Tuesday Open Thread [11.17.15]

Steven King of Iowa just endorsed Ted Cruz. Done. The race for the Republican nomination is over. Ted Cruz will be your Republican Presidential nominee.

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias says Democrats need to learn to defend Obama’s record on foreign policy better.

Unlike George W. Bush, he really has “kept us safe” and avoided any terrorist attacks on the US homeland. And while Bush let bin Laden get away in Afghanistan in order to free up resources to launch a pointless and unsuccessful invasion of Iraq, Obama found bin Laden and had special forces kill him. You’d think this would be something Democrats would want to mention as frequently and as quickly as possible in a discussion of counterterrorism. […]

Here are some other [successes of the Obama foreign policy]:

A broad multilateral agreement to disarm Iran’s nuclear program
The New Start arms control treaty with Russia
The historic diplomatic opening to Cuba
New Pacific military basing agreements with Australia and the Philippines
Bilateral agreements on climate change with China and India
An increase in positive perceptions of the United States in almost every region of the world

This good stuff does not, of course, undo the problems in the Middle East. But then again, the Middle East was a violent and chaotic place when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in office. Obama has not managed to solve the problems of the region, but he has defended America’s core interests — including, crucially, the absence of terrorist attacks at home — without incurring the thousands of American military casualties than we saw under his predecessor.

It is, all things considered, a pretty good record.

Rick Klein: “The speed with which the Paris attacks went from a national-security debate to an immigration one says more about the perceived state of today’s Republican Party than it does about today’s perceived security threats. The Republican contenders have sought to one-up themselves with letters, bills, demands, and sound bites aimed at blocking the Obama administration from allowing Syrian Muslim refugees into the United States. Half the nation’s governors – almost all of them Republicans – are threatening not to welcome them into their states, even though there’s little they can do to bar them if the federal government accepts them as refugees. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz have offered differing (and mostly non-specific, so far) proposals to make it easier for Syrian Christians to enter the US as refugees, while potentially blocking Muslims.”

“The rhetoric brought a harsh rebuttal from President Obama, who called it ‘un-American’ to impose a religious test on refugees. It does not, for now, look un-Republican in this primary season.”

A Bloomberg editorial criticizing those who would shut America’s doors to Syrian refugees:

Of all the reactions to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, some U.S. politicians’ objections to resettling Syrian refugees may be the most irrational. President Barack Obama has pledged to let in 10,000 people fleeing the carnage in Syria, but governors of at least a dozen states now say they won’t accept any. Presidential candidate Ted Cruz wants to admit only Christians. […]

[T]he American system for harboring people fleeing war and repression is different from that of Europe, which is struggling with a flood of refugees turning up in boats on its shores. In the U.S., it’s a careful, lengthy process that has always put domestic security first. Just as important, it’s a manifestation of cherished ideals from a nation founded largely by people fleeing oppression. […]

If the legal pipeline is closed, more refugees will turn to human-smuggling networks or succumb to Islamic State recruitment efforts. The best way to protect uprooted Syrians will be to end the war in Syria. In the meantime, refusing to help the refugees betrays American ideals, and can only increase the extremists’ appeal.

Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg predicts that “Election Day 2016 will produce a shattering crash larger than anything the pundits anticipate.” The reason, says Greenberg, is “because the revolutionary economic and social changes occurring in the United States have now pushed both the burgeoning new majority and the conservative Republicans’ counterrevolution beyond their tipping points.”

The United States is being transformed by revolutions remaking the country at an accelerating and surprising pace. Witness the revolutions in technology, the Internet, big data and energy, though just as important are the tremendous changes taking place in immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles. These are reaching their apexes in the booming metropolitan centers and among millennials.

As the revolutions interact, they are accelerating the emergence of a new America. Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

Greenberg explains that “diversity is becoming more central to our multicultural identity” and “Shifting attitudes were underscored in this year’s Gallup Poll when 60 to 70 percent of the country said gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce are all “morally acceptable.” He cites a “a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars” which comprised 51 percent of voters in 2012, but will account for 63 percent of voters in 2016.

We’ll see.

Once again, you can always count on the GOP to overreact to the extreme, so much so that their overreaction becomes the story rather than the original concern over national security and terrorism. Their cowardice and bedwetting when it comes to the Syrian refugees is but our latest example. You take an issue where, historically yet bizarrely, Republicans do better than Democrats, and you have a terrorist attack that highlights that issue. And instead of pressing the advantage, Republicans have decided to let their bigotry rule the day, and turn the issue of terrorism and national security into just another immigration issue where one can sound xenophoic as they want. It really is amazing to watch. Seriously, if you are a registered Republican at this very moment, you are a confirmed cowardly bigot. And you have allowed your bigotry to overrule your sense of political strategy.

And given that ISIS wants us to reject the Syrian refugees, you are also a traitor, since you are aiding the enemy.

Brian Beutler:

Obama condemned Republicans—particularly Ted Cruz, whose family benefited from America’s hospitality to the politically persecuted—in withering terms. “That’s shameful. … We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.” Obama spoke with more emotion about this domestic intolerance than about ISIS, yes, but precisely because it’s a critical housekeeping issue, not a complex foreign entanglement. Obama can’t make ISIS poof into smoke with macho rhetoric, but he can use rhetoric to shape, sharpen, and elevate U.S. policy.

Obama’s language doesn’t reflect insouciance about ISIS’s crimes. To the contrary, holding ourselves to a higher standard of tolerance is the entire point.