~ the nine ring wraiths…um, I mean policy advisers, that are shaping Mitt Romney’s policy positions.
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My father had a saying; “You can judge a man by the company that he keeps.” He would pull that one out and use it on me whenever he caught me hanging out with certain guys in the neighborhood. Kids that he saw as being “up to no good.” Well, it turns out that my dad was right about that ( when you get older it seems like it gets easier to admit that your old man was right about a few things…). Now, I am forced to recall my Dad’s words of wisdom whenever I take a look behind the curtain of Mitt Romney’s little dog and phony show.
There are some dark and sinister forces swirling around the Republican candidate for President.
Take for example, these nine men that Mitt Romney has selected to be his key Policy Advisers. My dad wouldn’t like these guys one little bit:
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Meet Cofer Black:
Cofer? Really? Who names their kid… Well actually, his first name is Joseph, but if I had said “meet Joe Black,” that would have sounded even stranger…
Mitt Romney has selected Mr Black to be one of his Foriegn Policy Advisors
Cofer Black had the dubious distinction of being the head of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center at the time that Al Qaeda brought down the twin towers. A 2005 CIA inspector general’s report later chastised Black and the CTC for not sharing information with other agencies that could have led to the discovery of the 9/11 plot before it occurred. Specifically, that they had knowledge of key personnel involved in the attacks being present in the US but they did not share that information with agencies outside of their own operations; The 9/11 Commission found that while Black testified before Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had access to information on the hijackers, the 9/11 Commission found that there was no such evidence of this being the case.
In a more recent and perhaps lucrative gig, Black was Vice Chairman of Blackwater USA from 2005 until 2008. That’s right, that Blackwater.
Black has long been associated with the Bush administration’s “dark side,” including torture and extraordinary rendition. He’s also a fan of colorful speech, having said that he wanted to “Capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice.” Interesting visual, but as we all know, that didn’t happen.
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Next in the Foreign Policy Adviser line up we have Walid Phares.
Mr Phares has worked as a professor, counter-terrorism adviser, author, and pundit for Fox News. If we squint when we look at that CV I guess all but one of those titles (I’m not going to say which one…) look fairly impressive. Well, stop squinting and put on your reading glasses quick, because this guy has had both feet in the dark side for a long time.
As Mother Jones first reported last year, Mr Phares “was a high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s brutal, 15-year civil war.” Phares has tried to downplay his involvement in this messy war (which resulted in more than 100,000 fatalities) but according to Régina Sneifer, who served in the Lebenese Forces’ Fifth Bureau, “Mr. Phares was aware of the crimes of Samir Geagea [a ruthless militia leader] and he was still close to him.”
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Next in the All Star Foreign Policy Adviser line up is Mr John Bolton.
Bolton is a lawyer and diplomat who served under George W. Bush. He worked in several positions within the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. He was also a “protege” of conservative ( some would say; Racist…) Senator Jesse Helms. Yup, that Jesse Helms.
Bolton is alleged by Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman to have played a key role in encouraging the inclusion of the statement that British Intelligence had determined Iraq had attempted to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address. These statements were based on documents that were later found to be forged.
A Bush-era recess appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, Bolton has been pushing for an Iran strike for years. He recently said that he thought the Israelis should have bombed Iran “three and a half years ago.”
A perennial favorite of bloviating, nut-job, conspiracy theorists like anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller, Bolton likes a good conspiracy theory himself, recently warning that a UN small arms treaty could take Americans’ guns away. He also stated that “The Secretariat Building in New York has 39 stories. If you lost ten stories today, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
Bolton has been pallin’ around with terrorists for real; He has long spoken in favor of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (also known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK), “an armed Islamic group with Marxist leanings”which has long been on the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. According to the State Department, the MEK “follows a philosophy that mixes Marxism and Islam.” In the 1970s, MEK members, who “had been trained by the Soviet Union in guerrilla warfare and supported Khomeini . . . assassinated U.S. military officers who were then working in Iran. MEK members actively took part in the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, according to a U.S. government report.”
According to conservative activist Kenneth Timmerman, executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran: “Iranian-Americans openly refer to MEK leader Massoud Rajavi as the “Pol Pot” of Iran, because they believe he would conduct wholesale massacres of his political opponents should the current regime implode and the MEK seize power through organized street violence. In the group’s “16 points” for a future “democratic” Iran, they promise political freedom to all – except their political enemies.”
On January 25, 2011, Bolton drew a standing ovation at a Brussels conference in support of the MEK, giving a speech in which he “backed MEK’s legitimacy, and the notion of removing it from the list of terrorist organizations.” Georgetown law professor David D. Cole has pointed out that “the United States government has labeled the Mujahedeen Khalq (MEK) a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ making it a crime to provide it, directly or indirectly, with any material support [including] engaging in public advocacy to challenge a group’s ‘terrorist’ designation,” under the Supreme Court‘s 2010 decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.
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But enough about all of that silly foreign policy stuff. It’s not like that stuff actually matters.
Let’s talk about Judicial Advisors. The person that would have sway over the judicial appointments that a potential Romney administration would make. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Mr Robert Bork!
Aside from the unique distinction of having his last name become a verb (as in that judicial nominee got “Borked” ) due to the fact that he was a failed Supreme Court nominee under President Ronald Reagan. Mr Bork also played a controversial role in the Watergate scandal. Yes, that Watergate…
He was appointed to the position of Solicitor General by the Nixon Administration. During his confirmation hearings for the position, it came to light that he supported the rights of Southern states to impose a poll tax. Later, while serving as solicitor general, Mr Bork agreed to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was much too close to cracking open Watergate. ( Bork’s colleagues, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, had refused to fire Cox and resigned on principle, making Bork the defacto Attorney General ). The firing was later found to be an illegal act in November of that year in a suit brought by Ralph Nader
Following Bork’s nomination to the Court, Senator Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork declaring: “Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids [and] schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution.”
Bork has also proposed reducing the scope of the 14th Amendment, and says that it’s “silly” to think: “Gee, [women are] discriminated against and we need to do something about it.” But that was in the past. What possible relevance could trivial distractions like “women’s issues” have in this campaign?
Bork has written several books, including the two best-sellers The Tempting of America, about his judicial philosophy and his nomination battle, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, in which he argues that the rise of the New Left in the 1960s in the U.S. has undermined the moral standards necessary for a civil society and has spawned a generation of intellectuals who oppose Western civilization. So that’s what the New Left “spawned.” I’ve often wondered about that…
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In the role of Military Adviser we have Mr Tommy Franks.
Franks is a retired commander of the US Central Command, overseeing United States Armed Forces operations in a 25-country region, including the Middle East. Franks led the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attacks, and then, when the Bush adminstration got bored with that whole “hunt down Osama Bin Laden” thing, he moved on to redder pastures to lead the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
General Franks has the dubious distinction of being listed at number 4 on Foreign Policy‘s “worst general in American history” list. He was narrowly edged out of the coveted number 3 slot by Edward “Ned” Almond; General Almond was given command of the 92nd Infantry Division, which was composed almost exclusively of African-American soldiers. He led the division in combat in the Italian campaign of 1944-1945. Although George Marshall picked Almond for this assignment because Marshall believed Almond would excel at this difficult assignment, the division performed poorly in combat. Almond blamed the division’s poor performance on its largely African-American troops, echoing the widespread prejudice in the segregated Army that blacks made poor soldiers.
Almond went on to advise the Army against ever again using African-Americans as combat troops. Almond told confidants that the division’s poor combat record had cheated him out of higher command… So admittedly, that was some pretty stiff competition for Tommy.
With regard to Iraq; Franks didn’t tell the American public that he was planning on invading Iraq and then he helped spread the big fat lie that there were actually Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Once the war was over, he had no plan to deal with the aftermath.
In their book, Cobra II, military correspondent Michael R. Gordon and military historian and retired Marine Corps general Bernard Trainor argued that Franks failed to recognize the threat the Saddam Fedayeen irregular fighters posed to the invading ground forces in 2003 and their potential to form the core of a post-war insurgency. For instance, they make a disputed claim that Franks threatened to fire General William Wallace, commander of the Army’s V Corps, for saying to the press during that war that the enemy the U.S. was facing was different from the enemy the military had planned against.
The authors also suggest that Franks was worn down by repeated pressure from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to reduce the number of U.S. troops in war plans and cancel the deployment of the 1st Cavalry Division, a scheduled follow-on unit that was slated for deployment in April 2003. (New York Times: Dash to Baghdad Left Top US Generals Divided 13 March 2006) More generally, they argue Franks’ command was somewhat understandably focused on the immediate task in front of it – defeating Saddam Hussein and taking Baghdad – and few were willing to divert resources away from that effort and toward the long-term post-war needs.
The writers also question his decision during the war to keep sealift ships carrying the equipment for the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) at sea instead of bringing the equipment ashore in Kuwait sooner so the division could have entered Iraq earlier than it did to add to the force levels in post-war Iraq. Franks argues that by keeping the ships at sea the Iraqis were deceived into believing a U.S. attack was yet to come from the north through Turkey, though Colin Powell and others have questioned his view (Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward, 2004).
Franks wanted to retire after the major combat phase of the war. As a result, Gordon and Trainor argue he was slow to act during the crucial months following the fall of Baghdad. They suggest there was a leadership void at U.S. Central Command because his two deputies, Michael Delong and John Abizaid, were at odds with each other until Abizaid succeeded Franks in the middle of the summer of 2003. They also note that there was a command transition in Iraq as V Corps and General Ricardo Sanchez took command of U.S. forces in Iraq without being fully resourced and trained for the mission in advance. (COBRA II Gordon and Trainor 2006)
In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, veteran defense and Pentagon reporter Thomas E. Ricks echoes criticism from officers who had served under Franks who put forth that, while tactically sound, he lacked the strategic mindset and overall intellect necessary for the task. While demanding and goal oriented he was also criticized for being unwilling to countenance alternate viewpoints and for detaching himself from day-to-day affairs when the ground war ceased and he prepared for retirement.
Oh yeah, and he also lost Osama Bin Laden…
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Who better to put in charge of shaping and guiding your energy policy than someone that has a deeply vested interest in preventing the entire alternative and renewable energy industry from ever succeeding? Well, based on those parameters, I could think of no one more qualified for the position of Energy Adviser than Mr Harold Hamm.
Hamm is a self-made American oilman worth $11 billion, as of September 2012.
Who says that you can’t go far with nothing more than a high school education? That’s right. Not only does Mr Hamm have no experience in shaping an effective Federal Energy Policy, Mr Hamm hasn’t even gone to college. Well, maybe I should rephrase that; Mr Hamm has technically gone to college, he actually went to two of them on the day ( but presumably not both on the same day…) that they gave him his honorary degrees.
Shortly after being named Energy Adviser to the Romney campaign in March 2012, Mr Hamm donated $985,000 to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future.On the eve of the convention, Hamm was credited in a report with being among oil and energy executives that consulted in a plan to devolve permitting on Federal lands down to the state where the land is located, thus effectively ending federal control of drilling on government land, a policy Theodore Roosevelt ushered in to help protect wildlife and America’s most beautiful places. If these policies were to become law, individual states would have the authority to frack and mine government lands without any federal oversight.
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Meet Kris Kobach.
Are you a big fan of Arizona’s draconian immigration laws? If so, then you are going to love this guy because he designed it! In fact, not only did he design it, but he has apparently started a franchise, drafting similar and even tougher laws for other states such as Alabama.
Mr Kobach is currently serving as the Secretary of State for Kansas, but that’s only his day job. By night he likes to don his caped border security agent outfit and “voila” he is transformed into “Immigration Man,” striking fear in the hearts of brown people everywhere…
He is also currently serving “of counsel” with the Immigration Law Reform Institute, which is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. When he isn’t disseminating bigotry and paranoia packaged to resemble legitimate immigration policy and border security, Mr Kobach likes to dabble in baseless insinuation and allegation regarding our President’s place of birth. Perfect qualifications for the position of Immigration Adviser to the Romney campaign.
Kobach has even sought to abolish birthright citizenship. But illegal immigration isn’t Kobach’s only hobby: At the GOP convention, he dipped his toe into Shariah panic by urging the adoption of an anti-Shariah plank to the GOP platform.
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In the roll of Economic Adviser we have Mr Kevin Hassett.
Hassett is currently a senior fellow and director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. He was John McCain‘s chief economic adviser in the 2000 presidential primaries and an economic adviser to the campaigns of George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election and McCain in the presidential election of 2008.
Hassett was a senior economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is your typical right-wing economist: He favors stimulus when Republican presidents are in office and he favors austerity when Democrats are in office, and in that sense he’s kind of a perfect adviser for Mitt Romney, who is known for changing his mind on big issues when it’s convenient.
Hassett is coauthor with James K. Glassman of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. It was published in 1999 before the dot-com bubble burst. The book’s title was based on a calculation that, in the absence of the equity premium, stock prices would be approximately four times as high as they actually were. In its introduction, Glassman and Hassett wrote that the book “will convince you of the single most important fact about stocks at the dawn of the twenty-first century: They are cheap….If you are worried about missing the market’s big move upward, you will discover that it is not too late. Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground–to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones industrial average.”
The Dow industrials index closed at 10,681.06 on the day of the book’s publication but by the end of 2004 it remained at essentially the same level—10,783.01, having dropped over 25% in the meantime. As of March 9, 2009, the trough of the 2008-9 bear market, the Dow Jones was at 6,547.05, which is 81% below his 36,000 prediction.
With a track record like that, how can Hassett’s assertion that Mitt Romney’s jobs plan will create “millions of jobs” possibly be wrong?
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That brings us to Congressman Paul Ryan. Mr Ryan pulls double duty as Mitt Romney’s Domestic Policy Adviser and his Vice Presidential running mate.
Ryan is a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
It is really kind of difficult to know where to begin in recounting Mr Ryan’s provocative, if not down right frightening positions and actions on a whole host of issues. A whole host of issues that now have a very short and very straight line leading directly to Mitt Romney.
In choosing Ryan as his running mate, Romney has tied himself irrevocably to Ryan’s budgetary and “Right Wing Social Engineering” policy agendas. Those agendas included turning Medicare into a voucher system which would result in seniors having to pay substantially more for their health care needs. He calls for devolving Medicaid essentially into a block grant program so that states consequently would have less money to cover medical services for the poor, old, and disabled. And he would do all of this while still managing to cut taxes on the wealthy.
Where does Ryan’s plan make up that extra revenue? In part by raising taxes on the poor. There’s no one on Romney’s team who embodies the “half the country are moochers” mindset expressed by Romney on that 47 percent video more than Paul Ryan does. Ryan himself said that “70% of the country are “makers” and 30% of the country are “takers…”
And let’s not forget about Mr Ryan’s retrograde ideas about women’s health issues:
In 2010, Ryan described himself as being “as pro-life as a person gets” and has been described as an “ardent, unwavering foe of abortion rights.” As of 2012 according to Bloomberg, Ryan has co-sponsored 38 measures in the U.S. Congress that restrict abortion. NARAL Pro-Choice America has noted that Ryan has “cast 59 votes” (including procedural motions and amendments which don’t have co-sponsors) “on reproductive rights while in Congress and not one has been pro-choice.” Ryan is in complete accord with men like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. He believes all abortions should be illegal, including those resulting from rape or incest, and only makes an exception for cases where the woman’s life is at risk.
During Ryan’s 1998 campaign for Congress, he “expressed his willingness to let states criminally prosecute women who have abortions,” telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time that he “would let states decide what criminal penalties would be attached to abortions,” and while not stating that he supports jailing women who have an abortion, stated: “if it’s illegal, it’s illegal.” In 2009, he cosponsored the Sanctity of Life Act, which would provide that fertilized eggs “shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of “personhood” and would have given “the Congress, each State, the District of Columbia, and all United States territories, the authority to protect the lives of all “human beings” ( read: fertilized eggs…) residing in its respective jurisdictions.”
Ryan has also supported legislation that would impose criminal penalties for doctors who perform certain types of abortions. Ryan voted against continued federal aid for Planned Parenthood and Title X family planning programs.He also opposed giving over-the-counter status for emergency contraceptive pills.
Ryan was one of 227 co-sponsors of the 2011 No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act bill in the House of Representatives that would have limited funding for federally funded abortions to victims of “forcible rape.” “Forcible rape” was not clearly defined in the bill, which critics said would result in excluding date rape, statutory rape, or other situations where the victim had diminished mental capacity. To avoid embarrassment for the Republicans who did not want to find themselves having to explain such things to their constituents, the language was removed from the bill before the House passed the bill on straight partisan lines. The Senate did not vote on the bill.
Ryan strongly opposes same-sex marriage, and supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. He opposed the repeal of the Military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy, and has opposed same-sex couples adopting children.
He voted against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Ryan voted in favor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 2007. The Human Rights Campaign, a GLBT rights organization, has frequently given Ryan a 0/100 rating on its legislative scorecard.
Ryan has been described by Larry Sabato as “just a generic Republican on foreign policy.”
Indeed, Ryan’s poses as a foreign policy hawk and promulgates nondescript notions about “peace through strength,” yet he voted in 2001 and 2004 to end the embargo on Cuba. He later, for reasons of political expediency, reversed his positions, and, since 2007, has voted for maintaining the embargo. Strangely though, in 2008, Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “If we’re going to have free trade with China, why not Cuba?” In 2009, Ryan termed the Obama administrations’ “reset” of diplomatic relations with Russia ( Cuba’s Mother Country until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 ) as “appeasement.”
Daniel Larison of The American Conservative wrote that Ryan “seems to conceive of U.S. power abroad mostly in terms of military strength” and “truly is a product of the era of George W. Bush.”
Indeed, Ryan was a reliable supporter of the Bush administration’s foreign policy priorities, who voted for the 2002 Iraq Resolution, authorizing President George W. Bush to use military force in Iraq. Ryan also voted for the Iraq War troop surge of 2007.
Ryan gave his support for over $10 billion in cuts to national security spending as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011 that included $50 billion in near-term budget cuts and a sequestration system to force further budget cuts.In 2012, Ryan explained his support for defense spending sequestration in the hope that this would open common ground with the Democrats on deficit reduction.
Ryan also has some rather nebulous ideas regarding sociopolitical constructs: At a 2005 Washington, D.C. gathering celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand‘s birth, Ryan credited Rand as inspiring him to get involved in public service. In a speech that same year at the Atlas Society, a group devoted to the writings and philosophy of Ayn Rand, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught him about his value system and beliefs.Ryan required staffers and interns in his congressional office to read Rand and gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In his Atlas Society speech, he also described Social Security as a “Socialist-based system.”
In 2009, Ryan said “What’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”
In April 2012, after receiving criticism from Georgetown University faculty members on his budget plan, Ryan rejected Rand’s philosophy as an atheistic one, saying it “reduces human interactions down to mere contracts.” He also called the reports of his adherence to Rand’s views an “urban legend.”
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the Sierra Club, and other environmentalists have criticized Ryan’s record on environmental issues, with Ryan earning 3 percent on the LCV 2011 National Environmental Scorecard.[164] He opposes cap and trade and opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.[165] In an 2009 editorial, Ryan has accused climatologists of using “statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change” and he criticized the EPA’s classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant.[165] Ryan supports a 10-year $40 billion tax break for the petroleum industry, and has proposed cutting funding for renewable energy research and subsidies.[166]
Ryan voted to weaken work requirements for welfare in 2002, 2003 and 2005, and against efforts to move more welfare recipients to work in 2012.
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And there you have them; the malodorous minions of Mitt Romney. These men, despicable though they are as individuals, do not, by themselves, represent much of a serious threat without any actual power structure to gather and focus there nefarious, or at least misguided, intentions. Much the way that stray dogs are relatively harmless when they are taken on their own, but can become dangerous when gathered in a pack, these strays have found their unlikely Alpha in the person of Mitt Romney.
I hope you have all had your shots…
Photo Credits: Cofer Black: State Department. Walid Phares: An-Nahar. Robert Bork: Wikimedia Commons. Kris Kobach: Wikimedia Commons. Paul Ryan: Flickr, Starley Shelton. John Bolton: Flickr, Gage Skidmore.Tommy Franks: Wikimedia Commons. Harold Hamm: Wikimedia Commons. Kevin Hassett: Wikimedia Commons.