doesn’t question this. Even for Trump, this is wildly removed from reality.

9:50 – Now Cruz going after Trump on health care too. Wolf wants to move on, but none will let him.

9:43 – Hmmm. Rubio must have been practicing holding his ground against a loudmouth. He’s dishing pretty well against Trump.

9:41 – Bash asks Trump to talk more about his health care plan. He drones on some more about the lines. Bash: “Is there anything you’d like to add to that?” Trump: “No! There’s nothing to add. What’s to add?”

9:39 – Trump: I watched Rubio melt down two weeks ago. Rubio: Trump only knows five things: Everyone’s dumb, we’re going to make America great again, win win win, we’re leading in the polls, and lines around the states. Bash breaks up the fight.

9:38 – Trump: Rubio doesn’t know about the lines. Rubio, sarcastically: That’s it? What’s your plan? Trump: You’ll have so many different plans. It’ll be beautiful.

9:36 – Bash: “Getting rid of state lines will solve all our health insurance problems?” Trump: You betcha.

9:35 – Trump says insurance companies are wrong when they say they need a mandate if they’re required to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Just another insurance company hustle.

9:33 – Zzzzz. Rubio reciting his index card on health care.

9:29 – Rubio says Trump was pro-life until recently. He wouldn’t trust him to appoint judges who defend religious freedom.

9:27 – Trump now hares off on a spiel about Cruz attacking his sister. He wants an apology. Cruz isn’t buying.

9:25 – Trump goes off on a tangent about Ted Cruz supporting the appointment of John Roberts, who allowed Obamacare to stand. Cruz throws Roberts under a bus, saying he only supported him because he was the nominee of the party.

9:22 – Cruz refuses to say whether he’d trust Donald Trump to appoint conservative justices.

9:20 – Trump: Hispanics love him, Univision loves him. He’ll be the greatest president for Hispanics ever.

9:09 – Trump accuses Rubio of lying. Rubio accuses Trump of lying. Trump says it was 30 years ago. Rubio: “I guess there’s a statute of limitation on lies.”

9:06 – Rubio now asking people to google “Trump Polish workers.” I think they were Romanian workers, but whatever. Then some stuff about Trump going bankrupt and Trump University getting sued. Then Trump goes after Rubio for his mortgage. Then they just start shouting at each other.

9:03 – How is Trump going to get Mexico to pay for the wall? Trump doesn’t answer, of course. He starts ranting about the president of Mexico using a bad word on television.

8:56 – Trump is now just randomly insulting Cruz for not having any friends.

8:54 – Rubio doing his best to take on Trump over immigration: he hired illegal immigrants and paid a fine, he hired foreigners at Mar-a-Lago, etc. Seems to have drawn a little blood.

8:45 – Kasich, Rubio, and Cruz are having none of Carson-geddon. America is great, anyone can become president, etc.

8:42 – Ben Carson starts off apocalyptic: “America is heading off the abyss of destruction.” Um….

8:40 – Hey! The debate is starting already? I guess I screwed up. I thought 8:30 was for the pregame chitchat. But it looks like we’ll be starting up any second.

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We Are Live-Blogging the GOP Debate in Houston

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