The Red Herrings That Will Shape 2012

The Article: The Biggest 2012 Political Red Herrings by Steve Kornacki in Salon

The Text: There are all sorts of uncertainties about how the political world will evolve in 2012, but we can say with confidence that an awful lot of the media’s oxygen will be sucked up by red herrings – seemingly big and exciting stories that are rooted in possibilities that have virtually no chance of coming to fruition. Here are the five biggest red herrings to watch out for in the year ahead:

1. The Hillary/Biden switch

The idea: Hillary Clinton will replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket in 2012 in an effort to motivate the party’s base. The move would also be a way to anoint Hillary as Obama’s successor for 2016.

Why we’ll hear about it: Because it’s an easy and irresistible, personality-based story for the media, which kicks the speculation into overdrive every time an even remotely credible political figure advances the idea.

Why it won’t happen: The reasons are many. Start with the reality that Biden hasn’t committed any fireable offenses as vice president and isn’t an electoral drag in any way. We’re not talking about Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle here.

There’s also the fact that vice-presidential candidates, even when they’re popular and generate lots of buzz, don’t move voters in November. Just remember: The biggest V.P. mismatch of all time, between Lloyd Bentsen and Quayle in 1988, ended up being worth nothing to Michael Dukakis.

Plus, if Obama did make the switch, wouldn’t the media portray it as a desperate move – an embattled president panicking at meager poll numbers? That would only reinforce Republican efforts to caricature the Obama White House as a flailing, chaotic operation. And why would Hillary even want the job? It wouldn’t improve her positioning for 2016, if that’s what she’s interested in; she’s already the Democratic Party’s biggest star not named Obama. But if she did take Biden’s place, the general election would (unfairly) be portrayed as a referendum on her popularity. A defeat would be blamed on her and would hurt her positioning for ’16.

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Does The US Really Support Arab Democracy?

The Article: End of the Pro-Democracy Pretense by Glenn Greenwood in Salon.

The Text: Media coverage of the Arab Spring somehow depicted the U.S. as sympathetic to and supportive of the democratic protesters notwithstanding the nation’s decades-long financial and military support for most of the targeted despots. That’s because a central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which Americans wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

It’s always preferable when pretenses of this sort are dropped — the ugly truth is better than pretty lies — and the events in the Arab world have forced the explicit relinquishment of this pro-democracy conceit. That’s because one of the prime aims of America’s support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations’ populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.

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The Worst GOP Attacks Against A Woman’s Right To Choose

The Article: The GOP’s 10 Most Extreme Attacks On A Woman’s Right To Choose An Abortion by Tanya Somanader in Think Progress

The Text: 2011 marked a banner year in the Republican war on woman’s health. Close to 1,000 anti-abortion bills sped through state legislatures as the GOP-led House led a “comprehensive and radical assault” on a federal level. But in surveying their arsenal this year, 10 bills stood out as particularly perturbing and far-reaching efforts to stymie women’s access to abortion services, birth control, and vital health services like breast cancer screenings. Here are ThinkProgress’s nominations for the most extreme attacks on a woman’s right to choose:

– Redefining Rape: Last May, every House Republican and 16 anti-choice Democrats passed H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. Anti-choice activists Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) tried to narrow the definition of rape to “forcible rape,” which meant that women who say no but do not physically fight off the assault; women who are drugged or verbally threatened and raped; and minors impregnated by adults would not qualify for the rape and incest exception in the Hyde Amendment. Smith promised to remove the language but used “a sly legislative maneuver” that essentially informs the courts that statutory rape cases will not be covered by Medicaid should the law pass and be challenged in court.

– Abortion Audits: The No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act also bans using tax credits or deductions to pay for abortions or insurance. Thus, a woman who used such a benefit would have to prove, if audited, that her abortion “fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.” This requirement turns the Internal Revenue Service into “abortion cops” who, agents noted, would have to force women to give “contemporaneous written documentation” that it was “incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger” which made an abortion necessary.

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Israel As A Tragicomedy?

The Article: Riding Israel: A Tragicomedy by Marwan Bishara in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: The film “Mission Impossible 4” opened in US theatres in recent weeks, starring BMW, Apple and Tom Cruise. A two-hour-long commercial on steroids.

If you are unfamiliar with it, Paid Product Placement (PPP) is a big thing in the movie industry.

This is how it works: Hollywood places in its movies certain watches, cars or a laptop brands; preferably worn by George Clooney, driven by Angelina Jolie or placed in front of Meg Ryan. In “The Transformers”, for example, GM’s Cameros lead with Megan Fox.

PPP is indirect marketing that targets oblivious movie viewers, gender notwithstanding, Catherine Banning or Will Smith could be drinking Pepsi.

The spirit and soul of a movie are sometimes compromised when its script and shooting are shaped by commercial, rather than artistic, considerations.

PPP allows for extra budgets to produce costlier gimmicks that, in turn, bring more profit. “Mission Impossible”, for example, has reaped $75m in the first 10 days at the box office.

The same logic seems to apply to politics. PPP is one way to understand the sudden surge of Israel-schmoozing and Palestine abusing ahead of the US election.

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Iraq: An Investment We Have To Protect

The Article: Iraq: The Gloves Come Off by Robert Grenier in Al-Jazeera

The Text: I must confess I didn’t see it coming.

Yes, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has always shown autocratic tendencies, unsurprisingly given the traditional political role models with which Iraqis are working. And yes, he has long over-centralised security power in his own hands, maintaining personal control over the Interior, Defence and National Security Ministries and making the Baghdad Operations Command directly answerable to his personal office. But this, too, is not entirely unexpected, given the tenuousness of Iraqi internal security.

And finally, yes, Abu Isra has been transparently uncomfortable in sharing any authority with the Iraqiyya bloc, the largest vote-getter in the last elections, and has essentially reneged on many of the elaborate power-sharing arrangements reached in the so-called Irbil accords, which facilitated formation of his government. But again, here too, Maliki has not been entirely outside his rights. He did, after all, form the most viable parliamentary coalition, giving him the right to form a government, and the vague provisions for an extraordinary National Security Council to be chaired by his chief political rival, and to which key domestic and national security policies were to be referred, were simply never realistic.

Now, however, only days after the final withdrawal of American troops, it is clear that al-Maliki has finally gone too far. His recent actions have served to strip the veneer of legitimacy from his past policies, and have revealed those past actions as the precursors to a naked power-grab. Beginning with the sudden and summary arrest of some 615 alleged Baathists, including many of Maliki’s political enemies and conducted while the final push to evacuate the last of the US troops was conveniently underway, the Iraqi prime minister has gone on to press politically-motivated terrorism charges against Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Islamist and a prominent member of Iraqiyya. At the same time, the Shia Maliki has moved to orchestrate a parliamentary no-confidence vote to oust Sunni deputy Prime Minister Saleh Mutlaq, another prominent member of Iraqiyya, ostensibly over a personal slight. Other political opponents have awakened to find tanks around their homes.

The upshot is that Hashemi has now sought asylum in Iraqi Kurdistan, against whose leaders Maliki is now making vague threats. In the face of Iraqiyya’s predictable walkout from the Council of Representatives (CoR) and boycott of the cabinet, Maliki is threatening to replace its ministers with interim appointments lacking CoR approval. And in response to Sunni-majority Diyala province’s stated desire to seek protection from the current wave of politically-motivated arrests through formation of an autonomous region – which is permitted under the Iraqi constitution – the rogue prime minister vows to unleash “rivers of blood”.

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