Making Sense by Michael Reagan
There we go again, Republicans.
We keep shooting ourselves in the feet — and at the worst possible times.
Things were going pretty well for the GOP until Monday.
President Obama was getting major grief from Republicans (and even some Democrats) for preparing to sign America on to a horrible nuclear arms deal with the Iranians.
Hillary Clinton was ensnared in an email-deleting scandal of her own making that was so obviously unlawful and politically devious that even the liberal media were attacking her.
So what did 47 Republican senators do?
They attracted the full attention of the mainstream media by sending a letter to the Iranian ayatollahs reminding them that any agreement the president signs without approval of the Senate can be undone by the next president faster than you can spell Bibi Netanyahu.
Nice job, Republicans.
Yes, what you told the Iranians in the letter was right. Any B-plus middle-school civics student knows that the Senate gets to ratify or reject treaties made by the president.
But sending an open letter to Iran was dead wrong — and politically stupid.
It merely gave Democrats — and their media buddies — a chance to change the subject and accuse Republicans of irresponsibly trying to sabotage the president’s foreign policy.
What rookie Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and his co-signers did with their letter was nothing new.
Members of Congress have been trying to score political points by undercutting the president’s treaty-making power for decades.
Ted Kennedy did it in the late 1970s when he tried to get the Soviets to do something to embarrass Jimmy Carter so he could take the nomination from Carter in 1980.
Kennedy pulled the same slimy trick against Ronald Reagan in 1983, when he sent emissaries to Moscow and offered to obstruct my father’s anti-Soviet foreign policy in Congress if the Kremlin helped Teddy run for president in 1984.
In 1987 Democrat House Speaker Jim Wright stuck his congressional nose into the negotiations between the Reagan administration and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
More recently, who can forget Nancy Pelosi’s jaunt to Syria in 2007, when she and a gang of House Democrats made nice with Bashar al-Assad at the same time the Bush administration was trying to put pressure on Syria to work with it on Mideast peace talks?
Those 47 Republican senators didn’t need to send a public letter to Teheran to remind the Iranians how America’s separation of powers works.
What was wrong with Sen. Cotton and a few others writing an op-ed piece about the Senate’s treaty-ratifying powers for the Wall Street Journal?
I bet the Iranians would have gotten the message just as well.
Instead Republicans only brought attention — bad attention — on themselves for doing exactly what many of them had rightly criticized Pelosi for doing.
Republicans in the Senate should have shut up and let Obama negotiate and sign the treaty with Iran, bad as it is bound to be.
Then they could have pointed out to the Iranians and everyone else that the deal needed to be ratified by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate — and that 47 Republicans were strongly against it.
The letter was a blunder. Until the senators sent it, Iran was exclusively Obama’s problem.
All the media attention was on the president’s defense of his treaty and Netanyahu’s concerns about how dangerous and naive it was.
Republicans should be sitting pretty right now and the media should be focusing on Obama’s and Hillary’s problems.
But now the Iran nuke deal is not just Obama’s issue. It’s the Republicans’ too.
And if anything goes wrong, which it probably will, you can bet that Republicans will — as usual — get most of the blame.
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Copyright ©2015 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution†(St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Damn, son just like his old man…..clueless and a liar.
Yay, try a disconnected step son deal out. I think the guys a certifiable nut job, however the call out to those idiots that undermines national policy is ok. The whole deal and letter is completely out of line.
There are better ways to disagree, even in the beltway.
“The president coddles the Iranian ayatollah and attacks his own countrymen and our closest allies over this deal,†Bolton said Saturday. “The danger we hope to avoid is now imminent. This is just one example of how the President doesn’t care about America’s national security.â€
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, blasted the letter’s “backstabbing†on Thursday. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the letter’s driving force, criticized the Ayatollah’s regime Tuesday.
“They’ve been killing Americans for 35 years, they’ve killed hundreds of troops in Iran, now they control five capitols in the Middle East,†Cotton said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.†“They are nothing but hard-liners in Iran, and if they do all of those things without a nuclear weapon, imagine what they would do with one.â€
Bolton said Saturday that Obama’s eagerness for a deal would give Tehran a “free pass†for nuclear arms. He said American voters should thus make national security the central issue of 2016’s presidential elections.
“The gravest threat to our national security sits in the Oval Office,†Bolton said. “The next two years can’t pass swiftly enough. For God’s sake, let’s not make the same mistake in 2016.â€
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/235733-bolton-calls-iran-deal-unprecedented-surrender
Yes, the gravest threat to our 57-59 United States is the Community Organizer-in-Chief:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws
Meanwhile Obama is focused on trying to help the Iranian Mullahs to enrich their uranium, the Red Chinese have been busy:
As if there aren’t enough territorial disputes the world over, China is — literally — manufacturing a new one in the South China Sea by transforming a series of lonely reefs into small islands.
Where nautical charts once identified bumps in the sea as Mischief Reef, Gaven Reef and others, China is dredging massive amounts of sand to create artificial islands. Over the past year or so, at least five of these new land masses have popped up in the chain of ocean specks and dots known as the Spratly Islands.
An example: Johnson South Reef, formerly a concrete platform atop submerged rock, now appears via satellite photos to be a sandy island hopping with Chinese construction activity. There’s speculation China is building an airstrip.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-islands-spratly-south-china-sea-vietnam-edit-0316-jm-20150313-story.html
GREAT cartoon, CCO.
CC, Agreed.
The cartoon says it all. Sad but true. Good job CCO.
Reagan makes a clear case that the GOP made mis-steps in putting themselves in the upfront Iran deal, okay so he probably is correct in condemning their actions. However, his snipes at the Deal doesnt lay out what he has determine makes it wrong, nor does he set forth on a course to explain what his position is, and why it is better than what was being negotiated.
This appears to be the strategy that works within the GOP, be anti-Obama and use no facts to stake out an actual position, rather simply just keep repeating that whatever they oppose, and act as if their hunches and feelings, are as good as those qualified men and women who spent 20 months hashing out a deal, among 6 nation states. And, if the GOP base is so wrapped up in ignorance that they must congratulate themselves for rejecting logic and facts (i.e. climate change), and rely only on their gut feelings—we are seeing the same vein of thinking that existed pre-Civil War, where raw emotion drove men and women to die for the irrationally of slavery. Today’s GOP base however, are serial cowards too frighten of the prospect of dying for theoretical ignorance but still vocal enough to put chaos ahead of the Union, only because they will not accept other’s views.
The GOP candidates are free to be full tilt crazy in the primary debates, but in the general election— the GOP will come to face with the world as it is, not the way Fox Entertainment and much of the right wing media lets them believes reflects their views.
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