In the past fifty years, the Civil Rights movement has changed America more than any other social movement. The efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King and others profoundly altered America's treatment of its minorities, in a way which represents one of its most powerful domestic accomplishments over the past century.
Yet one aspect of the Civil Rights movement has always been neglected in the conventional history of the movement. This was its connection to the Cold War. For America to win the Cold War, Civil Rights was a necessity. Continuing domestic discrimination against non-white minorities would make it impossible to win over the newly-free Third World.
I was out of action here when the latest WikiLeaks document dump story broke, covering an international convention of environmental justice activists who work on freight transportation issues. Given the size & copmplexity of the story and the speed with which things move online, at first I was a bit perplexed about what to say. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to start with Democracy Now!'s preview interview with Daniel Ellsberg.
The interview made a number of crucial points, all of which combined to underscore the degree to which Obama is following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, rather than, say, Dr. Martin Luther King. Among other things, this interview established the moral framework for what WikiLeaks and its source[s] are doing and why:
DANIEL ELLSBERG: I've faced that kind of risk myself forty years ago, and it always seemed worthwhile to me to be willing to risk one's life in prison, even, to help shorten a war, like Afghanistan or Iraq. That's what we were suffering then in Vietnam. And it was really a secrecy-it's the secrecy, the wrongful secrecy, of information like this that got us into Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq, or has kept the war going in Afghanistan. So if there's any chance of shortening that, it's certainly worth a person's life.
It dealt with government scare tactics:
DANIEL ELLSBERG: They're crying alarm over this, as they always do in the case of every case of a leak. Certainly they did with the Pentagon Papers. In fact, in that case, they said that the damage to national security was so great that they had to stop the presses for the first time in our history, that the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, having heard testimony on that. And the seventeen-in fact, nineteen newspapers, altogether, decided otherwise and did print the papers, in what amounted to civil disobedience against the warnings of the attorney general. In no case was there any harm discovered in that case. And as for the releases in July, with all the warnings we heard passed on by the media, quite uncritically, no damage has been reported. So I think that one should take their warnings now with a lot of salt.
And went even further by turning the government's charges back on themselves.
I was so wrong. I thought Obama was JFK-like, long on charisma, but short on heavy lifting. Turns out, he was more like Nixon, the man JFK beat, but that's only become obvious in adversity. Richard Nixon, OTOH, was like that all along. He just loved to blame everybody except himself. It's how he got elected--by finger-pointing at Communists real & imagined--and it's how he dealt with defeat as well:
Of course, in Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady : Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950, Greg Mitchell explains quite clearly how Nixon's rise to power was fueled by a sweetheart relationship with the press, highlighted by the LA Times chief political reporter, managing editor and editorial page editor (yes, he wore all three hats at once), Kyle Palmer, who also functioned as Nixon's de facto campaign manager. Nixon's rage at the press in 1962 reflected his loss of privileged treatment that he had previously taken for granted throughout his period on the national stage. Now it seems clear that--for much more complicated reasons--Obama has lost his magic as well, and he, too, is lashing out at others.
"[I]f people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."
Both Daou and Hamsher's diaries were linked to in Quick Hits, and both had excellent things to say. Hamsher's was particularly devastating, as she recalled the parade of Obama's presidential leadership:
Consider:
October 23, 2009, Creigh Deeds - Ten days before the general election, from the Washington Post:
Top Democrats seek to shield Obama in case of election loss....
January 17, 2009: Martha Coakley - Two days before the Massachusetts election, from Ed Henry, CNN:
Sources: Obama advisers believe Coakley will lose....
May 18, 2010: Arlen Specter - the night before the Pennsylvania election, ABC News:
White House distances Obama from Specter....
June 7, 2010 - 1 day before the Arkansas election, Sam Stein in the Huffington Post:
Obama Disengages From Race As Blanche Lincoln Slips In Polls....
I can tell you without fear of contradiction that in the last days of a tight race, or even a not-tight race, short of the FBI finding a stash of kiddie porn on your laptop there is nothing worse than the headline-grabbing news that the head of your party, the President of the United States, thinks you are a shitty candidate and his aides are privately saying you are going to lose.
It could easily shave 5 points off your total and mean the margin of defeat. It threatens to instantly suppress all those difficult-to-motivate 2008 "surge" voters the Democrats have been chasing, and which Obama's support was supposed to deliver....
There is no internal consistency to the narrative that the "professional left" is suppressing turnout by criticizing Obama, but Obama is not suppressing turnout when he scolds the voters who aren't clapping loudly enough for his achievements. But few in the professional punditocracy find their way to that obvious conclusion.
This isn't about GOTV. It's about setting up a fall guy for November. The headline should really read:
Obama Distances Himself From Democratic Voters
Democratic voters are all Martha Coakley now. And if shielding Obama from blame makes matters worse for those who are actually running in November? Well, that's the price of protecting the President.
The record Hampsher cites is clear and undeniable. The only question left is "Why?"
I wanted to write about this two weeks ago,when it broke. But it's not like it's any less true two weeks later. AP has the lowdown on just what a miserable failure the war on drugs has been, and it starts like this:
AP IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals
MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writer 9:02 PM PDT, May 13, 2010
MEXICO CITY (AP) - After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.
"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."
This week President Obama promised to "reduce drug use and the great damage it causes" with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.
Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.
Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for the spending to match the rhetoric.
"Nothing happens overnight," he said. "We've never worked the drug problem holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction."
The war on drugs started with Nixon, they note:
In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.
"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive."
His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation.
But most significantly, AP went digging in the weeds to see where drug war money was spent, and found that we spent lots of money of stuff that just didn't work:
One thing I've recently observed is the degree to which America self-corrects when selecting its leaders. It's very interesting to compare successive presidents; the new president nearly always lacks the weakness the previous president had. Though of course he comes with his own flaws.
I'll start with Jimmy Carter. Carter was known for being honest and a bit naive, in stark contrast to his predecessor Richard Nixon.
Carter, however, had a negative reputation for being an obsessive micromanager. He was replaced by Ronald Reagan - who was famous for leaving the details (and sometimes the whole plan itself) to his aides.
Reagan and the elder Bush were criticized as too old for the job. So along came Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the youngest presidential team in history, as the next presidential group.
Of course, Bill Clinton is remembered for his sexual indiscretion and the Monica Lewinsky affair. His replacement - George W. Bush - was widely characterized as morally upright and religious.
He was also characterized as stupid. Which is a criticism nobody would level at his successor Barack Obama - one of the most intellectual persons who has ever graced the high office.
The problem of tossing around the notion of Reagan winning a realigning election popped up again this week in the discussion thread of Chris's Monday diary, "Wall Street Bailout Thwarting Democratic Realignment", and so I decided it was time to take another solid whack at it, something to bookmark, perhaps. Which is why I'm going to give you some picture first, and then explain what they mean.
First, here's Reagan's election in 1980, along with averages of Democratic House share for 6 elections before that, and six elections from 1980 on. You will note that there is very little difference between the averages.
Next, here's the same thing, with Nixon's election in 1968--the de-aligning election that kicked off the Sixth Party System, the only party system in which divided government is the rule, not the exception. You will note that again there is very little difference between the averages:
Finally, here's an example of what a true realigning election looks like--in fact, the weakest example of one using this particular tool. The difference between averages is just over eleven points (for other realigning elections it's roughly 20-25 points):
That's step one in the demonstration to be explained below, showing quite clearly that Reagan did not win a realigning election.
Students at Stanford stood still as they listened to former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice speak. As the scholars pondered the words of the prominent woman who presented her case for waterboarding, many mused; "Is it Richard Nixon, or Condoleezza Rice? Which person thinks a President is above the law?" One might wonder. Those who viewed a video taped classroom conversation with Secretary Rice, today express astonishment as well. In her defense for actions she took to advocate for this extreme interrogation techniques Condoleezza Rice both blamed her former boss, George W. Bush and justified his decision.
"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
"Location! Location! Location!" The three most important things in real estate.
And for quality journalism, it's "Context! Context! Context!"
But you'd never know it, for the simple reason that we don't have good journalism. We have the other kind.
Case in point: the recently released tapes of LBJ talking about Nixon's treason in sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks in October and early November of 1968, so he could win the election. AP ran a story on it, and it's just about all the media notice there was. Context has it none.
Oh, sure, it was possible to pick up coverage from the NY Times or Washington Post--they both ran the AP piece themselves. There was a time when they'd be embarrassed to do such a thing. But after the last two or three decades they are utterly beyond embarrassment. Actual journalist Robert Parry, who broke the first story about the Iran/Contra scandal six months before the rest of the DC press corps caught on (working for AP at the time), wrote this about AP's story:
In line with how the mainstream U.S. press corps has treated this controversy for decades, the AP article ignores the substantial body of evidence that Nixon and his presidential campaign did sabotage the peace talks, out of concern that a last-minute agreement would hurt Nixon and help his rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
But instead of citing any of this evidence--which first surfaced in Symour Hersh's Kissinger biography, The Price of Power, in 1983--AP makes it seem like LBJ was just ranting against a political enemy, in a baseless Nixonian manner.
So, John McCain has taken to calling Barack Obama a "socialist". Why? Because Obama wants to "redistribute" the wealth. Of course, every time you tax someone, you redistribute wealth. And every time that government spends some money that benefits someone, that, too, redistributes wealth. By McCain's criteria, every government that ever existed in human history was "socialist." You might think that's sort of a whacked-out extremist position, somewhere two football fields to the right of the John Birch Society. And you'd be right. Because by John McCain's standards, I'd like to introduce you to four of the most prominent members of the Republican Socialists of America:
Politicians lie. Heck, pretty much everyone lies. But we're particularly aware that politicians lie. Still just because two people, or two politicians lie, that doesn't mean they lie for the same reasons or in the same ways.
Some people lie reluctanctly, as a sort of last resort, when they feel they have no other option. Others lie quite freely, saying whatever comes to mind, whether true or not. Some people merely want to please, they lie to make others feel good, and then they lie some more, to keep their lies from being discovered. Some lie out of embarrassment, to avoid feeling badly themselves. Some lie quite strategically, to achieve very specific goals. And some simply lie tactically, to get themselves out of lifes little jams--or into them, as the case may be.
In the current presidential campaign, the GOP ticket gives us quite a pair of liars, with very different profiles. But before looking at them specifically, it can help if we survey some other recent examples, in order to get ourselves oriented. So let us begin with Richard Nixon, aka "Tricky Dick," and work our way forward from there. I'm not arguing that any of these are pure examples. Rather, each of them is best understood in terms of a different landscape of lies.
As ABC is set to run a puff-piece celebrity interview with Sarah Palin, I would hit her hard ahead of time, if I were running Obama's campaign. The hard hit would go directly at the GOP's illusion of change, and serve to underscore how totally bogus the ABC interview will be.
How would I go about it? Simple: I'd link her to Richard Nixon, via Dick Cheney and GW Bush. The script I'd use is on the flip.
In parts 1-4 two weeks ago, I wrote a series of articles quite critical of Barack Obama's echoing rightwing narrative frames demonizing forms of dissent.
those who attack America's flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.
Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.
In part 3, "Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?", I expanded the critique of Obama's echoing rightwing Vietnam-era myths by taking on the image of Jane Fonda. I drew on Jerry Lembcke's paper, "Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory: America's Lost War in Vietnam" to illuminate how Jane Fonda was reinvented as an icon of cultural betrayal years after the fact, in stark contrast to the historical realities of the time, and how this reinvention fit into some of the oldest myths of American identity.
Then in part 4, "Patriotism Smackdown: "Hanoi Jane" vs. Tricky Dick", I looked at how it was actually Richard Nixon who was responsible for the senseless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in South Vietnam, as he schemed along with Henry Kissinger to prevent the signing of a peace treaty in 1968, before the November elections.
Collectively, these aticles go to show that Barack Obama tacitly--at the very least--embraces a view of political history since the 1960s that is deeply shaped by rightwing fantasies of liberal treachery, and that deliberately ignores and excuses the actual reality of rightwing treachery. The charge is not that Obama makes such a fantasy the cornerstone of his politics. He clearly does not. But he does allow this fantasy to define the limits and outline the shape of his politics. It is defines the box in which he lives--and in which he would have all of us live with him.
This fifth installment--unfortunately delayed by illness--completes the series by taking a longer historical view of the underlying dynamic in terms of one of its classic metaphors--the "stab in the back" that played such a crucial role in the emergence of Naziism after Germany's defeat in WWI.
In doing so, I'm going to hitch a ride through the 20th Century with Kevin Baker, who wrote a fantastic piece for Harpers a couple of yearrs ago, "Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth". In it, Baker makes specific reference to Lembcke and The Spitting Image, which we'll get to shortly. But he begins with a very tight thesis paragrph that cuts to the chase
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.
This is what we're up against--to this very day. But it's not just fighting off this profound evasion of responsibility and the wildly proliferating demonology it produces. There's also the little detail about getting past all this delusion to actually come up with something that makes sense as foreign policy--something we can't even get close to doing so long as we're spending all our time fighting off--or even worse, being seduced by--rightwing demons. If you don't believe me, just ask Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. She tried to have a normal life, but, well. You know.
It was post-WWI Germany, and a fellah named Adolph something-or-other who really got the ball rolling on this whole stabbed-in-back fantasy, in a way that the American right later picked up on, "big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say. Gory details on the flip.
The last diary in this series, Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?, looked at how a mythology was created after the fact to use Jane Fonda ("Hanoi Jane") as a symbol for blaming the loss of the Vietnam War on the anti-war movement. In particular, Fonda was presented as a betrayer of the troops. But, as is almost always the case with rightwing narratives, whatever accusations they may make about others are almost invariably true about themselves. "Projection" is the name of the game, and this episode is no exception. Indeed, there is now compelling evidence that Richard Nixon himself is fully deserving of all the calumny that has been heaped on Jane Fonda, and much, much more besides.
You see, in 1968, records now show, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger interfered with the Paris Peace Talks, to prevent the war from being ended before the 1968 elections. As a private citizen at the time, Nixon had no right whatever to be doing such a thing. In fact, what he did could arguably be construed as treason. Whatever the legal situation, however, one thing is clear: 20,763 American troops died on Nixon's watch, while another 111,230 were wounded. That's over 130,000 American troops who would have lived, or not been wounded had Nixon not interfered, and Johnson secured the peace treaty he so desperately sought to rescue his reputation as best he could. Over 130,000 American casualties that Richard Nixon is directly responsible for, simply in order for him to become President.
And the right wants to paint Jane Fonda as a betrayer of American troops?
In Part II of this series, I referred to Jerry Lembcke's book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, and his examination of the myth that anti-war protesters commonly spat on returning veterans. I quoted from an interview in which he touched on an important aspect of his book, the attempt to make sense of the myth in terms of blame-shifting, similar to that which took place in Germany after WWI, blame-shifting that would, eventually lead to the rise of the Third Reich. In this installment, I want to quote extensively from some more recent work that Lembcke has done focusing on another aspect of that same phenomena--the demonization of Jane Fonda.
There is a striking similarity between the two subjects. Just as Vietnam vets and the anti-war movement were close allies, rather than antagonists back in the late 60s and early 70s, Jane Fonda was a very popular figure with the troops, one of the priniciple organizers of the counter-culture alternative to the Bob Hope USO shows, known either as "Free the Army," or in its more colloquial form, "Fuck the Army."
After Dennis Kucinich introduced his impeachment resolution in the House earlier this month, the Huffington Post featured an analysis by occasional contributor Elizabeth Holtzman, whose biography there is given as:
Elizabeth Holtzman served for eight years as a U.S. Congresswoman and won national attention for her role on the House Judiciary committee during Watergate. She was subsequently elected District Attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn), the only woman ever elected DA in NYC, serving for eight years. Holtzman was also the only woman ever elected Comptroller of New York City. She currently works with Herrick Feinstein, LLP, and lives in New York City.
Omitted from that brief encapsulation of a 30+ year career of public service is the fact that her most important role in the Watergate hearings may simply have been getting elected in the first place.
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