Since the federal government filed a suit yesterday challenging Arizona’s immigration law, SB-1070, the right has remained overly confident that SB-1070 does not usurp federal authority as the Department of Justice contends. One of the most common arguments used to defend SB-1070 against the federal government’s preemption claim is that SB-1070 simply mirrors federal immigration law. In a piece written by the bill’s author in the National Review, Kris Kobach argues that SB-1070 “does not make any radical changes” and that it simply gives local police “a few additional tools.” He reiterated his position today on Fox News:

The federal government’s position that somehow Arizona is regulating immigration simply won’t fly because Arizona is not making any decisions about who’s legal or illegal — or decision about whom to deport or who to let into the country. Arizona is simply mirroring federal law and saying we want to help enforce federal law. We want our officers to cooperate with ICE. [...]

There’s complete consistency between the two laws. [...]

Watch it:

However, SB-1070 actually does depart from federal immigration law in a few rather radical ways:

SB-1070 requires local police to check the immigration status when there is “reasonable suspicion” that a person who has been stopped is undocumented.
And if legal residents suspect that local law enforcement is not enforcing SB-1070, they can individually clog the courts with lawsuits against police officers. Meanwhile, federal immigration law places no such mandatory demands on local police. Instead, if local police want to participate in the enforcement of immigration law, they can enter into a 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which was established by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The program provides local police with additional resources and training to enforce immigration laws. It’s far from perfect, but it’s hard to believe Congress would’ve even bothered establishing it if it were just assumed that local police have the inherent authority to enforce immigration laws.

SB-1070 criminalizes several aspects of immigration that are only considered civil violations under federal law and in some cases aren’t even illegal.
SB-1070 makes it a felony for anyone to knowingly transport or harbor an undocumented immigrant. However, federal law only prohibits the transportation and harboring of undocumented immigrants “in furtherance” of unlawful immigration. In other words, federal law narrows the scope of the violation to exclude entities such as clinics, churches, charities, and good samaritans who may just be trying to help out an undocumented immigrant in dire straits. SB-1070 also doesn’t just criminalize the act of working without proper authorization, it makes it illegal for someone to solicit work in a public space (such as a day laborer) regardless of that person’s immigration status and also states that its unlawful to “hire and pick up passengers for work.” Under federal law, it is not illegal to be a day laborer. Additionally, the act of working in the U.S. without documents was specifically not criminalized by Congress.

SB-1070 makes “attrition through enforcement” the law of the land.
The explicit intent of SB-1070 is probably one of the most conflicting aspects of the law. SB-1070 states that “attrition through enforcement [is] the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.” However, the federal government does not aim to squeeze out undocumented immigrants through overly draconian measures that cause them to self-deport. In fact, the DOJ notes that SB-1070 will create a situation in which the “federal government will be required to divert resources from its own, carefully considered enforcement priorities – dangerous aliens who pose a threat to national security and public safety – to address the work that Arizona will now create for it.” As broken as the U.S. immigration system is, it retains a degree of humanity that is utterly absent in SB-1070.

On Sunday, Octavia Nasr — CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs — acknowledged the death of Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by tweeting:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot..

Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings. But Nasr’s comment was enough to spark fierce outrage from the various precincts of the neocon blog/twittersphere, who went after Nasr for her egregious failure to reduce Fadlallah to an anti-Israel, anti-American terrorist bogeyman.

Responding to the uproar, Nasr wrote, “It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all”:

Here’s what I should have conveyed more fully:

I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam. [...]

Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret.

A good clarification, but almost certainly not enough to silence the sanctimonious neoconservative whining.

Mediate now reports that, based on an internal CNN memo, Nasr will be leaving CNN. “[A]t this point,” writes CNN Senior VP Parisa Khosravi, “we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

And so, once again, the neocons have managed to help make us all a little bit dumber. The punchline here is that Sayyed Fadlallah was the religious guide, or marja’ al-taqlid, to numerous members of Iraq’s ruling Da’wa Party, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This means that they looked to Fadlallah as a source of religious authority on matters relating to correct Islamic life and practice, and committed to following his edicts on those matters.

So here’s the neocon logic: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was — that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over 4,000 of its own troops and over 100,000 Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same “terrorist’s” avowed acolytes — that’s victory.

On Sunday, the influential Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah passed away in Lebanon. A source of religious guidance for thousands of Shiites, including many members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Da’wa Party (which he helped found), Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights, and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings.

Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam.

All in all, a fairly complex individual whose career, views and influence can’t really properly be conveyed by the single word “terrorist.” That is, of course, unless you’re a neocon. Marking Fadlallah’s death on Sunday, CNN Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs Octavia Nasr tweeted “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot..”

This was quite enough to cue outrage from the various precincts of the neocon blog/twittersphere, who went after Nasr for her egregious failure to reduce Fadlallah to an anti-Israel, anti-American terrorist bogeyman.

Responding to the uproar, Nasr wrote “It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all”:

Here’s what I should have conveyed more fully:

I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam. [...]

Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret.

A good clarification, but almost certainly not enough to silence the sanctimonious whining.

The punchline here is that Sayyed Fadlallah was the religious guide, or marja’ al-taqlid, to numerous members of Iraq’s ruling Da’wa Party, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This means that they looked to Fadlallah as a source of religious authority on matters relating to correct Islamic life and practice, and committed to following his edicts on those matters. It also meant that, in October 2008, when Fadlallah (along with several other ayatollahs) condemned the U.S.-Iraq security agreement in its then-current form and decreed that any agreement should call for an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, the agreement had to be re-negotiated.

As I wrote at the time, the power of these ayatollahs to effectively scuttle an agreement of significant import to the security of the United States throws into stark relief what the Bush administration created in Iraq: a government dominated by Shia religious parties who take their guidance — and derive much of their legitimacy — from the opinions and edicts of a small handful of senior Shia clerics.

That aside, here’s the neocon logic, as best I can explain: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was — that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over four thousand of its own troops and over a hundred thousand Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same “terrorist’s” avowed acolytes — that’s victory.

In the Washington Post today John Kerry responds to Mitt Romney’s oped by accusing him of putting scoring cheap political points above the safety and security of the American people. Kerry takes Romney to task for making “narrow, uninformed political objections” to START. Kerry goes through each of Romney’s claims noting that one is a “myth,” another is “baloney,” “flat wrong,” and a “red herring.” He assesses that:

Even in these polarized times, anyone seeking the presidency should know that the security of the United States is too important to be treated as fodder for political posturing. Sadly, former governor Mitt Romney failed that test… He disregarded the views of the best foreign policy thinkers of the past half-century, but more important, he ignored the facts…. I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation’s security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

The Slate’s Fred Kaplan further demolishes Romney’s oped noting that:

In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and—let’s not mince words—thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post… Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, clearly feels the need to pump up some foreign-policy swagger in advance of the 2012 presidential primaries. But one would think he could have found a ghostwriter who had even the vaguest acquaintance with the subject matter… And if this is the best the Republicans can do to beat down the New START treaty, well, that’s just sad.

As I noted yesterday, Romney gets so much factually wrong that it is hard not to call his oped a total joke. For instance, Romney yesterday argued that “Russia is free to mount a nearly unlimited number of ICBMs on bombers – including MIRVs or multiple warheads.” The only problem is that this is such a stupid idea that the U.S. and Russia have long since rejected it. It is like saying your going to put a tank on a submarine – it makes no sense. And if Russia were dumb enough to put ICBMs on bombers, they would still almost certainly be counted under the treaty.

So why did Mitt Romney enter the fray on the START treaty when he clearly knows nothing about it? For Romney this is nothing new. He has long been unserious on foreign policy and eager to adopt the extreme right position of the day. He is after all one of the first to utter the ridiculous phrase “Islamofascism” and the man who when asked in a primary debate if wanted to close Guantanamo said he wanted to double it.

From a political perspective Romney is severely compromised with the Republican base for his past liberal positions on domestic and social policy issues (pro-choice, health care reform, etc). But one area where he is a blank slate is on foreign policy. And Romney has made a concerted effort to fully embrace the Heritage Foundation’s national security positions. He gave a foreign policy speech there last year and his oped yesterday is a recycling of the “tired” arguments that Heritage has been desperately throwing at the wall since the START ratification process began. Defeating START is such a priority to Heritage that their new “action” 501c4 aspect to their organization has prioritized its defeat. Marc Ambinder also reported that Romney had contact with former Senator Jim Talent who just happens to be at the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage’s blind opposition to START and there resulting looseness with the facts is not surprising. To them this is religion. They are simply completely ideologically and theologicially opposed to arms-control and will say anything to block the treaty. After all they don’t want fewer nuclear weapons in the world, they want more. As an institution they are firmly with Senator Jim DeMint in believing that the Cold War has never ended, that we need to build and explosively test new nuclear weapons and that we should abandon decades of bipartisan policy and specifically target Russia with our missile defense systems – which would mean spending trillions to turn it into some sort of magical force field.