Tag Archives: krauthammer

Obama Was Right Not to Get Involved in Syria

by LeanneMeehan Posted on January 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Charles Krauthammer comments on the war in Syria:

Look, the most important thing here is that this cease-fire, to the extent that it holds, is not a result of clever diplomacy. It’s what the Romans called “the peace of the grave.” The rebels were dealt such a huge defeat in Aleppo, they are in no position to carry on the fight in the same way as before. This is a Russian victory. The mantra out of this administration always was, “You can’t solve a civil war militarily.” The answer is, you can.

It’s worth clearing this up. Obama and his team did indeed say this in various formulations over the past few years. But any honest reading includes the following implicit qualifiers:

  1. Obama said you can’t solve this civil war militarily, not civil wars in general.
  2. He said there was no ultimate military solution in Syria.
  3. And in the short term, he said there was no way for us to help the anti-Assad rebels to victory without an enormous commitment of ground troops.

You can argue with #2 and #3. But I’d still put my money on Obama being right. Syria is likely to be unstable for a good long time, and I doubt there was anything we could have done to defeat Assad that didn’t include a serious invasion force. This was an asymmetrical conflict from the beginning, and Assad had a real army at his disposal. I’ve just never bought the idea that we could have won if only we’d armed the “moderate” rebels back in 2012, or put up a no-fly zone, or anything like that.

Putin apparently decided that assisting Assad was worthwhile because (a) Assad could win with a modest additional reinforcement, and (b) in return Russia got better access to its Tartus naval facility, their only port on the Mediterranean. I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime soon Assad gives Putin permission to upgrade Tartus so that it can handle larger ships.

Would it have been worth a massive American presence to prevent that? I suppose Krauthammer would say yes, but I’m not sure how many Americans would agree with him.

Originally posted here:  

Obama Was Right Not to Get Involved in Syria

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No, the New Benghazi Emails Don’t Demonstrate a White House Cover-Up

by MorganFalconer Posted on April 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wait a second. Is a National Review editor allowed to say this about Benghazi?

On the totality of the evidence we have so far, the White House took the intelligence community and diplomatic community’s estimate, which was relatively uncertain, bereft of much detail, and turned out days later to be quite wrong, and played up certain parts of it to avoid questions about their counterterror strategy and the situation in Libya. That isn’t being as straightforward with the American public as they could or probably should have been; it’s also not a lie or a cover-up.

This is a response to Charles Krauthammer’s bombastic insistence yesterday that newly released Benghazi emails had revealed “a classic cover-up of a cover-up.” But as Patrick Brennan says, they show no such thing.

You know, if conservatives had stuck to a reasonable line like this one in the first place, they could have caused President Obama a lot more damage. Did the White House “play up certain parts” of the Benghazi story in order to “avoid questions about their counterterror strategy”? I’d quibble over some of the details here, but that’s fair enough. And there are certainly legitimate questions—although they cut a bipartisan swath—about how security was handled in Libya before the attacks.

Stick to that stuff and you have a story that resonates—and not in a good way for Obama. Take the Krauthammer route, and you get cheers from the Fox News faithful but not much else. That’s why no one but a hard core of loons and fanatics cares about Benghazi anymore.

Credit – 

No, the New Benghazi Emails Don’t Demonstrate a White House Cover-Up

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Krauthammer Lights the Way for Tidal Waves of Secret Campaign Cash

by ColePiguenit Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Charles Krauthammer writes today that he used to think there was a simple and elegant solution to the fight over campaign finance reform: “For a long time, a simple finesse offered a rather elegant solution: no limits on giving — but with full disclosure.” But now he’s changed his mind:

This used to be my position. No longer. I had not foreseen how donor lists would be used not to ferret out corruption but to pursue and persecute citizens with contrary views. Which corrupts the very idea of full disclosure.

It is now an invitation to the creation of enemies lists. Containing, for example, Brendan Eich, forced to resign as Mozilla CEO when it was disclosed that six years earlier he’d given $1,000 to support a referendum banning gay marriage. He was hardly the first. Activists compiled blacklists of donors to Proposition 8 and went after them. Indeed, shortly after the referendum passed, both the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento and the president of the Los Angeles Film Festival were hounded out of office.

….The ultimate victim here is full disclosure itself. If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression.

Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots. What a pity.

I wonder if Krauthammer feels the same way about free speech? Or gun rights. Or fair trials. The scope of zealots to abuse the system in those cases is infinitely greater than the sparse, weak-tea “harassment” he points to in the case of campaign finance disclosure.

On a larger scale, I realize that the Koch brothers think they’ve suffered abuse akin to the Holocaust at the hands of Harry Reid, but that’s what happens when you enter the political arena in a big way. You take your lumps. That’s no reason to allow billions of dollars to influence the political system with not even the slightest shred of accountability for where it’s coming from. With allies as weak as Krauthammer, ready to cave at the slightest provocation, campaign finance disclosure is now just the latest victim of conservative goal post moving.

Read the article – 

Krauthammer Lights the Way for Tidal Waves of Secret Campaign Cash

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The Chattering Classes Are Now in Full Chicken Little Mode

by Kiera5434lfzrmb Posted on November 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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We are in full feeding frenzy mode. Politico, by my count, has no fewer than 14 front page headlines today about the great Obamacare debacle. The Washington Post’s four top news articles and its four top op-eds are all about Obamacare, and the top op-eds are uniformly panicky.

Is panic just built into political observers, or what? Ruth Marcus thinks Obama’s entire presidency at risk. Ditto for Milbank. And if that’s not bad enough for you, Krauthammer suggests that yesterday’s events spell doom for the entire liberal project. It’s almost a relief to get down to the unsigned editorial, which is merely troubled, not in full-scale meltdown (or, in Krauthammer’s case, glee).

So what causes this? It’s pretty obviously ridiculous, and I suspect that even the folks writing this stuff would agree about that if they took a breath. But they write it anyway. Are they truly that panic-stricken? Do they simply need something exciting to write? Or what?

Well, this isn’t very exciting, but here’s what really happened yesterday. Obama made a short speech and then took questions. It wasn’t the high point of his presidency, but virtually no one outside the Beltway thought it was a disaster. It was just another forgettable presidential press conference. The Obamacare website is in deep trouble, but the evidence is pretty clear that it really is getting better, and will continue to get better. Lots of people are suffering from rate shock, but not as many people as Republicans and the press would have you believe. It’s early days, and signups will continue to improve as we get closer to the deadline. Insurers are upset with Obama’s new fix, but they’ll calm down. Their denunciations yesterday were pretty pro forma.

This is a bleak moment for Obama, but it’s not his Iraq or even his Katrina. Within a few months everything will settle down. Republicans have an obvious political motive for stoking panic, but the rest of us should be a little smarter about buying into it. OK?

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The Chattering Classes Are Now in Full Chicken Little Mode

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