Marco Rubio?

I hadn't given a lot of thought to Marco Rubio as a 2016 candidate. But perhaps I should. There is an article entitled “A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats” by Jeremy W. Peters on The New York Times' site which implies that Rubio is very good at capturing his audience's sympathy. And of course, his history of doing so well against the former Governor, Charlie Crist, among Republicans that Crist left the party and still lost when he tried to run an independent campaign certainly points to Rubio's electability, which is an important factor. He may be somewhat more conservative than I'd like, but he may well be a good choice. After all, anyone who scares Democrats interested in putting Hillary Clinton in the White House as much as is implied by that article is worth looking at.

Paul Krugman's idea of "compromise" — what world is he living in?

A lot of the time, when I quote a column or a blog at length, it's because I agree with it, and would like to echo the sentiments posted there. This time, however, I wish to quote one which I think is so far from making sense that it boggles the mind to think that there are people who actually think that way. The column I am discussing was one dated October 13, 2013 on The New York Times' site, called The Dixiecrat Solution by Paul Krugman. He begins:

So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.

Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.

The analogy that Krugman seems to be making assumes that President Obama and the Senate Democrats have a right to all they want to do with our government, that any attempt to oppose those plans is spurious, and that the Republican attempts to try to arrange a compromise is a phony compromise — in other words, that they are asking for everything and yielding almost nothing. In fact, if anything, it is the Democrats who have insisted they get everything they want — President Obama has even said that first they need to give up everything and only then will he talk! So when Krugman says:

And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.

Stocks surged last Friday in the belief that House Republicans were getting ready to back down on their ransom demands over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. But what Republicans were actually offering, it seems, was the “compromise” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article: rolling back some of the “sequester” budget cuts — which both parties dislike; cuts in Medicare, but with no quid pro quo in the form of higher revenue; and only a temporary fix on the debt ceiling, so that we would soon find ourselves in crisis again.

it is clear that Krugman's idea of “compromise” is a weird one. As he himself puts it:

I do not think that word “compromise” means what Mr. Ryan thinks it means. Above all, he failed to offer the one thing the White House won’t, can’t bend on: an end to extortion over the debt ceiling.

But this so-called “extortion over the debt ceiling” is the only weapon the Republicans have in the face of Democratic insistence that their entire program be allowed to go into force and the sequester rolled back. Krugman's idea of “compromise,” in short, is to allow the Democrats to have the whole of their wish list, without any give-back. This is a compromise? I certainly think not. And so, when he continues:

Yet even this ludicrously unbalanced offer was too much for conservative activists, who lambasted Mr. Ryan for basically leaving health reform intact.

it is clear that he considers Ryan's offer “ludicrously unbalanced,” without the slightest realization that it is his supposed compromise that would better be described in those terms.

I'm not going to continue further with his column, because it is easy enough to see how wildly out of touch with any notion of fairness Mr. Krugman is. And I assume he is not stupid. So my only question is, how can anyone take his ideas seriously?

Media bias, the NSA, and the last two administrations

There's an interesting post by Richard Benedetto on the Real Clear Politics site, dated June 18, 2013 and entitled “Media Cut Obama Slack They Denied Bush on NSA.” While the emphasis is mine, I quote it in its entirety. It shows just how biased the media are:

In recent days, there has been discussion about how Democrats and liberals, once severe critics of anti-terror surveillance programs when Republican President George W. Bush was conducting them, have been more careful, and less critical, when responding to the massive data collection sweeps that have come to light under President Obama.

“It is jarring to see the left so compliant now that the surveillance has been sanctioned by a Democratic president,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote Sunday.

Milbank raised a valid point. But perhaps even more “jarring” are the carefully chosen, softer words used by the news media when reporting on the Obama program, compared to the inflammatory and alarmist language used when his predecessor was in charge.

When news broke in December 2005 that the Bush administration was engaged in phone wiretaps (without court orders) against suspected terrorists, the major news outlets almost immediately labeled the program “domestic spying.”

“In address, Bush says he ordered domestic spying,” said a Page One headline in The New York Times on Dec. 18, 2005.

The Washington Post, reporting on the same radio address, used similar wording in its headline: “President says he ordered NSA domestic spying.”

The Times and Post news articles each went on to use the word “spying” — which has dark, sinister connotations — four more times, although Bush, in his speech, never used it once. The Post followed up with an editorial: “Spying on Americans.”

So use of the word “spying” was the media’s choice, not the president’s. But the stage was set. From then on, The Times, The Post and other major news outlets continuously used the phrase “domestic spying” when reporting on the Bush wiretap program months after the initial outburst.

Bush, apparently frustrated by what he saw as media failure to fully explain what was really going on, tried to clarify in a Jan. 23, 2006 speech at Kansas State University. He hoped to get rid of the “spying” label and convince Americans that he was not listening in on phone calls to their mothers.

“I'll repeat to you, even though you hear words, ‘domestic spying,’ these are not phone calls within the United States. This is a phone call of an al-Qaeda, known al-Qaeda suspect, making a phone call into the United States.”

The presidential explanation didn’t work. Here is the USA Today headline on the speech: “White House steps up defense of domestic spying.”

Fast-forward to June 2013. Obama, thanks to an explosive leak by a National Security Agency contractor, finds himself embroiled in a similar flap over the gathering of domestic intelligence. This time, he is in charge of what appears to be the most sweeping “domestic spying” mission ever undertaken. “Unprecedented” is a word Obama likes to use. That’s what it is. And while the news media have not shied away from covering the controversial program and its citizen-privacy ramifications, the style, tone and use of language are far different from the Bush days.

Mostly gone from the reporting is the loaded phrase “domestic spying.” Instead, we find a flurry of euphemisms such as “call monitoring,” “data collection,” “data mining,” “data gathering” and “electronic surveillance.” Most news outlets that continue to use the word “spying” when referring to the current U.S. intelligence gathering programs are foreign newspapers and broadcasters.

“Top official tries to quell US spying scandal,” said a headline in the June 10 New Zealand Herald. Moreover, many of the reports repeatedly remind us that the programs in question began under the Bush administration. So, by implication, it’s not really Obama’s fault.

Last Sunday’s Washington Post front page had a nearly 2,000-word story on the surveillance controversy headlined “NSA Surveillance: The Architecture.” It strongly reiterated the point that this is what Bush wrought.

There were no photos on the front page, but when you jumped inside there was a four-column picture of Bush, Vice President Cheney and two other top aides in a 2008 visit to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. There also were smaller headshot photos of two Bush legal and security aides and one more picture of protesters at a 2007 Senate hearing wearing oversized sunglasses with the message “Stop Spying.” The witness at that hearing was then-Bush intelligence director Mike McConnell.

Oddly, many news stories on the current surveillance controversy do not feature photos of Obama unless he is directly addressing the issue. It conveys that while this is a serious problem, it is not necessarily Obama’s problem. He’s busy showing the world that he’s doing other things. That’s the way he likes it. And so, apparently, do the news media.

A good observation. And one that needs to be given more publicity.