Krauthammer said that President Obama should have ramped up rhetoric against Iran during the brutal crackdown on the Green Movement — the distinctly non-violent protest movement born out of Mir Hossien Moussavi’s failed 2009 presidential campaign. And when O’Reilly asked what else Obama could have done, Krauthammer said he should have armed the protesters and order a covert war against Iran:

O’REILLY: But what else could he have done except rhetoric?

KRAUTHAMMER: Weaponry — he could have done a lot of things. Rhetoric is one thing and not to support the legitimacy of the regime. Clandestine operations. Why do we have $50 billion in secret operations in the CIA if not for an opportunity like this? He was hands off. He did nothing and we lost one of the great opportunities in history.

Watch the video:

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his ideological comrades have made President Obama’s reaction to the 2009 post-election Iranian government crackdown on Green Movement demonstrators a centerpiece of their criticisms. Romney’s campaign issue page for Iran says Obama “refrained from supporting the nascent Green Movement.” In a Washington Post op-ed, Romney wrote that he would “speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents who are fighting for their freedom.”

In reality, Obama didn’t, as Krauthammer put it, “support the legitimacy of the [Iranian] regime.” Daniel Larison has pointed out that, when failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the same charge, that unlike many world governments, Obama never recognized the elections. Furthermore, Obama condemned the abuses against demonstrators that June.

But more to the point, one hopes that Romney does not conflate symbolic “fighting” for freedom with literal fighting. Unlike in Syria and Libya, the Green Movement in Iran never took up arms. As Ardeshir Amirarjmand, a top adviser to Moussavi now in exile in France, told an audience at MIT last year, “We do not have any other choice than a nonviolent path toward democracy.” Or, as University of Toronto professor Ramin Jahanbegloo put it, “The Green Movement faces a troubling situation, but it is banking on its strategy of nonviolence as moral capital.” Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi — who, like Iranian civil society as a whole, opposes attacking Iran — told ThinkProgress in 2010 that she disagreed with critics who said that Obama should have spoken more forcefully in support of the Green movement in June 2009.

Krauthammer worries that Obama is not doing enough to support Iran’s democracy movement. But it’s perfectly clear that the Green Movement doesn’t want the kind of support — weapons and covert war — that Krauthammer is offering.

“Everyone understood why,” Krauthammer writes. “You do not undertake a supremely risky preemptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus“:

Because for Israelis today, it is May ’67. The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms. Israelis today face the greatest threat to their existence — nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation — since May ’67. The world is again telling Israelis to do nothing as it looks for a way out. But if such a way is not found — as in ’67 — Israelis know that they will once again have to defend themselves, by themselves.

“Nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation” would obviously represent a serious threat to Israel, but it’s worth unpacking this statement and examining each of its three claims.

First, with regard to an Iranian nuclear weapon, while Iran still has yet to answer key questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the nature of its nuclear work, the current position of both U.S. and Israeli intelligence is that the Iranian government has not yet made a decision to obtain a nuclear weapon. In an interview last month, Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said Iran “is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile.” Surveying the enormous pressure being brought to bear on Iran, Gantz continued, “I believe he [Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei] would be making an enormous mistake” by manufacturing a nuclear bomb, “and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile.”

Second, while Twelver Shia theology does speak of an End Times scenario (as do other faiths), there’s no evidence that a desire to trigger the apocalypse is driving Iranian policy. In the same interview, echoing former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Lt. Gen. Gantz said, “I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.” This isn’t to diminish Iran’s various aggressive actions, such as its continuing support for terrorism, only to point out that the evidence strongly suggests that Iran’s leaders are very much focused on the here and now, and not the afterlife.

Third, while Iranian leaders have made offensive and threatening statements about Israel, the last few months have seen Iranian leaders specifically walking back a number of those statements. Asked in March about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s oft-cited claim that Israel would be “wiped from the page of history,” Mohammed Javad Larijani, a key adviser and spokesperson for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, disavowed Ahmadinejad’s remarks, saying they were “definitely not” meant in a military sense and that such a move was not “a policy of Iran.”

Similarly, in an April interview, former Iranian president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was recently re-appointed by Khamenei as head of Iran’s Expediency Council, clarified a 1999 statement about Israel’s vulnerability in a nuclear-armed Middle East, saying it was mistakenly interpreted as a threat against Israel. “Having nuclear weapons is not even in Israel’s interest,” Rafsanjani explained. “We deeply believe that nuclear weapons must not exist, and this has been part of our policy.”

Of course, given their record of deception on the nuclear issue, the Iranians shouldn’t simply be taken at their word, which is why getting them to satisfactorily address the IAEA’s questions is a top goal of the current P5+1 negotiations. And none of this is to diminish the very real and legitimate concerns that Israelis and others in the region have over the prospect of an Iranian nuke. But, as retired Israeli Big. Gen. Shlomo Brom noted in March, efforts to prevent that outcome are not helped by making wild claims about the nature and imminence of the threat. (It’s also worth noting that quite a few Israeli commentators have doubted whether the creation of a unity government has much to do with Iran at all.)

Finally, Krauthammer’s rendering of Israel standing alone against a gathering threat is simply not accurate. Not only has the Obama administration extended U.S. military support and deepened intelligence cooperation with Israel over the Iranian nuclear issue, it has also forged, with considerable diplomatic effort, a broad and durable international coalition toward addressing that issue. There may be disagreements as to the exact timing and strategy, but Israel is in no sense on its own. As Lt. Gen. Gantz put it, “The state of Israel is the strongest in the region and will remain so. Decisions can and must be made carefully, out of historic responsibility but without hysteria.”

But conservative foreign policy chieftain Charles Krauthammer has a different take. Last night on Fox News, he downplayed — but made sure not to excuse — the incident, saying it’s not as bad as people are saying because some of the dead insurgents were suicide attackers and “did not treat their own bodies with respect”:

KRAUTHAMMER: Look, let’s start by stipulating that nobody should treat the body of a dead person with disrespect. However, this is a strange case because the victims themselves, suicide attackers, are people who did not treat their own bodies with respect. They deliberately destroy their own bodies and turn themselves into body parts.

So here we have soldier soldiers in war abusing what is left of the suicide attackers. I find it slightly different from had they been abusing the body of those who died in combat or who died accidentally. It doesn’t excuse them, but I think there is a disconnect here, because suicide attackers are the most criminal of all the war criminals, abusing all the laws of war and generally speaking attacking helpless and unaware civilians.

Watch the clip:

While the soldiers actions are inexcusable, the New York Times reports today that the incident highlights concerns about the breakdown of discipline at lower levels in the chain of command, mainly due to exhaustion and the so-called “stress on the force” from 10 years of war there.

Hilariously, the books drove Charles Krauthammer nuts. In 1989, he described Papa Bear as “post-feminist…The Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman” and said that Mother Bear was so irritating she was “the one you always dreamt of drowning,” which is a pretty creepy reaction to an organized woman who watches her cholesterol. He acknowledged that the kinds of companies that put out the books “put in question my most basic political principles, since I cannot deny that socialism, whatever its faults, does not permit such things.”

Charles Krauthammer

Deploying probably the single most overworked accusation in the conservative lexicon, Charles Krauthammer condemns the Obama administration’s Iran policy as "appeasement":

[President Obama] began his presidency apologetically acknowledging U.S. involvement in a coup that happened more than 50 years ago. He then offered bilateral negotiations that, predictably, failed miserably. Most egregiously, he adopted a studied and scandalous neutrality during the popular revolution of 2009, a near-miraculous opportunity — now lost — for regime change.

Obama imagined that his silver tongue and exquisite sensitivity to Islam would persuade the mullahs to give up their weapons program. Amazingly, they resisted his charms, choosing instead to become a nuclear power. The negotiations did nothing but confer legitimacy on the regime at its point of maximum vulnerability (and savagery), as well as give it time for further uranium enrichment and bomb development.

No, actually, the negotiations have been a force multiplier for the administration’s efforts to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. As one Israeli defense official told me for an article Meir Javedanfar and I wrote about this, the Israelis were initially quite skeptical that engagement with Iran would have any benefit, but now recognize that the effort "contributed to building international consensus" around the problem. Negotiations actually did the opposite of conferring legitimacy on the Iranian regime: they made clear to the world, and to the Iranian people, that the regime, not the U.S., was the recalcitrant party.

As for the idea that we could have had regime change in Iran in 2009 if only President Obama had sided more forcefully with the protesters, I know this has become something of an article of faith for conservatives, but the next person to describe a plausible scenario in which President Obama’s speaking out more explicitly in favor of the Green Movement in 2009 results in the regime’s collapse will be the first.

One can disagree with the Obama administration’s two track approach of engagement and pressure. But to describe that approach — which includes the adoption of some of the most stringent multilateral sanctions ever, successfully supporting the appointment of a special UN human rights monitor for Iran, and unprecedented defense cooperation with regional allies — as "appeasement" is to declare oneself desperately in need of a dictionary.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who has shown to have a very loose grasp on climate science and energy, might do himself a favor by sticking to that rule.

On last night’s O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, Krauthammer grossly oversimplified the environmental regulations he was mindlessly railing against — explaining that the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules to regulate coal ash, air toxics and mercury were simply an attempt to regulate carbon emissions. In fact, they are a series of rules — not all finalized — that would regulate a host of toxic pollution from coal plants, with carbon emissions being possible piece.

In turn, host Bill O’Reilly took the bait, explaining that “Look, you have to have a certain amount of carbon emissions, and if you go over it, you can’t burn any more fuel. That’s it.”

Watch it: (The EPA regulations portion of the segment starts at 3 minutes).

As any good anti-regulation hawk would, Krauthammer repeats the myth that any coal plants shut down by the rule would be done overnight: “This is going to shut down a tenth of our capacity. And as the Journal pointed out, if a terrorist shut down a tenth of our coal generating capacity, it would be an act of war.”

As we seem to point out daily on Climate Progress, the continuous claims being made on Fox News about the immediate shut down of the coal industry are grossly exaggerated. Many of these rules have been in the making for a decade.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, FERC, and the Congressional Research Service all say the industry estimates are vastly overstated. In fact, a major group of progressive utilities already investing in renewables and more natural gas — the clean energy group — say that over 60% of coal plants that have submitted data on their emissions already meet the standards.

And a detailed analysis from the Center for American Progress shows that in 17 states, around half of capacity is already equipped with pollutions controls to meet air quality standards.

If you’d like to get into a longer de-bunk of Krauthammer’s bogus claims, here’s a more detailed analysis from Media Matters:

[What follows is a Media Matters post, but for the sake of clarity, we aren't indenting it.]

Krauthammer’s Talking Point Comes From Inaccurate WSJ Editorial

WSJ: “With An Executive Order, [Obama] Could Exempt All Power Plants” From EPA Rules. A Wall Street Journal editorial stated that “Obama has the power to delay new rules that will shut down 8% of all U.S. power generation,” referring to an informal estimate of the combined impact of numerous EPA rules, many of which have not yet been proposed. From the editorial:

As it happens, those 1990 [Clean Air Act] amendments contain an overlooked proviso that would let Mr. Obama overrule EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s agenda. With an executive order, he could exempt all power plants “from compliance with any standard or limitation” for two years, or even longer using rolling two-year periods. All he has to declare is “that the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”

Both criteria are easily met. Most important, the EPA’s regulatory cascade is a clear and present danger to the reliability and stability of the U.S. power system and grid. The spree affects plants that provide 40% of U.S. baseload capacity in the U.S., and almost half of U.S. net generation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which is charged with ensuring the integrity of the power supply, reported this month in a letter to the Senate that 81 gigawatts of generating capacity is “very likely” or “likely” to be subtracted by 2018 amid coal plant retirements and downgrades.

That’s about 8% of all U.S. generating capacity. [Wall Street Journal, 8/29/11, emphasis added]

In Fact, WSJ Misleadingly Cropped The Text Of The Clean Air Act

The Presidential Exemption Applies Only To Hazardous Air Pollutant Rule. The Journal editorial cropped the quote from the Clean Air Act. Section 112 of the Act states that the presidential exemption clause applies only to regulations under that section, such as the EPA’s proposed Utility MACT/Air Toxics rule to limit power plant emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants. Contrary to the claims made by The Journal and Fox News, this provision does not authorize the President to grant exemptions from other pending EPA rules:

The President may exempt any stationary source from compliance with any standard or limitation under this section for a period of not more than 2 years if the President determines that the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so. An exemption under this paragraph may be extended for 1 or more additional periods, each period not to exceed 2 years. The President shall report to Congress with respect to each exemption (or extension thereof) made under this paragraph. [Clean Air Act, Sec. 112]

WSJ Is Calling For Exemptions From A Rule That Has Not Yet Been Finalized. EPA proposed the Utility MACT/Air Toxics rule in March, and will issue a final rule by November. [EPA, accessed 8/30/11]

Criteria For Presidential Exemption Are Not Met

Exemption Is An Option Only If Technology Is Unavailable And National Security Is At Stake. The Wall Street Journal claimed that Obama could “easily” exempt power plants from pollution limits:

All he has to declare is “that the technology to implement such standard is not available and that it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”

Both criteria are easily met. [Wall Street Journal, 8/29/11]

Pollution Control Technology For Air Toxics Is Readily Available

CRS: Compliance With Proposed Rules Will Not Require “Complicated Or New Technology.” Discussing the impact of the proposed Utility MACT rule on coal plants, an August 8 Congressional Research Service report noted:

In proposing the standards, EPA noted that while the requirements are stringent for those facilities lacking controls, 56% of existing coal-fired power plants already are in compliance. Thus, the standards are expected to level the playing field, bringing older, poorly controlled plants up to the standards being achieved by a majority of the existing units. In this respect, the proposed standards reflect the statute’s requirement that existing sources of HAPs should meet standards based on the current emissions of the best performing similar sources.

[...]

This is not complicated or new technology. Other types of facilities (notably solid waste incinerators) have used this technology for the past 15 years to reduce their mercury and other HAP emissions by 95% or more. As a result of state-level pollution control regulations, a growing percentage of coal-fired power plants do the same. [Congressional Research Service, 8/8/11]

CRS: 20 States Already Have Mercury Limits; Most Power Plants Are Already Meeting The Standards. From a March 21 Congressional Research Service Report on EPA regulations initiated since January 2009:

In 2005, EPA promulgated regulations establishing a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions of mercury from coal-fired power plants. The rules were challenged, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated them in 2008. Rather than appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, EPA agreed to propose Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards by March 2011 and promulgate final standards by November 2011. The proposed standards, released March 16, are already being met by 56% of coal- and oil-fired electric generating units; the other 44% would be required to install technology that will reduce mercury and acid gas emissions by 91%, at an annual cost of $10.9 billion. EPA estimates that the annual benefits, including the avoidance of up to 17,000 premature deaths annually, will be between $59 billion and $140 billion. Following promulgation of these standards, existing power plants will have three years, with a possible one-year extension, to meet the standards. About 20 states have already established mercury emission control standards for coal-fired power plants, and other major sources have been controlled for as long as 15 years, reducing their emissions as much as 95%. [Congressional Research Service, 3/21/11]

Energy Companies: “We Know From Experience That Constructing This Technology Can Be Done.” In a joint press release, representatives of several major energy companies asserted that EPA’s Utility MACT rule is achievable:

For over a decade, operators of coal-fired generation have known that pollution controls would be required to comply with Clean Air Act (CAA) requirements to reduce hazardous air emissions like mercury, hydrochloric acid, and arsenic. Most of the industry has been preparing for the rule by investing in modern pollution controls and cleaner, more efficient power plants.

“We recently completed the installation of a major air quality control system, including scrubbers, baghouse, and other equipment at one of our major coal facilities in Maryland,” said Paul Allen, senior vice president and chief environmental officer of Constellation Energy. “These systems work effectively and result in dramatically lower emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and acid gases. We know from experience that constructing this technology can be done in a reasonable time frame, especially with good advance planning; and there is meaningful job creation associated with the projects.” [Business Wire, 3/16/11]

Utility Executives: “The Technology Exists To Cost Effectively Control Such Emissions.” In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, executives representing several major power companies stated:

The electric sector has known that these rules were coming. Many companies, including ours, have already invested in modern air-pollution control technologies and cleaner and more efficient power plants. For over a decade, companies have recognized that the industry would need to install controls to comply with the act’s air toxicity requirements, and the technology exists to cost effectively control such emissions, including mercury and acid gases. The EPA is now under a court deadline to finalize that rule before the end of 2011 because of the previous delays.

To suggest that plants are retiring because of the EPA’s regulations fails to recognize that lower power prices and depressed demand are the primary retirement drivers. The units retiring are generally small, old and inefficient. These retirements are long overdue. [Wall Street Journal, 12/8/10]

Air Toxics Rule Has Been Anticipated For Decades

In 1990 Bush Sr. And Bipartisan Congress Directed EPA To Regulate Mercury And Other Air Toxics. From a December 2010 Greenwire report:

In the first few years after the law [Clean Air Act] hit the books in 1970, U.S. EPA cracked down on airborne lead, soot and smog. Congress had also ordered EPA to figure out the risks posed by toxic contaminants, but the agency did little to stop mercury and other rare but dangerous chemicals from being released into the air.

In two decades, the agency had applied that section of the Clean Air Act to just eight substances.

Lawmakers who wrote the pollution law were fed up; so was President George H.W. Bush. After consultations with environmentalists and industry groups, they prepared a package of amendments that changed the rules for toxic air pollution. It listed mercury and nearly 200 other substances by name and told EPA to regulate them, sparing the agency the challenge of proving that the substances posed a risk.

The amendments sailed through the House, 401-25, supported by many Republicans who are now among EPA’s most vocal critics. Bush signed the amendments into law the week before Thanksgiving, saying it was time to “break the logjam that hindered progress on clean air.”

“Every American expects and deserves to breathe clean air,” Bush said at a White House signing ceremony. “And as president, it is my mission to guarantee it for this generation and for the generations to come.”

Fast forward to today. Toxic pollution limits have been set for many industries, but a generation after the last major change to the nation’s air pollution laws, EPA still doesn’t have standards for coal-fired power plants and other facilities that release most of the nation’s mercury. [Greenwire, 12/8/10]

NY Times: George W. Bush Admin Proposed A Rule That Its Own Lawyers Knew Would “Almost Certainly Be Reversed.” The New York Times reported:

The new rules bring to a close a bitter legal and regulatory battle dating back to the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, which first directed the E.P.A. to identify and control major industrial sources of hazardous emissions.

By 1990, however, federal regulators had still not set standards for toxic emissions from power plants, and Congress, in the face of stiff resistance from utilities and coal interests, passed legislation directing the E.P.A. to study the health effects of mercury and other emissions, and to detail the cost and effectiveness of control technologies.

In 1998, the agency finally complied, delivering a comprehensive report to Congress detailing the health impact of numerous pollutants, including mercury, which by then had been linked conclusively in multiple studies to serious cognitive harm to fetuses.

In December 2000, in the last days of the Clinton administration, the E.P.A. finally listed power plants as a source of hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

The Bush administration E.P.A. faced its own deadlines to devise and put into effect controls for power plant pollution. But rather than issue emissions standards in line with federal law, in 2005, top agency officials instituted a controversial cap-and-trade program for mercury, despite a warning from agency lawyers that the move would throw the issue back into the courts and almost certainly be reversed.

As predicted, a coalition of states and environmentalists sued the agency, arguing that the cap-and-trade program would not limit other toxic emissions like arsenic and would allow the dirtiest power plants to pay for the right to pollute, putting nearby communities at risk. In 2008 a federal judge ruled against the E.P.A., giving the agency three years to develop standards for mercury and other pollutants. [The New York Times, 3/16/11]

Court Ruled That Bush Administration’s Version Of The Rule Violated The Clean Air Act. From the August 8 CRS report:

The mercury cap-and-trade rules promulgated in 2005 were a change in policy by EPA. All previous sources of mercury subject to emission standards had been required to meet plant specific Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards under CAA Section 112. Section 112 sets out very detailed requirements for MACT standards, including a list of the pollutants that need to be controlled (not just mercury, but any of 187 hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs) and the level of control that the standards must achieve. The 2005 cap-and-trade rules addressed only mercury, and would have allowed many power plants to avoid control provided they obtained allowances from others who achieved lower pollution levels than required, or reduced emissions sooner than required. The ability of plants to avoid emission control by purchasing allowances could lead to the continuation of “hot spots,” areas where mercury concentrations in waterbodies are greater than elsewhere.

By contrast, the statute requires MACT standards applicable at each existing plant to be no less stringent than the average emission limitation achieved by the best performing 12% of existing sources in the industry subcategory. These statutory requirements are referred to as the “MACT floor,” because the agency is not allowed to set less stringent standards, nor may it take economic factors into account in determining what the floor will be.

Whether the agency could substitute cap-and-trade rules for the MACT requirements was challenged by the State of New Jersey and others, and, in a 3-0 decision, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the cap-and-trade rules in 2008. The court found that, under Section 112, unless EPA “delisted” the category of sources, it had to require that each plant in the category meet MACT standards. Under the statute, delisting would have required a finding that no EGU’s emissions exceeded a level adequate to protect public health with an ample margin of safety, and that no adverse environmental effect would result from any source.

Rather than appeal the court’s ruling to the Supreme Court or attempt to delist the category, EPA proposed what is referred to as the “Utility MACT,” March 16, 2011. [Congressional Research Service, 8/8/11]

EPA Settlement Set November Deadline For Air Toxics Rule. As explained in EPA’s proposed Air Toxics Rule:

On December 18, 2008, several environmental and public health organizations (”Plaintiffs”) 10 filed a complaint in the DC District Court (Civ. No. 1:08-cv-02198 (RMC)) alleging that the Agency had failed to perform a nondiscretionary duty under CAA section 304(a)(2), by failing to promulgate final section 112(d) standards for HAP from coal- and oilfired EGUs by the statutorily mandated deadline, December 20, 2002, 2 years after such sources were listed under section 112(c). EPA settled that litigation. The consent decree resolving the case requires EPA to sign a notice of proposed rulemaking setting forth EPA’s proposed section 112(d) emission standards for coal- and oil-fired EGUs by March 16, 2011, and a notice of final rulemaking by November 16, 2011. [Federal Register, 5/3/11]

(HT: GOP12)

Bush would sometimes mock those aides and commentators who advocated an attack on Iran, even referring to the conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol as “the bomber boys,” according to two people I spoke with who overheard this.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has admitted that he was in favor of a U.S. attack on Iran, but was vetoed by President Bush. This is the first indication we’ve seen, however, that Bush thought that Kristol and Krauthammer are as crazy as the rest of us do.

Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review tweeted this column by Charles Krauthammer and asks, “Who Made the Administrators Legislators?” In a long piece that decries everything from the $20 billion BP escrow fund to TARP, Krauthammer concludes:

Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That’s bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That’s called the consent of the governed.

It’s hard to know where to begin here. First, Krauthammer and National Review didn’t utter a peep of protest when George Bush’s DOJ was issuing secret legal opinions that argued that laws against torture were irrelevant and that the Geneva Conventions — ratified by legislators — were “quaint”. In fact, they actively supported such actions using utterly twisted ends-justifies-the-means rhetoric and basically told Congress to take a hike.

But setting this aside, who did make the administrators legislators? Well, the Senate GOP Caucus did, by basically grinding all Senate business to a halt:

In other words, the Republican party — which overwhelmingly lost the last two elections — has orchestrated a grand strategy to cripple the Congress and prevent legislating. They won’t lay out an agenda for the upcoming November elections. They claim that regardless of the results of those elections, they will only accept conservative policy “compromises.” They won’t even permit the staffing of the Federal Reserve during a major economic crisis. They are, in essence, arguing that Congress should do nothing.

Ironically, in the tweet immediately following a link to Krauthammer’s piece, Lopez says, “every democrat and retiree, especially, should be pressured to agree to not be lame” and links to this pledge by Rep. Top Price that demands that Congress literally not even hold a session after the midterm election before the new Congress is convened. So if Lopez and Krauthammer want to speculate about why it is that the Congress seems to be increasingly irrelevant to policymaking, they should start by taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

O’REILLY: But my contention is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg in particular — and I’m trying to convince Megyn Kelly of this — doesn’t care about the Constitution. That all of her rulings are based upon her personal belief system about what is good and bad for American society. [...]

You don’t like it? Get a constitutional amendment and overthrow the Second Amendment. Two thirds of the states got to do it. Go ahead and put it on the ballot.

But Ginsburg doesn’t want to do that. She wants to be the end-all dictator here about her ideology. Do I read her wrong?

Watch it:

It’s not surprising to hear O’Reilly’s claim that Ginsburg doesn’t respect the Constitution, since he’s made that charge before. But it is more than a bit ironic, considering his past lack of concern with what the foundational document says. In Nov. 2009, he declared, “I don’t care about the Constitution!” when Fox News’ top legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano told him that the Constitution supported Attorney General Eric Holder’s push to try five Guantanamo Bay detainees — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad — in New York City.

While top U.S. officials have been reluctant to focus on a military strike against Iran, let alone endorse an Israeli one, Fox News war hawk John Bolton said last night on the network’s business channel that the U.S should actually “be helping Israel if they’re making a decision that they might use military force against Iran.” However, on the O’Reilly Factor, another reliable Fox News armchair warrior Charles Krauthammer actually acknowledged that attacking Iran could prove pointless:

KRAUTHAMMER: Do we have enough intelligence? Do we know where their stuff is hidden? They have spoken about a second uranium enrichment place. Do they have others? And, also, how deeply buried and how hardened are the targets? Because unless we know if we have access with our equipment, our bombs, they may be ineffective. I think they have got to make assessment on the current intelligence which appears to us, at least on the outside, rather weak.

Watch the compilation:

Krauthammer is right. There is a strong possibility that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would be completely “ineffective” at eliminating its program, because, as the New York Times reported in January, “Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers” which has “shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock” and has “obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort.”

Moreover, bombing will most likely incentivize the Iranian leadership to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and accelerate its nuclear program toward weaponization. An attack would not only unify the country around the regime but also, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last year, “cement their determination to have a nuclear program, and also build into the whole country an undying hatred of whoever hits them.” “Even a military attack will only buy us time and send the program deeper and more covert,” Gates has said.

Krauthammer then cited the case of the failed Christmas Day bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, saying that the Obama administration should have assumed that he “has people who are working with him” because he’s Nigerian:

KRAUTHAMMER: You arrest a guy who’s got a bomb in his underpants. You know, it’s likely he didn’t do it at home in his kitchen. … The guy is Nigerian. You’ve got to assume — you have to assume that he has people who are working with him.

WILLIAMS: Because he’s a Nigerian?

KRAUTHAMMER: Why do you assume otherwise? It makes no sense at all. You capture a terrorist and in almost all of our plots there are groups of terrorists. [...]

WILLIAMS: We have made such progress in terms of breaking down al Qaeda and getting them in terms of the structure to malfunction that there are now more lone wolves now and it’s tougher to capture and know the extent of knowledge they have at any one moment. There was no evidence, on the face of it on that day, had come from an al Qaeda training camp.

When Williams asked whether Holder should be held “accountable for all intelligence failures, including intelligence failures by the British and everybody else who didn’t understand what Abdulmutallab was up to,” Kristol smirked and shrugged his shoulders. Watch it:

On Jan. 5, President Obama admitted that there were “human and systemic failures that almost cost nearly 300 lives” on Christmas Day. He added that it “was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” Unlike what Kristol was trying to argue, it was not solely the fault of “incompetence” by Holder.

Transcript:

KRAUTHAMMER: Democrats are running away from any idea — from KSM in New York, and they all are arguing that you don’t — on Miranda rights, the Democrats are scared to death of defending Miranda rights. (CROSSTALK)

KRISTOL: You said we’re politicizing that. I supported the President on Afghanistan. I support him on Iraq. I have no problem with Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense. I don’t have much of a problem with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I don’t have much of a problem with Leon Panetta as CIA director. It is just unfair to say if we think Eric Holder is doing a bad job (CROSSTALK) — He is doing a bad job! He’s been an incompetent attorney general! He’s been an incompetent attorney general!

WILLIAMS: There’s no evidence he’s been incompetent. You’re simply saying you disagree with the idea that the civilian courts could handle Abdulmutallab. And that obviously is not —

KRISTOL: You defend the decision? You defend the decision not to let the CIA know that Abdulmutallab — (CROSSTALK)

WILLIAMS: No, I think they should have let everybody know, and when we see a list of administration top officials, including the Homeland Security director, Dennis Blair — director of Intelligence — saying he’s unaware, that to me is wrong. But it’s also the case that they did not understand that this man was not a lone wolf, that he was in fact tied into al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Once they did, then steps were taken.

KRISTOL: But, Juan, how could you not understand that?

WILLIAMS: Oh, please! C’mon.

WALLACE: Let Charles —

KRAUTHAMMER: You arrest a guy who’s got a bomb in his underpants. You know, it’s likely he didn’t do it at home in his kitchen.

WILLIAMS: It’s not. Let me just say —

KRAUTHAMMER: The guy is Nigerian. You’ve got to assume — you have to assume that he has people who are working with him.

WILLIAMS: Because he’s a Nigerian?

KRAUTHAMMER: Why do you assume otherwise? It makes no sense at all. You capture a terrorist and in almost all of our plots there are groups of terrorists. Why would you assume he is acting alone and not interrogate — (CROSSTALK)

WILLIAMS: We have made such progress in terms of breaking down al Qaeda and getting them in terms of the structure to malfunction that there are now more lone wolves now and it’s tougher to capture and know the extent of knowledge they have at any one moment. There was no evidence, on the face of it on that day, had come from an al Qaeda training camp.

KRAUTHAMMER: He told them immediately.

WILLIAMS: He told them. He told them.

KRAUTHAMMER: “I’m from Yemen.” Once you hear that –

KRISTOL: It’s in the files. In fact, if they alerted the CIA, they had intercepts with his name. Remember his father went to the embassy? If you were a responsible person and you immediately let the CIA and other intelligence agencies know and say, “What do you know about this guy?” You don’t mirandize him.

WILLIAMS: The President of the United States himself said there was a systemic failure in terms of intelligence gathering.

KRISTOL: And who was accountable for that failure?

WILLIAMS: Eric Holder is now accountable for all intelligence failures, including intelligence failures by the British and everybody else who didn’t understand what Abdulmutallab was up to? That seems to me to make you into someone who’s just trying to politicize this to beat the Obama administration and get rid of Eric Holder.

In the intervening years, though, and especially with the implementation of counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, that view has been largely discredited. Not only is it no longer seen as “excusing terrorism” to try and understand what activates and motivates extremists, or to explore whether and what U.S. policies and behavior have played a part in that, it’s seen as necessary for U.S. national security.

In the wake of the failed Christmas attack, though, and the discussion over what motivated Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab to become a violent jihadist, a few neoconservatives seem to have been emboldened to exhume some of this “they only hate us for our freedom” nonsense that so many Americans, Iraqis and others died to debunk over the past years. Sounding this tired note last night on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer scoffed at Al Qaeda’s grievances, saying, “These are excuses and not actual grievances”:

KRAUTHAMMER: When you hear Gibbs talk about Guantanamo as a recruiting tool, this is what we hear over and over again, I mean it’s as if he knows no history at all. The list of grievances that Al Qaeda has is endless and replenishing. [...]

The reason the war is on is because Al-Qaeda hates our way of life, our independence, our tolerance, our respect of women and the threat it poses to the fanatical kind of Islam that they are advocating.

Watch it:

Apparently, General David Petraeus is also one of those who Krauthammer thinks “knows no history at all.” Here’s what Petraus said about Gitmo last May:

PETRAEUS: Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us. We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activities since 9/11. And again, Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of some in that regard.

It’s really hard to believe that we even still need to have this debate. The point, again, is not whether Charles Krauthammer buys Al Qaeda’s grievances, or whether he thinks that they’re merely “excuses,” it’s whether the next guy that Al Qaeda tries to recruit as a suicide bomber buys them. And it’s simply no longer a matter of serious debate that a significant number of potential recruits buys Guantanamo as a grievance.

Then here’s Hugh Hewitt and Victor Davis Hanson:

HEWITT: I want to play for you a segment of his remarks today, Professor Hanson, because he talks about Guantanamo Bay as a causative agent for the Christmas attack, and I’ll pick up on it after we hear it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Some have suggested that the events on Christmas Day should cause us to revisit the decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. So let me be clear. It was always our intent to transfer detainees to other countries only under conditions that provide assurances that our security is being protected. With respect to Yemen in particular, there’s an ongoing security situation which we have been confronting for some time along with our Yemeni partner. Given the unsettled situation, I’ve spoken to the Attorney General, and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time. But make no mistake. We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests, and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

HEWITT: Now Victor Hanson, this seems to me to be his argument Bush made the Christmas bomber do it, the underpants bomber, because no Gitmo, no bomber. This is absurd, and it’s dangerous.

HANSON: Yes, I think it’s shameful, because we…nobody listens to what the grievances are of an enemy. That’s like saying Hitler went into Poland because he had grievances from Versailles. Every aggressor always dreams up rationalizations, but anybody who’s sober and judicious doesn’t believe them. And if he doesn’t think Guantanamo serves a purpose, then he should close it. There’s no need to delay. But the very fact that it’s been open one year under his administration, shows that it has some utility, otherwise he would have closed it. But he has this very strange, schizophrenic attitude that I’m going to trash Bush on tribunals, Guantanamo, renditions, predator attacks, when I’m demagoguing as a candidate, but as a president, when I’m responsible for governance, I’m going to keep them open, and keep them useful. And it’s not sustainable. It’s going to get people very, very angry.

First, as Greg Carlstrom noted, the president did overstate the explicit impact of Gitmo on the formation of AQAP. But you’ll notice that nowhere did Obama say anything about “Guantanamo Bay as a causative agent for the Christmas attack.” This is a strawman. No one’s saying that Gitmo, and only Gitmo, caused the Christmas attack. What we — “we” as in the overwhelming majority of people who actually study Islamic extremism — are saying is that the existence of Gitmo is and has been a source of hatred and resentment which has effectively enlarged the pool of young recruits willing to attempt attacks like the failed one on Christmas. If you can’t recognize the distinction there, then I suspect you’re either extremely dim or extremely a hack.

Hanson’s attempted point about Hitler is also instructive, but in precisely the opposite way that he supposes. Hitler may not have gone into Poland “because he had grievances from Versailles,” but it’s a pretty firmly established historical fact that German grievances regarding the Treaty of Versailles (regardless of whether “anybody who’s sober and judicious” thinks those grievances were silly) are part of what made it possible for the Nazis to mobilize popular support, and that the successful exploitation of those grievances is thus a part of what got Hitler into Poland. This is not that complicated.

KILMEADE: Let’s go to your second question. What did you talk about in your off-the-record meeting with opinion journalists at the White House-friendly media outlet for over two hours and why should it be kept secret? Who was there? What do you need to know Michelle?

MALKIN: Well, we know that a lot of left-wing opinion journalists were invited to this off-the-record meeting that lasted two-and-a-half-hours. That’s a lot longer than General McChrystal got and I think that the news-consuming audience ought to know what was discussed. We ought to know and it ought to be disclosed what was discussed by those attendees when they talk about this White House and its policy. Why shouldn’t this be completely transparent?

Watch it:

As Crooks and Liars’ Susie Madrak notes, the complainers at Fox appear to be “suffering from memory loss” about President Bush’s many off-the-record chats with conservative columnists and radio hosts, including Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck. Additionally, they seem to forget that Obama shared an off-the-record dinner with conservative columnists, including Fox contributors Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and Paul Gigot, before his Inauguration. Malkin should note that the dinner lasted two-and-half hours.

Many right-wing commentators later piled on. “John Bolton is right,” declared the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes. “This is a lifeline to a regime that is a terrorist regime that has proliferated nuclear technology,” he said. Former Bush press secretary Dana Perino even blamed Vice President Al Gore for the journalists’ imprisonment because he is a co-founder of the company (Current TV) that employs them. “Al Gore is responsible if he made the order, but ultimately, he’s responsible, and I think we need to hear a little bit more about that,” she said last night on Fox News. Some other lowlights:

– Fox News’ Dick Morris called Clinton’s trip “awful” and “ridiculous” and suggested that Ling and Lee should “live with the consequences of their decision to go” to North Korea.

– Charles Krauthammer complained that North Korea “got a lot” out of the deal and that “it does help the North Koreans in their legitimacy.”

But some conservatives did see the utility of Clinton’s trip. “I think it’s wonderful, obviously, that he secured their release,” Laura Ingraham conceded. Shortly after landing in Los Angeles, Ling expressed her “deepest gratitude” for the rescue:

LING: Thirty hours ago Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea. We feared that at any moment we could be sent to a hard labor camp and then suddenly we were told that we were going to a meeting. We were taken to a location and when we walked through the doors we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton. We were shocked but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end. And now, we stand here, home and free. Euna and I would just like to express our deepest gratitude to President Clinton and his wonderful, amazing, not to mention, super-cool team.

Watch it:

But what many conservatives don’t understand is that, as nonproliferation expert and Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione noted yesterday, Clinton was “the right man at the right moment.” And the BBC’s John Sudworth noted that now was the time to get the deal done:

And not least, there’s always the fear that North Korea could, by holding on to these two journalists, continue to use them as leverage. So I think in Washington’s wider — and perhaps colder — political interests, it makes good sense to try to clear this up now.

“I am very happy that after this long ordeal, Laura Ling and Euna Lee are now home and reunited with their loved ones,” President Clinton said in a statement. “When their families, Vice President Gore and the White House asked that I undertake this humanitarian mission, I agreed. I share a deep sense of relief with Laura and Euna and their families that they are safely home.”

I think even that concedes too much. I wish this chart actually started at zero, but the point should be clear either way. It shows the poverty rate in the United States:

What happened? Well, public policy happened. In the 1960s, federal domestic programs got more ambitious, especially with regard to senior citizens. And the poverty rate went down, with the declines concentrated among the seniors who were the main targets of the spending. The extent of poverty is very much subject to our control. Disease, presumably, really will always be with us. But still, polio isn’t with us anymore. Nor is smallpox.

Albert Hirschman wrote a book called The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Of the three, I think “futility” is the most pernicious and in some ways the easiest to knock down. It sounds very wise to observe that problems are unsolvable. But even though change is hard, it’s very much possible.

KRAUTHAMMER: And resigning from the Republican Governors’ Association chairmanship is not going to do it, and the reason is that there is a dereliction of duty here. I know that’s the titillation of the reason for it, but even apart from that, he is the governor of the state.

The governor of the state is chief executive, and if there is a disaster in the state, and this guy is incommunicado, he is nowhere to be seen and he doesn’t transfer authority to his lieutenant governor who calls out the National Guard, you cannot recover from that. I think he doesn’t last a week in the office of governor.

Watch it:

Transcript:

BAIER: but Byron, what about this story and how strange it has been?

BYRON YORK, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, WASHINGTON EXAMINER : Well, I think he’s toast. It’s been a bizarre scene over the last week.

South Carolina has just been a hotbed of rumors. I talked to someone in South Carolina a few days ago and said What’s going on? And they said, well, the theory is it’s either a Susan Boyle-type breakdown or another woman, or maybe both. And it seems to have kind of been both.

He has a large group of social conservatives in South Carolina who never loved him all that much who are very upset about this.

A reconciliation, a public reconciliation with his wife would be very popular with them, but the wife released a statement today saying that she had actually thrown him out a couple of weeks ago, and as part of that arrangement, he was not supposed to get in touch with the family, and thus when he disappeared, went AWOL, she didn’t know where he was.

All of this stuff looks really bad, and a number of Republicans in South Carolina are saying this does not look good for him.

BAIER: And Mort, he was at one time considered to be in the running for 2012.

MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL : I thought he was going to be the leading right wing candidate, and he was setting himself up to do that by refusing the $700 million from the stimulus package and all that. It raised his profile among Republicans.

But look, multiple affairs did not stop Bill Clinton from being elected president, but that’s because the Democratic Party is a lot more tolerant of licentiousness than the Republican Party is, and that’s the rub for poor old Mark Sanford here.

You know, he — this, plus John Ensign’s disclosure last week –

BAIER: Senator from Nevada.

KONDRACKE: Nevada — that he had an illicit affair is good news for Mitt Romney, for Bobby Jindal, for Pawlenty of Minnesota, for all the other candidates who might be running in 2012.

BAIER: Charles?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I would agree. I think he is toast politically.

And resigning from the Republican Governors’ Association chairmanship is not going to do it, and the reason is that there is a dereliction of duty here. I know that’s the titillation of the reason for it, but even apart from that, he is the governor of the state.

The governor of the state is chief executive, and if there is a disaster in the state, and this guy is incommunicado, he is nowhere to be seen and he doesn’t transfer authority to his lieutenant governor who calls out the National Guard, you cannot recover from that. I think he doesn’t last a week in the office of governor.

And the idea that he could actually have an affair in Argentina as an acting governor is sort of insane. If you go to Argentina, you have to have your passport stamped. You can’t hide it.

I don’t want to play psychiatrist on the show every night. However, the oddity of this and the self-destructiveness would suggest even to a layman that this is a near intentional political suicide.

KRAUTHAMMER: And the reason he did it is that he thinks he needs to preserve his relations with the existing regime so that he can negotiate nuclear disarmament with them, which in and of itself is a lunatic fantasy. It’s not going to happen. There’s no way he’s going to sweet talk, you know, the Supreme Leader out of his nukes. So, that was the point. He thought that if I support the protesters too much, I alienate and I prevent the relations with the government and I can’t.

Listen here:

The New Republic’s Chris Orr notes that Krauthammer also referred to Khamenei as “Supreme Leader” days before his column attacking Obama for using the phrase was published. This isn’t surprising, considering that top conservatives have regularly referred to Khamenei as “Supreme Leader.”

“[A]fter treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of ‘some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.’ Where to begin? ‘Supreme Leader’? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator.” — Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, June 19

“And the president has said ‘I have seen in Iran’s initial reaction from the supreme leader.’ He is using an honorific to apply to a man whose minions out there are breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, arresting students, shutting the press down, and basically trying to suppress a popular democratic revolution.” — Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 16

“Look, these were sham elections from the beginning. In a real democracy, you can have a change of power as a result. That was not going to happen in Iran. The mullahs are in charge. Khamenei, the supreme leader, remains in charge.” — Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 12

It’s well-established at this point that Fred Hiatt and his superiors have contempt for the readers of the Washington Post and don’t mind using their editorial real estate to misinform the public. But as Brad DeLong points out it continues to be mysterious why Krauthammer is listed as a Contributing Editor on the TNR masthead. The title is, to be sure, merely an honorific. But that only further raises the question of why the magazine would want to honor a writer for whom the rest of the staff seems—appropriately—to have so little respect.

On the merits, I think there’s never before been a taboo against describing foreign leaders, even nasty ones, with their proper titles. Hitler was The Fuhrer, Mussolini was Il Duce.

Will Krauthammer lash into McCain next for his “abject solicitousness?”