The Edge: Was Mitt Romney Right About Russia?
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Was Mitt Romney Right About Russia?
President Obama gave a big welcome Tuesday to South Korea’s “Iron Lady,” recently elected President Park Geun-hye, but his attention may have been focused far away.
While full of glamor, Park’s visit had far less gravitas than another meeting taking place on Tuesday: the one in Moscow between Obama’s secretary of State, John Kerry, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kerry sought to make the case that the United States and Russia share common interests and you’d think he had a pretty good one: As the Boston Marathon bombing incident demonstrated, Washington and Moscow do share intelligence and high concern over Islamist radicalization. Neither nation particularly wants Iran or North Korea (both of which sit just off of Russia’s vast borders) to have a nuclear bomb.
But to a degree that U.S. policymakers have not really acknowledged publicly, Russia under Putin has become the chief countervailing force to U.S. power and influence around the world, even more so than China.
Maybe Mitt Romney actually had things right in 2012, when he inartfully labeled Russia “America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Read more
Michael Hirsh
mhirsh@nationaljournal.com
TOP NEWS
HOUSE REPUBLICANS TIP-TOE ON POSSIBLE SANFORD WIN. As South Carolina voters headed to the polls today, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was asked whether House Republicans would welcome a victory by former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Boehner said, “The voters of the 1st District of South Carolina will make their decision. We don’t get to choose who they are. Their electorate gets to choose who they are. And so we’ll see what the outcome is tonight.” Meanwhile, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., “wouldn’t even speak Sanford’s name” during an interview with The Washington Post. Read more
National Journal's Alex Roarty writes that Democrats have invested a lot in the race and have a lot to lose.
CHRISTIE HAS LAP-BAND SURGERY; AN EYE TO 2016? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie disclosed in an interview with the New York Post that he underwent lap-band surgery on Feb. 16. “I’ve struggled with this issue for 20 years,” the Republican said. “For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them.” The issue of Christie’s weight was raised in his 2009 campaign for governor but did not appear to harm his candidacy, The New York Times reports. Following reports that Christie had undergone the procedure, observers characterized the move as removing a key obstacle to a 2016 presidential bid. Read more
BuzzFeedhas compiled a gallery of photos of a younger, slimmer Christie.
OBAMA, PARK ADDRESS NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR POSTURING IN JOINT PRESSER. President Obama held a joint press conference with South Korean president Park Geun-hye in which the leaders presented a unified front against nuclear provocations by the North Korean regime. “The days when North Korea could create a crisis and elicit concessions, those days are over,” Obama said. The leaders met to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the alliance between the United States and South Korea. “Instead of just hoping to see North Korea change, the international community must consistently send the message with one voice, to tell them and communicate to them that they have no choice but to change,” Park said. Read more
FLAKE: I’D RECONSIDER BACKGROUND-CHECK VOTE. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who voted against the Manchin-Toomey amendment expanding firearms background checks, told CNN that he would consider backing a revised measure that addressed his concerns about online gun sales. Flake contended that his opposition to the original bill owed to the fact that the Internet sales provision “is too costly and inconvenient, given the way guns are often sold among friends in his state of Arizona and others.” Last week, Flake compared himself to “pond scum” following a poll that showed cratering approval ratings. Read more
A report from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that gun violence has decreased sharply in the past two decades, but that roughly 70 percent of all homicides were committed with a firearm. Read more
WHY WOULD CHINA WANT TO HACK OUR MEDIA? The Pentagon has just released the latest version of an annual report looking at China’s military capacity, and as you might expect, a big chunk of it is concerned with Beijing’s ability to conduct cyberspace operations. The 84-page white paper describes how China’s growing interest in cyber could allow it to disable or disrupt the United States in the event of a shooting war. But less easy to understand are hacking attempts that have been attributed to the Chinese government. What possible military value could there be to hacking The Washington Post, for instance? Where does that fit in, strategically? To answer that question, maybe we need to reverse our perspective, National Journal’s Brian Fung reports. Read more
CIA SELECTS NEW HEAD OF CLANDESTINE SERVICE; FEMALE PASSED OVER. The Central Intelligence Agency has selected a 57-year-old male officer to serve as director of National Clandestine Service, CIA Director John Brennan announced today. The position had been filled on an interim basis for the past two months by a female officer who had been the first woman to serve in the role. She had been viewed as a front-runner for the permanent position, but had encountered opposition from lawmakers over her role in a counterterrorism mission that allegedly involved the use of torture. A CIA spokesperson disputed that assertion. The male officer ascending to the position has served in Pakistan, Latin America, and Africa, according to the CIA. Read more
THE RISE OF POLITICAL COMIC BOOKS. While tens of thousands of people, from pollsters to media buyers, make a living in politics, comic-book maker Darren Davis seems to have discovered a niche in creating political comics, National Journal’sCory Bennett reports. He’s done books on Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sarah Palin, and has another dozen or so in the works, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and CNN newsman Anderson Cooper. Thousands of libraries, and approximately a dozen schools, now carry his comic books. The White House gift shop even stocks the Bo Obama graphic novel, White House Tails. Read more
TOMORROW
FIVE BIPARTISAN ENERGY BILLS. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will mark up five bipartisan bills Wednesday that would streamline regulations for hydropower projects and promote energy efficiency. The committee is expected to easily pass all of the measures. But the real battle will come in getting the bills to the floor.
PRIORITIES IN THE DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION BILL. The House Armed Services Committee has allotted two hours on Wednesday for lawmakers to voice the priorities they would like to see reflected in the defense authorization bill the committee is drafting. Also Wednesday, the Strategic Forces Subcommittee will hear from a slew of witnesses outlining the administration's needs for missile-defense funding for fiscal 2014.
QUOTABLE
“We pass in the garage and I tell him, ‘Please don’t embarrass South Carolina anymore,’ which he thinks is very funny for some reason, which I can’t imagine,” —Former Gov. Mark Sanford’s neighbor, Marion Sullivan (National Review)
BEDTIME READING
MODERN HUMANS COULD HAVE CHATTED WITH HUMANS 150 CENTURIES AGO. If you traveled back 15,000 years—that’s before humans even began practicing sedentary agriculture—you could still use 23 “ultraconserved words” that were used almost identically then as they are today, writes David Brown for The Washington Post. New research at the University of Reading in England has questioned the traditionally held notion that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Some of the words are predictable: mother, man, not, what, to hear. Some are surprising: to flow, to spit, ashes, worm. Researchers say the conserved words show the consistent values of humans over centuries—“to give” is on the list—and onomatopoeia on which humans can’t really improve—“to spit,” for example, sounds a lot like the universal action. Read more
PLAY OF THE DAY
A LOOK AT 2016. Stephen Colbert got hold of a story about the Homeland Security Department buying more bullets than ever before and jumped on the bandwagon of those assuming a conspiracy. Monday night, Colbert asked why DHS would be doing such a thing, wondering if the department might be “shooting a Tarantino movie.” Jimmy Fallon took a look at the 2016 presidential race, joking about a possible election fight between Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Fallon’s jokes tapped the usual “Biden is immature” vein. Watch it here
REALITY CHECK
GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BENGHAZI TALKING POINTS. Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing in the House Oversight Committee on Benghazi, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker takes a whack at what is “known and unknown” concerning the now-infamous talking points used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice in the aftermath of the attack at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Spoiler alert: The piece ends, “As more information emerges, we will continue to track how the administration’s statements hold up over time and whether more Pinocchio ratings are appropriate.” Read more
THE QUIRK
WHY DO NPR REPORTERS HAVE SUCH GREAT NAMES? Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. Doualy Xaykaothao. Lakshmi Singh. Quil Lawrence. And of course the famous Sylvia Poggioli. All are part of what The Atlantic’sDeirdre Mask refers to as the “uniformly, gorgeously unusual names” of NPR. Mask goes on to report that Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal (technically of PRI) once had a goat named for him—which, alas, suffered a terrible fate. A woman once changed her name to Korva Coleman because she thought it sounded cool. Even stranger, find out how Neda Ulaby’s name became a mating call. Read more
