Month: November 2003

Dereliction of Duty

Sisyphus Shrugged has the goods on this strange story of the Green Beret who’s been accused of cowardice:

I’m much too angry to talk about this yet, so

I’m going to let Siegfried Sassoon do it for me.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, Sassoon was a poet and a british soldier in World War 1 who was not executed for his anti-war statements (although the army did consider it) because he was a decorated hero with a reputation for being almost suicidally eager to kill the enemy after his brother was killed at Gallipoli.

[…]

So we’re OK with putting soldiers on trial for their lives in the dark because they sought treatment they’re entitled to under military law, but they’re willing to be flexible if anyone should, you know, hear about it.

Way to model your basic military virtues for the soldiers, kids.

Anyway, here’s what Siegfried Sassoon had to say about – erm – a not entirely dissimilar war*

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize”.

and this is what he had to say about Staff Sergeant Georg-Andreas Pogany and his fellow sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (who include a majority of the homeless men in the United States)

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain

Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ –

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Support our troops. Refuse them medical care and then shoot them.

There’s a metaphor for you.

This is one of the wierdest stories to come out of the war so far. The charge is highly unusual in the first place, but it turns out that the Army doc on the scene said the guy just had a case of PTSD and needed a couple of days rest. Apparently, he had a bad reaction to seeing a body cut in half for the first time.

They’ve dropped the cowardice charges but he’s going to be charged with dereliction of duty.

The Reagan Cult

It may be apocryphal, but the bin Laden family’s good friend and everybody’s favorite Leninist right wingnut, Grover Norquist, is reported to have said back in the 1980’s:

“We must establish a Brezhnev Doctrine for conservative gains. The Brezhnev Doctrine states that once a country becomes communist it can never change. Conservatives must establish their own doctrine and declare their victories permanent…A revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself…(W)e want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle.”

I think he’s been damned successful so far. You can’t fault the guy for thinking small.

Inspired as he is by all things totalitarian, Norquist went on to do a number of things that Uncle Joe would be proud of, one of which was The Legacy Project.

Here’s what Mother Jones had to say about it:

Win one for the Gipper? Hell, try winning 3,067 for the Gipper. That’s the goal of a group of a powerful group of Ronald Reagan fans who aim to see their hero’s name displayed on at least one public landmark in every county in the United States.

A conservative pipe dream? The intrepid members of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project don’t think so. Launched in 1997 as a unit of hard-line antitax lobby Americans for Tax Reform, the project’s board of advisers reads like a who’s who of conservatives; it includes, among others, staunch GOP activist Grover Norquist, supply-sider Jack Kemp, and Eagle Forum chief Phyllis Schlafly. To this crew, the Great Communicator is the man who almost singlehandedly saved us from the Evil Soviet Empire, made Americans proud again, and put the nation on the road to prosperity through tax cuts that helped the poor by helping the rich help themselves.

Buoyed by an early success in having Washington National Airport renamed in Reagan’s honor in 1998, the project started thinking big. In short order, they convinced Florida legislators to rename a state turnpike. From there, it was a logical step to the push for a Reagan memorial just about everywhere. “We want to create a tangible legacy so that 30 or 40 years from now, someone who may never have heard of Reagan will be forced to ask himself, ‘Who was this man to have so many things named after him?'” explains 29-year-old lobbyist Michael Kamburowski, who recently stepped down as the Reagan Legacy Project’s executive director.

[…]

…it was the Gipper’s ho-hum performance in a 1996 survey of historians that apparently triggered the right’s recent zeal to enthrone him in the public eye. It was in that year that presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The New York Times Magazine, asked 30 academic colleagues and a pair of politicians to rank all US presidents, and when conservatives saw their undisputed hero languishing in the “average” column, they were aghast. Appearing on the heels of Clinton’s landslide victory over Bob Dole, the Schlesinger article seemed a slap in the face, a challenge to the GOP to stake its claim on recent history.

The charge was led by the Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank that helped devise the Republican Contract with America. In the March 1997 issue of the foundation’s magazine Policy Review, the editors charged that Schlesinger’s survey was stacked with liberals and New Deal sympathizers, and presented opinions from authors more appreciative of the Gipper. (The 40th president has always fared better with the general public than with the pointyheads: In a recent Gallup poll, respondents rated Ronald Reagan as the greatest American president, beating out second-place John F. Kennedy and third-place Abraham Lincoln.)

Two issues later, for its 20th anniversary, Policy Review ran a followup cover story: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?” For its centerpiece, the magazine invited soul-searching by prominent Reagan acolytes including senators Phil Gramm and Trent Lott, representatives Christopher Cox, and Dick Armey, then-Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, and Grover Norquist. Soon after the cover story appeared, Norquist launched the Reagan Legacy Project as an offshoot of Americans for Tax Reform, which he had founded a decade earlier to further Reagan’s fiscal policies.

And tonight, Grover won the very first Ronald Reagan Award. from the Frontiers of Freedom Foundation. Check out the sponsors, a veritable who’s who of GOP luminaries.

How sweet it must have been for these lovers of freedom to be able to celebrate successfully repressing a “docu-drama” about their Dear Leader without even having seen it. After all, “a revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself.”

I have no doubt that they all stood up at the gala tonight and proudly proclaimed “Thank You Comrade, Norquist!”

And Now For Something Completely Different

A rousing essay on pornography by Steve Gilliard. If I’m not mistaken, Steve is a heterosexual.

Not that there’s… no I won’t go there.

Very Gracious

He is a fine fellow, which I always knew and always said.

I too apologize if I offended anyone in my zeal to make my point. I used the phrase “waving the flag on the stump” and was rightly accused of demagoguery by a couple of people I respect. I truly didn’t mean to say that Dean himself was doing this, but was responding to some of his supporters who seemed to feel that he should even more actively use the symbol. I succumbed to my love of hyperbolic imagery in a situation where it wasn’t appropriate and failed to make it clear where I was deriving that particular concept from.

I suspect that Howard Dean and I have a lot in common, personality-wise.

Now let’s put all this nonsense behind us and figure out how to get those redneck crackers to vote for us!

I’m kidding…I’m kidding…

Final Word

I promise

From The Temple of Democracy, which with the SPLC, are the best online resources out there when it comes to the “southern heritage” movement and racial politics in America.

What Howard Dean doesn’t understand.

It is not a new observation that the racial division between white and black working people in the former Confederate states has worked against them and enabled various elites to dominate both of them. Hinton Helper realized that the plantation system oppressed white non-elites before the Civil War. One of the fears of the plantation class before the Civil War was that blacks and whites would work together. You can read about this in “Towards a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia,” by Michael P. Johnson.

There were attempts for black-white alliances during Reconstruction, in the 1890s with Populism, and Mahon in North Carolina, and other times in the history of the South, and this has been an ongoing hope continuing to this day. However, it has been defeated, again, and again, and again. The trump card that the elites have played over and over is white nationalism. The convincing of white working people, farmers, that their interest lies in a common white identity rather than the common economic interest they hold with African Americans in the South. You can’t defeat white nationalism by giving into it. You can’t appeal to it and expect to defeat it. You also can’t expect to beat the established interests in using it. They can always beat your appeal to it. You can’t build an alliance on top of it. The established interests will bust it up with a stronger appeal to white nationalism than you will be willing to make.

To have a movement of ordinary people, black and white, against established anti-democratic interests, you need to defeat white nationalism. FDR thought he could build a progressive future by side stepping the issues. We now witness a party with its strength centered in the former Confederate states demolishing FDRs legacy one step at a time.

Why Imminence Matters

Or, one of the reasons at least. This may be the one that hits home with the public.

Matt Yglesias

“…the reason the Clinton administration was so focused on keeping the body-count super-low is that they were primarily involved in humanitarian “wars of choice.” The standard of sacrifice that it is appropriate to ask of the military in such a conflict is different from the appropriate standard when the United States is responding to aggression or even, I would say, responding to a clear and present danger. This, however, is why all the talk about Iraqi weapons and whether or not the threat was imminent matters. We’re taking casualties in Iraq like it was necessary to fight this war, at this time, in this way, with these allies or else seriously imperil America’s national security. But it wasn’t necessary, even if it did help out the people of Iraq and remove a long-term irritant from our foreign policy, only to replace it with a much more severe short-term one.

New Life!

Congrats to Mr and Mrs Kos on the birth of their adorable Bundle ‘o’ Joy, Aristotle Alberto. He looks like he’s got the Democratic mojo already.

Bad Politix

I’m going to take another wack at this because the comments section from my last one won’t contain my response.

Howard Dean says: “White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance, either, and their kids need better schools, too.”

They ought to be, but they aren’t. And, for a good number of them the reason is pretty obvious. As David Niewert says in this post :

Why would the Confederate flag be an issue in northwestern Washington? Because it is a symbol of white supremacism for people well outside the South as well. This is why phony arguments about its meaning are only cover for the stark reality that anyone — particularly anyone of color — who is confronted by the flag knows all too well: The Confederate flag is meant to intimidate — to trumpet the values of white supremacy. The “heritage” which it harkens back to is mostly rife with the charred corpses of lynched innocents.

Ok. I know that Howard Dean wants no part of that. But, it is inescapable that the confederate battle flag is a potent symbol of race hatred for some people and that it’s obviously not a symbol that the Democratic party should use or accept. And, rejecting the flag does not translate to telling all southerners they are jerks. After all, forty-five percent of white southerners vote Democratic and reject the confederate flag.

Dave Johnson says in the comments to my previous post that when Dean uses this language he is talking about getting poor white guys to vote for the Democrats. Of course he is. But, he’s also the guy who’s very likely to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States and I expect that person not to be a putz and use symbols and images that speak to beliefs that are completely at odds with the central values the Democrats have held fast to through “3rd ways” and “center-left realignments” and elections won and lost for the last 40 years. The only Democrat I know who might use the battle flag is Zell Miller and even he didn’t back Dean up.

As Sara says in the same comments:

I Assume Dean has a good point here, which he argued well at an earlier date, namely that the Symbolic Politics of identity had not gotten anyone health insurance or any other benefit — and it was time for the Democrats to address all that. If this is his idea about how to do such, well it’s pretty weak. It may be Dean is trying to prove he is not “politically correct” or one of the other points of opposition to liberalism, but it is unlikely to get him all that many votes from Molly Ivins “Bubba” and “Bubette” — and it is going to hurt him among those of use who expect clear argument, and not just symbol chasing.

And, I would add that if you are going to use symbols and images to convey your argument to the masses (which I think is absolutely necessary in the modern media age) then you should certainly eschew associating yourself with negative symbols that the other side has created to sow division between the very people you are trying to bring together.

As for separating himself from the ranks of the politically correct, Dean already is perfectly positioned to do that. His “Sistah Soljah moment” would be to make a pitch for gun rights in front of the New York or California Democratic Party Convention. The boos that ensue from that would warm the hearts of pick-up driving swing voters everywhere and it wouldn’t have to be done again on the backs of a historically shat upon minority group who has shown this party nothing but loyalty. They already did their bit with the original Sistah Soljah.

Anybody who’s been observing politics for a while knows that this issue of how to attract white southerners is a big conundrum for the Democrats (although Ruy Teixeira would argue that we really shouldn’t worry too much about it.) But, the enthusiastic embrace of the flag as an election ploy by some in the comments to my last post on this subject (not Dean himself, mind you) tells me that the Democrats may suffer from a serious misunderstanding of who we can and cannot draw to the Democratic party.

Some commenters seem to believe that the issue of racial equality is a loser for Democrats so we are simply moving to a class based argument, just like the Republicans have been agitating for, for years. Pmac says that “most blacks are capable of sufficiently complex thought that says it’s more self-interested to be divided by class than by race,” to which I can only observe that Ward Connerly has apparently been magnificently successful in making inroads in the democratic party even as we’ve been remiss in getting through to the pick-up truck crowd. I wonder, though, how African Americans by and large feel about this.

I do think it’s pretty obvious that we can’t get the racist dittohead vote unless we tell our black voters to go fuck themselves. It’s a (southern) strategy to be sure, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good one even if it weren’t morally reprehensible. The fact is that we need to have an enthusiastic 95% turn-out of African Americans to go with our 45% of whites in order to win in the south anywhere, something that didn’t happen in 2002 and is widely considered to have been a huge contributing factor in our squeaker of a loss in the midterms. So, this is something we should be very sensitive to in this closely divided electorate.

But, even if we were to tell the African American consituency to suck it up, I doubt that expressing a wish to get more “white folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back” will ever draw many converts from the ranks of the right wing unless we are also willing to toss gay rights and abortion and a whole lot of other civil rights issues that virtually define the Democratic party on to the bonfire, too. That’s the problem with capitulating in culture war battles. You give them an inch and they take a mile.

There are, however, many hard working white guys all over the country who just don’t want to hear about the damn flag or much of anything else about the culture wars anymore, from either side. They are concerned about losing their good paying jobs and their freedom to own a gun and the national security of the United States. They listen to Rush on the road from time to time but they think he’s kind of a blowhard and they voted for Junior but he’s starting to make them feel nervous. They believe in God but they don’t make a fetish of religion and they are just as sick of hearing people argue about that as they are of the pissing and moaning about the flag. They get teary when they hear the national anthem and yes, they drive pick-up trucks. But, as Gephardt shrewdly noted, they don’t fly the confederate flag, they fly the American flag.

They vote Republican because they think Democrats are weak. It is a matter of temperament, not culture. A lot of them were in or around the military and are comfortable with blacks in positions of equality or authority, and they don‘t give a shit about “southern heritage” symbols if they are going to cause trouble. They are sick and tired of hearing about race because it never seems to go anywhere. They like problems to be solved, not chewed over.

These guys are reachable for us from a number of angles, but we sure won’t gain any points by waving around the confederate battle flag on the stump. It looks patently phony, particularly coming from a Vermont doctor who signed the only civil union law in the country, and these guys are very sensitive to phoniness. And they are sick of the argument. The way to appeal to them is by reframing the culture war issues, not by clumsily evoking the GOP’s favorite divisive symbols. It’s not our style and everybody knows it.

Bush doesn’t care about working people and has fucked up the Iraq war. We care about the working man and we will fix the situation in Iraq and deal with terrorism like adults. That is what will get these guys.

One final bone to pick on this issue.

Dean’s comment is one of those “process comments” that should not be on the campaign trail in the first place. It’s like Bob Dole blurting out that he was endorsing Prop 209 in California because it was a “wedge issue,” or Bush saying “I‘m gonna tell the American people that the nation is more secure.” If Dean believes that the Democrats need to appeal to “white folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back” then it is incumbent upon him to actually formulate a message that will do that. Merely expressing a desire to do it isn’t going to move the ball forward. Edwards has a great message on this, and I really hope that people are paying attention to what he’s saying.

And, for what it’s worth, saying that my position on this is colored by my support for Clark is bullshit. I’ve been writing about the confederate flag and the southern heritage movement for a long time and my reaction has little to do with the primary battle. I would come down hard on Clark exactly the same way, for both moral and practical reasons. It’s bad politics, that’s all. This is not a realigning election and we will lose if we don’t keep our base enthusiastically behind us and appeal to enough swing voters to keep the GOP from stealing it. Let’s wait for a second term to start planning how to deprogram the dittoheads, ok?

I hope that Dean wises up and figures out what he really needs to do to win in the South. He’s a smart guy and I’m confident that he can figure out some way to communicate without evoking divisive culture war images.

Freeing The Inner Incubus

Leah over at corrente points to one of those patented incoherent rants by everybody’s favorite wing nut guest pundit, Cliff May.

In response to a Red Cross worker wondering why someone would attack the Red Cross he says:

What do the terrorists and their allies want? They want to get Iraq and its resources e.g. oil, weapons, cash, — back into their sweaty hands so they can utilize them to further for their viciously destructive aims. They can accomplish that by killing as many all foreign infidels and their allies as possible, and by driving the rest out of Iraq.

That includes you, Ms. Doumani. You too, represent the hated Judeo-Christian West and it won’t help for you to say you never eat at McDonald’s and that you think George W. Bush is a unilateralist and uncultured cowboy. The fact is you’re working for the Red Cross and people who remember the Crusades and the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols remember what that cross used to stand for.

WTF?

The “terrorists” want to get Iraqi oil, cash and weapons back into their sweaty hands…

Well, the hell with that. Possession is 9/10th of the law. WE have the Iraqi oil, cash and weapons and we’re not giving them back.

And, there’s nothing in his piece to suggest that this worker said a word about McDonalds or cowboys. That image just seems to have appeared unbidden in his fevered little fantasy about nefarious Anti-American Red Cross workers with foreign sounding names. He just opened a little can of Bush Doctrine preemptive whoop-ass on her in case she might be thinking about maybe having a program or a desire to hate Happy Meals and cowpokes in the future.

And then he pretty much tells her that the “terrorists” attacked the Red Cross because of the crusades, and his tone suggests that he isn’t convinced that actually isn’t a pretty good reason to blow the shit out of them. Damn those anti-freedom fry, crusading blood hustlers anyway.

I gotcher Sackin’ o’ Baghdad for yah, right here.

I fear we are starting to see the re-emergence of that crazy ass, Linda-Blair’s-head-spinning like-a-top thing that was so characteristic of even the more sober wingnuts during the Clinton years. Whenever things don’t go their way they go all wild eyed and drooly start screeching like Joan Crawford in coat hanger factory.

Flagging Support

I know that Howard Dean isn’t a racist, but I also know he isn’t stupid so I’m having a hard time figuring out why he’s said this confederate flag bit more than once. His vaunted campaign staff have let him down mightily if they didn’t school him by now about what an offensive symbol the confederate flag is to the vast majority of Democratic voters and cautioned him to not say it anymore.

This will not do, and it’s not just the flag thing, it’s also that he accuses his rivals of employing the GOP politics of racial divisiveness by criticizing him. He really is the one in the wrong on this and he sounds like a Republican member of the judiciary committee himself when he throws a racism charge at the others in this situation:

a Dean spokesman called the criticism “a desperate political attack on the part of Governor Dean’s opponents.”

Spokesman Jay Carson said Dean was trying to explain that Democrats need to broaden their appeal to Southern men, who in recent years have voted Republican in growing numbers. Carson said Dean has been using the flag line since he started campaigning, and that his rivals misconstrued it as support for the Confederate banner.

Dean also released his own statement to clarify his comments.

“I want people with Confederate flags on their trucks to put down those flags and vote Democratic,” he said in the statement.

“We have working white families in the South voting for tax cuts for the richest one percent while their children remain with no health care,” said Dean. “The dividing of working people by race has been a cornerstone of Republican politics for the last three decades. For my fellow Democratic opponents to sink to this level is really tragic. The only way we’re going to beat George Bush is if Southern white working families and African-American working families come together under the Democratic tent, as they did under FDR.”

I’m more pragmatic than I’ve ever been about presidential politics, and I know that he wasn’t actually endorsing the confederate flag, but antipathy to this symbol is embedded in the DNA of African Americans since the civil war (and liberals everywhere at least since the civil rights movement) so I can’t quite figure out why he would think it was ok to use it. Appealing to racist sympathy, which is what the confederate flag symbol is really all about, cannot coexist with the Democratic party of 2004. It’s not the same as supporting the NRA or being for free trade or once voting Republican. The issue of civil rights is the moral center of our party. It’s not negotiable.

Sure, we must try to boost our appeal in the South, but we must be very, very careful never to do it that way. It’s not only wrong, it wouldn’t work anyway. For every yahoo who wudda, cudda, shudda voted Democratic if we accept the symbol of their (racist) “heritage,” there will be 5 southern African Americans who will just stay home. Even if it weren’t abhorrant on a moral basis, for Democrats, southern racism is a zero sum game.

If Dean meant to say that the party must once again appeal to working class and rural white guys who drive pick-up trucks (which is what I assume he meant) there is absolutely no reason to evoke that stupid flag. How about saying “working men who drive pick-up trucks and watch football on Sunday?” Or, “guys who drive pick-ups and wish they drove Nascar?” There are many, many more southern white men who don’t feel the need to put a confederate flag in their pick-up than there are southern white men who do. Those are the guys we want.

I don’t want to make too much of this (although I admit that I would be very hard on any Republican who regularly opined that he wanted confederate flag wavers to vote for him) but Dean has to stop using this image or risk developing a serious perception problem — not just for being dramatically insensitive to racist codes and symbols, but as a mulish, my-way-or-the-highway, know it all.

That’s what Bush actually is, but Karl Rove has the sense to know that he can’t get elected if people see him that way. Neither can Howard Dean. A little humility is called for on this one.