It looks quite clear that US-Russian negotiations over a new START treaty are proceeding smoothly. Yet while the START treaty reaches the finish line, conservative commentators have adopted the bizarre and hypocritical attack that not reaching an agreement before December 5th – the date at which the existing treaty expires – would represent a failure.

This line has been pushed by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and was reiterated by Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard this weekend. Kyl in a floor speech last week claimed that the Administration “spent the first half of the year negotiating a joint understanding that would allow it to show progress toward the president’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons” and have “only now have negotiators begun looking at the question of verification.” Barnes added in an oped titled “another Obama diplomatic failure,” that the Administration “is desperate to avoid the humiliation of having failed to finalize” the treaty.

Conservative complaints reek of hypocrisy. Not only did conservatives not lift a finger to advance START over the last eight years, but they have also shown almost no concern for verification measures in the past. But what is most galling about this attack is that the Administration has had effectively only 5 months to negotiate an incredibly complex treaty – not a full year.

The reason for this is that conservatives in the Senate put a number of holds and stalled numerous appointments crucial to the START negotiations. For instance, Senator Kyl quite openly put a hold on Ellen Tauscher’s appointment as Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. So if conservatives were so concerned about getting a new treaty in place before December 5th, why then did Kyl hold up someone of critical importance to the START talks?

Laura Rozen, then at The Cable, reported that Kyl was putting a hold on Tauscher because of START.

A Congressional source says that Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) put a hold on all State Department nominees earlier this week because he is not satisfied with the information he has been receiving from the administration on the progress of arms control negotiations with Russia. “Kyl’s beef and the general Republican argument now emerging against the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policy is that they are rushing to conclude a new agreement with Russia on strategic arms levels before their Nuclear Posture Review is complete.”

But Kyl knew that the Nuclear Posture Review was not scheduled to be completed until next year – so demanding that the NPR be completed prior to conducting negotiations over a new START treaty, was simply an effort to torpedo the Administration’s ability to negotiate a treaty before the December 5th deadline. But instead of just being upfront about his opposition to controlling the Russian nuclear arsenal, Kyl is now trying to attack the administration from a pro-arms control position by proclaiming his support for verification measures – something he has consistently discounted in the past. This is all just bizarre and by trying to disguise his own position, Kyl is just demonstrating how weak and out of the mainstream his actual position on arms control really is. Instead of wanting a world without nuclear weapons, Kyl wants one with many more.

Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, was caught on video last week slamming “Ron Paul fanatics” in the anti-immigration movement along with tea-bagger wannabe William Gheen who organized poorly attended “copycat” anti-immigration tea party protests:

I used to support Ron Paul, until I had this falling out with these Ron Paul fanatics. They’re not all that way, just too many. The ones that I’ve met, who are very hateful people, have no business supporting Ron Paul. Jeff Schwilk and William Gheen have no business being in political activism because, in my blatant personal opinion, they are outright racists.

Watch it:

Gilchrist has long attempted to distinguish his “multi-ethnic” border vigilante group from more overtly racist organizations such as Gheen’s Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). However, their public feud is more the product of personal infighting than ideological differences.

To begin with, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists both the Minuteman Project and ALIPAC as “nativist extremist” organizations. SPLC has extensively documented the Minuteman Project’s ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a “white supremacist hate group” which even co-hosted a “strategy session” with one of the Minuteman Project’s chapters. The Anti-Defamation League points out that the Minuteman Project is “highly publicized among right-wing extremists ranging from militia groups to white supremacist organizations,” including neo-Nazi National Alliance members. Harvard University recently canceled Gilchrist’s invitation to speak at the campus, explaining that his views were “not compatible with providing an environment for civil, educational, and productive discourse on immigration.”

Earlier in the interview, Gilchrist offers a more convincing explanation for the mutual contempt held amongst nativist groups: “personality disorders” or “just hate for the competition.” Gilchrist claims Gheen’s hatred for him started when he refused to hand over his email lists and that his group was later attacked by Gheen for endorsing Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) for President over Ron Paul. Both candidates pandered to the right-wing anti-immigrant fringe during their 2008 presidential campaigns.

Newsweek editor John Meacham — the same guy who insisted that Barack Obama’s election as president proved that America was a “center-right” country — thinks that a Dick Cheney run for the presidency would be great for America. Meacham that an Obama-Cheney match-up would “give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way. As John McCain pointed out in the fall of 2008, he is not Bush.”

It is true that John McCain is not, in fact, George W. Bush. But, as this blog spent a lot of time examining during the 2008 campaign, on national security McCain was virtually identical to Bush, except where McCain was more extreme. In that respect, the 2008 election were as clear an adjudication of the George W. Bush years as one could have hoped for. The American people delivered a pretty resounding verdict of “fail.” So now Meacham wants a do-over.

Given that the best case for George W. Bush’s stewardship of U.S national security boils down to: “Hey, we didn’t get attacked again!” it’s not hard to understand why Cheney has chosen to ignore American tradition and bash Bush’s successor at every opportunity, frantically trying to sway the public whose opinion he casually and disdainfully dismissed while in office.

If U.S. security were best served by talking smack on Meet the Press, or delivering pro-torture applause lines to sycophants at the American Enterprise Institute, Dick Cheney could be considered a success. In terms of actual measurable evidence, however, Cheney’s record, and that of the administration he served, is one of staggering incompetence and failure.

One of the worst, and most consequential, of those failures was letting Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden escape from the caves of Tora Bora where U.S. forces and Afghan allies had him cornered in late 2001. A new report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examines various aspects of that failure, the and concludes:

Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.

Cheney has accused President Obama of “dithering” over a new Afghanistan strategy — a strategy necessitated by Cheney’s and Bush’s failure to get bin Laden, and to commit the necessary resources to finish the job in Afghanistan. It’s enormously important to understand that that failure was not an accident, it was the direct result of a conservative national security ideology that puts more stock in talking “tough” than in actually having an effective policy. Cheney is a prime exponent of that ideology, and the George W. Bush presidency was the definitive demonstration of its intellectual vacuity — something Cheney and his supporters have been, and will continue to be, at great pains to conceal. Frankly, I really doubt Cheney would want to get into a situation where he would have to answer tough questions about his failures, or give the American people another chance to reject his approach to national security.

Part of the Obama administration’s plan to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table has been to call on the Israeli government to freeze all settlement building and expansion throughout the occupied West Bank.

Yet despite agreeing to freeze all settlement activity in the 2003 Road Map, the Israelis have continued expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, last week, Israeli government ministers approved a measure calling for a 10-month freeze on new building permits and construction of new residential buildings in the West Bank (but exempts East Jerusalem), a move top U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell said “falls short of a full settlement freeze, but it is more than any Israeli government has done before, and can help move toward agreement between the parties.”

This weekend, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party attacked President Obama for the Israeli settlement decision:

[Member of the Knesset] Dani Danon organized the meeting after Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat (Likud) launched a verbal attack over the matter on U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, which she branded “terrible.” [...]

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately distanced himself from her comments, the activists at Saturday’s conference leveled further criticism at Obama over the moratorium, which Israel undertook to carry out in the wake of tremendous U.S. pressure.

“The Obama administration is an enemy of the Jews and the worst regime there ever was for the State of Israel,” said Yossi Naim, the head of the Beit Aryeh regional council, at the Ra’ana meeting. “I announce to Obama: You won’t be able to stop us.”

Ron Nahman, mayor of the West Bank settlement of Ariel, applauded Livnat’s comments. “You had the public courage to say what most of the public feels ever since Obama came to power,” he said, repeatedly referring to the U.S. President as “Hussein Obama.”

The New York Times argued in a recent editorial that, despite the settlement dispute and mishaps, Obama should continue to move forward:

The president has no choice but to keep trying. At some point extremists will try to provoke another war…and the absence of a dialogue will only make things worse. Advancing his own final-status plan for a two-state solution is one high-risk way forward that we think is worth the gamble. Stalemate is unsustainable.

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes that Netanyahu’s refusal to comply with a full settlement freeze “is a huge part of the problem here” and that the Obama administration may have to “stop pretending that Netanyahu is a partner for peace.”