Ready to shut down Bill O'Reilly's Harassment Machine? Think Progress has responded to O'Reilly's ambush of blogger Amanda Terkel by launching a campaign demanding accountability from O'Reilly's corporate advertisers. This certainly wasn't O'Reilly's first journalistic ambush; in fact, Think Progress counts 40 instances in which O'Reilly has used his henchmen producers to go after everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Moyers to our own Robert Greenwald.
Going after O'Reilly through his corporate sponsors seems like a fitting punitive measure, considering O'Reilly's manic obsession with his imaginary enemy NBC and their parent company GE. O'Reilly even managed to use the Terkel ambush to continue his assault on his network nemesis, which was particularly strange since Terkel has nothing to do with NBC whatsoever. (In fact, as Terkel told Keith Olbermann, she derived her initial report from a News Hounds post on O'Reilly's despicable comments regarding the rape of Jennifer Moore.) It was even odder when O'Reilly tried desperately to make the connection between Terkel, NBC, GE, and Iran in less than one minute!
The bottom line is O'Reilly's thuggish brand of gotcha journalism has got to end, and you can hold O'Reilly to a higher standard by dropping his corporate sponsors a quick note telling them to shut down the O'Reilly Harassment Machine.
We've been tightly-and rightly-focused on the stimulus and the bailout of late. But if Obama's economic moves, reflecting his economic team ("no one could have foreseen...") have been disappointing tilted towards the conventional stupidity that got us into this mess in the first place, that's not the only realm in which this pattern holds true, as was signaled most blatantly by his retention of Bush's Secretary of Defense, Iran/Contra second-string player Robert Gates.
It took less than a week for Obama to start bombing civilians, just like his predecessor. Thankfully, for small favors, Bill Moyers, as LBJ's one-time press secretary, has seen this movie before, up close and personal, and he put on one helluva segment last night directly taking on this ominous step into darkness. His guests included Marilyn Young, whose book, Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 is, for my money, the best single overview of the war ever written, and Pierre Sprey, one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids" who went on to help found the military reform movement in the last 1970s, and between the two of them they left little doubt of just how disastrous a course of action Obama appears to have set out on.
PLEASE NOTE: This video essay contains images of the Israeli and Palestinian casualties - including children - in Gaza as well as the Pulitzer prize-winning photo of the nude Vietnamese girl running from napalm bombing. Some viewers may find the images disturbing, but they are in context and germane to the subject matter.
Last night, the first segment on Bill Moyers Journal dealt with rightwing hate radio, using the late July shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Church as the entry point. It was an unusually raw and unvarnished look at what hate radio does--examining specific examples: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh--and yet, there were some significant critical avenues that were left unexplored. Still, the media has been so neglectful of this for so long, it was heartening to see this virulent cultivation of mass hatred finally get a spotlight thrown on it. Rick Karr was the correspondent reporting the story. He began reporting like this:
RICK KARR: On a steamy Sunday morning in July a man armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead, another mortally wounded, and six injured.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.
RICK KARR: Members of the congregation wrestled a fifty-eight-year-old, unemployed truck driver named Jim David Adkisson to the floor and held him until police came. At first it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence until a police news conference the next day.
POLICE CHIEF STERLING OWEN: It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.
Last night, on Bill Moyers Journal, one of the topics was an amazing new book, Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. It's about the way in which virtual slavery was reimposed on the Southern black population, and lasted well into the lifetime of people still alive today.
This involved much, much more than legal segregation under Plessy, as Moyers describes, and Blackmon explains below. This is incredibly important not only in its own right, but because of the light it throws onto the strikingly similar way that drug laws and other punitive measures have been used in the last several decades to largely crush the promise of the Civil Rights movement for millions of poverty-struck black Americans, people who are, themselves, the descendents of generations who had their freedom stolen from them a second time after supposedly being freed by the Civil war.
Moyers begins:
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
....
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
(Another diary about Bill Moyers last night. There's a message here: watch his show! Failing that, the full transcript is here.)
The Republican Party is not the enemy this November. They are a pathetic wreck. Hegemony is the enemy, and the Republican Party's recent inability to enforce hegemony has been superbly compensated for by the corporate media.
Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. It means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.
Or, as I like to put it, "Hegemony is ideology in common sense drag."
A key aspect of Gramsci's theory is that various different cultural institutions each fulfills their own function, often in ways that purportedly have nothing to do with one another-and yet they are actually functioning like various different units in an army-or nowadays an integrated fighting force, involving everything from infantry to satellites in space.
The media is an excellent example of this. In the 1990s, the media led the charge to depose Bill Clinton. As Gene Lyons meticulously documented in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post persistently, repeatedly, and egregiously misreported virtually every major aspect of the so-called "Whitewater scandal." When that failed, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in its place, dozens of leading newspapers editorialized that Clinton should resign. Sixty percent of the American people disagreed, but they couldn't get a word in edgewise-which is where, when and how MoveOn.org was founded.
In contrast, George W. Bush has not merely subverted the most central aspects of our constitutional order with his dictatorial theories of unchecked executive power, he has shredded the Magna Charta as well as the Constitution, and yet the media persists in lying that only the "loonie left" thinks that there's anything amiss.
That's hegemony for you. And they do it, in large part, by following the supposedly "nuetral" rules of professional journalism. Although he makes no mention of Gramsci, Jeremy Iggers does a masterful job of showing that journalism ethics itself is the problem here in his 1998 classic, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest. So long as people think that the trouble with journalism is Jason Blair, not Judith Miller and her editors and publisher, then Houston, we have a problem. (Iggers, writing in the 1990s uses early Reagan-era examples, but the comparative misdeeds are eerily similar.)
On Bill Moyers Journal last night, Moyers played a clip of John F. Kennedy. He did it as a way of talking about how far-and how surprisingly we've come to have a black presidential nominee. But I noticed something different. See if you can spot it:
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
I never thought we'd see this in my lifetime. When I was growing up in the segregated south the Democratic Party was the bastion of white male supremacy. The inequality of the races was a given, God-ordained and immutable. Women were okay, as long as they kept to their place. And now look what's happened. A black man and a white woman battled each other to the wire for the nomination by a party that turned itself upside down, inside out, and around in my lifetime. Barack Obama was born the year John F. Kennedy took the oath of office as President of the United States.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy do solemnly swear. . .
BILL MOYERS: At his inauguration, I stood in the clear, cold weather and felt a shiver, not from the weather, but from the hint of things to come. Two years later, Obama was a toddler, and I was 27, and there was Kennedy on television proposing a civil rights bill to end the awful discrimination enforced on black people throughout America's history. It was 45 years ago next week - June 11, 1963 - and the President asked, "Are we to say to the world - and much more importantly to each other - that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race, except with respect to Negroes."
JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed. . .
BILL MOYERS: Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated as Congress was still battling over his civil rights bill and Lyndon Johnson was thrust into the White House. I went with him and saw Johnson take up the cause. Martin Luther King marched, and Lyndon Johnson maneuvered, and on the 2nd of July in 1964 the President signed the Civil Rights Act into law. The fight wasn't over; he knew it. The President told me, "I think we've just handed the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life - and yours." Sure enough, the backlash was so bitter, and the Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln, so exploited it, that I figured this country would have a serious woman candidate for President long before any person of African descent. As the choice came down this year to one or the other, is one of those shifts that democracy and history take when we least suspect it.
BARACK OBAMA: Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
Note: I have to apologize for late and light posting this weekend. I've had a series of calamaties, leaving me, at one point with no car, no computer, and--seemingly, at least--no electricity. My prep work for several diaries is on a copmuter I'm just about to take to the shop, and a good 8 hours of lost time means, well, like I said, light posting this weekend. But I did save the beginnings of this in draft form just before my electricity went off around 3 AM, and I've just whipped together the rest...
Reverend Jeremiah Wright appeared on Bill Moyers Journal (video and transcript), and proved yet again-as if we needed it-how utterly disconnected from reality our politics has become. I've defended Reverent Wright on this website before, but what was fundamentally refreshing about Wright's appearance with Bill Moyers was how far beyond all that he was, how utterly undefensive, how open, and how centered he was.
In fact, he was so centered, so equinanimous-which is not to say self-satisfied or smug-that at first I was disappointed. I had fully intended to blog about his appearance, but it was all so normal that it seemed there was nothing to blog about at first: "News Flash! Jeremiah Wright appears on Bill Moyers-He does not have horns!" But, of course, that's the point. We've become so accustomed to phony-controversy, junk-food tv that plain, old-fashioned honest truth-telling bores us, or at least makes it difficult to find a place to engage.
In retrospect, though, here's an excellent place to start, because it shows Wright recalling an incident, which was, in one sense, a typical reminder that blacks are constantly under suspicion. Yet Wright did not tell the story to make that point, nor did he recall it in bitterness. He was, in fact, a bit bemused by it. And yet, it was there. And that simply fact of witnessing to what is so-ultimately that has been Wright's great sin in the eyes of the Versailles media. He has not become complicit in his own brainwashing, and that is something that Versailles simply cannot forgive:
BILL MOYERS: He served six years in the military: two as a marine, and four in the Navy as a cardiopulmonary technician. That's where our paths crossed for the only time.
That's Jeremiah Wright, behind the I.V. pole, monitoring President Lyndon Johnson's heart as he was recovering from gall bladder surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital. And right behind him is a very young me. I was the President's Press Secretary.
REVEREND WRIGHT: As you know, the President had to be operated on and out of surgery by 9:00 when the stock market opened. And talking and wide awake. So, we scrubbed in, like, 3:00 in the morning.
When he awakened, unlike other patients, you did not move him to recovery. You didn't move him to ICU. They kept him right there for security reasons. Secret Service all around, there was secret service in the whole operating suite and nobody else allowed in the operating suite except Secret Service.
So, after about an hour and a half, I went to get some coffee. And as I was coming back from the lounge where the coffee was, going back to monitor, I saw the guys talkin' into their wristwatches and I was nodding, speaking to them. So, I turn to go into the room to check the pace. And secret service guys standing there grabbed me, knocked the coffee outta my hand, burned me with the hot coffee, twisted my arm up behind my neck and screams into his phone, "I got him." And I was, "Got him?" And I'm screamin' in pain. And my assistant comes running out of the booth. He sees me jacked up and he starts laughing. I said, "Joe, don't laugh. Tell him who I am." And he said, "He's been here all morning."
BILL MOYERS: Standing above the President.
REVEREND WRIGHT: Guy looked at me, pulled my mask up over face, "Oh, yeah." And that was it.
But, of course, what Reverend Wright can afford to be bemused by is but the tip of the iceberg that can casually crush a young child in his congregation. And so he is not complacent when it comes to saving the lives of those entrusted to his care. This makes him even more unforgivable....
Yesterday, both Amy Goodman (Democray Now!) and Bill Moyers had David Cay Johnston on to talk about his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill). This is a book about Reagan's real legacy--or one of them, anyway. (9/11, obviously, was another.) And while I would disagree with Obama's characterization that Reagan was really the prime mover involved, he was most definitely the front man, which is why it is impossible for many high-information activists to go quietly with the idea of sweeping it all under the rug.
From Democracy Now!:
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was struck, listening to the program from Kenya [previous segement], where they talked about the president and his power to give money to people, give land, and that's why many people identify with it. We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs-a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden-that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I was struck-you have numerous chapters in the book on the various aspects of this transfer, but I was especially struck by your material on the New York Yankees and Steinbrenner and Joyce Hogi, who you mention in the book, who I know well, and this whole issue of sports teams across America and how the public is subsidizing them. Could you elaborate on that part of it?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Sure. George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.
That last part is the real killer--Guiliani gave the Yankees and the Mets $50 million of taxpayer money to lobby against the taxpayer's own public interest.
I want to address a fundamental misunderstanding that seems to be directed at just about everyone here at Open Left-the notion that just because we frequently critricize Obama, we therefore hate him. This is, quite frankly, such an absurd notion on its face that I've been remise in not addressing it sooner. So let me be as clear as possible: To criticize a politician is not necessarily to attack him. Indeed, it is simply the most basic duty of a citizen, and a necessary precondition for the politician being criticized to reach their full potential.
Our leaders are not kings, indeed, they are not even our leaders. They are followers of the true leaders-those who recognize injustice and refuse to accept it.
Left: Civil Rights marchers paid the price of freedom in Selma, Alabama a week before LBJ took up their cause and introduced the Voting Rights Act, using their rallying cry, "We Shall Overcome." Congressman John Lewis was among those beaten.
Officeholders, on the other hand, may not be true leaders, but they are (1) public servants and (2) official leaders. On both counts, listening and responding to public criticism is, quite simply, an integral part of the job they've taken on. Bad things happen when they forget this-but worse things happen when the people themselves forget this. And that's what we seem to be in danger of, when Obama supporters start treating him like a man who can do no wrong, a man that none of us should criticize. We rightly criticize coservatives for taking this same attitude toward palapable fools, but the atttitude itself is fust as flawed when directed toward far superior men.
And that's where Lynodon Johnson comes it. You see, the Vietnam War was such a terrible event in our history, such a long, drawn-out, bloody crime, that it's difficult for most people to remember all the other things that Lyndon Johnson did-the things that, unlike the Vietnam War, he actually believed in. In order to really understand how bad the Vietnam War was, morally and political for our nation, you have to appreciate how good Lyndon Johnson really was. He was, in terms of his domestic record, the second greatest President of the 20th Century-second only to FDR. Part of his greatness was born of his own intentions, and part of it came from his openness to others.
Black conservative Shelby Steele appeared on Bill Moyers Journal last night. Moyers, though demonized by the right like everyone to the left of Attila the Hun, has a long history of engaging with various conservatives, and treating them with far more dignity and intellectual respect then they deserve. It's one of the ways in which liberals repeatedly get themselves into trouble, and last night was no exception.
Steele's main conceit of the night was his schema of bargainers vs. challengers-a schema that makes perfect sense within the limited schema of conservative thought, in which there is no such thing as social responsibility, only "personal responsibility," which always seems to be deployed downward: like Leona Helmsly famously said about taxes, it's for "little people." All of this is to say that there's some truth in what Steele has to say-but it's not quite the truth he imagines it to be.
SHELBY STEELE: .... I think that the black community in general has been very conflicted about Barack Obama. Precisely because he's been so successful among whites. And that makes black people nervous.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. You say in here, white people like Barack Obama a little too much for the comfort of many blacks.
SHELBY STEELE: Yes. Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SHELBY STEELE: Well, the black American identity, certainly black American politics are grounded in what I call challenging. It's basically, they look at white America and say we're going to presume that you're a racist until you prove otherwise. The whole concept is you keep whites on the hook. You keep the leverage. You keep the pressure. Here's a guy who's what I call a bargainer who's giving whites the benefit of the doubt.
I work with a young black man. He's our managing editor. Like all young black men, he knows what you do when the police pull you over. "Assume the position." It's so routine, most blacks don't even bother talking to whites about it. But, it does give folks a good reason to presume that white America as a whole is still racist. Steele, like all conservatives, engages in a blurring strategy between the individual and the group. The purpose of the post is to engage in a bit of strategic unblurring.
The interview continues:
BILL MOYERS: Give me a simple definition of what you call a bargainer. And a simple definition of what you call a challenger.
SHELBY STEELE: A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to rub the shame of American history in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Whites then respond with enormous gratitude. And bargainers are usually extremely popular people. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier back in the Sixties and so forth. Because they give whites this benefit of the doubt. That you can be with these people and not feel that you're going to be charged with racism at any instant. And so they tend to be very successful, very popular.
Challengers on the other hand say, I presume that you, this institution, this society, is racist until it proves otherwise by giving me some concrete form of racial preference.
BILL MOYERS: Affirmative action.
SHELBY STEELE: Affirmative action. Diversity programs. Opportunities of one kind or another. And so, there is a much more concrete bargaining on the case of challengers. And you go into any American institution today and they're all used to dealing with challengers. They all have a whole system of things that they can give to challengers, who then will offer absolution.
[Snarky aside: Ay, there's the rub: "there is a much more concrete bargaining on the case of challengers." Challegers aren't cheap! They want some quid with their pro quo. There's gotta be a cheaper way. America loves them some cheap. No new taxes! Let the children pay!]
