It appears that Barack Obama’s strategic web initiatives, including the launch of the private-label social network My.BarackObama.com are paying off. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, more than 4,000 individuals have set up blogs, and an additional 3,000 individuals have set up private fundraising pages on Obama’s social network. The article, written last week, also points to the 2,400 groups formed on the site. This morning, however, I counted 3,229 groups on Obama’s SNS, a 35% increase in just a few days.
Illinois junior Senator Barack Obama has a huge lead in the presidential campaign — in MySpace friends. Obama supporters could get excited about his more than 43,000 close buddies, and how that puts him well ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 23,000 friends. (No Republican candidate tops 2,600.)
And from the front page of TechPresident — (my daughter can beat the bottom two Republicans.)
… my greatest wish for this campaign season is for Democrats to back off from the trifles now and again and instead spend some time getting back to basics and outlining a broad perspective on both American and global security that competes with the puerile bluster that currently passes for intelligent discussion among Republicans.
It’s actually quite important that they do so and soon. Here’s a rundown from the German papers on the Iraq escalation votes:
The Financial Times Deutschland writes:
“For four years any criticism of the war was seen as a betrayal of the troops. This taboo has now been broken … the vote marks a decisive change in American politics.
“The Bush Administration has not only forfeited its credibility internationally — now it is also fighting a losing battle on the home front.
“One could be tempted to feel Schadenfreude about the spectacular failure of this president. But a US government that has suffered such a loss of authority is a weakness for the whole West. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran and North Korea are the big conflicts in international politics. Bush — morally disavowed and increasingly abandoned by his own party colleagues — will not be able to do much to solve them. So who will?”
It is a huge problem and one that will not be solved by Joe Lieberman admonishing Democrats to start goose stepping behind the president. Nobody believes anything either he or Bush say. In fact, our greatest hope for getting through this unstable historical juncture is for Democratic presidential candidates to start letting the world know what they will do to change course. We are in a very dangerous time in which people both in our own government and in the outside world are likely to make terrible misjudgments. The world needs to know not only that the US Congress is engaged in oversight, but that the most likely subsequent presidential leadership understands the stakes.
If Libby is found guilty, investigators are likely to probe further to determine if Libby devised what they consider a cover story in an effort to shield Cheney.
Here’s the skinny:
In the fall of 2003, when it was disclosed that the Justice Department had begun a criminal probe as to who leaked Plame’s identity to reporters, Libby sought out Cheney to complain that while then-White House spokesperson McClellan was making public statements that Rove had not been a source of the leak, McClellan refused to do the same on Libby’s behalf. Asked by Fitzgerald whether during that conversation Libby might have in fact told Cheney that he had spoken to reporters about Plame, Libby answered: “I think I did. Let me bring you back to that period. I think I did in that there was a conversation I had with the vice president when all this started coming out and it was this issue as to, you now, who spoke to Novak. “I told the vice- you know, there was- the president said anybody who knows anything should come forward or something like that… I went to the vice president and said, you know, I was not the person who talked to Novak. “And he [said] something like, ‘I know that.’ And I said, you know, ‘I learned this from Tim Russert.’ And he sort of tilted his head to the side a little bit and then I may have in that conversation said, I talked to other — I talked to people about it on the weekend,” Libby said in apparent reference to his conversations with Cooper and Miller. Fitzgerald then pressed Libby: “What did you understand from his gesture or reaction in tilting his head?” Libby responded: “That the Tim Russert part caught his attention. You know, that he- he reacted as if he didn’t know about the Tim Russert thing or he was rehearing it, or reconsidering it or something like that… New, new sort of information. Not something he had been thinking about.” Fitzgerald asked: “And did he at any time tell you, ‘Well, you didn’t learn it from Tim Russert, you learned it from me? Back in June you and I talked about the wife working at the CIA?'” “No,” Libby responded. “Did he indicate any concern that you had done anything wrong by telling reporters what you had learned?” Fitzgerald asked. “No,” Libby responded. Later, Fitzgerald asked Libby: “Did you tell the vice president that you had actually spoken to Time magazine and Mr. Cooper and had discussed Wilson’s wife’s work with Mr. Cooper? Libby answered: “I think this conversation was about whether — the leak to Novak. I don’t know that I discussed that with the vice president. I did tell him, of course, that we had spoken to the people who he had told us to speak to on the weekend. I think at some point I told him that.” Libby had been frustrated that in recent days that McClellan had made statements saying that Rove had nothing to do with the leak of Plame’s identity, but refused to do so for Libby as well. Libby then pressed his case to then-White House chief of staff Andy Card, but to no avail himself until Cheney intervened. An agitated Cheney wrote in a note to himself: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” Cheney also scribbled: “Must happen today.” Some time later — Libby wasn’t able to provide the grand jury with the exact date — he went back to Cheney to tell him that he discovered a note indicating that he had first learned from Cheney, not Russert, that Plame was a CIA officer. Libby told the grand jury: “In the course of the document production, the FBI sent us a request for documents, or Justice Department, I’m not sure technically. In the course of that document production I came across the note that is dated on or about June 12, and the note… shows that I hadn’t first learned it from Russert, although that was my memory, I had first learned it when he said it to me. “And so I went back to see him and said, you know, I told you something wrong before. It turns out that I have a note that I had heard, heard about this earlier from you and I just — you know, I didn’t want to leave you with the wrong… the wrong statement that I heard about it from Tim Russert. In fact, I had heard about it earlier, but I had forgotten it.” Asked by Fitzgerald what Cheney’s reaction was, Libby responded by saying that Cheney hardly had anything at all: “He didn’t say much. You know, he said something about, ‘From me?’ something like that, and tilted his head, something he does commonly, and that was that.”
Read the whole article for a very nice, succinct rundown of the evidence Fitzgerald presented against Libby as well as this very interesting speculation.
I have no idea if Libby will turn on Cheney or if Fitzgerald will follow through with an obstruction investigation. I do not believe he will bring charges against Cheney unless he has a solid case.
I’ve heard some wags say recently that some former special prosecutors believe Cheney was lucky to have a “conservative” running this case because they would have named Cheney as an unindicted co-conspirator. I don’t know if that’s true, but it brings up something important about Patrick Fitzgerald that’s sometimes missed. He’s conservative but not in a discernably political sense. It’s because he uses his office with prudence and circumspection. That’s not to say he isn’t tough or that he doesn’t play hardball — his cases in Chicago are almost frightening in their methodical thoroughness. But he isn’t a partisan either left or right (or if he is, it doesn’t seem to show itself in his work.)
I would love nothing more than to see Dick Cheney indicted on an obstruction charge, but I’m glad to know that Fitzgerald is not the type of prosecutor who would bring flimsy charges, even against that dark eminence. The typical right wing partisan prosecutor has been a blight on our system for a long time, railroading innocent people and using racist “tough on crime” platforms to launch political careers. (Can you hear me Rudy?) Fitzgerald is a true conservative in the literal sense and that’s a very good thing when it comes to police powers. I wish there were more real conservatives in law enforcement and judicial system. We’d have a safer and more just society if we did.
The NY Times has apparently had some kind of revelation about the fact that the Whitewater and subsequent scandals were ginned up by rich rightwing character assassins.
Mr. Scaife, reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, spent more than $2 million investigating and publicizing accusations about the supposed involvement of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in corrupt land deals, sexual affairs, drug running and murder.
But now, as Mrs. Clinton is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Scaife’s checkbook is staying in his pocket.
Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”
How nice. Let’s all sing kumbaaya, shall we? And let’s not examine the new Swiftboat hitmen who have emerged to take their places. That would be uncivil, I’m sure — and all that rich, delicious, GOP nastiness would be denied them.
And let’s not forget how all the kewl kidz made fun of Clinton as if she were some sort of paranoid freak for saying there was a vast right wing conspiracy. The press, for reasons that remain obscure, decided it was good fun to pretend that wasn’t happening and to report all this drivel in the first place. And that is the problem.
How odd it is that that fail to mention their own complicity in that ongoing effort. It’s been well over a decade now; you’d think they could have found a paragraph or two to explain why they reported these hoaxes and smear jobs with all the incredulity of a three year old sitting on a mall Santa’s lap.
The New York Times still has failed to answer for its deplorable coverage over the course of eight long years. Here’s a case in point from a few years back — Joe Conasan on NY Times editor Joseph Lelyvend’s embarrassing defense of his paper’s rpeposterous coverage in his review of Sidney Blumenthal’s book “The Clinton Wars:
Thanks to Joseph Lelyveld’s long, sloppy, rather mean-spirited review of Sidney Blumenthal’s “The Clinton Wars” in the current New York Review of Books, the Whitewater mystery is finally resolved, at least in part. That mystery was never much about Whitewater itself — a mundane, money-losing land deal. What always defied understanding was why the editors of the New York Times tolerated their paper’s persistent hyping of the phony “scandal.”
The answer, as Lelyveld reveals inadvertently, was a remarkable degree of carelessness at the very top. Although he has defended the paper’s coverage publicly for several years — and continues to do so as if he knows what he’s talking about — the former Times executive editor clearly never mastered the basic facts.
They never wanted to. They were breathlessly creating a “narrative”, not doing journalism and they evidently don’t understand that even today. Because of that of that they missed the real story, which they belatedly and perfunctorily report today as if its old news. Here’s Blumenthal responding to Lelyveld’s error ridden review:
Lelyveld writes now that Gerth’s article “had multiple sources.” But a single source had given Gerth the tip on the story and arranged for him to meet Jim McDougal, who was at the time suffering from manic depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, and bankruptcy. That source was Sheffield Nelson, an embittered partisan Republican rival of Bill Clinton, who had run against him for governor in 1990. Nelson’s pertinence to Madison Guaranty was that he’d contributed to breaking it. As I write in my book: “McDougal and Nelson had been business partners in a deal to buy Campobello Island, FDR’s famous summer place, and turn it into resort lots. More than any other scheme, that failed one had helped pull the Madison bank under. But the Campobello deal went unmentioned in Gerth’s account.”
At first, Gerth’s Times article had little impact. As I write, “McDougal retracted his charges, saying Clinton had done nothing illegal or unethical. A forensic accountant scratched through the confused records and issued a report showing no wrongdoing by the Clintons, while they lost about $65,000.” However, a Republican activist, L. Jean Lewis, who worked as an investigator at the Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal agency dealing with failed savings and loans associations, read the article and became the prime mover in turning its allegations into a criminal referral.
Then, many months later, during the presidential campaign in October 1992, Bush White House legal counsel C. Boyden Gray asked the chief executive of the RTC to look into this referral. The US Attorney in Arkansas, Charles Banks (a Republican appointee), looked into it, and on October 7, 1992, the following telex, which I cite in The Clinton Wars, was sent to Washington: “It is the opinion of Little Rock FBI and the United States Attorney…that there is indeed insufficient evidence to suggest the Clintons had knowledge of the check-kiting activity conducted by McDougal…. It was also the opinion of [Banks that] the alleged involvement of the Clintons in wrong-doing was implausible….” When Attorney General William Barr nonetheless tried to revive Lewis’s referral, Banks rebuked his boss: “I must opine that after such a lapse of time the insistence of urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election.”
Then, prophetically, he added: “You and I know in investigations of this type, the first steps, such as issuance of grand jury subpoenas for records, will lead to media and public inquiries [about] matters that are subject to absolute privacy. Even media questions about such an investigation in today’s modern political climate all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven.'” He suggested that participating in such an investigation “amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”
In another telex the Little Rock FBI office added that there was “absolutely no factual basis to suggest criminal activity on the part of any of the individuals listed as witnesses in the referral”—that is, the Clintons.
Although the Los Angeles Times reported these memos and telexes on August 9, 1995, the Nexis database reveals no mention in The New York Times. Was Lelyveld ever made aware of these documents at the time?
The NY Times treated this story like it was The Pentagon Papers. They legitimized its obfuscatory style of reporting and the confusion that resulted led to the naming of an independent counsel and finally to the partisan impeachment of a popular and successful president. Yet, it was obvious to observers that they were being led around by a cabal of rightwing hit men from very early on. They simply refused to see the story for what it was and instead validated their erroneous reporting with a continuous narrative stream of unproven implications that fed the toxic political environment — and that fed them in return.
I know this is all boring, arcane history now, but it’s important to note that we are seeing similar stuff happening already with respect to various “deals” that are being reported in the press about Harry Reid and John Edwards. So far they are thin, nonsensical “exposes” written by one man, John Soloman, formerly of the AP and now of the Washington Post. Soloman is known to be a lazy reporter who happily takes “tips” from the wingnut noise machine and faithfully regurgitates them. He holds a very important position at the paper that was second only to the Times in its eagerness to swallow Ken Starr’s spin whole.
We are also seeing some similar reporting begin to emerge on Obama, much of it generated by hometown political rivals, just as we saw in the Clinton years. Today the LA Times implies that Obama is exaggerating his activist past. A couple of weeks ago we saw a truly egregiously misleading report on a deal he made to buy some land from a supporter.
These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?
The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90’s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power.
But it happened and it will happen again. They have learned nothing and feel they have nothing to answer for. Clinton’s spokesman is right when he says “I think that history demonstrates that whoever the nominee is is going to engender opposition from the right, and we will certainly be prepared” but it is only part of the story. All Democrats will also engender reporting from a press corps that persists in seeing politics through the lens of the rightwing narrative that was set forth by Scaife and his various hitmen back in the 1990’s.
Pat Buchanan said something quite bracing on the McLaughlin Report this week-end:
What this tells you John is that we are coming out of Iraq. This is the first resolution and it’s non-binding, others are coming down the road. There will be no more surges into Iraq, the president has said we are not winning the war with the troops we have, we are coming out. So we had better prepare ourselves for the consequences, not of a defeat for American arms, but a defeat for American policy in Iraq, the potential loss of Iraq. And frankly John, the situation’s not looking all that good in Afghanistan either, where the NATO allies are not doing their bit. So we are at a historic turning point, I think, for the United States in the middle east.
We aren’t going to be leaving Iraq while George W. Bush is in the white house. But, I think he’s got the rest of it right. We certainly have a policy failure in Iraq. Big time.
Tony Blankley let the cat out of the bag, however, when he said that the US will be in Iraq for 20 years. When challenged about the difference between American combat troops on the ground an an American “presence” he (angrily)said this:
The fact is that when the oil is challenged in the Saudi oil fields and the Straights of Hormuz are closed, we’ll be fighting even by your definition.
Right. They aren’t even pretending anymore.
I think the great public intellectual and conservative philosopher Ann Coulter said it best:
“Liberals are always talking about why we shouldn’t go to war for oil. But why not go to war for oil? We need oil.
We keep hearing a lot about how wrong it is for the Democrats in congress to have the temerity to stop giving the president a blank check. Over and over again the Republicans wail about how the Dems want to hurt the troops by refusing to fund this escalation.
“I really want to know: If Democrats insist that they are supporting our troops, then why wouldn’t they let me introduce my measure that mandates that Congress would support and fully fund the men and women in uniform?
“I’m positive that Democrats will attempt to cut funding as soon as the spending bills come up this spring…and fear what that means for our troops on the ground.
[…]
“What is the democrats’ plan to move forward and win? They don’t have one! Just 36 hours of political grandstanding, non-binding resolutions, and petty posturing. They are not proposing solutions. They are not even encouraging new ideas – in fact – they stopped them, like when they squashed my amendment.
“Many hope that the troop surge is the beginning of the end. We all should want that if it gets the job done. Yet, Democrats are just saying no.
“You know, the time will come when they can put the money behind these non-binding resolutions….. and you better believe that we’ll be watching them …and calling them on those funding cuts loud and clear.
“America needs to know: cutting funds for our troops in harm’s way is not a remedy – it’s a ruse.”
He had more to say in his gripping closing statement:
“We POWs were still in Vietnam when Washington cut the funding for Vietnam. I know what it does to morale and mission success. Words can not fully describe the horrendous damage of the anti-American efforts against the war back home to the guys on the ground.”
“Our captors would blare nasty recordings over the loud speaker of Americans protesting back home…tales of Americans spitting on Vietnam veterans when they came home… and worse.
“We must never, ever let that happen again.
“The pain inflicted by your country’s indifference is tenfold that inflicted by your ruthless captors.
“Our troops – and their families – want, need and deserve the full support of the country – and the Congress. Moms and dads watching the news need to know that the Congress will not leave their sons and daughters in harm’s way without support.
[…]
“Debating non-binding resolutions aimed at earning political points only destroys morale, stymies success, and emboldens the enemy.
“The grim reality is that this House measure is the first step to cutting funding of the troops…Just ask John Murtha about his ‘slow-bleed’ plan that hamstrings our troops in harm’s way.
“Now it’s time to stand up for my friends who did not make it home – and those who fought and died in Iraq – so I can keep my promise that when we got home we would quit griping about the war and do something positive about it…and we must not allow this Congress to leave these troops like the Congress left us.
“Today, let my body serve as a brutal reminder that we must not repeat the mistakes of the past… instead learn from them.
“We must not cut funding for our troops. We must stick by them. We must support them all the way…To our troops we must remain…always faithful.
UNITED STATES TROOP DEPLOYMENTS IN BOSNIA (House of Representatives – December 13, 1995)
Mr. SAM JOHNSON of Texas:
Mr. Speaker, this is not about peace and war; it is about war. That is what is going on over there, and they are not going to stop fighting just because we go in there.
I wholeheartedly support withholding funds from President Clinton’s Bosnia mission. Although it is a drastic step and ties the President’s hands, I do not feel like we have any other choice. The President has tied our hands, gone against the wishes of the American people, and this is the last best way I know how to show my respect for our American servicemen and women. They are helpless, following orders. But we, we are in a position to stop this terrible mistake before it happens.
I know how those soldiers are feeling. I was in the military for 29 years, and I recognize that we used to say `Let’s go to war. Let’s go fight that war, it is the only one we have got.’ And that is what some of them are doing. However, I was told by Senator Hutchison that the guys down in Fort Hood did not say that. They said `Why are we going there? Can’t you stop us?’ She said she would try.
Thirty years ago when I was sent to Vietnam in a similar situation, Vietnam started out as a peace type mission, no defined goal, no exit strategy, no idea whose side we were on, and a created incident to gain support of the Congress. A peacekeeping mission? Come on. Does this not sound just like a carbon copy? I think it is.
What is going to happen when our guys get over there, and if the rules of engagement apply, and they get shot at, and we start shooting back, what are their people going to say when we start killing them, killing Bosnians, killing Croatians, killing Serbs? We will do it, and we will get chastised for it.
Let me just ask one more thing for the guys over here voting against it: What are you going to do when one of our women soldiers get captured?
These principled conservatives really get you coming and going don’t they?
It seems that the Republicans have forgotten the debate over troop funding in 1995. Too bad they are on record:
As thousands of U.S. soldiers packed for a winter in Bosnia, the Senate Wednesday debated President Clinton’s plan to send those troops to enforce peace between ancient enemies. House Republicans vented their opposition.
In a 108-64 vote Wednesday, House Republicans backed a measure that would cut off funding for the mission. Although House leaders gave the funding cutoff no chance of passing later Wednesday, the caucus action clearly reflected stiff opposition.
[…]
The measure drafted by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was given the best chance of winning Senate approval Wednesday -shortly before the president departs for Paris and the signing of the Bosnian peace agreement Thursday.
House backing appeared less certain, particularly after Republicans endorsed the measure by Rep. Bob Dornan of California, which would cut off money for the operation.
“I’m going to be in Tuzla on Christmas with the troops,” Dornan said, referring to the U.S. headquarters in Bosnia. “Please don’t question Bob Dornan’s support for the troops.”
[…]
The Senate debated three options: Cut off funding, a proposal given little chance of passing; oppose Clinton’s decision to send troops but support the soldiers themselves, expected to gain Republican support; or permit Clinton to send troops but impose restrictions on the mission, also considered likely to pass…”I think the American people are solidly behind our effort to stop the deployment, even though it’s almost too late now,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)
To be fair, the debate was all over the place, although the Dems were solidly behind Clinton. (The public was extremely skeptical that the mission could work or that the US would not take casualties. As it turned out, there were none, either there or in the Kosovo war that came later and which many Republicans also opposed.)
Never the less, it’s quite astonishing to see how casually Republicans discussed cutting off funding and how they offered legislation to do it — and all the other things they now purport are outrageous betrayals of the military. There were troops on the ground then too — Dornan was headed out to Tuszla to visit them. (They knew, of course, that they wouldn’t be baited by rightwing character assassins for doing so, so they do have freedom that Democrats don’t have.)
But, still, it was only twelve years ago that our big POW hero Sam Johnson held an entirely different position on defunding the troops than he has now. You’d think that someone would have noticed the inconsistency.
I have to wonder just how many times Republicans get to be totally wrong on national security before the American people (certainly the press) catch on to the fact that they have never had the faintest clue?
One of the things thats driven me nuts over the past few years is this reflexive portrayal of the GWOT as the most dangerous and challenging in world history. They have from the beginning behaved in a way that I think history will see as panicked and overwrought. As a nation we behaved with much more calm and deliberation when we were much more seriously threatened in the past. These last few years were not our finest.
Still they audaciously insist that the forty years of the cold war were a cakewalk compared to what we are dealing with now. Indeed, many of them also believe that WWII was nothing to the horrors we face today. (Chris Hayes wrote a great piece about this for In These Times some months back.) Bush still repeats his completely absurd line about how the oceans used to protect us and he’s just dumb enough to actually believe it. Paul Kennedy, a professor of history and the director of international security studies at Yale discusses this in today’s LA Times:
IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a “less complex time” and saying he was “almost nostalgic” for its return.
Gates should know. He himself is the quintessential Cold Warrior, having served nearly 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (facing off against the likes of Putin, who was for 17 years an agent in the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB). So we should take him seriously when he suggests that the problems of 20 or 30 years ago were in some ways more manageable than our current global predicament.
Nor is he alone. There is a palpable sense of nostalgia these days for the familiar contours of that bygone conflict, which has been replaced by a much more murky, elusive and confusing age.
The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world — centered on Washington and Moscow — and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it’s true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other’s biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.
I see this as being two different phenomena. The first is the unreconstructed cold warriors who are both rewriting history and adhering to their long standing hysterical position that the sky is always falling and the only thing to do is fight, invade, bomb or some other form of violence. They have never seen any use in diplomacy, international law, sophisticated containment strategies or anything else that requires finesse and subtlety. It’s always been about might makes right with these people. They were frustrated to no end by anyone who tried something different and that includes St. Ronnie who was roundly denounced for taking yes for an answer when the Soviets saw the light.
One would have thought that the outcome of the cold war would make them embarrassed to ever offer an opinion again, but they simply airbrushed the facts to suggest that Ronald Reagan’s welfare for middle aged white males (otherwise known as the 80’s defense buildup) somehow meant they had defeated the Soviets on the battlefield. But it wasn’t truly satisfying and they were looking for a proper boogeyman to hate from the moment Gorbachev and Ronnie made nice.
Then 9/11 happens when they are in charge and they have a chance to do it the way they always wanted to — by roaring and flailing about like a wounded Giant under the ridiculous assumption that this will scare the enemy so much he will just give up. They are facing this complicated threat with all the sophistication of early man trying to scare off a big predator.
The doughy pantload generation of wingnuts, on the other hand, thinks it’s some sort of game and they are the star players. They yearned to be “part” of something momentous — but from a distance, like you are when you are watching movies about war and heroism and identify with the main characters. No need to give up your Milk Duds just to enjoy a good bloodbath. They are writing an exciting plotline that has Islamic terrorism somehow so uniquely dangerous that it has surpassed WWII and the cold war and is more like something out of science fiction: “Star Wars” or “War of the Worlds.” To these people, naitonal security is cheap pulp fiction.
Of course it is all nonsense. After acknowledging that today’s world is complicated and difficult, yadda, yadda yadda, Kennedy continues:
So is it true? Was the Cold War era, on the whole, a safer era? Ponder the following counterarguments:
First, however tricky our relationships with Putin’s Russia and President Hu Jintao’s China are nowadays, the prospect of our entering a massive and mutually cataclysmic conflict with either nation are vastly reduced.
We seem to have forgotten that our right-wing hawks argued passionately for “nuking” communist China during the Korean War and again during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954. We also have apparently forgotten — although newly released archival evidence overwhelmingly confirms this — how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Likewise, we’ve forgotten the shock of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which prompted then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to ask, “Is this the new Sarajevo?” a reference to the outbreak of World War I. And who still remembers 1984-85, when we were riveted by Jonathan Schell’s argument in the New Yorker that even a few nuclear explosions would trigger such dust storms as to produce a “nuclear winter”?
Those were really scary times, and much more dangerous than our present circumstance because the potential damage that could be inflicted during an East-West conflagration was far, far greater than anything that Al Qaeda can do to us now. No one has the exact totals, but we probably had 20,000 missiles pointed at each other, often on high alert. And the threat of an accidental discharge was high.
None of today’s college-age students were born in 1945, 1979 or maybe even 1984. None lived with those triangular signs proclaiming their schools to be nuclear bomb shelters.
To recapture those frightening atmospherics these days, university professors must resort to showing Cold War movies: “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Fail Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Five Days in May,” “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” Students look rather dumbfounded when told that we came close, on several occasions, to World War III.
Yet what if, for example, Josef Stalin had prevented American and British supply aircraft from flying into Berlin in 1948-49? Phew! The years 1945 to, say, 1990 were horrible on other accounts. China’s Mao Tse-tung’s ghastly Great Leap Forward led to as many as 30 million deaths, the greatest loss of life since the Black Death. The Soviet Union was incarcerating tens of thousands of its citizens in the gulags, as were most of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. The Indo-Pakistan wars, and the repeated conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, produced enormous casualties, but nothing like the numbers that were being slaughtered in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, Vietnam and Cambodia. Most of the nations of the world were “un-free.”
It is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would not visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht’s East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.
Let us not, then, wax too nostalgic about the good old days of the Cold War. Today’s global challenges, from Iraq to Darfur to climate change, are indeed grave and cry out for solutions.
But humankind as a whole is a lot more prosperous, a great deal more free and democratic and a considerable way further from nuclear obliteration than we were in Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy’s time. We should drink to that.
No thanks to the rabid right which has been lobbying for a nuclear meltdown (and global domination, let’s face it) since the end of WWII. It is a worldview that has almost nothing to do with actual events or facts on the ground. It reached its zenith with Bush, but they will never go away. They are fearful, insecure people whose temperament and ideology create a need for them to believe that they are warrior heroes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They are the last people on earth who should be leading a powerful nation in a time of great challenge. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.
Update: Tangentially related is this column by David Brooks today in which he says, “Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.” My goodness, that sounds an awful lot like and endorsement of totalitarianism, don’t you think? (Read this by Arthur Silber, to see Brooks revealed as the cramped, anti-enlightenment fraud he is.)
This, again, relates more to psychology than ideology. These are people who are apparently motivated by a rather simple desire to dominate. Gone now are the lovely paeans to democracy and freedom and liberty and even private enterprise. Within three short years we are back to a Hobbesian hellhole where the wogs need a strong hand. Man, you’d think they’d get whiplash.
On a political level, this all means that it’s silly to believe that anything they say or do is sincere. We have seen the Bush administration cast aside virtually every tenet of modern conservatism and yet the base remains devoted believers in the Party. Indeed, they are getting ready to vote for one of three other world class conservative hypocrites, knowing full well that they are liars, cheats and panderers. So let’s cut the crap about them ever having strong principles. It’s all about kicking ass and taking names with these people. All other aspects of the conservative “philosophy” clearly mean nothing to them.
The ideal candidate for president, as I see it, would come from a platform of remediation; it would be a person who realizes that America is deeply flawed, and who understands the need to usher in an era of remedial action, to study where America went off the tracks; it would be someone who sees how corporations and religion have violated the public sphere to the detriment of the founding ideals, and how those two public corruptions, money and religion, have fostered the imperialism that put America, once again, in an unnecessary war.
I’m not for one minute suggesting that a remediation platform will garner votes. If a candidate wants votes, they will be out peddling a different audacity, one called hope. Hope will attract the feeble-minded voter who wants to feel good today and can’t imagine that America might not be “great.” Hope is just the snake oil these folks need.
The audacity of remediation, on the other hand, begins with the understanding that America has some medicine to take before it can get better. The medicine is making changes to the core of how society operates, to remove money as the main driver of its politics, and to restore to society the ideals of justice and humanity.
The platform:
1. The ideal candidate should be able to differentiate between illusory concepts such as hope, and the important duties we have to justice and humanity. Blog-friend Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez differentiated it nicely in an inspiring post today:
If there is hope for the future of mankind, it does not lie in our media, it does not lie in our laws, it does not lie in our war-makers, and it does not lie in the endless verbal and mental diarrhea that we call “News.” Perhaps it lies in remembering that our first duty is to mankind; to humanity. Perhaps it lies in remembering that an honest person who remains neutral is not an honest person at all, but an accomplice to every crime done in their name. Perhaps it lies in telling the truth.
2. The ideal candidate would acknowledge that 700,000 people have been killed and maimed in an illegal war, and that justice and humanity demands the impeachment of those responsible. From digby’s post yesterday, Lincoln spoke of the gravity of violating the constitution, and spoke of our duty with regard to impeachment:
Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
3. The ideal candidate would push to re-establish the public interest aspect of the corporation, and to restore the balance of power between labor and capital; the candidate would support Fair Trade standards. The candidate would push to remove all private money from election campaigns.
Joe Vecchio provides this quotation by Theodore Roosevelt:
At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of free men to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. -Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism, 1910
Another learned man, Eisenhower, had a similar recognition:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
4. The ideal candidate will protect religion as private worship, but will support restrictions on it as a public spectacle. The candidate will understand the impact of public charlatans upon the people, particularly when using mass media to manipulate mass minds. The candidate will understand what Jefferson meant when he said:
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Those are the words inscribed under the dome of the Jefferson memorial.
The ideal candidate will push for the resurrection of secularism (yes, pun intended) promoted by humanism scholar Susan Jacoby:
Those who cherish secular values have too often allowed conservatives to frame public policy debates as conflicts between “value-free” secularists and religious representatives of supposedly unchanging moral principles. But secularists are not value-free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments. No one in public life today upholds secularism and humanism in the uncompromising terms used by Ingersoll more than 125 years ago.
Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. Secularism has no ‘castles in Spain.’ It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end is to make this world better every day — to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes.
These values belong at the center, not in the margins, of the public square. It is past time to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation’s historical memory and vision of the future.
Remediation.UPDATED to replace bogus Lincoln quote with a fitting one by T. Roosevelt. (h/tJoe Vecchio)
Every time I see our illustrious VP’s mug on the tube or hear mention of Halliburton, I always flash on my favorite scene in Warren Beatty’s Reds. Early in the film, we are first introduced to the story’s protagonist, journalist/activist/Communist John Reed (Beatty), as he attends a meeting of the Liberal Club, where the discussion has turned to America’s involvement in the current war (WWI). Reed, who has just returned from reporting on the European Front, is asked what he thinks the conflict is “about”. Reed stands up, faces the group, mumbles one word, then sits back down. The word is: “Profits”. The crystalline brevity of that answer really blew my (then) twenty-something mind back in 1981.
Indeed, it is a testament to Beatty’s sense of conviction and legendary powers of persuasion (or, as Tom Hanks put it so succinctly at the recent Golden Globe Awards, “Balls”) that he was able to convince a major Hollywood studio to back a 3 ½ hour epic about a relatively obscure American Communist (who is buried in the Kremlin!).
As we know now, of course, the film turned out to be a critical success, and garnered a dozen Oscar noms (it won three, including Best Director). Almost unbelievably, it was not released on DVD until late 2006. If you haven’t seen it in a while or (gasp!) have never seen it-you owe yourself a screening (particularly if you are a history buff).
Diane Keaton turns in one of her best performances as Reed’s lover, writer and feminist Louise Bryant. Maureen Stapleton (who we sadly lost last year) certainly earned her Best Supporting Actress trophy with a memorable portrayal of activist Emma Goldman. Jack Nicholson’s take on the complex, mercurial playwright, Eugene O’Neill is a wonder to behold. And Beatty deserves special kudos for assembling an amazing group of surviving real-life participants, whose anecdotal recollections are seamlessly interwoven throughout, like a Greek Chorus of living history. No one makes ‘em like this anymore.
If you really want to make a night of it, a certain rousing anthem that figures prominently in the “Reds” soundtrack is the sole spotlight of another recent DVD release. Blending archival footage with thoughtful commentary, The Internationale takes a look at the origins and continuing historical impact of its namesake, from its 19th century roots in the French Commune movement to Tiananmen Square and beyond, packed into a breezy 30 minutes. Arguably one of the most idealized (and frequently misinterpreted) rallying songs ever composed (just the melody alone gives me goose bumps), the tune has been embraced by Socialists, Marxists, anarchists, anti-Fascists, workers and labor activists alike over the years, transcending nationalist and language barriers. The most interesting aspect the film examines concerns the bad rap the song received after it was “officially” adapted by the oppressive, post-revolutionary Soviet regime. Pete Seeger (a perfect choice, no?) emcees the proceedings, with support from historians, musicologists, and multi-national participants (veteran and current) in some of the aforementioned movements. British punk agitprop troubadour extraordinaire Billy Bragg also makes a brief appearance. C’mon everybody (You know the words!)
that they were being led around by a cabal of rightwing hit men from very early on. They simply refused to see the story for what it was and instead validated their erroneous reporting with a continuous narrative stream of unproven implications that fed the toxic political environment — and that fed them in return.
. Early in the film, we are first introduced to the story’s protagonist, journalist/activist/Communist John Reed (Beatty), as he attends a meeting of the Liberal Club, where the discussion has turned to America’s involvement in the current war (WWI). Reed, who has just returned from reporting on the European Front, is asked what he thinks the conflict is “about”. Reed stands up, faces the group, mumbles one word, then sits back down. The word is: “Profits”. The crystalline brevity of that answer really blew my (then) twenty-something mind back in 1981.
takes a look at the origins and continuing historical impact of its namesake, from its 19th century roots in the French Commune movement to Tiananmen Square and beyond, packed into a breezy 30 minutes. Arguably one of the most idealized (and frequently misinterpreted) rallying songs ever composed (just the melody alone gives me goose bumps), the tune has been embraced by Socialists, Marxists, anarchists, anti-Fascists, workers and labor activists alike over the years, transcending nationalist and language barriers. The most interesting aspect the film examines concerns the bad rap the song received after it was “officially” adapted by the oppressive, post-revolutionary Soviet regime. Pete Seeger (a perfect choice, no?) emcees the proceedings, with support from historians, musicologists, and multi-national participants (veteran and current) in some of the aforementioned movements. British punk agitprop troubadour extraordinaire Billy Bragg also makes a brief appearance. C’mon everybody (You know the words!)
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(1956), 
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