DOWNLOADS: (84)

PLAYS: (195)

Embed

I don't know why anyone would think that Baghdad Bob a.k.a. neocon Dan Senor would be on anyone's short list to discuss the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, but MSNBC loves this guy so much that he's now apparently renting out Pat Buchanan's old cot in the back of the studios, ever since the Romney campaign hired him as an advisor.

The campaign might be over but sadly, our days with Senor on the air are not. He's been on Morning Joe so much over the year or so, there were weeks I was starting to wonder if he was going to take Mika's place as the co-host. If Chuck Todd and MSNBC are going to bring this guy on to talk about foreign policy, maybe they should let their viewers know that his Foreign Policy Initiative with the lovely sounding name is just the latest reincarnation of PNAC. A few more of them might be familiar with that group's name and how effectively they beat the war drums to get us into Iraq.

And maybe they could ask him if he ever found out what happened to that $9 billion that they managed to lose in Iraq, like Bill Maher did back in February of 2006 on Real Time: Dan Senor Tells Bill Maher How We Lost 9 Billion In Iraq.

Here's more on Senor and why MSNBC should be putting warning signs above his head every time they allow him on the air, from my post last April: Romney Adviser Dan Senor: Too Wrong to Fail.

DOWNLOADS: (162)

PLAYS: (1018)

Embed

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting really tired of watching a bunch of extremely rich pundits sit around and tell the rest of us that there just hasn't been enough shared sacrifice from the working class, the elderly and the poor yet in order to solve our deficit problem. But that's exactly what the viewers are treated to day after day on MSNBC's three hour long Villager conventional wisdom regurgitation-fest called Morning Joe.

This Wednesday was no exception and immediately following the so-called "fiscal cliff" debacle coming to a conclusion, and the pundits on there didn't miss a beat with demands that President Obama had better get out there and use his bully pulpit to explain to the American people that we're all just going to have to be willing to give a little more in order for Republicans to not kill the hostage called the world's economy over this upcoming debt ceiling standoff.

This week we had Tom Brokaw going on Meet the Press and telling everyone that there's nothing wrong with raising the retirement age for Social Security and telling the lie that Americans are living longer. It's little wonder he'd have that view since he's not ever going to have to worry about his retirement security. And yes, rich people like himself are living to be older. Not so much for most of the rest of us.

If these guys want to go on the air and pontificate about how we ought to get a pound of flesh out of the working class, I think their salaries and net worth ought to be displayed right under their names in the chryon for the viewers. Maybe they'd feel a little differently about their opinions.

According to Forbes, Brokaw has an estimated net worth of $70 million.

And if the site Celebrity Networth is accurate, Scarborough's is $18 million and Brzezinski's is $8 million.

I'm not sure what some of the others who were on there this Wednesday like David Walker, Chuck Todd, Dan Senor, Richard Haas and Mark Halperin are worth, but I'm pretty sure they're all being paid really well and aren't worried about relying on Social Security for a comfortable retirement as well. But every one of them was joining in on carping about the deficit that none of them cared about it when Bush was blowing holes in it a mile wide with tax cuts and wars that weren't paid for. Deficits only matter when Democrats are elected as president.

And as far as Walker's claim that his group has gone around the country and gotten a positive response from ordinary people as they explained to them that they need to cut our social safety nets in order to balance the budget, well, that's not the experience our own Susie Madrak had when she went to one of them. As she noted:

You know what most of them wanted to do? Soak the rich -- and cut defense spending. [...]

I thought maybe it was just my table, but when they tabulated the results, it was pretty much the same throughout the crowded ballroom of several hundred attendees.

And of course absent from this conversation was any discussion about what to do to get Americans back to work. If we were at full employment and had some sort of decent economic growth in the United States, this deficit problem would take care of itself because we'd have more people paying taxes.

They also keep pretending like Social Security adds to our deficit. It doesn't and it has a surplus. And if they want to solve the problem with Medicare, we need to fix our health care costs over all. We pay way more than any other developed country with worse outcomes and putting seniors into the private insurance market doesn't solve the problem. It just shifts the costs around and drives them up. But you won't hear that discussion while they're pounding their fists about lowing the deficit.

DOWNLOADS: (57)

PLAYS: (244)

Embed

Yes, those poor, poor Republicans have just been completely humiliated by President Obama's initial offer during these debt negotiations, or so says former Bushie and Romney adviser, Dan Senor on ABC's This Week. Senor also did his best to try to spin the idea that the offer was somehow so toxic that most of the public would not blame Republicans if they can't reach a deal.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you agree that something is going to happen. Dan Senor, that conflicts at least with a lot of the reporting I had on Capitol Hill this week, where you saw significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats more willing to accept the idea of going over the cliff, at least for a few days?

SENOR: Yes, I think as one Republican House member said to me, good lesson in negotiating is don't make your opening offer one of humiliation, which is what Republicans felt the White House has put forth in the last couple of days.

I think there's a sense now, Republicans I have spoken to, particularly in the leadership, have said, look, if we go over the cliff, we're going to get blamed.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No question about that.

SENOR: The view is shifting a little bit now, where there is a sense that if President Obama goes into his second term and poisons the environment so much that he can't get a deal and we go over the cliff, it's going to be so toxic for year two, year three, year four, and he -- the Republicans have some leverage too. The president has to be worried about his legacy and how he's going to govern through the second term. And even though Republicans might get blamed, this whole idea that the president is bringing the country together, something he wasn't able to do in his first term, if he can't do it in his second term, it could be very problematic.

Yeah, that's the ticket. President Obama had better not hurt the Republicans' feelings, or they might start obstructing everything he does and that's going to harm his legacy... oh wait.

I guess Senor thinks the American public has been asleep for the last four years is he actually believes the garbage he's shoveling.

DOWNLOADS: (226)

PLAYS: (2691)

Embed

Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, says that if lawmakers are going to go after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice over her initial public assessment of the September attack in Benghazi then maybe Congress should also look at how President George W. Bush pushed bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Dan Senor, who worked to spin the Iraq war for the Bush administration as the chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), told a Sunday panel on ABC that Rice deserved to be scrutinized because she was "front and center" as the voice of the Obama administration after the Benghazi attack.

"I spoke with one senator who met with her this week," Senor explained. "The consensus is -- this individual conveyed -- is the meetings did not go well. Benghazi was a serious issue. We can debate whether or not Susan Rice should be blamed for it."

"There is a legitimate concern that she was used five days after the fact to propagate a story that we should have known at the time was not the case," Cole agreed, adding that there were also "serious questions about our own intelligence people."

"We saw President Bush out front defending something wasn't true too," the Oklahoma Republican recalled. "Maybe we should ask those guys some questions too."

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) pointed out that 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan and "we came together and said that this is a national tragedy and blame was not parceled out the way that it is now."

Senor, however, insisted that there was "accountability" after the Marines were killed because Reagan appointed a fact-finding committee to investigate.

"Part of the problem here is in the lead up to the election when Benghazi got a lot of attention, the president said, 'Don't talk about Benghazi. If you do, you're politicizing the issue,'" Senor opined. "So you weren't allowed to -- [former GOP nominee Mitt] Romney and others weren't allowed to talk about it in the political context. Here we are after the election and there's no full airing. We still don't know exactly what happened."

DOWNLOADS: (131)

PLAYS: (810)

Embed

Dan Senor, a top adviser to former GOP nominee Mitt Romney, on Sunday lashed out at President Barack Obama for meeting with progressive groups like MoveOn.org after winning the election, but ignored similar meetings with business leaders.

Appearing on a Sunday panel on ABC's This Week, Senor said that the president's first offer to avoid the fiscal cliff by ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest Americans, $400 billion in targeted spending cuts to earned benefit programs like Medicare and several stimulus measures was as extreme Republicans demanding Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) controversial budget plan and a 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates.

"I think he has spent more time on the phone this week, from what I understand, with Steve Israel, the chairman of the Democrats' campaign arm, than he did with [House Speaker] John Boehner," Senor complained. "He's spending time with [AFL-CIO president] Richard Trumka and MoveOn.org. You tell me what he's telling those hard-left groups about his position and how he can walk back to something more reasonable."

"He also met with quite a number of business leaders, a lot of CEOs, a lot of Republicans this week," former Obama adviser Steven Rattner noted. "He's trying to do something different than he's done before, which is take his message outside the beltway, outside of Capitol Hill and try and bring it to the people. And I'm totally in favor of that."

"But look, in the negotiations a year and almost a half ago, Speaker Boehner was reported to have offered $800 billion in revenue," Rattner added. "The president has asked for $1.6 trillion of revenue. There's a bid, there's an ask. If the Republicans want to get a deal done, let's sit down and try to find some place in the middle."

DOWNLOADS: (196)

PLAYS: (1258)

Embed

Neoconservative Dan Senor is blaming everything and everyone but former nominee Mitt Romney for Republicans losing the White House in 2012.

In his first appearance on Morning Joe since the election, the former Romney adviser said that a "systemic crisis in the world of polling" gave the campaign bad data.

"I think particularly on right-of-center polling, the modeling was way off," he explained.

While Senor only cited Rasmussen and Gallup, the final Real Clear Politics aggregation of polls came very close on the election outcome and showed that every other major polling organization called the race correctly.

Senor refused to assign any significant blame to the substance Romney's campaign because "if we had picked up 400,000 in a handful of swing states, Mitt Romney would have been a genius."

"The Friday night before the election, we were in Cincinnati, we had this huge rally," he recalled. "You could feel the energy, a hundred top-tier Romney surrogates at the event. I'm backstage with some of them -- I won't mention their names -- but they're talking about Romney like he's [former President Ronald] Reagan. You know, the debate performance were the best debate performances of any Republican nominee in history. This guy's got -- he's iconic. They were talking about him because they believed he was going to win in four or five days. And in fact, some of them were already talking to our transition [team] to position themselves for Romney cabinet."

"And I won't say who they are, they know who they are, they were on television -- the body was buried -- five, six days later absolutely eviscerating him."

MSNBC's Richard Wolffe pressed Senor about "what the Republican Party needs to do on policy" to win in the future.

"Look, I'm no longer professionally spinning for Mitt Romney," Senor insisted. "I do think he got a couple of things right and they have been eclipsed by the pile on."

But the man who worked to spin the Iraq war for the Bush administration as the chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq did admit that the Republican Party in general needed to do a "better job at thinking trough about how to talk about middle-class economics."

DOWNLOADS: (278)

PLAYS: (2454)

Embed

With the final presidential debate on foreign policy coming up this Monday, Rachel Maddow again reminded us of the fact that Mitt Romney, with no real experience of his own, is just reassembling George Bush's foreign policy team and hoped that this is a topic that is finally discussed during the debate on Monday evening.

Maddow again featured too wrong to fail, Dan Senor, who's been traveling around working with vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan on the campaign trail for now. And she took the viewers through the long list of other Bushies who Mitt Romney has hired.

For more on that, here's some recommended reading.

From Ari Berman at The Nation: Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet:

Romney is loath to mention Bush on the campaign trail, for obvious reasons, but today they sound like ideological soul mates on foreign policy. Listening to Romney, you’d never know that Bush left office bogged down by two unpopular wars that cost America dearly in blood and treasure. Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. Christopher Preble, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute, says, “Romney’s likely to be in the mold of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy if he were elected.” On some key issues, like Iran, Romney and his team are to the right of Bush. Romney’s embrace of the neoconservative cause—even if done cynically to woo the right—could turn into a policy nightmare if he becomes president. [...]

Romney knew little about foreign policy when he ran for president in 2008. An internal dossier of John McCain’s presidential campaign said at the time that “Romney’s foreign affairs resume is extremely thin, leading to credibility problems.” After being branded as too liberal by conservative GOP activists four years ago, Romney aligned himself with Bolton and other neocons in 2012 to protect his right flank. Today there’s little daylight between the candidate and his most militant advisers. “When you read the op-eds and listen to the speeches, it sounds like Romney’s listening to the John Bolton types more than anyone else,” says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for national security at the Center for American Progress. (The Romney campaign’s openly gay foreign policy spokesman, Richard Grenell, who had been an indefatigable defender of Bolton as the latter’s PR flack in the Bush years, was forced to resign after harsh attacks by anti-gay conservatives.)

Bolton is one of eight Romney advisers who signed letters drafted by the Project for a New American Century, an influential neoconservative advocacy group founded in the 1990s, urging the Clinton and Bush administrations to attack Iraq. PNAC founding member Paula Dobriansky, leading advocate of Bush’s ill-fated “freedom agenda” as an official in the State Department, recently joined the Romney campaign full time. Another PNAC founder, Eliot Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009, wrote the foreword to the Romney campaign’s foreign policy white paper, which was titled, perhaps not coincidentally, “An American Century.” Cohen was a tutor to Bush administration neocons. Following 9/11, he dubbed the war on terror “World War IV,” arguing that Iraq, being an “obvious candidate, having not only helped Al Qaeda, but…developed weapons of mass destruction,” should be its center. In 2009 Cohen urged the Obama administration to “actively seek the overthrow” of Iran’s government. Read on...

From Kimball at Daily KOS: The vital narrative of the next debate:

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (82)

PLAYS: (229)

Embed

It would really be nice to turn on the television one of these days and know that I'm not going to be subjected to another one of these Bush, neocon warmongers being allowed to come on the air and pretend they have an ounce of credibility on the issue of foreign policy. Sadly, I assume that day is never going to come until they all die off from old age. Here we go again with another anchor on MSNBC giving Dan Senor, the world's worst salesman of Bush's failed invasion and occupation of Iraq, face time to beat the war drums and complain that the Obama administration isn't being sufficiently hawkish with threatening Iran.

Romney adviser: 'Nothing new' in Obama's UN speech:

A senior adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign said Tuesday there was "nothing new" in President Obama's address to the United Nations, where he called for an end to the "violence and intolerance" surrounding attacks on American diplomatic missions and said the United States will prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

"It's a version of what he said before," said Romney adviser Dan Senor, adding there was "nothing new" in the president's remarks. [...]

"There is no progress. There is a sense that there's an unraveling going on abroad, and the president citing these doesn't mean we're making progress," Senor added.

The Romney adviser also defended the Republican nominee from those who questioned his statements critical of the Obama administration response to the violent protests at American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

"I think the reaction to his reaction was disproportionate," Senor said. "At the end of the day he criticized a statement that came out of the administration, that the White House ultimately distanced themselves from."

The Obama administration has pushed back on Romney challenges to the president's foreign policy, accusing the Republican of bluster, especially in regard to Iran. Obama has previously challenged Romney to say explicitly if he believes war should be waged against Iran, a point on which Senor was challenged.

"Gov. Romney has not advocated military action and any suggestion that he has by the president or his surrogates is a mischaracterization," Senor said. "What Gov. Romney's concern is, is a weak posture in the region makes war more likely."

Yeah, as opposed to Mitt Romney listening to the likes of Dan Senor should he be elected president. Senor, and MSNBC's producers for that matter, who keep booking him on these shows, apparently believe the American people are completely incapable of recalling anything that happened more than four years ago. They're sure doing their best to pretend that the Bush administration and their disastrous invasion of Iraq never happened during segments like this one.

DOWNLOADS: (988)

PLAYS: (13272)

Embed

Jon Stewart took a shot at Sarah Palin as well on this Monday evening's The Daily Show, but he spent the majority of this segment absolutely skewering Sean Hannity and Dan Senor, or as we like to call him, Baghdad Bob, for their sheer and utter hypocrisy on the topic of whether the United States ought to be promoting democracy around the world.

Apparently their view is completely dependent on whether it's George W. Bush, or that Kenyan usurper they hate so much in the White House. Stewart ended the segment by having Senor literally debate himself.

Maybe that hack Scarborough can show Senor this clip the next time they decide to have that neocon warmonger sitting in on the entire three hours of Morning Joke again.

DOWNLOADS: (116)

PLAYS: (163)

Embed

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would "respect" and back Israel if they decided to attack Iran to prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons, the candidate's campaign said on Sunday.

"If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing the capability, the governor would respect that decision," Romney's senior national security adviser Dan Senor told reporters, adding that a strike should be "on the table."

Romney arrived in Israel on Sunday, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced him as a "personal friend and friend of Israel."

"We have to be honest and say that all the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota," Netanyahu said during his meeting with Romney. "And that's why I believe that we need a strong and credible military threat coupled with the sanctions to have a chance to change that situation."

President Barack Obama has said that he has "zero tolerance" for Iranian nuclear weapons, but has tried to convince Israel not to take military action.