Author: Joe Conason

During the festival of falsehood held by Republicans in Tampa, Florida, a few weeks ago, perhaps the very biggest lie emanated from the mouth of Jeb Bush, the Florida politician, entrepreneur, and potential heir to the GOP presidential dynasty.

“My brother,” began Jeb, referring to former President George W. Bush, “I love my brother.” He then went on to add, more arguably: “He is a man of integrity, courage, and honor. And during incredibly challenging times, he kept us safe.”

That those words — “he kept us safe” — could be uttered in public about George Bush is a testament to our national affliction of historical amnesia. The harsher truth, long known but now reiterated in a recent startling report on The New York Times op-ed page, is that the Bush administration’s “negligence” left us undefended against the disaster whose anniversary we marked again this month.

New documents uncovered by investigative journalist Kurt Eichenwald show that despite repeated, urgent warnings from intelligence officials about an impending al-Qaeda attack, Bush did nothing, because his neoconservative advisers told him that the threats were merely a “ruse” and a distraction.

Recalling the evidence compiled by the 9/11 Commission — which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and numerous other officials sought to stymie and mislead — it has been clear for years that they ignored many warnings about al-Qaeda.

Specifically, as Eichenwald points out in his op-ed report, CIA officials sought to warn Bush with a glaring headline in the famous August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” That memorandum represented the culmination of many months of attempts to awaken a somnolent White House to the impending threat of a terrorist attack.

None of that is news, although Republicans like Jeb Bush continue to behave as if the facts uncovered by the 9/11 Commission had never emerged.

But according to Eichenwald, he has seen still-classified documents that place the August 6th PDB in a new context — namely, the briefing papers preceding that date, which remain locked away:

“While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: The administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the August 6th document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.”

On May 1, 2001, the CIA relayed a report to the White House about “a group presently in the United States” that was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22nd, the agency told Bush that the al-Qaeda strikes might be “imminent.”

A week later, the CIA answered neoconservative officials in the Bush administration who claimed that Osama bin Laden’s threats were a ruse to distract the United States from the real threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “The United States is not the target of a disinformation campaign” by bin Laden, wrote agency officials, citing evidence compiled by its analysts that the al-Qaeda threats were real.

The warnings continued and multiplied into July 2001, with counter-terrorism officials becoming increasingly alarmed — or as Eichenwald puts it, “apoplectic.” Still, Bush, Cheney, Rice, and their coterie failed to act.

Familiar with Eichenwald’s career, I’m confident that he is reporting what he has seen with complete accuracy and due caution. A two-time winner of the George Polk Award and a Pulitzer finalist, he concludes carefully that we will never know whether a more alert administration could have mobilized to prevent 9/11. What we know for certain — that they didn’t bother — is an eternal indictment.

But Eichenwald’s report has relevance that is more than historical. Advising Mitt Romney, foreign policy neophyte, are the same neoconservatives whose arrogance and incompetence steered Bush away from al-Qaeda and toward the quagmire in Iraq. Returning them to power would be exceptionally dangerous to the security of the United States and the world.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.

By naming Paul Ryan as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has endorsed what used to be known as “voodoo economics” — and restored that special brand of Republican superstition to the center of national debate.

To take Ryan seriously, as all too many pundits and politicians insist we must, requires everyone to behave as if the plans he produced as House Budget Committee chairman represent a meaningful effort to improve the nation’s fiscal future. Sooner or later, however, real analysts will scrutinize the Ryan budget using honest math instead of humbug and magic.

In fact, they already have done so — and that is where the myth of Ryan as a serious, scrupulous, and bold reformer begins to disintegrate.

As close observers know, the Wisconsin congressman wants to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans even more sharply than George W. Bush, whose tax policies caused the bulk of the deficits that provoke so much righteous anger among Republicans like Ryan today. In Ryan’s budget, his tax cuts leave an enormous revenue gap, even with the absurdly destructive spending cuts he also proposes.

But according to Ryan, we need not worry that his plan will increase fiscal deficits as well as the deficits it will assuredly worsen in infrastructure, education, health care, environmental quality, consumer protection, and scientific research. He says that his tax cuts, which naturally favor the wealthiest Americans, will pay for themselves by creating a huge, rapid spurt of economic growth — which will result in higher tax revenues to cover the deficit.

Where have we heard this before? There was the original Reagan version and then later the Bush version, which relied on a gimmick called “dynamic scoring” to create the same fake equation. Ryan’s version is updated slightly, claiming that if Congress removes enough loopholes and tax expenditures, the resulting spurt of growth will reach 5 percent, 10 percent, or even more.

Let us turn now to the respected professionals at the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who are too polite to simply laugh at Ryan. They took him seriously enough to examine his assertions with care, only to find that the research he cites doesn’t support his assumptions — and that most economists still don’t buy his theories. They also noticed that Ryan never specifies which loopholes and expenditures he expects to end. That must be why Romney, who has offered similarly foggy plans for tax reform, feels Ryan is such a kindred spirit.

When voters hear that Ryan is a bold, responsible figure determined to reduce the fiscal overhang that threatens future generations, they should know that his budgets don’t balance — at least not any time before 2040. And that’s because he is pursuing the same agenda George W. Bush did — which will produce still more ruinous results if he succeeds.

No fear, however, because Ryan happily tells us that his tax cuts will stimulate so much economic growth so rapidly that fresh revenues will fill the gaps. Yes! Cutting taxes will actually increase tax revenues.

Everyone in Washington certainly knows where we heard that before. That argument first appeared when Ronald Reagan was president then disappeared when he was forced to raise taxes in a vain attempt to cover the vast deficits his policies spawned. The same argument reappeared in the guise of “dynamic scoring” to justify the Bush tax cuts, with consequences that continue to cripple the nation.

Voodoo economics, as the senior (and smarter) Bush so memorably termed this belief system, does not work. But Ryan evidently believes in it, because his budget depends heavily on that old voodoo to achieve balance. He claims that closing loopholes and reducing tax expenditures will cover the revenue losses.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.

When Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters last week that Mitt Romney’s foreign investment accounts don’t trouble him because “it’s really American to avoid paying taxes,” he must not have realized that he was calling his party’s nominee-to-be a liar.

“As long as it was legal, I’m okay with it,” said the South Carolina Republican. “I don’t blame anybody for using the tax code to their advantage. … It’s a game we play. Every American tries to find the way to get the most deductions they can. I see nothing wrong with playing the game, because we set it up to be a game.”

Graham assumes — no doubt correctly — that Romney sent his money offshore to avoid taxes. But the Republican candidate and his flacks have repeatedly insisted that the Romneys’ admittedly minimal tax bill was not reduced at all by their remarkable maze of holdings in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda. It is “the very same” as if he had kept those millions of dollars in the United States, or so they claim.

But Graham clearly doesn’t buy that alibi. In fact, nobody does. And eventually Romney may be forced to reveal complete information about his investments that may yet indicate the extent to which he and his family have escaped taxation.

Meanwhile, what Graham unwittingly evoked with his clumsy endorsement of tax avoidance is the specter of Greece — a nation whose fiscal drama incites endless Republican prattle about the need for austerity. Warnings that as a nation we are on “the road to Greece” have become a favorite Republican cliché, regurgitated by every politician who wants to be considered for vice president as well as by the presidential candidate himself.

“You call that forward?” Romney said mockingly of an Obama campaign slogan last month. “That’s forward over a cliff; that’s forward on the way to Greece.”

What Graham, Romney, and all the other Republican politicians and pundits consistently fail to mention — or perhaps don’t know — is that the central Greek problem isn’t overspending per se. The central problem is the Greek government’s failure to collect what taxpayers (especially wealthy taxpayers) actually owe under the law.

That’s because over the years so many Greeks have adopted an attitude toward taxes resembling that of Romney and Graham. Indeed, Greece has developed a culture of tax evasion, with wealthy citizens sending their money out of the country and poorer citizens bribing officials or conducting their business off the books. The amount of tax owed but not paid in Greece is estimated at roughly a third of total receipts — or enough to cover the nation’s deficits and begin to restore its credit.

Sociologists who have studied the Greek tax situation say that rampant evasion by the rich has trickled down to infect the rest of society, ruining the “tax morale” of wage-earners and small business owners. As James Surowiecki explained in The New Yorker, people here and elsewhere don’t pay taxes simply because they fear prosecution; they pay because they are “social taxpayers” who “feel a responsibility to contribute to the common good.” But that sense of shared obligation gradually dissipates when taxpayers suspect that many others, especially the rich, are not participating fairly and fully.

Despite growing debt and deficits, we are not on the road to Greece. With investors around the world rushing to purchase U.S. Treasury bonds and driving rates to historic lows, this country is far from the plight of the homeland of democracy. For now, it is safe to ignore right-wing rhetoric that shrieks the fiscal sky is falling.

But if such troubles lie ahead, the real cause will not be spending on income security, health care, infrastructure, education, or any of the other programs that have made America a great nation. If we are driven toward national bankruptcy someday, the likeliest cause will be our failure to raise and enforce taxes on those who can afford to pay — because we, too, have encouraged a culture of evasion rather than responsibility.

Joe Conason is editor in chief of nationalmemo.com.

Representative Barney Frank gave a memorable exit interview recently to New York magazine suggesting that President Obama “underestimated, as did Clinton, the sensitivity of people to what they see as an effort to make them share the health care with poor people.”
       

The Democratic Party “paid a terrible price for health care,” Frank said. “I would not have pushed it as hard.”

Is Frank right? We know what Republicans unanimously think. What’s surprising is how many Democrats, with the benefit of hindsight, agree with Frank. Although they support the substance of the law, they are appalled by its political fallout and wish they had a do-over. Their thinking was summarized this week in the National Journal by Michael Hirsh, who wrote that by embracing health care reform amid the economic crisis, Obama confused his priorities and took his eye off the ball, much as President George W. Bush did when he invaded Iraq instead of worrying more about al-Qaeda.
       

This analysis has new resonance because of the recent Supreme Court oral arguments over Obamacare. Democrats are wondering if it was worth it to lose the House in 2010 and perhaps the White House in 2012 over a bill that may be declared unconstitutional anyway.
       

The answer is yes. To understand why, we need to be clear about the purpose of politics. It’s not to win elections — hard as that may be to believe in the middle of a campaign. Public approval as expressed in elections is the means to change the country, not the end in itself.
       

Insuring 30 million Americans and ending the shameful era when an illness in the family meant selling the house or declaring personal bankruptcy? Nothing to sneeze at, whatever the cost to one’s political career.
       

Frank is mistaken that the White House underestimated the political price. At various points, Vice President Joe Biden, senior advisor David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel advised the president to focus entirely on the economy and leave comprehensive health care for another day.
       

I asked the president in late 2009 why he overruled his team. He answered: “I remember telling Nancy Pelosi that moving forward on this could end up being so costly for me politically that it would affect my chances” in 2012. But he and Pelosi agreed that if they didn’t move at the outset of the Obama presidency, “it was not going to get done.”
       

Obama was right that his political capital would diminish over time. Even if the Democrats had delayed health care and held the House in 2010, their numbers would almost certainly have been reduced. Can you imagine trying to bring it up now or in a second term?
       

Hirsh argues that Obama should have stayed focused on the economy not for appearances’ sake but because it was worse off than he and his closest advisers recognized. This wrongly assumes that he could have done substantively more to spur a rebound or keep the benefits of recovery from skewing toward the top 1 percent.
       

It’s important to remember that Obama began his presidency with economic recovery, not health care. In his first month in office, he pushed through a mammoth stimulus package that, contrary to the analysis of Drew Westen and others, was as big as Congress would allow. There was no political appetite for a second stimulus before the first had even kicked in — the period when health care was on the table. In other words, the opportunity costs of health care reform were zero.
       

The “eye off the ball” critics have a point, but it relates to the second year of Obama’s presidency, not the first. Just as Richard Nixon had his “18-minute gap” on the Watergate tapes, so Obama had his 18-month gap, from the signing of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010 until the introduction of his jobs bill in September 2011.
       

If the president had pivoted more quickly from health care to a jobs agenda and signed a bill before the midterms, he would be better off politically and might even have helped the economy a bit.
       

But let’s not pretend health care reform was a fatal Iraq-style distraction from the main event. Instead of costing thousands of lives, it will potentially save many more with its incentives for preventive care, among other historic provisions.
       

The public might not appreciate it yet, but Obamacare took leadership and guts from the president whose name it bears. n
       

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com

With the Republican primary contest over and the general election under way, presumptive nominee Mitt Romney faces a voting public whose disdain for him has reached levels that pollsters describe as “historic.” From his embittered opponents, as well as from Romney and his campaign, Americans have learned that the former Massachusetts governor simply won’t uphold any political position, issue, or achievement he thinks might cost him votes. He doesn’t seem to understand that his inconstancy forfeits more respect than any disagreeable opinion would.

No matter how carefully Romney parses and prevaricates, many voters, including more than a few conservatives, evidently feel they’ve detected the inner Mitt: a man with utmost regard for himself and people like him — and a profound disregard for people like most of us. They’ve observed him straining to express sincere concern for the unemployed, the poor, and the powerless, while sounding quite sincerely resentful whenever the privileged are held accountable. They’ve perceived an attitude of entitlement, whether he is withholding tax returns, defending tax breaks for billionaires, or spending vast amounts to defame opponents. And they don’t like it, no matter what they may feel about Barack Obama.

Although one recent poll showed Romney with a small lead matched against Obama — indicating how close this election may ultimately become — most show Obama ahead by several percentage points. What is consistent is polling showing that voters disapprove of the presumptive Republican nominee. As they have learned more about him over the past several years, his negative ratings have soared. Over the past five years, since he began to run for president, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that negative views of Romney have roughly doubled, from about 24 percent to 47 percent, while his positive ratings have lagged (only 12 percent express “strongly” positive feelings about him).

More important, Romney polls 21 points behind President Obama in public approval — the worst rating for a likely presidential nominee in a Post/ABC poll since 1984. Indeed, he is the first to be “underwater,” with higher negative than positive ratings, in the last eight presidential elections.

Vulnerable groups seem to find Romney particularly unappealing and unsympathetic, as the Post/ABC cross-tabulations suggest. Among voters with annual household incomes lower than $50,000, Obama leads by 29 points. Among the young, who now tend to be in debt, without jobs, or both, Obama leads by 36 points. Among married women, Obama is ahead by 20 points. Among unmarried women, his lead grows to an astounding 45 points.

Obama’s favorability score is 9 points higher than Romney’s among married adults — but this swells to a 37-point advantage among those who are not married. Romney and Obama are seen favorably by about equal numbers of married men, and Obama’s unfavorable score is higher in this group. But he jumps to a 20-point higher favorable rating than Romney among married women, 25 points among unmarried men, and, again, 45 points among unmarried women. Overall, Obama is seen not only as more likable and friendly but as more understanding of the economic conditions faced by most Americans.

The latest CNN poll gives the president a substantial lead over his likely challenger, reflecting the same advantage for Obama among low-income, female, and young voters. But all those surveyed felt that Obama was far more likely to stand up for his beliefs than Romney and to sympathize with those less fortunate and less powerful.

Evidently, Romney hopes to bury Obama beneath a barrage of negative advertising, with at least $800 million that his party expects to raise from wealthy conservatives like him. But that won’t erase the lasting damage created by a primary campaign that left Americans with a bad impression of the Republican Party and a worse impression of the nominee that process selected so grudgingly.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.

Politicians and their flacks lie every day, but it is unusual for someone prominent to utter a totally indefensible falsehood like the whopper that sprang from the mouth of Eric Cantor’s press secretary on national television last week.

While interviewing the House majority leader, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl suggested that he might consider compromise, because even Ronald Reagan had raised taxes several times. Cantor’s flack then burst out in protest, saying he couldn’t allow her remark “to stand.”

The premise of Stahl’s perceptive question was perfectly accurate, of course. But the rude Hill staffer is scarcely alone in promoting this super-sized lie about Reagan’s tax purity. And it would be worth discovering which of the Republican candidates likewise reject a fundamental truth about their party and its idol.

That video exchange is revealing for several reasons, not least because it shows Cantor trying to suggest that he was always willing to “cooperate” with President Obama and the Democrats during the current session of Congress. The public’s distaste for the obstructionism spearheaded by Cantor and supported by the Tea Party faction is evident in polling data, which may well worry the ambitious Cantor, who almost openly hopes to depose Speaker John Boehner.

The argument began when Stahl asked, “What’s the difference between compromise and cooperate?”

Cantor replied: “Well, I would say cooperate is, let’s look to where we can move things forward, where we agree. Compromising principles — you don’t want to ask anybody to do that. That’s who they are as their core being.”

Then Stahl noted, “But you know, your idol, as I’ve read anyway, was Ronald Reagan. And he compromised.”

Cantor retorted, “He never compromised his principles.” And Stahl recalled, “Well, he raised taxes, and it was one of his principles not to raise taxes.”

“Well, he — he also cut taxes,” bumbled Cantor, a moment before his press secretary blurted from off camera: “That just isn’t true. And I don’t want to let that stand.”

Over a rolling image of Reagan announcing his 1982 tax increase — sometimes described as the largest tax hike in American history — Stahl noted, a bit mischievously: “There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982, during a recession,” as Reagan intones, “Make no mistake about it, this whole package is a compromise.”

In fact, Reagan compromised on many issues, including an agreement negotiated with the late Democratic House speaker Tip O’Neill to improve the solvency of Social Security for the past several decades. As Timothy Noah explained cogently in The New Republic (and not for the first time), Reagan repeatedly raised taxes in the years following the gigantic, budget-busting 1981 tax cut. Noah quotes former White House and Treasury official Bruce Bartlett, who served under Reagan and wrote a paper last year on “Reagan’s Forgotten Tax Record,” demonstrating beyond any doubt that the GOP icon raised taxes at least 10 times during his two terms as president and also during his governorship of California. In that paper, Bartlett destroys the mythology of Reagan, which has been made concrete by the right-wing activist and lobbyist Grover Norquist with the “antitax” pledge signed by most Republican politicians.

It is understandable that Republican presidential aspirants, including the present crop, would seek to associate themselves with Reagan, a formidable leader who was often underestimated by Democrats. It is understandable, too, that they would emphasize the aspects of his career that appeal to their constituents and elide the painful episodes of compromise and even disaster that marred his presidency. But in an election year when every Republican candidate has vowed to refuse any compromise on taxes that will reduce future deficits, the urge to erase history and distort facts must be exposed over and over again — because the lies are so often repeated by right-wing pundits and politicians.

The real history: Reagan was forced to raise taxes because his cuts didn’t “pay for” themselves, as the mythology also insists — and he didn’t raise taxes enough to avoid a legacy of deficits that only Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase on the top tier of tax-payers began to remedy. The Bush tax cuts, like Reagan’s, set the nation on its current fiscal path, worsened by his multitrillion-dollar misadventure in Iraq. When the Republicans debate again, someone ought to test whether they will acknowledge those basic facts or whether they will insist on the “big lies” of Republican fiscal stewardship.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of nationalmemo.com and writes for Creators Syndicate.