Tag: criticism
'No Labels' Wants Justice Department To Investigate Its Critics

'No Labels' Wants Justice Department To Investigate Its Critics

Critics of the No Labels movement have been warning that if a Joe Biden/Donald Trump rematch is really close in the 2024 presidential election, a No Labels candidate could act as a spoiler and put Trump back in the White House. Many of No Labels' critics are Democrats, although some are Never Trump conservatives like Amanda Carpenter and The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson — a former GOP strategist who is supporting Biden and believes that a second Trump term would be disastrous for the United States.

No Labels, meanwhile, is arguing that pro-Democrat groups are going too far in their efforts to discourage them from running a presidential candidate in 2024.

According to the Washington Post's Michael Scherer, No Labels leaders are asking the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to launch a criminal investigation of Democrat-leaning groups it claims are harassing and bullying them.

Scherer reports, "The group, in a January 11 letter signed by former Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT.), former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) and others, argues that a public and private pressure campaign to discourage donations to No Labels and support for the ticket goes beyond legally protected political speech…. The Justice Department has not responded to the letter, according to No Labels leaders."

In their letter, No Labels told the DOJ, "It's one thing to oppose candidates who are running; it's another to use intimidation tactics to prevent them from even getting in front of the voters."

Scherer notes that No Labels' opponents "have publicly declared their intent to put pressure on donors and potential candidates to steer clear of the group."

Former Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-MO) has maintained that No Labels opponents aren't try to intimidate or bully the group but rather, are merely trying to let voters know what is at stake in the 2024 election.

In December, Gephardt told reporters, "We are worried about any third party. We realize it is a free country. Anybody can run for president who wants to run for president. But we have a right to tell citizens the danger they will face if they vote for any of these third-party candidates.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Republicans Criticize Prisoner Swap That Freed Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl

Republicans Criticize Prisoner Swap That Freed Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl

By David S. Cloud, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Senior Republicans criticized President Barack Obama on Sunday for releasing five high-ranking Taliban prisoners to secure the return of an American prisoner of war, arguing that it breached longstanding U.S. policy against negotiating with terrorists.

Administration officials strongly defended the swap, saying Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s health and safety appeared in danger after five years in captivity. They said they acted to save the life of the only American held by insurgents after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bergdahl’s parents offered only praise and thanks for the release on Saturday of their 28-year-old son, with whom they had still not spoken.

“There is no hurry. You have your life ahead of you,” said Bergdahl’s mother, Jani, fighting back tears during a news conference at an Idaho Army National Guard facility in Boise, near the family’s hometown, Hailey.

“You are free. Freedom is yours,” she added. “We will see you soon. I love you, Bowe.”

Bergdahl’s father, Bob, called the lack of contact a necessary part of his son’s reintegration.

“Bowe has been gone for so long that it’s going to be very difficult to come back,” he said. The soldier’s father still wore the bushy beard he had grown to show solidarity with his son, who disappeared after completing guard duty at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan in 2009.

Bob Bergdahl compared his son’s plight to making a deep-sea dive — if he returned too quickly to the surface, “it could kill him.”

Sgt. Bergdahl was flown Sunday from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. He is expected to be moved to a military hospital in San Antonio this week.

The debate in Washington immediately turned partisan. Republican critics argued that the deal would embolden insurgents to try to grab other U.S. soldiers or civilians to trade for more prisoners at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“What does this tell the terrorists? That if you capture a U.S. soldier, you can trade that soldier for five terrorists,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who is expected to run for president, said on ABC’s “This Week.” He called the prisoner swap “very disturbing.”

Visiting troops in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel thanked the special operations forces who retrieved Bergdahl on Saturday from a pre-arranged site in Khost province. He told reporters that the administration agreed to the prisoner exchange because Bergdahl’s “safety and health were both in jeopardy” and it was necessary to “save his life.”

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hagel said he does not believe “that what we did in getting our prisoner of war home would in any way encourage terrorists to take hostages.”

The need to move quickly when the opportunity arose last week prevented Obama from giving Congress the required 30-day notice before transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Hagel said.

The five were released to the custody of the government of Qatar, which mediated the exchange. They are barred from leaving the Persian Gulf emirate for one year. U.S. officials said they would be subject to monitoring and to other restrictions on their movements and activities.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, called the five Taliban prisoners “the hardest of the hard core” who were “possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands.”

Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” he added: “We need more information about the conditions of where they’re going to be and how. But it is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to re-enter the fight.”

Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, dismissed GOP criticism that the deal to get Bergdahl home would put other soldiers at risk of being taken hostage, and she disputed that it violated a U.S. practice not to negotiate with terrorists.

“This is a very special situation,” she said on CNN, saying that getting Bergdahl back was a “sacred obligation” that required reaching a deal with a “non-state actor.”

“In all likelihood, (the returned Taliban detainees) will not pose a national security risk,” she said.

In previous wars, governments have exchanged prisoners when the conflict is over. But in this case, Bergdahl is believed to have been held by the Haqqani network, a militant group closely linked to the Taliban.

The five released prisoners were all senior Taliban commanders, and were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 after the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban government. Before the exchange Saturday, none was deemed eligible for release by the Pentagon.

Muhammad Fazl, 47, served as Taliban deputy defense minister during the U.S. invasion and commanded troops fighting the U.S. forces in northern Afghanistan, according to a 2008 Defense Department document on his case. He was wanted by the United Nations for “possible war crimes, including the murder of thousands of Shiites,” the document said. “If released, the detainee would likely rejoin the Taliban,” it added.

Khairullah Khairkhwa, according to another 2008 Defense Department document, served as the Taliban government’s interior minister and as governor of Herat province, and he was “directly associated” with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader. Khairkhwa also “was associated” with a military training camp run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a notorious al-Qaida-linked leader later killed by U.S. forces in Iraq. In addition, he was “probably one of the major opium drug lords in western Afghanistan,” the document said.

Mullah Norullah Noori, according to a similar 2008 document, was the senior Taliban commander in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif during the 2001 U.S. invasion. He was wanted by the U.N. for possible war crimes, including the deaths of thousands of Shiite Muslims, the document said. He was “associated” with Mullah Omar and senior al-Qaida leaders, it said.

Abdul Haq Wasiq, according to a 2008 document on his case, served as deputy minister of intelligence during the Taliban rule and was involved in recruiting other militant groups to fight against the U.S. after the 2001 invasion. He used his office to support al-Qaida and “arranged for al-Qaida personnel to train Taliban intelligence staff,” it said.

Mohammed Nabi was a “senior Taliban official” with close ties to al-Qaida, the Haqqani network and other groups that fought the U.S. in Afghanistan, according to a 2008 Defense Department document. He was part of a militant cell in Khost that attacked U.S. troops and facilitated the smuggling of weapons and fighters, the document said.

AFP Photo

5 Examples Of Fox News’ ‘Fair And Balanced’ Obama Coverage

5 Examples Of Fox News’ ‘Fair And Balanced’ Obama Coverage

As part of the ongoing Republican freakout over President Barack Obama’s remark to The New Republic that “if a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it,” Sean Hannity made a truly jaw-dropping claim on his Monday night show.

According to Hannity — who, you may recall, is the proud owner of a painting of President Obama burning the Constitution — Fox is the “only media organization on this planet that has delivered fair and balanced coverage” of the president.

Luckily for us, groups like Media Matters for America keep tabs on Fox, providing plenty of examples to counter Hannity’s claim.

Here are five examples of Fox’s not so “Fair and Balanced” coverage of the president:

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Barack And Michelle Obama Share “Terrorist Fist Jab”

Fox’s attacks against Obama began even before he was elected president. When then-Senator Obama and his wife shared a celebratory fist bump after he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, Fox News anchor E.D. Hill questioned the deeper meaning behind the gesture.

“A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We’ll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says,” Hill said.

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Obama May Not Be A Citizen

In March of 2011, Hannity — in an attempt to promote conspiracy nut Donald Trump’s potential presidential candidacy — falsely claimed it’s “not true” that President Obama has released his birth certificate.

This was just one of at least 52 segments on Fox pushing the racially charged birther myth.

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Fox & Friends Airs Anti-Obama Campaign Ad

Apparently bored with pretending to be a news show, Fox & Friends decided in May to create and air its own four-minute anti-Obama campaign ad.

The ad was not only so poorly made and over-the-top that the Santorum campaign probably wouldn’t have touched it, but it was also outrageously inaccurate.

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Positive Jobs Numbers Are Fake

After former GE CEO Jack Welch ridiculously claimed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September jobs report must have been falsified because it was too favorable for President Obama, Fox News rushed to put Welch on the air that afternoon.

Not content to merely provide a platform for Welch to push his conspiracies, host Eric Bolling went on to suggest that two Obama donors working for the BLS may have manipulated the data:

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“Here Comes The Landslide”

In the final days before the 2012 election, Dick Morris — the world’s worst pundit — repeatedly appeared on Fox News, promising that Mitt Romney would defeat President Obama in a 325-213 electoral vote landslide.


After Morris’ predictions were proven hilariously wrong, he returned to Fox News to explain that “the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory. And I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said.”

Fair and balanced indeed.

Obama Can’t Win For Winning

WASHINGTON — You have to ask: If unemployment were now at 6 percent, would President Obama be getting pummeled for not having us back to full employment already?

The question comes to mind in the wake of the Libyan rebels’ successes against Moammar Gaddafi. It’s remarkable how reluctant Obama’s opponents are to acknowledge that despite all the predictions that his policy of limited engagement could never work, it actually did.

Let it be said upfront that the rout of Gaddafi was engineered not by foreign powers but by a brave rebellion organized inside Libya by its own people.

But that is the point. The United States has no troops in Libya, which means our men and women in uniform do not find themselves at the center of — or responsible for — what will inevitably be a messy and possibly dangerous aftermath. Our forces did not suffer a single casualty. The military action by the West that was crucial to the rebels was a genuine coalition effort led by Britain and France. This was not a made-by-America revolution, and both we and the Middle East are better for that.

What NATO and its allies did do, as Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller reported in The Washington Post, was to help the rebels “mount an aggressive ‘pincer’ strategy in recent weeks, providing intelligence, advice and stepped-up airstrikes that helped push Moammar Gaddafi’s forces toward collapse in Tripoli.”

Sounds like a successful policy to me.

Yet no good Obama deed goes unpunished. In the midst of the bracing news, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham issued a statement saying, well, too bad that Obama got it wrong.

After heralding the rebels’ achievements, they could not resist adding this: “Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Gaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.”

Less than six months and no American casualties were obviously not good enough. Should we have done this the way we did things in Iraq?

But perhaps the two Republicans were embarrassed for their party, which was split between those who thought Obama was wrong for not doing more and those who said he should not have intervened at all.

“Once again, we in the United States have not defined what we believe the outcome should be,” said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in March. “The fact is we cannot afford more wars now.” Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman recently declared that “we have no definable interest at stake, we have no exit strategy.”

Oh, and who can forget the commentary that Obama was “henpecked” into intervening by “these Valkyries of foreign affairs”? The latter is the memorable phrase foreign policy writer Jacob Heilbrunn used to describe the three women in Obama’s administration — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and key adviser Samantha Power — who favored intervention.

Writing on National Review‘s website, Mark Krikorian concluded that the lesson of Obama’s decision-making was that “our commander in chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates.”

In light of this, it’s worth paying tribute to one former Republican official willing to give Obama a little credit.

“I was among those who were critical of the position of ‘leading from behind,”’ L. Paul Bremer III, former President George W. Bush’s envoy to Iraq, told the Los Angeles Times. “I think as a general proposition that’s not a good position for the U.S. to be in. On the other hand, I think the outcome should give the administration some degree of satisfaction. After all, it worked.” Yes, it did.

What should Obama take from this? He needs to learn the difference between middle-ground policies, which flow from his natural instincts, and soggy, incoherent compromises with opponents who will say he’s wrong no matter what happens.

Obama used the greater freedom he has in foreign policy to define the middle ground in the Libyan case on his own terms. “It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs,” Obama said in March. “But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right.”

That made a lot of sense. Obama should remember that steady moderation is very different from continually looking around to see if he can accommodate opponents who won’t be happy until he’s back teaching law school.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group