Wednesday Open Thread [4.9.14]

A video above from Ezra Klein’s new venture that explains the news, Vox.

A video below from Randall Paul, which some pundits are saying will end his 2016 candidacy. I am not so sure. Watch the whole video, but specifically from minute 9:36 on, and then go below.

David Corn explains:

On April 7, 2009, as Paul was on the cusp of announcing his senatorial bid, he spoke to student Republicans at Western Kentucky University. Recalling President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, he noted, “We need to be fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy.” And the company he had in mind was Cheney’s former home: “When the Iraq War started, Halliburton got a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution. I mean, it shouldn’t be sloppy work; it shouldn’t be bad procurement process. But it really shouldn’t be that these people are so powerful that they direct even policy.”

Paul then indicated to the students that he believed that Cheney had used 9/11 as an excuse to launch the Iraq War to serve Halliburton’s interests.

There’s a great YouTube of Dick Cheney in 1995 defending [President] Bush No. 1 [and the decision not to invade Baghdad in the first Gulf War], and he goes on for about five minutes. He’s being interviewed, I think, by the American Enterprise Institute, and he says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it’d be civil war, we would have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes. Dick Cheney saying it would be a bad idea. And that’s why the first Bush didn’t go into Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he’s back in government and it’s a good idea to go into Iraq.

Paul continued:

The day after 9/11, [CIA chief] George Tenet is going in the [White] House and [Pentagon adviser] Richard Perle is coming out of the White House. And George Tenet should know more about intelligence than anybody in the world, and the first thing Richard Perle says to him on the way out is, “We’ve got it, now we can go into Iraq.” And George Tenet, who supposedly knows as much intelligence as anybody in the White House says, “Well, don’t we need to know that they have some connection to 9/11?” And, he [Perle] says, “It doesn’t matter.” It became an excuse. 9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq.

Critics of President George W. Bush and Cheney have long assailed the pair for pushing a WMD-centered case for war that was false and questioned their reasons and motives for invading Iraq. But it’s notable that a member of the Senate who might be a leading contender for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination thinks that the most recent Republican vice president snookered the nation into war to boost profits for a company he once steered.

This is not news to us. We long believed that this was what Cheney did. We believed it then, in 2002 and 2003. And we were proven right. But we are dirty liberals, right? Who cares if we are always right. We’re “libruls!!!!!” Now that a libertarian-tea-party-conservative-clinton-hater confused Republican is saying it, finally, the notion that Dick Cheney committed treason may finally sink in. Treason too strong a word for you? Well, think about it:

The message is clear: Cheney, a corporate shill, was more loyal to Halliburton—and the millions of dollars he earned from the company—than to the United States, and he and Halliburton manipulated the country into the Iraq War. Paul was essentially accusing Cheney of a profound betrayal: using 9/11 to start a war to profit Halliburton.

No shit. That Dick Cheney is 1) still alive (because really, 5 heart attacks and he gets a transplant??) and/or 2) not in prison is one of the reasons I believe there is no God, or that if there is a God he left long ago to create life on Rigel VII.

But Cheney is part of the GOP Establishment. Chief of Staff to Ford. Congressman. Secretary of Defense to Bush I. Vice President to Bush II. He is at the very least the leader of the Neocon faction of the party, and the leader of all of those who love big defense spending and perpetual war. All those big defense donors are not going to be happy that these words even escaped Paul’s mouth in 2009 and 2008. They certainly are not going to be happy to see him nominated to be their party leader and President. And yet, if Paul actually campaigned on this message today, tomorrow and in 2015 and 2016, he’d stand a good chance about being elected President. I just wonder if he can be nominated by the GOP. Ed Kilgore agrees, saying that the Paul candidacy is over:

It hasn’t been all that long since Republicans—again, nearly all of them—were celebrating the Iraq War as one of the great acts of U.S. leadership that might well intimidate enemies into submission for decades. A great many of them believe we should still be fighting there, and/or that we might have won had a lot more troops been deployed (some of the older GOPers also think we should have fought on to “victory” in Vietnam, for that matter). And even those Republicans who now think the occupation was a mistake generally think getting rid of Saddam Hussein was “worth it.” And here’s Rand Paul telling them all his old man was right and they were wrong—not just wrong, but stupidly, immorally wrong—from the get-go.

But that’s not all. Later in the video Paul casually talks about a massive retrenchment of U.S. foreign policy commitments in order to slash the defense budget as part of a “grand coalition” with liberal Democrats to balance the federal budget.

Unsurprisingly, Paul uses the old Eisenhower warning about the undue power of the military-industrial complex to give his comments a touch of orthodoxy. But virtually no one other than liberal Democrats has used that quote for many, many years. The military-industrial complex still has significant Democratic support, but its home is in the GOP. And if it has any power at all, it will be mobilized to crush Rand Paul in 2016.

MICHIGAN–US SENATE–Public Policy Polling: Rep. Gary Peters (D) 41, Fmr. Sec. of State Terri Lynn Land (R) 36. The last poll by PPP had Peters trailing Land 42-40, so this is a net swing of 7 points. Looks like those Koch sucker ads backfired.

MICHIGAN–GOVERNOR–Public Policy Polling: Gov. Rick Snyder (R) 43, Fmr. Rep. Mark Schauer (D) 39.