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Tag: david frum
Pro-choice protest in front of the Supreme Court.

Former Bush Speechwriter: GOP May Soon ‘Regret’ Texas Abortion Law

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

This week, Texas' draconian anti-abortion law went into effect, and the U.S. Supreme Court — in a 5-4 decision — let the law proceed. Far-right social conservatives in the Republican Party are delighted, as they are optimistic that the High Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. But one conservative who isn't celebrating is journalist/author David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. In an article published by The Atlantic this week, Frum warns fellow conservatives that their anti-abortion victories could lead to a major backlash against the Republican Party.

According to the 61-year-old Frum, the Texas law and the possible end of Roe v. Wade will bring about a seismic shift in the abortion debate in the United States.

"Pre-Texas," Frum argues, "opposition to abortion offered Republican politicians a lucrative, no-risk political option. They could use pro-life rhetoric to win support from socially conservative voters who disliked Republican economic policy, and pay little price for it with less socially conservative voters who counted on the courts to protect abortion rights for them."

Frum continues, "Pre-Texas, Republican politicians worried a lot about losing a primary to a more pro-life opponent, but little about a backlash if they won the primary by promising to criminalize millions of American women. That one-way option has just come to an end."

The Texas law outlaws abortion about six weeks into a woman's pregnancy. Because many women who become pregnant don't know that they're pregnant until after six weeks, the law effectively prohibits abortion in most cases — even if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. To make matters worse, the law allows private citizens to sue someone for $10,000 if they "aid and abet" an abortion. And abortion rights activists are warning that even an Uber driver who drives a pregnant woman to an abortion clinic could be sued for that amount.

Because of the Texas law and the Supreme Court's response to it, Frum predicts, abortion will be a major issue going into the 2022 midterms.

"Today, accountability has suddenly arrived," Frum warns fellow conservatives. "Texas Republicans have just elevated abortion rights to perhaps the state's supreme ballot issue in 2022. Perhaps they have calculated correctly. Perhaps a Texas voting majority really wants to see the reproductive lives of Texas women restrained by random passersby. If that's the case, that's an important political fact, and one that will reshape the politics of the country in 2024."

Frum adds, "But it's also possible that Texas Republicans have miscalculated. Instead of narrowly failing again and again, feeding the rage of their supporters against shadowy and far-away cultural enemies, abortion restricters have finally, actually, and radically got their way."

Countless critics of the GOP have argued that Republicans are pushing voter suppression bills because they know how unpopular their ideas are. But Frum speculates that even voter suppression laws may not be enough to prevent Americans from expressing their disdain for the Texas law at the polls.

"There's already compelling evidence that Texas Republicans understand how detested their new abortion law will soon be — not only in New York City and Los Angeles, but also in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth," Frum writes. "They took the precaution of preceding the nation's most restrictive abortion law with one of the nation's most suppressive voting laws…. But the Texas voting law only impedes voting; it does not prevent it."

According to Frum, "Republicans do best when the electorate is satisfied and quiet" but "face disaster when the electorate is mobilized and angry" — and the Texas law may result in a lot of angry, mobilized voters.

"Texas Republicans have just bet their political future in a rapidly diversifying and urbanizing state on a gambit: cultural reaction plus voter suppression," Frum stresses. "The eyes of Texas will be upon them indeed. The eyes of the nation will be upon them too."

Trump Wished For A Whiter America All Along

Trump Wished For A Whiter America All Along

So the cover has now been ripped off the rationalizations about President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, the tissue paper peeled away from his insistence that he only wanted to get rid of terrorists, rapists and drug-dealers. Back during the campaign, you’ll recall, Trump and his supporters insisted that their goal was to rid the country of criminals who were sneaking in illegally.

Even then, most voters knew better. Trump was clearly pandering to those white Americans who were unhappy with the cultural changes of the last half-century, including the shifting demographics that are weakening their political and social influence. Trump’s election was, in large measure, a backlash against the first black president.

Now, Trump has enthusiastically embraced a new Senate proposal that would limit legal immigration, with a goal of cutting the number of immigrants in half within 10 years. It’s refreshing, actually, to have this agenda out in the open: Trump and his allies want to make America white again.

That’s a longstanding goal of some of his closer compatriots, including his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Indeed, Bannon’s views are more xenophobic than those of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA).

Their bill would limit the ability of naturalized American citizens and legal residents to bring in their relatives, something current law generously allows. They would grant preferences to English-speakers, business owners and the highly educated.

Bannon, by contrast, once ranted that “engineering schools are all full of people from South Asia and East Asia. … They’re coming in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, he claimed, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because all these foreign students come.”

That’s of a piece with the nationalism of some of the Republican Party’s more xenophobic thinkers. Several of them have complained for decades about a change in immigration policy pushed through by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It allowed people from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to come to the United States in large numbers, rather than restricting legal access mostly to people from Western Europe, as was the case before.

The ultraconservative Pat Buchanan wrote a book called Suicide of a Superpower, in which he forecasts a swift decline for a nation that has allowed itself, in his view, to be overrun by people of color. Journalist Peter Brimelow — himself an immigrant from Great Britain — founded a web-based magazine called VDARE, which traffics in ugly racial stereotypes and longs for a whiter America.

Cotton and Perdue claim that their bill is copied from policies put in place by Canada and Australia, both of which use a “merit-based” system that awards points for job skills and English-language proficiency. But both of those countries take in more immigrants, based on their populations, than the United States does. (Immigrants account for about 22 percent of Australia’s population, about 20 percent of Canada’s and about 13 percent of ours, according to the Migration Policy Institute.) The United States is not in danger of having its social safety net overwhelmed by foreigners.

Still, there are thoughtful conservatives — among them, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, an immigrant from Canada — who argue that the United States would be better served by an immigration policy that favors those who are better educated. Indeed, research does show that some low-skilled Americans may be aced out of entry-level jobs by low-skilled immigrants.

But most economists believe that we are better off with an immigration policy that welcomes newcomers. Many of those low-skilled immigrants take jobs that Americans simply won’t do — jobs such as plucking chickens and harvesting crops. Besides, immigrants tend to have more children than native-born citizens, which has helped the United States avoid the economic slump that befalls countries with too many elderly retirees and not enough working-age adults.

Of course, for many Trump supporters, all those black and brown babies are the problem. It doesn’t matter how hard their parents work or how well they speak English. They make the country look different — and that, apparently, is unacceptable.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

Why Are So Many In The ‘Resistance’ Ignoring Trump’s Iran Warpath?

Why Are So Many In The ‘Resistance’ Ignoring Trump’s Iran Warpath?

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

There are roughly two categories of resistance to President Donald Trump that have emerged over the past few months. There’s the grassroots, earnest resistance marked by mass protests, populated by everyone from radicals to liberals to nonprofits to immigration rights groups to antifascists to the occasional Democratic politician with the backbone to stand up to the administration. Then there’s the Resistance, a loose confederation of media careerists who nominally oppose Trump, but do so often for the most cynical and ideologically incoherent reasons. The “Resistance” consists of, among others, discredited neocon David Frum, racist huckster Glenn Beck, blowhard Keith Olbermann, and former spook and backalley abortion advocate Evan McMullin.

These men comprise the worst of the “Resistance.” Their attacks on Trump, such as they are, are marked by Cold War-mongering, gendered insults, career revamping, and a dislike of a foreign policy they view as inadequately bellicose toward Russia, Syria, and Iran.

Stop with the purity tests! is a common rejoinder to these criticisms. We must, given the stakes, welcome all who oppose Trump, some might say.

But what use is that opposition when it stops at the water’s edge; when it cares only for Trump’s excesses at home but ignores—if not welcomes—excesses abroad? Consider this not an indictment on the whole of their ideology, but an honest question from a potential anti-Trump ally: why does the “Resistance” not seem to care about Trump’s Iran war path?

Since he was sworn in just under a month ago, Trump has signaled a radical departure from the Obama White House’s already hostile (though mild in relative terms) approach to Iran. Trump has surrounded himself with anti-Iran hawks like Michael Flynn (since departed for unrelated reasons) and his Secretary of Defense General James Mattis. Flynn stated time and again that Iran was “intent on having a nuclear weapon” despite all evidence to the contrary. Gen. Mattis, who, as Politicoput it, “has a 33-year grudge against Iran,” insists “the Iranian regime… is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”

In their short time in office, Trump has put Iran “on notice” and leveled new sanctions nominally for firing a ballistic missile in January—an act that, according to NPR, did not violate the terms of the relevant U.N. resolution.

Trump has also surrounded himself with radical pro-Israel voices whose antipathy for Iran dovetails with their staunch loyalty to Israel’s far right. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, once compared the Iran deal to the Dreyfus Affair, the infamous anti-Semitic persecution of a Jewish army captain in 1890s France, saying of the deal, “the blatant anti-Semitism emanating from our president and his sycophantic minions is palpable and very disturbing.”

“The relationship between America and Iran,” Saeid Golkar, an Iran expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, recently told Al Jazeera, “is getting very dangerous.”

One would hardly have noticed if they were only listening to high-status Resistance pundits.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote a much-praised 8,000-word piece warning of Trump’s “authoritarianism,” but didn’t mention Trump’s hostility toward Iran, his alliance with Israel’s far right, or any of his foreign policy aggressions once. The only time foreign countries were brought up, whether it was Russia or Honduras or Venezuela, was when Frum needed to use them as examples of backwaters Trump would turn us into, not targets of Trump’s hothead foreign policy.

For Frum, the vaguely defined concept of “authoritarianism” seems to apply only stateside. This is an exceedingly self-serving definition given that Frum worked in the Bush White House and is to this day an advocate for the devastating Iraq war leveled by his former boss.

Limiting criticism of Trump to the damage he will inflict domestically isn’t just bad politics, it’s also a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card for Frum and his neoconservative friends who helped turn Iraq and the Levant into a hellscape less than a generation ago. To this extent, Frum is far more concerned with protecting the GOP brand both in the future and down-ballot than he is with “resisting” Trump. This is why Frum is silent on Trump’s Iran war path and his increasingly close relationship with Netanyahu; Trump’s vision of power in the Middle East, sans perhaps Syria, is entirely in line with Frum’s.

Evan McMullin, who has been calling for the United States to bomb the Syrian government and overthrow Assad for years, routinely discusses how Trump’s posture on Russia will help Iran rather than reading the words the president actually states on the subject. On actual policy, on actual statements threatening Iran and ratcheting up tension, McMullin has little to say. McMullin even lavished praise on Trump’s selection of Gen. Mattis as Defense Secretary, largely because, again, Trump’s policy on Iran dovetails with what McMullin actually believes.

Keith Olbermann, who isn’t nearly as vile as other members of the faux “Resistance,” rants and raves about Trump being a “Russian whore,” but can’t take five minutes out to note Trump’s gutting of Obama’s hard-fought Iran deal. Nor does Olbermann have anything to say on Trump cozying up to the worst elements of the Israeli far right. Olbermann never tweets about or discusses Iran, Israel, or Palestine on his GQ web series. Like Frum, he limits his outrage over Trump to purely domestic issues.

Racist grifter Glenn Beck has used the anti-Trump sentiment to try to rebrand himself as a moderate, principled, conservative crusader, even given validation and airtime by liberal late-night comedian Samantha Bee for a much publicized anti-Trump campaign. Beck (as well as Bee) has been entirely silent on Trump’s anti-Iran rhetoric. Beck, showing the nebulous nature of the “Resistance,” has even praised Trump’s far-right Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and gone back to blaming Black Lives Matter for entirely unrelated crimes against whites.

The Washington Post, which raised money saying it would hold Trump to account, publishes op-eds on Trump’s Iran policy ranging from praise (Jennifer Rubin) to procedural handwringing (David Ignatius), but never offers any meaningful criticism. Liberal media watchdog Media Matters and Mother Jones have not covered Trump’s ramped-up hostility with Iran once. Not only has MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid ignored Trump’s surly Iran posture, she even praised Gen. Mattis as the man preventing Trump from “dragging us into bed with Russia.” A pro-Russia stance is, as a matter of dogma, always assumed to be worse than potential war with Iran.

The reason, if history is any guide, is that if someone in the media has three topics to choose from, and two of those topics don’t upset American national security orthodoxy, those two topics will always rise to the top of the press heap. This is why foreign policy, especially as it relates to Palestine, Iran, and Muslim countries in general, always gets lowest priority. Its moral hazard is seen most explicitly during the early Obama years when issues like drone killings, extrajudicial assassination and a sprawling war on terror largely went unquestioned. This is a bipartisan consensus of executive power that, predictably, later came back to haunt liberals after Trump was elected.

Just the same, because Trump’s hostility in the Middle East largely serves the bipartisan consensus on Iran and Israel, it is of extremely low importance to most high-status liberals and centrists who are far more concerned with scoring points and winning the latest 24-hour news cycle than building an ideologically sustainable opposition to the Trump regime and the Republican Party it serves. This myopia is understandable for party flacks and media hangers-on, but it doesn’t mean thinking adults should indulge it or its longer-term implications.

It’s important that the resistance to Trump, such that it is, highlight the clampdown on domestic opposition and liberal programs. But it’s equally important for the resistance not to lose sight of those outside the U.S. who will suffer greatly from Trump’s eagerness to ramp up tensions in Iran and the Middle East as a whole.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst at FAIR and contributing writer for AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter Adam@AdamJohnsonNYC.

IMAGE: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves as he gives a speech on Iran’s late leader Khomeini’s death anniversary, in Tehran, Iran June 3, 2016. Leader.ir/Handout via REUTERS/Files

5 Reasons The GOP Is In Worse Shape Now Than It Was In 2012

5 Reasons The GOP Is In Worse Shape Now Than It Was In 2012

Predicting doom for Democrats and taking Republican-inflated scandals seriously is a job description for much of the media. And while in full pearl-clutching mode over the Democratic frontrunner, as they usually are, they’re missing the real story: The Republican Party, after eight years of plotting the demise of Barack Obama, is in far worse shape than it was the last time it lost the presidency.

What is supposed to be “the best field of Republican candidates in a generation” is being trounced by a birther, a fetal-tissue-experimenting doctor, a disgraced, anti-vaxxer CEO, and the guy who is only known for shutting down the government.

Oh, yeah, the birther is also an anti-vaxxer.

It’s only August, but the Republican right is on the verge of duplicating or tripling down on every mistake its leaders told themselves not to make after they lost last time, while inventing new flubs beyond the imagination of mortal satirists. Sure, the Koch network has doubled its spending commitment from 2012 to close to a billion dollars and it’s difficult for any party to hold the White House for three straight terms. But conservatives are at war with themselves, while their candidates are spouting nonsense and purposely alienating precisely the same voters they need to be winning over.

Why aren’t the media pointing this out?

“I know that it’s disturbing to read columns that portray the entire field as a bunch of cranks,” The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman wrote. “But it would be a dereliction of duty, basically an act of dishonest reporting, to pretend that they aren’t.”

So let’s do our duty and point out why this August is even worse for Republicans than the summer of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain.

1. Donald Trump is the most anti-immigrant frontrunner of a major party imaginable.
Birtherism made him a conservative hero. Xenophobic rants where he simultaneously promises to bring back jobs from China and cut wages in America speak to a real angst among the white working class that has been battered by conservative and neoliberal policies. But it’s Trump’s promise to deport 11 million immigrants that is most corrosive to the Republican brand. His newly released immigration plan would have denied citizenship to a couple of his competitors and wives. To even have a chance of winning Florida, the GOP needs to do at least as well with minorities as it did in 2004 — pre-Katrina, before the conservative backlash on immigration.

Immigration isn’t the only issue Latinos and Asian-Americans care about, but even Mitt Romney’s embrace of “self-deportation” conjured up images of broken families. Trump seems to be vowing to deport even U.S. citizens who had undocumented parents. The idea of mass deportations may appeal to a large segment of GOP primary voters, but we rarely discuss how suggesting people be jammed into buses and trains damages a party that’s spent decades relying on the frame of smaller government. Promoting a police state powerful enough to turn humans into cargo marked for destinations unknown, combined with promises to close marijuana shops in Colorado and Washington, while seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade so miscarriages can be investigated as murders — these eccentric ideas may well combine to taint the party’s image, possibly beyond repair.

2. Real conservatives know Trump is their worst nightmare.
Simply put: 2016 is the most important election of our lifetime, especially if you’re a GOP donor who sees the chance of building a solid majority of seven conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Many of these high-powered donors and establishment figures see Trump for what he is: a thin-skinned megalomaniac who holds few if any conservative beliefs beyond the basic impulse to make himself richer. Even scarier to them is seeing a guy who can go to war with hives of villainy like Fox News and RedState — and win.

When establishment conservatives face off against Trump supporters, it’s like turning over a rock and releasing the hate-infested, bigoted microbes that grew in the dank, moldy environment of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Understandably, they’re disgusted by what they’ve created, and some sense of justice deep in their collective conscience likely fears that they deserve to be consumed by it.

Watching as Trump validates every Democratic argument against Scott Walker’s jobs record or Carly Fiorina’s lack of business acumen must feel like a repeat of Newt Gingrich’s highly successful assault on Romney’s business record at Bain Capital. But the difference is that Trump isn’t playing with Adelson’s money, and he isn’t dependent on Republican benefactors to keep him in the .01 percent.

Trump has little to no chance of winning the GOP nomination, but he has a decent chance of leading the polls even as the establishment candidate racks up the delegates necessary to win. The damage that would do to the party is as impossible to imagine as Trump’s ridiculous campaign itself.

Continue reading: Jeb Bush, Obamacare, and the Government Shutdown

3. Jeb Bush is flailing.
It may seem insane that your name is Bush, and you think the Iraq War is a winning issue for you. Well, George W. Bush left office with about 30 percent of America thinking he was doing a good job. And much of that 30 percent will vote in the GOP primary. W. remains much more popular with America and the GOP base than Jeb has ever been. He may have lost two wars and failed to prevent 9/11 or the financial crisis, but he never backed Common Core. And while Jeb’s willingness to pass immigration reform mirrors his brother’s — and Ronald Reagan’s, for that matter — W. was a master at hiding his disdain for the GOP base. He would never suggest, as insultingly as Jeb did, that the GOP nominee must be willing to lose the primary to win the general election.

But Jeb Bush is certainly nailing the first part of that equation. He looks squeamish onstage next to Trump, and stiff as he comes out against spending on “women’s health.” Suddenly he’s realizing that he was doing better before, when he couldn’t come up with a good answer on Iraq — mostly because Democrats were attacking him. So this week he decided to try some more lying about Iraq while endorsing torture. This doesn’t differentiate him from the GOP field, but it does remind the base that it’s kind of a family tradition for him.

4. There could be a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood.
Opposing Planned Parenthood and shutting down the government would be fantastic issues for Republicans — if there were no such thing as general elections. The GOP base is demanding that Republican leaders make a principled stand, much as they did in 2013 against Obamacare. But the difference is that Planned Parenthood is popular, much more popular than any politician or political party, especially in swing states.

Such an act of extremism against women’s health — one year before the election that will decide the fate of Roe v. Wade — would be a dream come true for progressives, which is why Republican leaders are vowing to avoid it. But given the energy that this phony issue has developed among the conservative base, and the fear of an approaching GOP primary, the party’s leaders on Capitol Hill may be upstaged by Ted Cruz once again.

5. Obama and Obamacare are failing to fail, magnificently.
In 2011, Republicans were running against a president who had passed a controversial health care reform bill that had seen few benefits roll out. Now, four years later, 15 million Americans have gained health insurance while the economy is in the middle of the longest private sector job expansion in history. Obama’s second term is on pace to see the third most jobs created in any presidential term ever. And this is the term when Obama’s most transformative policies — the first new taxes on the rich and the full rollout of Obamacare — went into effect.

Promising to take health insurance away from 15 million Americans is still popular with the GOP base, but former Bush speechwriter David Frum gets that this promise may not play so well in the general election.

“More than 80 percent of those who have gained coverage under the ACA were pleased with the coverage they got,” he wrote in The Atlantic. “Everything we know about voters tells us that they are much more motivated to protect something they already have than to vote to gain something new.”

Frum presents ways Republicans could vow to improve Obamacare. None of them — especially changing the funding mechanism to a carbon tax, which would be awesome — would ever be embraced by a GOP presidential candidate. It is true that Frum, a native of single-payer Canada, has long dissented from conservative orthodoxy on Obamacare, but he gets why Romney lost.

Mitt’s Obamacare paternity was baked into his numbers when he won the primary. His indelible betrayal of conservatism as Massachusetts governor kept him from truly veering to the center in the general election. But what happens next summer when a conservative Republican candidate realizes that he actually can’t vow to destroy Obamacare and win? Will the base forgive him before November for turning reasonable?

Never count the GOP out. After a decade of wrecking nearly everything it touched, it only took them six years to win back Congress. And a country that has made horrible choices out of fear of terror and foreigners could do it again, especially when voters lack the protection of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for the first presidential election since 1968. Conservatives are on the verge of a massive rebuke or a ridiculous vindication. And if you look at what they’ve learned — and failed to learn — since 2012, it’s easy to see which is more likely.

Illustration: DonkeyHotey