During a recent deposition as part of a racial profiling lawsuit against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Arpaio’s Chief Deputy David Hendershott came to his boss’ defense and claimed that the racial profiling allegations being waged against him are false. According to Hendershott, the lawsuit is part of a conspiracy theory that goes all the way up from the attorney questioning him, David Bodney, to the Obama administration:

BODNEY: Do you believe there is an organized conspiracy to muzzle Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

HENDERSHOTT: Yes.

BODENY: Who is leading this conspiracy?

HENDERSHOTT: Well, I don’t know…it has become clear that you, Bill Straus, Phil Gordon, members of the Anti-Defamation League, and your firm is extremely political. And you have a political agenda. And the association with the Obama administration. And so that is uh, we have caught the federal government…

BODNEY: Whose association with the Obama administration?

HENDERSHOTT: Janet Napolitano.

Watch it:

This isn’t the first rumor of a conspiracy theory to come out of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Arpaio has often stated that his federally-granted power to enforce immigration law on the streets of Phoenix was stripped because the Obama administration is out to get him and has “a political axe to grind over immigration policy.” However, back in November, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Janet Napolitano explained that Arpaio was simply “unwilling to accept” the new standards that the administration was implementing in an attempt to prioritize the removal of dangerous undocumented immigrants.

During his own deposition testimony, Arpaio admitted to not reading his own book and blamed the references to the wingnut reconquista conspiracy theory contained in it on his co-author.

In an important speech yesterday Vice President Biden pushed for rapid action on the President’s nuclear agenda. Biden spoke at the National Defense University and was introduced by Secretary of Defense Gates, sending a strong message that the military is firmly in support of moving full speed ahead on the President’s nuclear agenda. As Biden put it, “we are all on the same page” and that “even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong.”

Biden laid out an ambitious agenda, which notably called for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Vice President also emphasized that there is clear bipartisan support among foreign policy experts for this agenda:

Our goal of a world without nuclear weapons has been endorsed by leading voices in both parties. These include two former Secretaries of State from Republican administrations, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz…During the 2008 Presidential campaign, both the President and Senator McCain supported the same objective. We will continue to build support for this emerging bipartisan consensus like the one around containment of Soviet expansionism that George Kennan inspired. Toward that end, we have worked tirelessly to implement the President’s Prague agenda.

On CTBT, Biden explained that “explosive testing damaged our health, disrupted our environment and set back our non-proliferation goals” and he affirmed that the past concerns that prevented ratification of the treaty in 1999 have been addressed, as technological advances make testing unnecessary. Biden explained:

Our labs know more about our arsenal today than when we used to explode our weapons on a regular basis. With our support, the labs can anticipate potential problems and reduce their impact on our arsenal. Unfortunately, during the last decade, our nuclear complex and experts were neglected and underfunded… That’s why earlier this month we announced a new budget that reverses the last decade’s dangerous decline. It devotes $7 billion to maintaining our nuclear stockpile and modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.

Watch it:

The speech presents a clear challenge to conservatives in the Senate. There is steadfast support from the military and widespread bipartisan support among serious foreign policy officials and experts (including Secretary of States for Reagan, Nixon, and George W. Bush) in support of eliminating nuclear weapons. Yet conservatives in the Senate, led by Senator Jon Kyl, appear determined to torpedo this effort, with Kyl even advocating for nuclear testing and building more nuclear weapons.

The key question is whether conservatives in the Senate motivated by an obstructionist political strategy and an extremist foreign policy vision are able to unite their party around blocking this agenda. In other words, this will demonstrate if they are the party of Powell or Palin.

Our guest bloggers are Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow, and Peter Juul, Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.

With Iraq heading into elections early next month, a handful of conservative analysts are spinning a tall tale: Obama lost Iraq to Iran. To call this ridiculous is to give it too much credit.

As with their attempts to misrepresent Obama’s strong record against Al Qaeda and other terror networks (thanks to David Ignatius for setting the record straight in his column) conservatives are spinning a laughably cartoonish story of what’s happened in Iraq.

Similar to the Cold War mythologies that the right has peddled for decades, this narrative only has potency if no one bothers to examine what really transpired.

At the most basic level, conservatives are attempting to convince the public that the Iraq war started on January 10, 2007, when President Bush announced the surge. The point of this is to give the Bush administration credit for the Obama administration’s withdrawal policy by claiming it would not be possible without Bush’s Iraq policies. Like all great propaganda, there is an element of truth to this claim: violence in Iraq has decreased since mid-2007 for a variety of reasons, and President Bush did, at the insistence of the Iraqi government, sign the U.S.-Iraq security agreement calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.

However, such details are beside the point — all conservatives are hoping to do is plant the idea that Bush deserves all the credit for Iraq’s stability. With this concept in place, conservatives can then pivot to claiming the Obama administration has squandered the Bush administration’s achievements by “abandoning” Iraq.

The usual suspects are among the authors of the Iraq fairy tale. Fred and Kimberly Kagan warned in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that Iraq is being thrown to the Iranian wolves. Frank Gaffney earlier this month characterized the Obama policy as the “devil-take-the-hindmost abandonment of Iraq” which was resulting in an “Iranian puppet state.” Expect more hyperventilating of this sort to come. Why?

The truth is that many of the conservatives who supported the Iraq invasion back cannot bring themselves to own up to the central strategic flaw underpinning their initial arguments for the war. Back then, some proponents argued that an Iraq war was the panacea: the road to peace in Jerusalem led through Baghdad and a tsunami of democracy would wash throughout the Middle East, including Iran. The Iraq war was supposed to upend the Middle East. But instead of rooting out the despots in Tehran, it played right into their hands, and Iran ended up getting some of their best allies in the Middle East safely ensconced into power in Iraq (something Brian Katulis and Matt Duss pointed out to the Kagans almost two years ago) all under a security umbrella provided by the Bush administration. As Sarah Palin might say, “How’s that working out for ya?” (Actually she wouldn’t say it, because she, too, is blind to the damage done by a conservative foreign policy – possibly a result of being staffed by Randy Scheunemann, a key neoconservative activist behind the war). Read more