Ruth Marcus' Bitter, Unfair Column Against Obama's Defense of the Iran Deal (Which She Supports!)

Ruth Marcus: polishing her bonafides as Post reporter by blasting Obama.

Yes, Ruth Marcus takes Barack Obama to task for disrespecting his opposition on the Iran deal. How does she do it? By disrespecting him on the way he defends a deal she approves. Yes, Marcus approves of the Iran deal and believes that Obama should naturally press for its adoption.

So what's the problem? Hey, Obama, you're not doing it right. What are we, back in middle school again? No, with Marcus we're inside the Beltway where intelligent minds melt into nonpartisan centrists with rat poison in their veins.

Funny thing, it hasn't happened to Barack Obama (he's not a pundit or an actual partisan). He's just gotten tired of coddling an opposition that would disapprove of him making Monday "I-love-those-darned-Republicans-Day!"

Read Marcus' column (plus the priceless comments), then wonder why she sits on the Post perch. Oh yeah, it's because she plays by Beltway rules. Real mature conversation you got going there.

Are Laws Against Prostitution Anachronistic?

The Red Light District of Haarlem, Holland.

When I first encountered the red light districts of Holland back at the tender age of twenty-two -- I spent about a year playing music there right after college -- I found the notion of legal but carefully regulated prostitution to be quite sensible. And that was more than a decade before AIDS devastated the casual sex lives of people around the world. After AIDS, legal, well-regulated prostitution seemed, in an advanced society, almost mandatory.

Now, almost forty-five years later, my sensibilities haven't changed. So I was quite pleased to read a well-thought-out op-ed in the New York Times suggesting that sex for money or gifts in private settings should be considered private, protected behavior. In today's world, that makes perfect sense to me, just as well-regulated, legal prostitution remains a sensible approach to the sex-trade and health issues that arise from sex for money in public settings.

Read this important piece by Laurie Shrage, professor at Florida International University. Just as laws that used to govern private sexual behavior have slowly vanished from law books over the past several decades, so too should anachronistic notions of sex-for-hire be reexamined. Should a woman who hunts for and finds a sugar daddy be prevented for satisfying him in exchange for support and expensive gifts if he freely offers them? That hasn't been thought a crime for, well, forever.

I've never availed myself of prostitutes -- though I accompanied friends who did into some of the brothels and red light districts of Europe -- but I must say I've had a girlfriend or two in my early "courting" years that left me broke and otherwise exhausted. Were they ladies of the night or just engaging, attractive women with a penchant for coke and champagne?

I do recall enjoying them until the money ran out. And, boy, did they like me until then. Oh, well.

I'm sure there are plenty of people with their own stories that brushed the line between love and, well, not quite commerce. Now, all these years later, it's time -- past time -- we sort out what's best for society, with less enforcement of public mores and more emphasis on privacy.

The old Palais d'Amour in Hamburg, Germany.  Jeez, that looks like the VW
Micro Bus I drove around Europe back in 1971-72. I stayed outside, waiting for
my traveling companions. I didn't go in. Why? Morality? Nah. It just wasn't me.

GOP Candidates to America: We Are All Todd Akin Now!

Todd Akin's contribution to Republican politics: flapping-gum syndrome.

Joan Walsh of Salon noticed something Thursday night. The GOP candidates -- as well as Republican leaders in general -- have embraced the controversy initiated by a string of videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood directors willing to "sell" aborted fetal tissue for profit. These highly edited videos actually do nothing of the kind.

A group of virulently anti-abortionists concocted these stings and, through careful editing, distorted their targets' intentions. Planned Parenthood does indeed assist in the donation of fetal tissue for research, but the only money that changes hands is associated with the costs of transport. Anybody who takes an honest look at the videos knows this.

Enter Republicans in search of a cause. Truth be damned. All we need to do is claim that these videos are "disturbing" and show that liberal abortionists sell human body parts of babies for profit and then laugh all the way to the bank.

When they embrace this position and are willing to defund Planned Parenthood and shut down the government to do it, they risk alienating more than fifty percent of the electorate. Todd Akin here we come.

Joan Walsh of Salon thinks it's a bad move:

But the hoax perpetrated by the Campaign for Medical Progress, to dishonestly claim Planned Parenthood “sells” fetal tissue after abortions, may have backfired on the right, judging from the anti-choice pyrotechnics that erupted on stage in Cleveland Thursday night. CMP intended to hurt Planned Parenthood and Democrats in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign. But they seem to have hurt the GOP, by tricking the 2016 candidates into believing there’s more revulsion at both abortion, and at the respected women’s healthcare provider long attacked by conservatives, than there actually is.

The anti-abortion one-upmanship at the debate showed how the candidates are misreading the political opportunities and turning themselves into Todd Akin, the Republican who challenged Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill in 2012. Akin, you’ll recall, was disputing the need for a rape exception to an abortion ban when he told an interviewer that in cases of “legitimate rape,” a woman’s body magically has a way to “shut that whole thing down.” His idiocy helped not only McCaskill but President Obama that year. (Three quarters of Americans believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape, by the way.)

Partisan that I am -- and foe of hypocrisy anywhere -- I hope the GOP field jumps the shark en masse in the abortion debate. Any politician with an ounce of honesty knows that funds given by government to Planned Parenthood cannot by law be used toward abortions, and the vast majority of Planned Parenthood services are aimed at women's health issues having nothing to do with abortion. But will that stop the candidates hoping to rally the Tea-Party-infused conservative base to their cause?

No. It's irresistible. It's a pre-packaged scandal. That it's built on misinformation is, as usual, beside the point. It's like a rattlesnake charm: You shake it at your enemy and America rallies to your side. But, oops, America doesn't agree with conservatives on this one.

It's going to be fun to watch, or would be if there weren't serious negative consequences to women's health. These negative consequences are a feature, not a bug, to the conservative proponents of controlling women's bodies against their will. Hopefully, the GOPers have overplayed their hand just in time to negatively impact their 2016 chances.

If there is one thing to worry about is that low-information voters are susceptible to this kind of ideological charade. How many buy the conservative line, however dishonest it is, remains to be seen. Here's hoping Joan Walsh is right.

Update. NYTimes weighs in on the GOP plight with women post-debate.

The GOP Field's Empty Rhetoric on Foreign Policy

Jimmy Olson, boy governor, sidles up to Sir Donald Trump.

Fred Kaplan of Slate points out the painfully obvious:

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who by all estimates won the debate because she seems capable of talking and thinking at the same time, said that defeating terrorism required “a different mindset,” in which law enforcement and intelligence agencies would cooperate. (Apparently, this insight has eluded Obama and George W. Bush before him.)

Fiorina also said that, on her first day in office, she would tear up the Iran nuclear deal, after calling her “good friend Bibi Netanyahu,” and then, on the second day, hold a summit with our Arab allies, including her “friend King Abdullah of Jordan.” These acts and conversations would send a signal that “America is back in the leadership business.” At the moment that she said this, the ambassadors from Britain, France, and Germany were urging 30 members of Congress to support the Iran deal, saying that rejection would trigger a “nightmare” and a “catastrophe”—thus sending a signal that they were fine with American leadership as is.

Fiorina was by no means the only "foreign policy expert" Kaplan disembowels in his piece. Read it and pray none of these clown-car luminaries make it out of the car.

Update. Just read Krugman's piece of the GOP debate and the GOP field. Yep, he sees it just about the way Kaplan does, only not looking just at foreign policy. It's not pretty.

Chickens Coming Home to Roost in the GOP Nomination Battle? Tonight We Find Out.

So it might appear.

Have the Republicans gotten the frontrunner they deserve?

An interesting notion has crossed the minds of conservative journalists, in this case exemplified by Ramesh Ponnuru's pronouncement that the GOP has earned for itself the frontrunner they deserved. The conservative media and the politicians they have nurtured have led to an epistemological closure that allowed them to get Trump'd. Oh well.

Let's let Martin Longman explain:

That’s a learning moment for the folks who actually noticed. And that’s why they’re looking for a candidate who will call the Washington Republicans on their duplicity and double-dealing. I mean, how many times has the Republican leadership in Congress held votes to repeal Obamacare?

And it was ALL bullshit?

A person might have some scales fall from their eyes on a thing like that.

Which is basically why Ponnuru is saying that the GOP deserves Trump. They’ve earned him.

Tonight, they get their first real taste of the consequences of their actions.

I can't wait. Oh, the answer is, yes, it was ALL bullshit. Good on ya, GOP.

Tonight's Fox GOP Debate: A Tryout for Future Fox Commentators?

Er, yes. Otherwise why so many running?

The also-rans, except one. The rest? Jobs at Fox!

This, plus post-Citizen United campaign funding, makes for a weird shift from democracy to America-as-reality-TV. Stay tuned (the actual point). Oh noes, I got it: Celebrity Apprentice Candidate, holy crap, still starring Donald Trump!!

When Will Republican Rhetoric Reach Peak Crazy?

And the black man and the woman are among the most vitriolic. Go figure.

You don't need a program to figure out who's the nastiest bit of business in the clown car that's morphing into a clown bus. They're all trying to out-nasty each other, thanks to Trump's over-the-top style.

Ed Kilgore points out the source of the problem, with some good examples. Hint: Everyone is saying, New Yorker-style, "Hey, I'm running here!"

Josh Marshall gets pretty deep into the core of the problem:

In the economics of Crazy, there is purity and volume. Trump has brought to market a purer and more widely deployable product. He has also radically increased volume. Like a high-flying tech start-up or new drug syndicate, he has radically devalued the product, while dominating the transformed market in a way that allows him to make a killing even against reduced prices and margins. Many of us thought that the string of collapsed business deals and partnerships would hurt Trump. And they may have damaged his bottom line. But in the political realm they have only served to confirm his image as a no-nonsense (all nonsense?) truth-teller who is indifferent to how controversy may affect his personal fortunes. In both purity and volume, his competitors simply cannot compete.

And yet they try.

Dana Milbank of WaPo traces the problem to how crazy the Republican base is. To him, all the crazy talk is calculated. Get that? Calculated to appeal to the crazy base. Holy crap.

Fifty-four percent of Republicans last year said they thought that “deep down” Obama was a Muslim, and 29 percent said they didn’t know, according to a poll by political scientist Alex Theodoridis, who writes for The Post’s Monkey Cage blog.

Walker’s encouragement of the Muslim myth was another case of a dynamic that could be problematic for the eventual Republican presidential nominee: Saying zany things is rational strategy.

Zany = rational in the world of the GOP. Now we begin to understand the (temporary?) ascendency of Donald Trump.

I'd be sanguine if Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush hadn't been elected president. Twice.

Misty-colored memories of the way we were.

Update. Donald Trump adds his thumbs up to a Republican government-shutdown attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. Double holy crap. Guess going for the women's vote is Job One.

Just so you know, if the Donald is for this, it boxes in any rational voices in the GOP, if there are any, that is.