Today a man flew a plane into a Texas federal building in an apparent domestic terrorist attack. The suicide bomber, identified as Joseph Andrew Stack, was allegedly a right wing extremist who wrote on a website that violence “is the only answer” and expressed anger at the IRS, the federal government, and health care reform.

Newly-minted Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appeared on Fox’s Neil Cavuto and showed none of the outrage and concern about terrorism that he exuded during his Senate election campaign. Asked for his reaction, Brown said he felt for the families, but quickly shrugged off the attack and transitioned to say that “people are frustrated” and “no one likes paying taxes.” Watch it:

Brown’s blasé attitude toward this terrorist attack is in stark contrast to the tone he struck during his campaign:

– “The President reacted too slow” to the failed Christmas Day plot.

– “We are at war. … We’re at war in our airports. We’re at war in our shopping malls. I have to be honest with you, folks. … I’m scared at some of the policies that I’ve heard.”

– Calling Coakley “naïve” on terrorism, Brown said she possessed a “deeply troubling lack of awareness and understanding of the threats facing our troops and on our national security.”

It is naive for Brown to think the dangers of right wing terrorism aren’t real. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security released a report warning of the dangers of rising right wing extremism, as was evidenced by the shooting at the Holocaust museum in D.C. and by a Pittsburgh killer who was partially inspired by Glenn Beck.

While conservatives are quick to make political hay out of terrorism when it suits their needs, they have been relatively silent in the wake of this attack, as well as in the wake of the news that the Obama administration struck a significant blow to the Taliban and to al Qaeda.

Transcript: Read more

Today, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is featuring two conflicting immigration panels in what seems like a blatantly duplicitous and opportunistic attempt to appeal to the nativist instincts of the anti-immigrant Right while simultaneously trying to grow the Republican base to include more Latinos.

One panel, entitled The Rise of Latino Conservatism, is sponsored by the American Principles Project’s (APP) Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. “We represent a form of conservatism that is welcoming to people of all racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds,” explains Robert George, APP’s founder. According to George, his organization supports a “generous and welcoming immigration policy,” explaining that “a conservatism that is anti-Latino is not one that we want any part of.”

Perhaps unbeknownst to George, a screening of Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration, a documentary from the self-described “conservative grass-roots advocacy organization” Citizens United is scheduled to take place just a few hours after his own CPAC panel. The movie has been panned by mainstream critics who claim that it leaves “little for a viewer to latch onto besides a transmitted sense of general anxiety and outrage.” The film, which calls for stricter policies and more enforcement, has also been described as a one-sided, offensive, negative portrayal of Mexicans.

Watch the trailer:

Former Arizona Congressman and U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Hayworth, who is featured in the documentary, will introduce the film at the screening. In a background briefing released today by America’s Voice, Hayworth is identified as a “practitioner in the strategy to drive Latinos away from the Republican Party.” In the past, Hayworth has referred to previous generations of American immigrants as “illegal invaders” and equated his hard-line immigration stance to “standing up for our culture.” However, Hayworth’s views didn’t bode well with Arizona citizens who voted him out of office after he opposed a harsh bill that that would have made undocumented immigrants and anyone who helps them into felons because it didn’t do enough to “turn back the massive invasion of our country by illegal aliens.”

CPAC’s two-faced agenda ultimately serves as a microcosm of the larger internal debate dividing the conservative movement. While some conservatives continue preaching a hardline and unrealistic immigration position to secure right-wing votes, shrewd Republican leaders have warned that an anti-immigrant platform could render the Party obsolete as Latino and immigrant voters will one day outnumber the wingnuts.

On Saturday, CPAC will also host a panel called “Saving Freedom from Obama’s Immigration Plan” with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Linda Chavez, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, Dino Teppara of the Indian American Republican Council, and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

Josh Rogin’s story on the Obama administration’s intervention into whether Voice of America should attach its name to a statement protesting Iranian signal jamming indicates that the administration is still approaching certain aspects of the Iranian regime’s repression with meticulous caution. Perhaps too much caution, in my opinion.

This apparent caution does, however, work against Flynt Leverett’s suggestion that the administration is moving closer to endorsing regime change in Iran. As I’ve written previously, while I think the administration needs to elevate human rights on its Iran agenda, I don’t think that President Obama’s explicitly enlisting the United States in the Iranian reform movement in hopes of “regime change” is a wise choice right now. But I continue to find Leverett’s dismissal of that movement as a serious factor, either in Iranian politics or in U.S. considerations toward Iran, to be incredibly obtuse.

Appearing on the NewsHour on February 12, Leverett insisted “The United States needs to be doing serious strategic business with the Islamic Republic as it is, and not as some might wish it to be”:

That’s what the Obama Administration needs to be focused on, and not give in to what is, frankly, an illusion that Iranian domestic politics are going to produce some government that we’re going to find much, much easier to deal with.

Yes, by all means, let’s not have illusions that a new Iranian government will give us everything that we want. But it’s pretty clear that dealing with the Islamic Republic “as it is” means dealing with a government that is currently experiencing a serious crisis of legitimacy, probably the most serious since the immediate post-revolutionary period.

While Leverett sees the regime’s success in preventing large-scale anti-government demonstrations on February 11 as evidence that we should all just get over the Greens, Farideh Farhi writes that “the only message of February 11 is that, by spending a tremendous amount of resources and energy on security, arrests and mobilization, the government can control the crowds”:

But managing the stage and controlling the crowds on any given day are not the same as actually resolving the problems and grievances that have repeatedly brought protesters into the streets. Unless some of these are addressed, the Iranian state will remain on edge, vigilant, and engaged in a permanent crackdown that will effectively undermine the country’s economic and regional ambitions. [...]

Iran’s political system, with its bickering elites, remains as dysfunctional as ever. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration is still perceived as incompetent even by many of its conservative backers at a time when the government faces the dual challenge of embarking upon what it calls the “economic surgery” of reforming the country’s unwieldy subsidy system and thwarting growing foreign pressures to curb the country’s nuclear program.

While I don’t think we should bank on any particular faction to come out ahead (though obviously we’d like to see an Iranian government that was more democratic and less confrontational), neither should we refuse to see that the Islamic Republic is significantly divided right now. Simply denying that those divisions exist, or that they matter, is not realism.

Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy’s the Cable reports on a new letter from Senators Jon Kyl, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman to General Jones that essentially postures that they won’t support a new START treaty if the Russians complain about missile defense. The Russians, according to these three, want to include a provision in the new START treaty that allows them to withdraw from it should they feel that “strategic stability” has been upset by US missile defense efforts. As Jonathan Kaplan in Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher’s office explains:

Anybody who knows anything about treaties knows that it is customary to be able to withdraw for reasons pertaining to one’s national interest, so there’s nothing new or diabolical here.

One can only assume that Kyl, McCain, and Lieberman aren’t completely stupid. They know that providing an out clause in a treaty is not that big of a deal and, as Rogin notes, George W. Bush unilaterally pulled out of the ABM treaty. Treaties have mechanisms for sides to pull out. The Senators also presumably understand that getting the Russians to stop complaining about missile defense in their backyard is impossible. Yet to support the treaty these Senators are in fact demanding that an irrelevant provision be pulled out in exchange for their support.

This is shockingly transparent. The Senators problem is not with missile defense it is with START and with reducing nuclear weapon stockpiles more generally. Yet these three Senators aren’t willing to simply oppose the effort to get a new START treaty, because flat out opposition to continuing Ronald Reagan’s treaty would reflect a new tea-partyesque level of extremism. We are after all talking about a treaty that forces the Russians to remove nuclear weapons currently pointed at the United States.

Instead, Kyl, McCain and Lieberman want to make opposition to START about missile defense. They exclaim (pdf):

Even as a unilateral declaration, a provision like this would put pressure on the United States to limit its systems or their deployment because of Russian threats of withdrawal from the treaty.

So to clarify, Kyl and his cohorts are willing to torpedo a treaty because the Russians may sometime down the line decide to torpedo the treaty. In this view, because the Russians may threaten to pull out of the treaty over missile defense, there should simply be no treaty to reduce the number of nuclear weapons pointed at the US because of missile defense. That doesn’t make any sense.

Furthermore, the claim that the Russian threat will constrain missile defense by making the Administration cower is also a ruse. The Obama administration, after all, has been pushing ahead with their new European missile defense plan despite the START negotiations. In fact, they are currently greatly angering Russia and potentially upsetting the START talks because of the Administration’s decision to explore negotiations with Romania and Bulgaria to host land based missile interceptors. Ellen Tauscher confirmed the Administration’s commitment to its missile defense plan in speech yesterday standing next to the Russian Ambassador, “While nuclear weapons have a clear role, our deterrent extends beyond nuclear weapons. It includes developing better and more effective missile defense systems and strategies.”

What is clear is that the letter from Kyl, McCain, and Lieberman is not about missile defense, it is about Senators that are so extreme that they even oppose extending Ronald Reagan’s own treaty.