The
hallmark of Republican thinking these days, especially as expressed in
Romney/Ryan rhetoric, is just the sheer laziness of it. That’s
presumably a consequence of having developed an amazingly efficient
partisan press. There’s just very little incentive remaining to develop
actual policies or even a real critique of Barack Obama’s
administration. After all, if the president is a Kenyan socialist intent
on destroying the United States, it’s hardly necessary to explain
exactly where his policies are going wrong or why.
That often
shows up in the way that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan dissemble. Every
presidential campaign lies, but what distinguishes this crowd is a
lazy mendacity in which there’s not even an attempt to make their falsehoods plausible (
here’s another recent, excellent example).
But
it also shows up in their basic rhetoric. Why put together a critique
of Barack Obama’s foreign policy when they can just refer to unspecified
disasters and know that anyone watching Fox News will nod in agreement?
And thus we get
Paul Ryan’s astonishingly substance-free line that
“What we are witnessing, as we turn on our television screens these
days, is the absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy.”
Ryan trotted out “unraveling” three times in the vice-presidential debate.
The first one was at the end of a scattershot answer that was mostly about Libya:
And
with respect to Afghanistan and the 2014 deadline, we agree with a 2014
transition. But what we also want to do is make sure that we’re not
projecting weakness abroad, and that’s what’s happening here. This
Benghazi issue would be a tragedy in and of itself. But unfortunately
it’s indicative of a broader problem, and that is what we are watching
on our TV screens is the unraveling of the Obama foreign policy, which
is making the world more — more chaotic and us less safe.
Apparently
something is happening “on our TV screens” that’s self-evident to Ryan.
Now, I have no doubt that on certain TV screens – the ones permanently
set to Fox News – all sorts of terrible things are happening as a direct
result of Obama’s incompetence. Or, perhaps, Obama’s deliberate
preference for those horrible outcomes. But it would be nice for Ryan to
give us some sort of clue about it. His critique is that the U.S. is
“projecting weakness abroad” (how?), and that’s resulting in …
something. What? No idea.
So that’s one try. Next:
Look,
this was the anniversary of 9/11. It was Libya, a country we knew we
had al-Qaeda cells there. As we know, al-Qaeda and its affiliates are on
the rise in northern Africa. And we did not give our ambassador in
Benghazi a Marine detachment? Of course there is an investigation so we
can make sure that this never happens again. But when it comes to
speaking up for our values, we should not apologize for those.
Here
is the problem. Look at all the various issues out there and that’s
unraveling before our eyes. The vice president talks about sanctions on
Iran.
At which point he was asked a question about
Iran and answered it.
“Unraveling”? There’s surely plenty of room for
criticizing Barack Obama’s Iran policy, either that it’s too hawkish or
not hawkish enough, but it’s really hard to understand an argument that
Iran policy is “unraveling before our eyes.”
Unwise? Perhaps.
Short-sighted? Maybe. Unraveling before our eyes? How? The only obvious
news out of Iran is the collapse of their currency, which, for better or
worse, is awfully hard to cast as an unraveling of a tough sanctions
policy. Indeed, it seems suspiciously like the consequences of a
successful tough sanctions policy! Again, one can criticize the policy,
but how is it unraveling before our eyes?
Otherwise, all we get
here is a vague reference to “the various issues out there,” as if we
all knew what they were. Presumably because they’re on our TV screens.
And therefore not worth mentioning.
That’s two strikes. The third? It’s in response to a question about staying in Afghanistan beyond 2014:
We
want to make sure that 2014 is successful. That’s why we want to make
sure that we give our commanders what they say they need to make it
successful. We don’t want to extend beyond 2014. That’s the point we’re
making.
You know, if it was just this, I feel like we would — we
would be able to call this a success, but it’s not. What we are
witnessing as we turn on our television screens these days, is the
absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy. Problems are growing at
home, but jobs — problems are growing abroad, but jobs aren’t growing
here at home.
So Afghanistan would be a success, but
it’s not for some unspecified reason, which goes back to that “absolute
unraveling of the Obama foreign policy” that we can see “on our
television screens.” The best example of which appears to be something
about jobs.
Strike three.
It’s easy to spin this as an
example of Paul Ryan’s inexperience with foreign policy and national
security issues, but I think that’s wrong. The truth is that he’s merely
reciting a standard Republican talking point here. And why not? On the
Rush Limbaugh program or any of the other Republican-aligned talk shows,
it’s obviously true that Obama’s foreign policy is a total failure.
That’s good enough for the hosts, and it appears to be good enough for
the audiences. So why bother developing anything more?
A minor
problem with all of this is that it leaves Republicans ill-equipped to
convince anyone of anything unless they’re already within the
conservative closed-information feedback loop. Minor, because most
voting decisions are more about retrospective evaluations of incumbents
than about careful examination of the logic in campaign statements, to
the sheer laziness of the critique probably doesn’t matter very much at
that point. The major problem, however, is that all of this lazy
thinking leaves Republicans ill-equipped to govern – as seen in the
problems encountered by the Gingrich Congress, the George W. Bush
administration and now the Boehner/Ryan House. And that matters a lot.
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