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Iran Provides New Test of Obama’s Mettle

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

05.22.2012 - 3:42 PM

Just hours after an announcement that an agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency on access for inspectors was imminent comes a new bit of news that could render the entire diplomatic process moot. As the Associated Press reports via the Times of Israel:

Iran announced Tuesday that it had delivered its first two batches of domestically produced nuclear fuel to a Tehran research reactor. The move comes on the eve of talks between Tehran and six Western powers over the future of the country’s nuclear program. The move is widely seen as an attempt by Iran to boost its bargaining position by exaggerating its nuclear technology.

Tehran had tentatively agreed to ship its enriched uranium abroad in order to produce such fuel in 2009. By moving the fuel rods to its own reactors, Iran will effectively put the kibosh on a deal by which it would send the fuel abroad.

While one has to applaud the sheer chutzpah of the Iranians in conducting this maneuver on the very day that IAEA chief Yukio Amano was in Tehran to negotiate with them, it does speak volumes about their utter contempt for their Western negotiating partners. Do they really think they can get away with this? But an even better question would be to ask whether the P5+1 negotiators led by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton are so desperate for an accord as to go forward with the talks even as the Islamist regime contradicts the terms of the proposed deal.

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Pressure Booker? From Inept to Dishonest

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

05.22.2012 - 3:20 PM

Earlier today I criticized Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt for his strikingly inept television appearance. But ineptness is one thing; misleading people is quite another. And as this new RNC ad makes clear, LaBolt’s statement that the Obama campaign did not reach out to Newark Mayor Cory Booker in the aftermath of Booker’s defense of Bain Capital was simply not true.

Mayor Booker himself admits he was contacted by the Obama campaign. Which means that LaBolt was either lying or he’s speaking out on issues he has no knowledge about while giving us the impression that he’s an authoritative voice.

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Warren’s Indian Problem Isn’t Going Away

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

05.22.2012 - 2:11 PM

Genealogy has become a popular American pastime, but it’s not one that Elizabeth Warren seems to be enjoying. The law professor turned Democratic Senate candidate has discovered to her displeasure that more attention is being paid to her somewhat tenuous claim to Native American ancestry and the use her academic employers made of this fiction than her attempt to defeat Massachusetts incumbent Scott Brown. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta has compiled all the available evidence on the matter and found some facts that will comfort Warren and others that her critics will promote. But even after we have gotten to the bottom of this — and Franke-Ruta appears to have done so — that won’t solve her problem. Warren’s dilemma is more pressing than merely the irony of a “progressive” hoisted on the petard fashioned by the left.

Warren is vulnerable on this score not just because it is amusing to see a liberal squirm after being called out for masquerading as a minority. Rather it is the fact that she’s a relative newcomer to politics and this controversy is helping to define her. Though she’s right that this is a distraction from the issues, having entered the public imagination as the object of popular scorn in this fashion, it’s going to be difficult for her to shake this image of faux Indian in the next six months.

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Ike: Good Man, But Not a Great Leader

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

05.22.2012 - 1:40 PM

In his New Republic review of Jean Edward Smith’s new Eisenhower biography, Rutgers historian David Greenberg rightly take legions of Ike-worshippers to task for sugar-coating Ike’s mixed performance as both a general and a president. As Greenberg notes, Dwight Eisenhower was not the amiable dunce of contemporary caricatures but nor is he the genius and giant he is now made out to be.

Not even his greatest admirers make any great claims for his tactical prowess, while many of his specific decisions during the liberation of North Africa and Western Europe were deeply flawed. (One decision that he got right–and that Greenberg needlessly criticizes him for–was sticking by George S. Patton after the latter slapped a couple of soldiers for alleged cowardice. Ike realized what Greenberg does not: that this was a small price to pay for Patton’s tactical genius.)

His presidency was even more problematic. While one can make the case, as Smith does, that Ike presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, the same might be said for other presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton or, in the case of two who did not serve a full eight years, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. Ike’s achievement was not as unprecedented as Smith makes it out to be, nor did he have the kind of accomplishments that FDR (got the nation through the Great Depression, helped win World War II), Truman (the containment policy) or Reagan (helped end the Cold War) had.

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Poll: Obama’s Big Lead With Women Gone

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

05.22.2012 - 1:10 PM

President Obama and Mitt Romney are in a dead heat in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, partially because Obama’s wide advantage with women last month has evaporated:

One of those times came last month, when Obama held a seven-point advantage. That lead was fueled in part by a 19-point advantage among women, the largest across the set of polls. In the new survey, 51 percent of female voters support Obama and 44 percent Romney, almost precisely the average divide since April 2011.

The Democrats’ war on women strategy may have given Obama a temporary boost with women, but it didn’t last. As soon as the issue dropped out of the news cycle, the divide bounced back to where it was before, which was what some conservatives predicted would happen.

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Message Discipline Ad Absurdum

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

05.22.2012 - 12:50 PM

Anderson Cooper’s interview with Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt is fantastically ineffective. CNN’s Cooper asks LaBolt questions about the hypocrisy of Obama’s attack on Bain Capital. LaBolt refuses to answer them, choosing instead to simply repeat his talking points. This isn’t unheard of in American politics, of course. But LaBolt’s mechanical, rigid, and robotic style — his refusal even to acknowledge Cooper’s question if only to pivot off of it — is beyond parody. It is message discipline ad absurdum.

It’s impossible to know why the Obama campaign would think there is any up-side to putting someone like LaBolt on the air. Anyone even remotely objective would come away from this interview less impressed with the president’s position, correctly assuming that LaBolt’s inability to address the questions directed at him means he has no counter-argument to offer.

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Credit is Due for Chen’s Flight to Safety

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

05.22.2012 - 12:30 PM

Because I have been critical of President Obama’s handling of Afghanistan and other foreign policy issues, it is only fair to give credit where it’s due. And the administration does deserve credit for engineering Chinese dissident’s Chen Guangcheng’s flight to safety in the U.S. along with his immediate family.

The administration stumbled initially by conniving in a deal to force Chen to leave sanctuary in the U.S. embassy in Beijing where he had fled after eluding thuggish security forces. But the administration, led in this case by Secretary of State Clinton, was not entirely to blame because it appears that Chen changed his mind about whether he wanted to leave the embassy or not. When he did decide that he wanted to come to the U.S., the administration went to bat for him even though “realpolitik” voices in the administration no doubt urged abandoning him to his fate so as not to disturb bilateral relations. President Obama and Secretary Clinton rightly rejected the siren song of faux realism and not only pressured Beijing to let him go but gave him sanctuary on our shores.

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Iran’s Nuclear Shell Game

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

05.22.2012 - 12:04 PM

Iran took another step toward convincing the West it is showing flexibility about its nuclear program this week by inviting the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency to Tehran. IAEA chief Yukio Amano has been a thorn in the side of the Iranians as his agency has reported clear evidence of their work on military applications of nuclear power and their refusal to allow inspectors access to vital sites. But by signing an agreement with Amano to belatedly allow IAEA personnel entry into their facilities, the Islamist regime is creating the impression that it has turned over a new leaf of cooperation that will make it easier for the West to allow it to keep its nuclear program. Though the talks with the IAEA are separate from the P5+1 negotiations that will soon resume in Baghdad, by seeming to give in to the international community on inspection issues, Iran is hoping to strengthen those in the West who are inclined to ease up on them.

But this move, like other alleged concessions on Iran’s part, must be viewed with extreme suspicion. Like the idea of removing their stockpile of refined uranium to another country, the new inspections cannot conclusively allay our fears about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Deceptions are possible on both scores, especially as long as Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is left intact. Given the limited and belated nature of these alleged compromises, it is impossible to disregard or discount the very real possibility that the West is once again being played for suckers by Iran.

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Solid Case Against Birth Control Mandate?

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

05.22.2012 - 11:30 AM

More than 40 religious institutions, included Catholic universities and charities, filed simultaneous lawsuits against the Obama administration’s birth control mandate yesterday, As The Hill reports, the biggest threat to the mandate in court is a 1993 religious freedom law, which was originally introduced by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and then-Rep. Chuck Schumer, of all people:

RFRA sailed through Congress with broad bipartisan support in response to an unpopular decision by the Supreme Court that was seen as curbing Native Americans’ religious freedom to use peyote, a traditional hallucinogen.

Now it will force the government to prove that federal regulators did not have another way to expand women’s access to birth control that would be less burdensome on religion — an argument experts say conservatives can win.

The law puts the onus on the federal government to show that it had a compelling interest in requiring Catholic employers to provide birth control coverage, and that it couldn’t have achieved these aims another way. The Hill reports that legal experts think this case is solid:

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The Fraudulence of Obama

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner

05.22.2012 - 11:09 AM

To understand the fundamental fraudulence of Barack Obama, consider just one issue: his relationship with lobbyists.

In arguably the most important speech of the campaign, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in 2007, Obama said, “[Lobbyists] have not funded my campaign, they will not work in my White House.” Upon taking office, Obama made quite a show of announcing new ethics rules barring lobbyists from working in the administration on issues that fell under their lobbying bailiwick. Yet Obama immediately allowed waivers for lobbyists working on issues that fell under their lobbying bailiwick.

But that’s not all. During the 2008 campaign, Obama said this:

I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over, that they had not funded my campaigns, and from my first day as president, I will launch the most sweeping ethics reform in U.S. history. We will make government more open, more accountable and more responsive to the problems of the American people.

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Tainted Money from Bain Capital?

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

05.22.2012 - 10:33 AM

Last night, Cory Booker attempted to walk back his Bain Capital comments yet again, this time on the Rachel Maddow show. Why is he even bothering? The damage is already done. The left now sees him as a traitor to the class struggle, bought and paid for, as Cornell West is fond of saying, by the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats.

Let’s imagine they’re right, and Booker said what he said because he thinks the Bain attacks are unpopular with his constituents and donors on Wall Street. If that’s the case, shouldn’t Obama take his comments even more seriously? Back in 2008, Obama was the top candidate recipient of donations from the securities and investment industry, raising more than $16 million. So far in 2012, he has raised $2 million. So…maybe Booker has a point.

Still, liberal bloggers are pushing the issue in an effort to run damage control for the Obama campaign. Booker has apparently taken donations from Bain higher-ups over the years, and Think Progress seized on this scandalous scandal as proof of his treachery:

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Why Can’t They Pay Their Taxes On Time?

Omri Ceren | @cerenomri

05.22.2012 - 8:53 AM

What is it with these people?

Only seven months after critical news stories about unpaid taxes on a private airplane, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill was late paying property taxes on her Washington, D.C., condominium. Records show that the Missouri Democrat missed the fall 2011 deadline by about three weeks. McCaskill paid $197 in penalties and interest on top of the $1,514 in taxes owed for half the year. McCaskill also was about a month late paying her spring 2010 property tax bill on the condo.

McCaskill’s Chinatown condo was purchased in 2007 for $700,000. It’s unclear how much her private plane is worth, but the taxes she failed to pay on it amounted to $300,000. So, it’s worth more than $300,000. Per liberal logic just the house and the plane are enough to springboard her into the 1 percent of Americans who are bleeding this country dry by stubbornly insisting on having wealth (though in fairness she’s been in the public sector for all but three years since around age 30, so she didn’t earn her wealth exclusively as some vampire capitalist businesswoman or whatever).

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My Week in Vegas With Wounded Troops

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

05.21.2012 - 6:54 PM

Since 2001, there have been 48,083 American service members wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many Americans hear very little about them. When the national media broaches the issue, it’s often in terms of statistics and connected to some sort of domestic challenge or burden: the high veteran unemployment, the cost of treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or the military suicide epidemic.

At times, wounded warriors have been exploited for political agendas; they’re often used as props by the anti-war movement, which has characterized them as victims of imperialist U.S. government foreign policy. And while politicians love to tout their appreciation for veterans, they often gloss over the deeper challenges the wounded face after they return home.

There are a few reasons for the disconnect. For one, the all-volunteer military means that wide swaths of America have little interaction with service members in general, let alone wounded soldiers. And their injuries can sometimes be emotionally difficult to deal with. Wounded warriors represent both the horrors of war and the valor, and when they return home they force us to confront both. It’s impossible to see a 22-year-old confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and hold a romanticized view of war. And it’s impossible to listen to the story of how he got there and not be left humbled by his sacrifice.

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Why Obama Isn’t Dumping Biden

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

05.21.2012 - 6:25 PM

The idea that President Obama is seriously considering dumping Joe Biden from the Democratic ticket this year is a seductive one. To assume that this is a real possibility, as William Kristol argues in the Weekly Standard, you must believe the president is not only sick and tired of Biden’s bloviating, but that he believes his re-election effort is in real peril. While I don’t doubt the former proposition for a moment, I have yet to see proof President Obama’s messianic self-image has been so punctured by reality that he is willing to do the unthinkable and not only discard a sitting vice president but elevate Hillary Clinton as his figurative and actual successor.

Unlike Kristol and my esteemed colleague Pete Wehner, who also thinks Biden is on his way out, I think the potential costs to the president outweigh the benefits. Even more to the point, the essential prerequisite of this scenario — a panic-stricken White House that sees the president as doomed to defeat unless the Democrats throw the sort of Hail Mary pass that caused John McCain to make a fateful veep pick — doesn’t exist. The president is behaving as if he is convinced that a campaign to destroy Mitt Romney’s character will succeed. Conceding that all is lost without Clinton to save him goes against everything we know about Obama’s belief in himself and his abilities. He may also understand that Biden wouldn’t go quietly, and the perception of weakness the veep’s political execution would engender would merely discourage his supporters rather than energize them.

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Cronkite and the Roots of Media Bias

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

05.21.2012 - 5:17 PM

An essential element of the mainstream media’s myth about its own impartiality is the notion that before Fox News came along we were living in a golden age of broadcast news reporting. The days when national news was the dominion of three networks and a few major newspapers is portrayed as Eden before the fall, an era when partisanship of the kind that is now both familiar and expected was unknown. A key element to this fairy tale is the idea that the journalistic icons of the time, like CBS’s Walter Cronkite, were Olympian figures who would never stoop to play favorites or inject ideology into the news.

But this view is totally false. As media news analyst Howard Kurtz writes in the Daily Beast, a new biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley spills the beans on the godlike anchorman’s unethical practices, including blatant partisanship that would make the conservative talkers on Fox and the liberals on MSNBC blush. While Kurtz still admires Cronkite in spite of his flaws, the problem here is not just that god had feet of clay after all. It’s that the truth about Cronkite throws the entire narrative of the liberal mainstream media under the bus. It wasn’t Fox that poisoned the well of journalism, as former New York Times editor Bill Keller recently alleged. Fox and other such outlets were brought into existence in an effort to balance a journalistic establishment that was already tilting heavily to the left. The real sin here is not bias or even partisanship but the pretense of fairness that Cronkite exemplified.

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Obama Rolls Over Again for the Turks

Omri Ceren | @cerenomri

05.21.2012 - 4:26 PM

It was only last month when the State Department was acknowledging that Israel is “one of NATO’s partners [and] has participated over the years in many, many, many NATO activities, consultations, exercises, et cetera.” The context was a surreal exchange between the AP’s Matt Lee and State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland regarding how Turkey was vetoing Israel from participating in this week’s Chicago NATO summit. Lee expressed confusion at the bland acquiescence with which the Obama administration was meeting Turkey’s machinations:

QUESTION: Toria, I’m trying to help you out here, because you’re going to get absolutely slammed.
MS. NULAND: I understand. Matt, there is no –
QUESTION: You are. If you can’t come out and say that the United States wants Israel to participate, its main ally in the Middle East and you won’t come out and say that the administration wants them to participate in whatever event is going on in Chicago, that’s – that is going to be seized on.
…
QUESTION: Fair enough. But the Turks wouldn’t be objecting to Israel’s participation if someone hadn’t proposed that Israel participate. And if you have proposed that they participate –
MS. NULAND: Again –
QUESTION: — and you’re not willing to stick up for it, I don’t understand why.

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“Afghan Good Enough”

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

05.21.2012 - 3:28 PM

Earlier today, I blogged about the revelation in the New York Times that, in the words of one of the president’s advisers, in Afghanistan, “The military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.” Meaning that the military wanted to pursue a wide-ranging counterinsurgency strategy and Obama didn’t.

This has been accompanied by numerous leaks about how the administration was redefining success downward, the mantra being the condescending formulation,”Afghan good enough.” The president’s own national security adviser told reporters on the record: “The goal is to have an Afghanistan again that has a degree of stability such that forces like al-Qaeda and associated groups cannot have safe haven unimpeded, which could threaten the region and threaten U.S. and other interests in the world.” (Does that mean that “impeded” safe havens would be ok?)

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Obama Launches New Bain Attack Ad

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

05.21.2012 - 2:20 PM

Note to Cory Booker: don’t watch this latest Obama ad while eating lunch. The Obama campaign has released another distorted attack on Bain Capital, this time targeting the company’s acquisition of a textile firm called American Pad and Paper (Ampad):

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Mass Dems Stuck With Elizabeth Warren

Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman

05.21.2012 - 1:30 PM

Massachusetts Democrats are stuck with Elizabeth Warren. That’s what the Boston Herald is reporting after talking to state Democrats, and they’re probably right. There is nobody with Warren’s name recognition and catching up with fundraising, at this point, would be a long shot:

“The Democratic Party is really stuck,” countered University of New Hampshire political science professor Andrew Smith. “They essentially cleared the path for her as a candidate, and they can’t get rid of her now. She could conceivably drop out, but I doubt that will be the case, and I doubt the party will try to push her aside.” …

Smith and some Democrats say the party can’t switch front-runners now — it’s probably too late for a big name that could attract big money to jump in and gather the 10,000 signatures needed by a June 5 deadline.

“They’re in a tough spot, but there’s not a lot they can do about it,” Smith said.

Warren had $10.9 million as of late March to Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s $15 million.

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Burma’s Tricky Question

Seth Mandel | @SethAMandel

05.21.2012 - 1:00 PM

The beginning of this month was a week of firsts for Burma’s famed pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. She won a seat in parliamentary by-elections and, unlike after her party’s overwhelming victory in 1990 that was immediately nullified by the ruling junta, was granted her seat on May 1. She was then awarded her first passport in 24 years, which she will use to fulfill other firsts: she will address both chambers of the British parliament, and she will travel to Norway and deliver her Nobel acceptance speech. (She won the Peace Prize in 1991 but was put under house arrest.)

The European Union had already agreed to suspend its economic sanctions against Burma, and on Friday U.S. officials said they would suspend the prohibition against American investment in Burma. This is both a momentous decision and a risky one. As Reuters reports this morning:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi have discussed the need to protect against the country backsliding on reforms.

The U.S. on Friday said it would suspend a ban on American investment in the country also known as Burma. It was the Obama administration’s most significant step yet to reward Myanmar for its shift from five decades of authoritarian rule, although rights groups criticized the move as premature.

The State Department said Clinton called Suu Kyi on Sunday night, and that they agreed Myanmar’s progress remains fragile. Clinton said the U.S. was keeping its sanctions’ authorities in place as an insurance policy.

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