As American negotiators raced to clinch last month’s landmark deal with the Taliban, several shadowy figures played a surprising but significant role: former Guantanamo Bay detainees whose release in a 2014 prisoner exchange sparked a partisan firestorm.Several of the men wielded their clout, as prominent figures from the Taliban’s pre-9/11 government and longtime prisoners of the United States, to push months of fractious negotiations toward a deal. One of them, a fearsome former commander accused in the deaths of religious minorities in Afghanistan, traveled at least twice to Pakistan to generate buy-in among skeptical militant commanders, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the negotiations. Continue reading.
Tag: Obama
‘Weaponizing An Epidemic’ Is How Limbaugh Attacked Obama
“It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh, February 26, 2020
The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote has said much the same, accusing Democrats of “politicizing the coronavirus,” which he characterized as “their new hoax.” Fox News and others in the rightwing media fell right into line as well.
Let’s deal with the substance of this in the manner in which it deserves. First, Limbaugh is a stone-cold liar (and so is Trump)—although we knew that simply by the fact that his lips were moving. Second, and I’ll try not to spit as I scream this: Limbaugh and his shamelessly hypocritical buddies on the right weaponized Ebola to (try and) defeat Barack Obama. There, I feel a little better. And here’s the evidence, which I gathered researching my new book on how Limbaugh paved the way for Trump by spending eight years deploying the worst kind of hateful, racist rhetoric against President Obama.
After having spent several shows in July and August 2014 using the outbreak of the Ebola virus—which, counting only documented cases, killed over 11,000 Africans and one American—as a reason to “close the border,” on Sept. 8, the host pondered whether the enterovirus D68 outbreak that ultimately infected people in all but one state, and which may have killed fourteen (they tested positive but their deaths could not be definitively linked to EV-D68) was connected to the unaccompanied minors from Central America, and noted that “some people” believe it could be. Limbaugh also wondered whether the White House was covering up such a connection. Talk about weaponizing illness. Continue reading.
A historian dissects President Trump’s strange Obama complex
Journalists were astonished when President Donald Trump took verbal shots at President Obama (without naming him) in a speech intended to deescalate a conflict with Iran on January 8, 2020. In that kind of international crisis, U.S. presidents ordinarily encourage a united American front. Yet Trump’s remarks had a disuniting effect. He presented a sharply negative judgment about Obama’s leadership. Trump criticized Obama’s “very defective” and “foolish Iran nuclear deal.” He claimed missiles fired by Iran at bases housing U.S. troops were financed “with funds made available by the last administration.” The statement implied that blood would be on Obama’s hands if Americans died in the bombings. Journalists said it was quite unusual for a president to lash out at his predecessor when delivering an important foreign policy message that needed broad public support.
The journalists should not have been surprised. Trump has publicly berated Barack Obama on numerous occasions. While Trump’s dislike of Obama is complex and multifaceted, his behavior at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may reveal an important source of the hostility. Continue reading “A historian dissects President Trump’s strange Obama complex”
With Flimsy Claims, Right-Wing Figures Constantly Demanded Obama Impeachment
As Donald Trump finds himself at the center of an impeachment inquiry, his backers in right-wing media have been working overtime to play defense for the embattled president. From Fox & Friends in the morning to Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight in the evening, Fox News has remained (mostly) unwavering in its defense of Trump. Breitbart, The Daily Wire, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and so many other constants of conservative commentary have dutifully deflected and defended their political champion.
However, it wasn’t so long ago that conservative media sang a different tune on impeachment. Barack Obama’s time in office marked a period of rapid-fire demands from right-wing media for the president’s removal from office. It’s instructive to see how much the bar for “high crimes and misdemeanors” has shifted since then, helping gauge how seriously we should take the words of conservative pundits when the president is a member of their own party.
Less than two months after Obama took office, right-wing radio host Michael Savage declared, “I think it is time to start talking about impeachment.” He was angry about Obama’s use of executive actions, and he called the American people “a bunch of schmucks” for sitting idly as they were “watching a dictatorship emerge in front of their eyes.” Despite occasional criticism, Savage has been largely supportive of Trump and recently accused Nancy Pelosi of being an “illegitimate speaker” of the House intent on destroying the Constitution by opening a Trump impeachment inquiry.
President Trump Claims Credit for Shell Plant Announced in 2012 Under President Obama
MONACA, PENNSYLVANIA — President Donald Trump sought to take credit Tuesday for the construction of a major manufacturing facility in western Pennsylvania as he tries to reinvigorate supporters in the Rust Belt towns that sent him to the White House in 2016.
Trump visited Shell’s soon-to-be completed Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex, which will turn the area’s vast natural gas deposits into plastics. The facility, which critics claim will become the largest air polluter in western Pennsylvania, is being built in an area hungry for investment.
Speaking to a crowd of thousands of workers dressed in fluorescent orange and yellow vests, Trump said “This would have never happened without me and us.” In fact, Shell announced its plans to build the complex in 2012, when President Barack Obama was in office. A Shell spokesman said employees were paid for their time attending Trump’s remarks.
Trump Administration Postpones an Obama Fair-Housing Rule
The following article by Emily Badger and John Eligon was posted on the New York Times website January 4, 2018:
Undermining another Obama-era initiative, the Trump administration plans to delay enforcement of a federal housing rule that requires communities to address patterns of racial residential segregation.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, in a notice to be published Friday in the Federal Register, says it will suspend until 2020 the requirement that communities analyze their housing segregation and submit plans to reverse it, as a condition of receiving billions of federal dollars in block grants and housing aid. The notice tells cities already at work on the detailed plans required by the rule that they no longer need to submit them, and the department says it will stop reviewing plans that have already been filed.
The move does not repeal the 2015 rule, a product of years of pressure from civil rights groups and review by the Obama administration. HUD argues that it is trying to respond to cities that have struggled with the rule’s requirements, delaying it for several years while the agency further invests in the tools communities use to assess their housing patterns. Continue reading “Trump Administration Postpones an Obama Fair-Housing Rule”
Fact Checker: Trump’s pointing of the finger at Obama for failing to vet Flynn
The following article by Glenn Kessler was posted on the Washington Post website May 9, 2017:
“General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration — but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that.”
— President Trump, in a tweet, May 8, 2017
“If President Obama was truly concerned about General Flynn, why didn’t he suspend General Flynn’s security clearance, which they had just reapproved months earlier. Additionally, why did the Obama administration let Flynn go to Russia for a paid speaking engagement and receive a fee?”
— White House spokesman Sean Spicer, at a news briefing, May 8
The Trump White House has tried to point the finger at the Obama administration for its travails with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whom the president fired as national security adviser just three weeks after taking the oath of office. Flynn was fired after The Washington Post reportedthat he had misled other administration officials, including Vice President Pence, about whether he had discussed pending sanctions with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. Continue reading “Fact Checker: Trump’s pointing of the finger at Obama for failing to vet Flynn”
White House aides struggle to defend Trump wiretap claims
The following article by Ashley Parker and Jenna Johnson was posted on the Washington Post website March 6, 2017:
The White House on Monday attempted to defend President Trump’s unfounded claim that former president Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower near the end of the presidential campaign, sending out several administration officials — both on and off camera — to reiterate the assertion without providing supporting evidence. Continue reading “White House aides struggle to defend Trump wiretap claims”
How The Press Never Stopped Blaming Obama For Radical GOP Obstruction
The following article by Eric Boehlert was posted on the Media Matters website January 19, 2017:
Right on cue, as President Obama readies his exit from office, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza this week published a misguided critique of the Democrat’s two terms. His analysis focused specifically on Obama’s broken “promise” and parroted a favorite Beltway media talking point: Both sides are to blame for the federal government being mired in “partisan gridlock” during his eight years, and it’s largely Obama’s fault he didn’t “fix” politics. Obama didn’t create “a government that worked for all of us”; he failed to create “something new, different and better,” wrote Cillizza.
Cillizza acknowledges that “Democrats immediately point to the fact that congressional Republicans, almost from the first day of Obama’s time in the White House, made opposing him a political strategy,” but dismisses it as being the primary cause for the partisan mess. (In Cillizza’s view, it’s both sides’ supposed culpability for the failed “grand bargain” in 2011 that serves as the key event.) Continue reading “How The Press Never Stopped Blaming Obama For Radical GOP Obstruction”