Republican leaders, who often seem to find international alliances more irritating than useful, have taken to openly mocking traditional U.S. allies. One gets the impression that they’re not only disinterested in maintaining international bonds with long-time friends, but they are actively seeking to break these bonds as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
France bashing<\/a>, of course, continues to be all-the-rage in GOP circles, but now Republicans are also turning their attention to east Asia<\/a>.<\/p>\n Speaking of Asia, let’s hope the Japanese don’t think their membership in the mighty Coalition of the Willing is going to earn them any kudos or insulate them from condemnation on other matters. <\/p>\n No way. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), House GOP fundraiser extraordinaire, issued a blistering attack at some major Asian trading partners in a recent congressional newsletter to his constituents. The headline was “A New Red Menace; Pushing China Back.” <\/p>\n “China and its fellow currency parasites (Japan and Korea),” the item began, “are sucking the life blood out of our economy and it must stop. That’s why Mike introduced the first bill in Congress designed to stop Chinese currency manipulation, and in January, he succeeded in creating a new office devoted solely to fighting illegal Chinese imports.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Republican House leaders — the paragon of class.<\/p>\n The issue of Chinese currency is a real one, but why would Rogers, a GOP House floor leader, find it necessary to smear U.S. allies in Japan and Korea by calling them “currency parasites”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Republican leaders, who often seem to find international alliances more irritating than useful, have taken to openly mocking traditional U.S. allies. One gets the impression that they’re not only disinterested in maintaining international bonds with long-time friends, but they are actively seeking to break these bonds as quickly as possible. France bashing, of course, continues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}