Right Wing Nut House

The release of nearly 700 pages of formerly classified documents detailing CIA lawbreaking from the 1950’s to the 1970’s will hardly surprise those who have been critics of the agency. Many of the “black bag” operations, the wiretaps, the surveillance, the unusual experiments on American citizens, have been hinted at or exposed through the years so there are no real bombshells - although I found the process of how these operations were compiled fascinating.

Evidently, former DCIA James Schlessinger ordered the review of CIA operations from the 1950’s on, regarding activities that “fell outside of the Agency’s charter” when he discovered two of the Watergate burglars had help from inside the agency to carry out some of their domestic spying on Democrats. What he discovered - the so-called “Family Jewels” - was placed in a file and the Justice Department was briefed by Schlessinger’s successor, William Colby.

Here is a summary of these illegal activities per a contemporary Justice Department memo obtained by The National Security Archive:

1. Confinement of a Russian defector that “might be regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws.” (A reference to James Angleton’s holding of defector Yuri Nosenko).

2. Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott.

3. Physical surveillance of muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including current Fox News anchor Britt Hume.

4. Physical surveillance of then Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.

5. Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee.

6. Break-in at the office of a former defector.

7. Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee.

8. Mail opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union.

9. Mail opening from 1969 to 1972 of letters to and from China.

10. Behavior modification experiments on “unwitting” U.S. citizens. (LSD and other drug trials)

11. Assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo (on the latter, “no active part” but a “faint connection” to the killers).

12. Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971.

13. Surveillance of a particular Latin American female and U.S. citizens in Detroit.

14. Surveillance of a CIA critic and former officer, Victor Marchetti.

15. Amassing of files on 9,900-plus Americans related to the antiwar movement.

16. Polygraph experiments with the San Mateo, California, sheriff.

17. Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws.

18. Testing of electronic equipment on US telephone circuits.

These files were slated to be released years ago - except George Tenet refused:

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA’s illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973–the so-called “family jewels.” Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called today’s release “a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency.”

“This is the first voluntary CIA declassification of controversial material since George Tenet in 1998 reneged on the 1990s promises of greater openness at the Agency,” commented Thomas Blanton, the Archive’s director.

Hayden also announced the declassification of some 11,000 pages of the so-called CAESAR, POLO and ESAU papers–hard-target analyses of Soviet and Chinese leadership internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations from 1953-1973, a collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact military programs, and hundreds of pages on the A-12 spy plane.

Those last documents will be a boon to Cold War historians. Down through the years, we’ve had leaks from those analyses but never the whole story of what the CIA knew, what they believed, and what they were telling policy makers. It should make for fascinating reading.

As for the rest, it is apparent that for 25 years or more, the CIA was an agency out of control, beyond the law, and shockingly insensitive to civil liberties.

What new?

I have rarely been surprised or horrified by what the CIA has done down through the years “in our name.” The world is a cold, brutal place and there are many times when the “ends/means argument” is not relevant. Nor is the criticism that there was “no moral difference” between what the Soviets were doing and what the CIA did valid. Of course there was a difference; they were the enemy and what the CIA did most of the time to protect the United States was its own moral justification - survival.

Clearly, this was not always the case. The Agency was a good friend in Latin America of American business interests like United Fruit Company and AT & T. Helping to overthrow governments not friendly to American corporations is a whole other story - one that needs telling. But by and large, CIA actions down through the years have been necessary. Whether we can decide if those actions were “moral” or not is a luxury granted those who can sit in judgement enjoying the benefits of freedoms protected and fought for by some of the most dedicated public servants in our nation’s history.

Domestic spying operations initiated by Nixon brought the Agency great shame, as well it should. Nixon’s paranoia about his enemies should not have led to the kinds of surveillance carried out against American citizens by the CIA. Someone, somewhere should have stood up to the President and told him that what he was suggesting was outside the Agency’s charter and illegal to boot. The fact that no one did - at least no one that we know of - should not surprise us given that list above.

If you enjoy playing “what if” with history, let’s go ahead and put Humphrey in Nixon’s shoes from 1969-72. Thousands of people in the streets calling for not only the defeat of the United States military on the field of battle but also calling for the overthrow of the US government. Clear evidence that a substantial source for funding this movement came from our bitter enemies. Certain involvement in the anti-war movement by the KGB and the GRU (Soviet Military intelligence).

What would Hubert have done? How much differently would he have reacted to this grave threat to our internal security? It certainly puts a little different light on things when you take Nixon’s name away and substitute the beloved Humphrey. Anyone who says that Humphrey would have done none of the things Nixon did or that everything he did would have been on the up and up is not being rational. Presidents do what they feel they have to do to protect the country. And Humphrey would have been no different. Not being a paranoid, I imagine a lot less of what Nixon did would have been going on. But I can imagine Humphrey feeling it necessary to open mail and perhaps utilize the CIA’s expertise in “black bag” operations.

A fascinating exercise but not really germane. For some, the revelations contained in the documents will validate a world view where the CIA was “off the reservation” and out of control. For others, the documents will be interesting historical curiosities and nothing else. But somewhere, there is the truth. And revealing that truth is always a good thing no matter where you stand.

There has been no greater boon to historians and others seeking the truth of government actions than the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI and Intel agencies hate it. Bureaucrats despise it - mostly because it piles on lots of extra paperwork duties. And Administrations from LBJ’s White House to the present have been embarrassed by what researchers - professional and amateur - have been able to bring to light.

The latest FOIA bombshell comes to us via Judicial Watch. You may recall these folks from the Clinton scandals, specifically their assistance to Paula Jones. At that time, the left accused them of being a right wing smear machine funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

I wonder what the left is saying about them today?

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released new documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) related to the “expeditious departure” of Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, from the United States following the 9/11 attacks. According to one of the formerly confidential documents, dated 9/21/2001, terrorist Osama bin Laden may have chartered one of the Saudi flights.

The document states: “ON 9/19/01, A 727 PLANE LEFT LAX, RYAN FLT #441 TO ORLANDO, FL W/ETA (estimated time of arrival) OF 4-5PM. THE PLANE WAS CHARTERED EITHER BY THE SAUDI ARABIAN ROYAL FAMILY OR OSAMA BIN LADEN…THE LA FBI SEARCHED THE PLANE [REDACTED] LUGGAGE, OF WHICH NOTHING UNUSUAL WAS FOUND.” The plane was allowed to depart the United States after making four stops to pick up passengers, ultimately landing in Paris where all passengers disembarked on 9/20/01, according to the document.

Overall, the FBI’s most recent document production includes details of the six flights between 9/14 and 9/24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members. The documents also contain brief interview summaries and occasional notes from intelligence analysts concerning the cursory screening performed prior to the departures. According to the FBI documents, incredibly not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value.

This is more than curious. It is suspicious. At a National Security Council meeting at 3:30 PM on 9/11, CIA Chief George Tenet said that it was “virtually certain” that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were behind the attacks. FBI Director Mueller was also at this meeting and heard Tenet’s analysis, including the NSA’s interception of al-Qaeda communications revealing the terrorists congratulating one another on the success of the operation. (Even the more cautious 9/11 Commission said of this meeting “At about 3:15, President Bush met with his principal advisers through a secure video teleconference. Rice said President Bush began the meeting with the words, “We’re at war,” and that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said the agency was still assessing who was responsible, but the early signs all pointed to al Qaeda.”)

So if the US government had even an inkling that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, why did they allow a flight out of the country carrying Osama bin Laden? Already a wanted man for the embassy bombings in Africa, what possible excuse involving stupidity, incompetence, or any other human failing could account for this monumental blunder?

Let’s ask Richard Clark:

First, we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001.24 To the contrary, every flight we have identified occurred after national airspace reopened.25

Second, we found no evidence of political intervention. We found no evidence that anyone at the White House above the level of Richard Clarke participated in a decision on the departure of Saudi nationals. The issue came up in one of the many video teleconferences of the interagency group Clarke chaired, and Clarke said he approved of how the FBI was dealing with the matter when it came up for interagency discussion at his level. Clarke told us, “I asked the FBI, Dale Watson . . . to handle that, to check to see if that was all right with them, to see if they wanted access to any of these people, and to get back to me. And if they had no objections, it would be fine with me.” Clarke added, “I have no recollection of clearing it with anybody at the White House.”26

Although White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card remembered someone telling him about the Saudi request shortly after 9/11, he said he had not talked to the Saudis and did not ask anyone to do anything about it. The President and Vice President told us they were not aware of the issue at all until it surfaced much later in the media. None of the officials we interviewed recalled any intervention or direction on this matter from any political appointee.27

To make matters worse, the FBI apparently did not do a thorough job of searching and interrogating the Saudis on those flights - even if Osama was not among them:

Overall, the FBI’s most recent document production includes details of the six flights between 9/14 and 9/24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members. The documents also contain brief interview summaries and occasional notes from intelligence analysts concerning the cursory screening performed prior to the departures. According to the FBI documents, incredibly not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value.

Moreover, the documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies which call to question the thoroughness of the FBI’s investigation of the Saudi flights. For example, on one document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 20 of 23 passengers on the Ryan International Airlines flight (commonly referred to as the “Bin Laden Family Flight”). On another document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 15 of 22 passengers on the same flight.

It bears repeating that 9/11 Cassandra Richard Clark appears to be responsible for allowing these flights to begin with. Sort of puts a dent in Mr. Clark’s self-proclaimed anti-terrorism bona fides, no? Maybe the next time he shows up on one of the Sunday morning talkies, some intrepid journalist will ask him about this?

Not likely.

Perhaps most shocking to me is that the FBI failed at the most basic level of investigative competence possible; they seemed not to be curious about who was on those flights and what they might know about 9/11. I realize this will bring the 9/11 kooks and loons out of the closet with explanations of the Bush family’s close ties to the Saudis and how they wanted Osama to escape anyway. Unfortunately for them, Richard Clark (no friend of Bush, my tin-foil hat wearing friends) appears to be the highest level government official who knew of these flights in advance and authorized them. There is zero evidence that Bush or Cheney knew of these charters or authorized them in any way.

Another nagging question is what the 9/11 Commission staffers made of these memos when they read them? One would think that a mention of Osama Bin Laden in an FBI report on the Saudi flights would have raised every red flag possible and led to hauling Mueller, Clark, and the investigating agents before the Commission to explain themselves. The fact that Commission staffers either missed these reports or never acted upon them is just more evidence that the Commission itself had flawed investigative procedures.

Or they never saw the reports at all. This raises other, more troubling questions, about what else the FBI failed to give the Commission.

I will say that the idea that Osama was in the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 seems implausible. But given the incompetence of our intelligence, counter intelligence, administrative, and political national security infrastructure that was exposed by 9/11, it is not out of the realm of the impossible.

UPDATE AND AN APOLOGY - SORT OF

This report has been denied outright by the FBI who assures us that they investigated the Saudis thoroughly before allowing them to leave.

While I have no doubt that the Osama angle has been overblown - and I apologize to my readers for being dumb enough to forget what Neo was kind enough to point out in the comments; that Osama was in Afghanistan just hours after the towers fell answering questions about the attack, I still think the Judicial Watch reports raise difficult questions for the FBI and, by extension, the 9/11 Commission.

But my reaction to the idea that Osama may have been on one of the planes or even that he may have chartered one of the flights was so wrong as to be laughable. For that, I apologize.

It used to be that the conspiracy bug was almost exclusively confined to right wing extremists - Birchers, Klansmen, McCarthyites, and a mish mash of anti-government, anti-communist (where many believed the commies had already taken over the US government), and anti-UN psychopaths. According to the eminent historian Richard Hofstadter’s brilliant essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics , these pathetic people felt that they had no control over their lives, that “an invisible hand” was directing their destiny and the destiny of the nation.

Scholar Daniel Pipes expounded on this theme more recently with his book Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From. Pipes traces the history of conspiracy mongering from the Middle East, to Western Europe (where regular pogroms against the Jews were the result) and it’s arrival here in America with its roots in the anti-Masonic, anti-Illuminati groups of the 19th century.

Now James Piereson, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, president of the William E. Simon Foundation, and former executive director and trustee of the John M. Olin Foundation, has written a book that posits the theory that the JFK assassination “compromised the central assumptions of American liberalism” thereby devastating the left as no other event did before or has since. This led American liberals to several wrong historical conclusions which gave flight to a conspiracy culture of their own.

The book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, is not the first effort to use the Kennedy Assassination as a starting point to show where liberalism lost its way. Theodore H. White’s brilliant autobiographical In Search of History made basically the same point; that the unfulfilled promise of the JFK presidency haunted liberals down to this day. From tragedy, there emerged a culture of paranoia that saw the “invisible hand” at work - not of Masons or Communists, but of right wing extremists both in and out of government. White also commented on the takeover of the liberal ideology - his ideology - by hard left Stalinists as New Deal Democrats like Humphrey were marginalized as a result of their support for the Viet Nam war.

John Miller interviewed Piereson for the National Review. It should be noted that Piereson is a well respected academic whose main interest over the years has been to promote an ideologically neutral atmosphere in our educational system - in other words, a “classically liberal” education. While he is generally identified as being a moderate conservative, Mr. Piereson has not been shy about taking on the right over issues such as teaching evolution in classrooms and prayer in schools.

Miller begins the interview by asking how the JFK assassination changed American politics:

JAMES PIERESON: Kennedy’s assassination, happening the way it did, compromised the central assumptions of American liberalism that had been the governing philosophy of the nation since the time of the New Deal. It did this in two decisive ways: first, by compromising the faith of liberals in the future; second, by undermining their confidence in the nation. Kennedy’s assassination suggested that history is not in fact a benign process of progress and advancement, but perhaps something quite different. The thought that the nation itself was responsible for Kennedy’s death suggested that the United States, far from being a “city on a hill” and an example for mankind, as Kennedy had described it (quoting John Winthrop), was in fact something darker and more sinister in its deepest nature.

The conspiracy theories that developed afterwards reflected this thought. The Camelot legend further suggested that that the Kennedy years represented something unique that was now forever lost. Liberalism was thereafter overtaken by a sense of pessimism about the future, cynicism about the United States, and nostalgia for the Kennedy years. This was something entirely new in the United States. It was evident in the culture during the 1960s. George Wallace tried to confront it in the electoral arena in 1968, as did Richard Nixon — though it was somewhat difficult to do so because neither Lyndon Johnson nor Hubert Humphrey represented this new orientation. It was not until this mood of pessimism was brought into the government during the Carter administration that it could be directly confronted in the political arena, which is what Ronald Reagan in fact did.

Miller challenges Piereson on the notion that 11/22/63 meant more than 9/11:

We know from looking back over the decades that Kennedy’s sudden death cast a long shadow over American life, which I have tried to describe. Many of us thought that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would also have great consequences for the way Americans looked at politics, the parties, and national security. In particular, some felt that the attacks might drive out of our politics the tone of anti-Americanism that had been a key feature of the American Left from the 1960s forward. That did not really happen. The liberal movement today remains far more the product of the 1960s than of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. Indeed, the terrorist attacks now seem to have had very little effect on the thinking of American liberals who view the war on terror and the war in Iraq through the lenses of the Vietnam War. That is not true of conservatives. In that sense, the terrorist attacks have simply deepened the divide between liberals and conservatives. What is surprising, then, is what little enduring effect the terrorist attacks have had, particularly for liberals.

I have written many times on this site with all the earnestness that I can muster that it is absolutely imperative that if we are going to survive as a nation and win this war against the terrorists and the states that continue to enable them, the left simply must join this fight. Until liberals embrace the notion that the War on Terror or whatever you choose to call it is real and not some political ploy designed by President Bush to win elections, or set up a dictatorship, or destroy the left itself, we have no hope of either confronting the menace or winning through to victory. The intellectual framework for the survival of the west has always been best outlined by classically liberal writers and thinkers. Today, they are missing in action and it hurts the cause terribly.

Piereson believes a large part of the problem is that the left has their eyes focused on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza:

Liberals who were rational and realistic accepted the fact that Oswald killed JFK but at the same time they were unable to ascribe a motive for his actions. They tended to look for sociological explanations for the event and found one in the idea that JFK was brought down by a “climate of hate” that had overtaken the nation. Thus they placed Kennedy’s assassination within a context of violence against civil rights activists. They had great difficulty accepting the fact that Kennedy’s death was linked to the Cold War, not to civil rights. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his 1,000-page history of the Kennedy administration, published in 1965, could not bring himself to mention Oswald’s name in connection with Kennedy’s death, though he spent several paragraphs describing the hate-filled atmosphere of Dallas at the time — suggesting thereby that Kennedy was a victim of the far right. The inability to come to grips with the facts of Kennedy’s death pointed to a deeper fault in American liberalism which was connected to its decline.

Gerald Posner points out in his conspiracy debunking book on the assassination Case Closed that theorists have gone to extraordinary lengths to absolve Oswald of any connection to the crime at all. He traces the theories on Oswald’s involvement from the notion that he was an assassin hired by the CIA or FBI through the “patsy” phase to where now, Oswald is thought of by many conspiracists as an innocent bystander. Anything but the truth about Oswald’s political leanings.

To be fair, it is doubtful that Oswald really understood Communism or any other ideology for that matter. He embraced it because it set him apart, made him different. And for someone as brutally neglected as Oswald was when he was young, basking in the glow of attention as a result of his contrarian political stands - especially in the Marine Corps - it must have given him an enormous amount of satisfaction.

As historian William Manchester points out in his seminal work on the assassination Death of a President, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President of the United States in the back to get attention.” Rather than looking for complex, multi-level reasons for why Kennedy and Oswald’s paths crossed that tragic day in Dealey Plaza, sometimes the simplest explanations are the most plausible.

Piereson weighs in on Oliver Stone’s fantasy film JFK:

The Oliver Stone movie was foolish to the extent it was held up as an account of the Kennedy assassination. Using Jim Garrison as a credible authority on the Kennedy assassination is akin to citing Rosie O’Donnell as an authority on the collapse of the Twin Towers. It is not possible to claim that Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll without at the same time claiming that the autopsy (which said he was shot from the rear) was wrong or fabricated. The conspiracy theories do not arise from any evidence but from a need to believe that Kennedy was shot by someone other than Oswald.

Garrison, the ambitious, homophobic New Orleans DA who prosecuted Clay Shaw for the murder of JFK made Mike Nifong look like a pillar of legal rectitude. The fact that the jury returned a verdict in 45 minutes of not guilty should tell you everything you need to know about Garrison’s out of control prosecution. (One juror said after the verdict that the reason they took so long was that several jurors had to use the washroom.) Making Garrison out to be a hero in the film was perhaps the most outrageous calumny in the history of Hollywood. The damage done to the historical record by Stone should never, ever be forgotten.

Finally, Miller asks Piereson about Jack Ruby:

MILLER: Would liberals have had an easier time of it if Jack Ruby hadn’t killed Oswald?

PIERESON: If Ruby had not intervened, Oswald probably would have tried to stage some kind of “show” trial in which Kennedy’s policies in Cuba would have been raised as a central issue. Oswald proudly acknowledged that he was a Communist. If the case had been brought to trial, Oswald would have certainly been convicted. In that case, it would have been far more difficult for liberals and the Kennedy family to maintain that JFK was killed because of his support for civil rights. There would have been less talk of conspiracies; less anti-Americanism from the left; perhaps it would have further reinforced the anti-communism of post-war liberalism. There is no question that Ruby changed the equation a great deal.

Recent theories about the Mafia’s involvement in the assassination include not only Ruby as silencer but Oswald as trigger man thanks to a distant uncle of Oswald’s who worked for New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. The thought of any one of those gabby losers working for the Mafia on a hit the magnitude of the Kennedy assassination is outrageous on its face. Besides, federal agents had Marcello, Sam Trafficante, and Sam Giancana - all three implicated by conspiracists in the assassination - under close surveillance for years prior to the death of Kennedy and not a word was uttered by any of them that would prove they had anything to do with the murder.

I think Piereson is right. I believe that the assassination so unbalanced the left that they have yet to find their way back. Spinning ever more fantastic conspiracy theories to explain electoral losses, describe their political enemies, and generally view the world with a suspicion and paranoia once reserved for the mouth breathers on the right, the left has truly lost their way. Perhaps it will take someone like Senator Obama - a sunnyside up sort of liberal - to reinvigorate the movement and bring it back down to earth.

And then perhaps, we can all go to war together rather than the left hanging back while seeing monsters under the bed.

Not having any children, I really am in the dark as to whether or not classic American patriotic songs are taught to kids in school or whether it is up to parents to expose their children to the music of Sousa, Cohan, Irving Berlin, and others. It would not surprise me in the slightest if schools had stopped the practice long ago. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that schools no longer teach music to classes of primary grade kids at all. Or if they do, I’d bet that American music is the absolute last thing they would be willing to teach.

I reflect on these questions today, June 14, 2007 because it is Flag Day - a day to proudly fly the flag to honor both the symbol of our country and what it stands for. And one way to honor the flag is to enjoy listening to patriotic songs.

I think my mother used to play a record with about 15 different songs on patriotic holidays like the 4th of July and Flag Day. “Songs of Americana” I think was the name of the album (one of my lurking family members, help me out here). It featured Sousa marches like The Washington Post March, The Stars and Stripes Forever, as well as God Bless America by Irving Berlin. There were also Civil War songs like Tenting Tonight , and Battle Cry of Freedom.

And then there was “You’re a Grand Old Flag” by George M. Cohan. Anyone who has seen James Cagney in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy perform this tune knows the raw power and emotion the song can inspire. Cagney, who consciously imitated Cohan’s half singing/half talking song presentation, along with director Michael Curtiz, faithfully recreated the stage version first seen in Cohan’s George Washington, Jr. for the screen.

Indeed, reports were that the performance of the song brought down the house. The song also became the first tune to sell a million copies of sheet music. Clearly, the lyrics in the chorus touch something deep down in all of us:

You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
The land I love.
The home of the free and the brave.
Ev’ry heart beats true
‘neath the Red, White and Blue,3
Where there’s never a boast or brag.
But should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Keep your eye on the grand old flag.

The story behind the song is interesting:

The original lyric for this perennial George M. Cohan favorite came, as Cohan later explained, from an encounter he had with a Civil War veteran who fought at Gettysburg. The two men found themselves next to each other and Cohan noticed the vet held a carefully folded but ragged old flag. The man reportedly then turned to Cohan and said, “She’s a grand old rag.” Cohan thought it was a great line and originally named his tune “You’re a Grand Old Rag.” So many groups and individuals objected to calling the flag a “rag,” however, that he “gave ‘em what they wanted” and switched words, renaming the song “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

It was in George Washington, Jr. that Cohan worked out a routine with this song that he would repeat in many subsequent shows. He took an American flag, started singing the patriotic song, and marched back and forth across the stage. Music such as Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag” helped create a shared popular cultural identity as such songs spread beyond the stage, through sheet music and records, to the homes and street corners of America.

You’re a Grand Old Flag and all the other Patriotic ditties are a large part of the American Songbook. They used to be the primary means by which each generation was connected to another in patriotic devotion. For patriotism cannot be taught. It must be instilled by culturalizing children and exposing them to the sentiments and ideas that we all share about the United States; what it should stand for, how fortunate we are to have been born here, and the glorious ideas of liberty and freedom that so many have given their lives to defend.

Yes, she’s a “Grand Old Flag.” A little tattered perhaps. A little careworn as a result of neglecting some of the principles on which our nation was founded; self reliance, tolerance, and that fighting for freedom is a good and sometimes necessary thing. But despite her appearance, she still flies proudly, snapping in the breeze as a reminder to all that choose to see it, that this is still the greatest country ever created filled with the most remarkable people ever born. And despite all of our problems, disagreements, mistakes, and failures, there is still no place on earth I’d rather live.

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
and the walls came tumbling down.

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
and the walls came tumbling down.

(”Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho.” Traditional Spiritual)

Note: This video of Nat King Cole introducing Mahalia Jackson singing the above song is a keeper.

Theodore H. White believed there were several elements that went into making a great speech. First, there must be “the occasion” - a suitable reason to give the speech in the first place. Secondly, the words themselves must reach out and not just stimulate the mind of the audience but touch the heart as well. And finally, the venue in which the speech is given must act as an amplifier to give the speech an importance beyond the occasion or the actual words spoken.

Reagan had it all 20 years ago today as he stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The man, the moment, the venue - all came together so that his thundering challenge to the mighty Soviet state to “Tear down this wall” hit the occupied countries of Europe like a bolt of lightening. It discomfited Gorbachev (and not coincidentally, the western left), gave heart to our allies, and electrified conservatives at home. It is one of the three great political speeches of my lifetime, easily the equal of Kennedy’s speech inaugurating the 1960’s and coming close to Dr. King’s challenge to America at the Lincoln Memorial to turn his dream of a peaceful, multi-racial society into reality.

As bracing as President Reagan’s speech at Brandenburg was, perhaps only the Gipper himself could have foreseen how prescient his words would be when a scant 2 years and 5 months later, joyful East Berliners took matters into their own hands and hammered the wall into dust. If there has been a more shocking, surprising, uplifting example of the power of the spoken word to affect the course of world events, I cannot think of one.

Of course, Gorbachev got the credit. But stop and think what the Communist leader actually was credited with doing - or more accurately, not doing. Mikhail Gorbachev was lionized for not sending in the tanks, for not slaughtering people as most of his predecessors certainly would have done. It speaks volumes of the desperation of the western left at that time that no credit whatsoever should fall to President Reagan and his open challenge to the moral authority of the Soviet Union that they would praise Gorbachev for simply acting like a human being and not a Communist thug.

But that was a symptom of the times and I’m sure Reagan could have cared less. He was not a vain man. His purpose at Brandenburg was to tweak the Soviet State by allowing them to hear the footsteps of freedom as the March of History approached the crumbling, rotten core of Communist tyranny all over Eastern Europe. New technologies had revealed the truth about the west to the captive peoples behind the Iron Curtain; the simple truth that they could see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears on pirated TV signals, cassette tapes, and newspapers smuggled across ever more porous borders - that the people of the west lived happier, freer, more enriching lives than they did. Rather than tamp down the restlessness as Gorbachev hoped, his mild, hesitant reforms opened the floodgates and a full blown revolution was underway.

I like the idea of Reagan as Joshua, sounding the ram’s horn of freedom which spurred a mighty shout from the host of oppressed peoples, bringing the whole rotten edifice of Communist tyranny crashing down. Of course, it was much more complicated than that. More than a 40 years of spadework had been done under both Democratic and Republican Presidents that gradually ate away at Soviet authority and the myths that kept the tyrants in power.

And let’s not forget the contributions of that smiling, brilliant, hard as nails holy man from Rome whose political savvy was matched by an iron will and an absolute total belief in his own moral authority. There was also an equally savvy, tough as boot leather Brit whose special relationship with the American President helped forge the most successful transatlantic partnership since World War II.

Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Maggie Thatcher - Freedom’s Triumvirate - never formally coordinated strategy to challenge the idea of the permanence of the Soviet State. But if there is a guiding hand of God, surely they were touched by it. The idea that those three came to power at basically the same time is either one of the happiest accidents of history or proof that there is an Almighty God, depending on your personal beliefs.

But it was Reagan at the Gate who put the finishing touches to the beginning of the end of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. The groundwork had already been laid in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary. All that remained was for Reagan to utter the words:

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The story of the ruckus those last 4 words caused in our own government is one of high drama and low comedy. Everyone in the permanent bureaucracy was aghast at the thought of an American president directly challenging a Soviet leader. Even some of Reagan’s closest aides were against the idea of including the words. Peter Robinson, who is credited with authoring the speech, tells the story here:

With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to suppress it. The draft was naïve. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—my journal records that there were no fewer than seven. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

When in early June the President and his party reached Italy (I remained in Washington), Ken Duberstein, the deputy chief of staff, sat the President down in the garden of the palazzo in which he was staying, then briefed him on the objections to my draft. Reagan asked Duberstein’s advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. “But I told him, ‘You’re President, so you get to decide.’ And then,” Duberstein recalls, “he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, ‘Let’s leave it in.’”

The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

(Via Powerline)

I find it amusing that up to the day of the speech, the bureaucrats were scrambling to get Reagan to change his mind and drop those 4 little words. But in the end, Reagan’s unerring sense of the moment and flair for the dramatic won out in his own mind. He guessed the impact those words would have. And he was proved right in the end.

Has it really been 20 years? Reagan himself is fading into myth and legend, an iconic part of our national story. The Soviet state is a rising authoritarian power, gradually moving away from the west and edging closer to outright opposition to American interests in Europe and especially elsewhere. But the countries Reagan helped free in Eastern Europe are doing very nicely, thank you. And the only way Russian hegemony could be re-established over their old dominion at this point would be through a ruinous war. The former captive nations are now full blown members of the democracy club. And there’s is nothing Putin and his former KGB friends can do about it.

Let that be the story, then. Reagan spoke. The wall fell. And tens of millions of souls live and breathe free because an American President stood alone in front of what was thought to be a permanent symbol of division only to blow his horn and have it come crashing down, uniting people in the ageless quest for human liberty.

I’m glad I was alive to see it.

UPDATE:

Some others marking this day as well:

Hugh Hewitt:

Reagan had to lose the presidential race in order to win it, and had to leave office after eight often difficult years before the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet empire collapsed. Reagan never stopped believing in freedom or in the rightness of his cause, leaving a record of persistence that ought to inspire his successors in government as well as those captive and oppressed peoples around the globe who would, like the men and women of Eastern Europe in the long years of Soviet cruelty, prefer freedom to tyranny.

Sister Toldjah remembers with pictures and video.

Jim Hoft points out that today is the day they dedicate a memorial to the victims of communism - all 100 million of them:

The Goddess of Democracy” was carved by students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China and erected in Tiananmen Square during the democracy protest in 1989.

Today the Victims of Communism Organization is dedicating a memorial to the millions and millions of vicitms of communism by unveiling the “Goddess of Democracy” statue in Washington, DC. The monument to victims of communism stands at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey avenues, two blocks from Union Station.

It was a debate that almost tore the young nation apart. Where to put the Capitol city?

In 1789, Congress was charged with the difficult task of locating a Capitol city that would satisfy the concerns of the two sections, north and south. The current Capitol of New York was deemed unacceptable by most - except New Yorkers for the most part. Congress had earlier carved out some land near Trenton, New Jersey to serve as the Capitol but southerners put their foot down and refused to appropriate any monies to build anything on the site.

The Senate compromised by moving the Capitol to Philadelphia following the second session of the new Congress while the permanent Capitol would be built along the Potomac at the boundary between Virginia and Maryland. So beginning with the legislative session of 1790 until the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Philadelphia served as our nation’s temporary Capitol.

President Washington, ever mindful of his place in history and enormous popularity, made the journey between New York and Philadelphia something of a whistle stop tour. Every town and hamlet he entered with his impressive carriage drawn by 2 beautiful white mares became an occasion those townfolk were not likely to forget. From miles around, everyone would turn out to see him. He made few speeches, usually some words of thanks for the host and asking people to support the new government.

What the people didn’t see was the rest of Washington’s entourage. It included several wagons of trunks and furniture. It also included the 9 slaves George Washington was bringing with him to Philadelphia.

It was never officially acknowledged that Washington brought slaves with him to the new Capitol. That’s because Philadelphia was the birthplace of the Abolitionist Society and was very touchy about the issue of slavery. Therefore, it came as no surprise that archaeologists, uncovering the remains of house where George Washington (and John Adams) lived while the Capitol was located in Philadelphia, have unearthed a secret passage used by Washington’s slaves that kept them out of sight of visitors to the Presidential mansion:

Archaeologists unearthing the remains of George Washington’s presidential home have discovered a hidden passageway used by his nine slaves, raising questions about whether the ruins should be incorporated into a new exhibit at the site.

The underground passageway is just steps from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. It was designed so Washington’s guests would not see slaves as they slipped in and out of the main house.

“As you enter the heaven of liberty, you literally have to cross the hell of slavery,” said Michael Coard, a Philadelphia attorney who leads a group that worked to have slavery recognized at the site. “That’s the contrast, that’s the contradiction, that’s the hypocrisy. But that’s also the truth.”

Coard, a local attorney, hip-hop aficionado, and activist, led a letter writing campaign to force the US Park Service to recognize a small building adjacent to the house as slave quarters for those held in bondage by our first president. The Park Service, who is in charge of the archaeological dig unearthing Washington’s house, was originally only going to put a plaque at the site, not acknowledging its role in housing Washington’s slaves. Now, there will be a memorial at the house not only acknowledging its history but also naming the 9 slaves Washington took with him to Philadelphia.

This is all well and good. It is fitting and proper to recognize the history of the site in this manner. But great care must be taken lest perspective on the heritage of the site be lost leaving only the grim reminders of what Coard calls “the hypocrisy” of that history.

I’ve always thought what truly makes America a different place - “exceptional,” if you will - is this searing dichotomy from our past; that a nation so in love with liberty would have begun its history by holding 3 million people as chattel slaves. Is it “hypocrisy” as Mr. Coard contends? Or is it more like schizophrenia, where the afflicted have only a vague awareness that something is wrong with them? How could Thomas Jefferson write something like the Declaration of Independence -a document quoted by revolutionaries down to this day in calling out tyranny and crying for liberty - while holding hundreds of human beings in bondage?

These are questions asked since the beginning of the republic and even prior to our founding. The English literary giant Samuel Johnson was heard to remark following the Stamp Act troubles in the 1760’s, “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negro slaves?” And Jefferson, perhaps seeking to assuage his own guilty conscience, tried to blame the introduction of slavery in America on the King of England in the Declaration. It was voted down by southerners who knew better than anyone that slavery was America’s sin and blame could not be foisted on any other person or country.

Even casual readers of history know most of these things. They are certainly aware of Washington’s slave owning. But to hear Coard and others talk, one would think that American history is locked away in a closet guarded by CIA agents 24 hours a day:

Archaeologists have served as guides, answering visitors’ questions. Cheryl LaRoche, a cultural heritage specialist, said she enjoys educating people about how even a prominent statesman like Washington could own slaves.

“We’ve been striving to present a balanced view of history that stands apart from what’s been taught in history books,” LaRoche said.

That’s out and out ridiculous. There isn’t a history book that’s been published in the last 50 years which fails to highlight the slave owning of the Founders. It’s the “Ive got a secret” view of history promoted largely by racialists and “cultural heritage specialists” who probably never paid attention to history in school and therefore would be shocked to learn what they are teaching today’s kids about the Founders.

But my beef isn’t necessarily with the LaRoche’s of this world. It is with those who would sacrifice the narrative power of America’s history on the altar of political correctness and multi-culturalism. Teaching that slavery was an evil, brutal institution is easy. But supplying a little perspective on what that institution meant to the south, to the north, and how it so enmeshed the country in its cultural, economic, and even religious tentacles is a real challenge.

By the time Washington moved into the house they are currently digging up in Philadelphia, slavery had well and truly trapped our country in a hellish nightmare of violence and economic necessity. Parse it any way you would like, but the fact of the matter is that when all is said and done, freeing the slaves at that time would have impoverished the south and turned loose 3 million people to find their way all by themselves.

Many, no doubt, would have stayed on to work the fields as their grandchildren did 70 years later following the Civil War. Many more would have been lost - adrift in an unfamiliar world with few marketable skills and not many friendly faces. There may be something to the idea that living in wretched poverty while free was much preferable to the security of the slave quarters. But that idea doesn’t put food in people’s bellies or give them the skills necessary to feed themselves and their families.

It took a gigantic war to free ourselves from slavery’s iron grip. To this day, that cataclysmic event shapes our politics and our history. Its influence is seen in the controversy over Washington’s house. There is talk of not including the ruins of the House in an exhibit marking the site due to the slavery issue:

The findings have created a quandary for National Park Service and city officials planning an exhibit at the house. They are now trying to decide whether to incorporate the remains into the exhibit or go forward with plans to fill in the ruins and build an abstract display about life in the house.

Making that decision will push back the building of the exhibit, which had been slated to open in 2009. But the oversight committee won’t rush into construction, said Joyce Wilkerson, the mayor’s chief of staff.

“We never thought we’d be faced with this kind of decision,” she said. “We would’ve been happy to have found a pipe! And so we don’t want to proceed blindly or say, ‘This isn’t in the plan.”‘

The care being taken to decide what to do is commendable but I think misplaced. Clearly the site has great historical value and filling it in to erect an “abstract display” of some kind reeks of political correctness. Let’s tell the whole story of what went on in that house. Not just the fact that the first President owned slaves but also through the sheer force of his personality as well as his unquestioned personal integrity, George Washington created the office of the presidency and with it, the new nation he served so well. That’s the kind of history that is not being told in school books today. Without the “indispensable man,” the US experiment in self-government may very well have been stillborn. The forces of separation threatened several times over those first 8 years to tear the country asunder. It was only Washington’s steadfast support for the new constitution and his presence in the government as chief executive that kept the nation from flying apart at the seams.

Will that story also be told in these ruins? Can’t we find room to tell both vital and necessary stories about our first President. Should they include the fact that Washington’s will freed his own slaves upon the death of his wife? What other aspects of our first President’s life and his relationship with his slaves would be appropriate to highlight in order to give a complete picture of the man, the institution, and his times?

These are questions I’d like to see the City Council take up. Alas, in the political world inhabited by most, such questions would undermine the narrative story that the racialists and others would like the public to hear. Such perspective would leave people thinking that Washington was a great leader and flawed human being rather than a one dimensional slave owner and hypocrite.

Joe Klein, reporter, author, columnist, and blogger who is currently ensconced at Time Magazine’s blog Swampland, has had a full flowing, Road to Damascus revelation about the left wing blogosphere.

After pondering the matter for however long he has been taking the slings and arrows flung his way by the rabid dog left, it has suddenly dawned on Mr. Klein that these are not very nice people. Nor are they very rational. Nor are they very “liberal” in the classical sense of the word.

Klein’s eyes were opened when he quoted Representative Jane Harmon (former Chairman of the House Intel Committee until Reverend Mother Pelosi saw fit to boot her off in favor of one of her cronies) prior to the Iraq funding vote as saying that she wanted to vote against the bill but felt an obligation to support the troops by giving them the equipment they needed to do their jobs. Harmon, as politicians are wont to do, changed her mind and voted against the bill anyway leaving Klein hanging out to dry and the netnuts went to town on the poor fellow:

The next day, I was blasted by a number of left-wing bloggers: Klein screwed up! I had quoted Harman in the past tense—common usage for politicians who know their words will appear after a vote takes place. That was sloppy and… suspicious! Proof that you just can’t trust the mainstream media. On Eschaton, a blog that specializes in media bashing, I was given the coveted “Wanker of the Day” award. Eventually, Harman got wind of this and called, unbidden, to apologize for misleading me, saying I had quoted her correctly but she had changed her mind to reflect the sentiments of her constituents. I published her statement and still got hammered by bloggers and Swampland commenters for “stalking” Harman into an apology, for not checking her vote in the Congressional Record, for being a “water boy for the right wing” and many other riffs unfit to print.

First of all, if Joe wants the job of carrying water for the right wing, he’s more than welcome to it. Somebody’s got to. Since no one in Congress seems to be stepping up to do it, it may as well be Klein.

But Joe would first have to delve into the world of moonbattery and paranoia. For he has, in fact, discovered the lefty netnuts to be a bunch of unhinged, drooling, raving lunatics:

This is not the first time this kind of free-range lunacy has been visited upon me. Indeed, it happens, oh, once a week to each of us who post on Swampland (Karen Tumulty, Jay Carney and Ana Marie Cox are the others). A reasonable reader might ask, Why are the left-wing bloggers attacking you? Aren’t you pretty tough on the Bush Administration? Didn’t you write a few months ago that George W. Bush would be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in history? And why on earth does any of this matter?

[...]

But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable.

I was just thinking about this very thing as it relates to the right side of the blogosphere the other day as I was bemoaning my loss of readership over these last few months. While many smaller and mid-sized bloggers have drummed me out of the Conservative Book Club and taken away my key to the executive washroom at Haliburton’s corporate headquarters (a turn of events I regret for the most part since a lot of those people I consider my friends), all of the largest righty blogs still link to this site on occasion and have never attacked me personally for being something of an apostate. This kind of tolerance has always been lacking on the left and bespeaks a mindset exactly described as Klein; if you don’t toe the line, we kick you in the balls.

But before we go patting Joe on the back for having the good sense to recognize the illiberality of liberal blogs, Klein descends into full blown moonbattery himself while ignoring history with a vengeance:

Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.

And that is precisely the danger here. Fury begets fury. Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party’s bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh’s show—where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates—has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats. The spitballs aimed at me don’t matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right—in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration.

It’s the right’s fault that lefty bloggers are a bunch of pinch-faced, bile spewing half wits? And they are only aping a “tone” that was pioneered by Rush Limbaugh?

Does Klein actually believe that all this bloody “speaking truth to power” by savaging your opponent in the most vile, personal way imaginable sprang from the microphone of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990’s?

I’m sorry, but that is at best disingenuous and at worst, a calumnious lie. Let me give Mr. Klein a little history lesson to open his eyes a bit.

If modern conservatism has a beginning, it could very well have been the publication of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.. Let us examine what some of those polite, tolerant, intellectually honest liberals said about the book at the time:

The book reviewers were absolutely hostile, enraged at what they read.

“The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face,” snarled one, ominously comparing it to a work of the Ku Klux Klan. “This fascist thesis,” angrily spluttered another, “…This…pure fascism….What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for…?” Still others piled on. The book was dismissed as a series of “fanatically emotional attacks” that “succeeded in turning the stomachs of its readers.” The author drew howls of outrage, the lesser of which focused on adjectives like “rude” and “obnoxious” before descending into cries of “fascist.”

The name of the book was not Godless. And the author was not Ann Coulter. The book that drew such ferocious attention was God and Man at Yale. The author, a recent Yale graduate, was a precocious William F. Buckley, Jr.

With conservatism consigned to the outer political darkness in the 50’s and the 60’s, liberals felt more than enabled to carry out a slash and burn rhetorical campaign against them. “Nazi” and “Klansmen” were common epithets applied to conservatives - as they are today. Witness the treatment Goldwater received in the 1964 campaign:

For Goldwater, the first modern conservative to win a presidential nomination, the unending torrent of abuse verged on the apoplectic. CBS News solemnly reported the week of his nomination that Goldwater’s first act after the convention would be to travel to Germany for a visit to “Berchtesgaden, once Hitler’s stamping ground.” And what will the conservative Goldwater do once there? “There are signs,” CBS reporter Daniel Schorr said ominously, “that the American and German right wings are joining up…” Got that? Barry Goldwater, said CBS in so many words, was really a Nazi. With a presidential nomination in hand, he was literally heading to Hitler’s home to get the international Nazi movement rolling. The story, from the trip to Germany to the visit to Hitler’s estate was, of course, false from beginning to end.

Equally hysterical was a liberal magazine that published a 64-page “psychological study” of the candidate which began: “Do you think Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” You guessed it — after claiming to poll over 12,000 psychiatrists across the country, the answer was no. New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger answered the question this way: “The possibility exists that, should he (Goldwater) enter the White House, there might not be a day after tomorrow.” In case voters didn’t get the message, Democratic strategist and LBJ aide Bill Moyers designed the so-called “daisy commercial” that saw a child counting the petals of a flower disappear in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

The Nixonian interlude allowed the left to fully vent their hatred at one conservative who most people think deserved everything he got. But the emergence of Reagan on the national scene gave liberals the screaming meemies. Reagan himself remarked that he discovered once he crossed the Mississippi River, he grew horns and a tail. And the viciously personal and outrageous comments made by his political opponents during his terms in office were unmatched until the Clinton years. Ted Kennedy accused President Reagan of deliberately fostering policies that would starve old people and children. Representative Charles Rangel called him a racist. The vitriolic hate directed against Reagan was met with a shrug, a wink, and usually a devastating put down that always contained a little humor. Hardly the stuff of a right wing attack dog.

For Klein to blame the left’s historic, hate-filled rhetoric on the recent phenomena of talk radio and specifically Limbaugh’s broadly drawn (and at times, over the top) satire is fantastically ridiculous. The world did not begin in the 1990’s with the right’s reaction to the deliberate Clintonian strategy of personally destroying your opponent with outrageous smears and lies. It’s just that the left has now perfected the technique and uses the world of blogs to vastly amplify the tactic so that the target feels beseiged. Witness the most recent kerfluffle over a post at Six Meat Buffet that skewered recently deceased blogger Steve Gilliard.

Forgetting how they reacted every time in the last few years when a person of note on the right passed away, publishing the most outrageously disrespectful, cruel, heartless, drivel imaginable, the netnuts went ballistic I personally found the post in extremely poor taste and borderline racist. But the point wasn’t to skewer Gilliard so much as to show liberal bloggers what incredible hypocrites they truly are.

The fallout from the episode claimed a Tennessee woman - a liberal - who blogged at WKRN. She made the mistake of pasting an excerpt from the Six Meat Buffet piece and not condemning it. For her oversight, she was subjected to a withering blast of stupidity from left wing bloggers and their mouth breathing commenters. She has since quit in disgust.

Klein is already hearing it today for daring to call the liberal blogs what they are; raving lunatics who cannot tolerate an iota of dissent from their worldview. Will Joe Klein do as most other liberals do who find themselves in the crosshairs of lefty blogs and go before them with bended knee and abjectly apologize for his heresy? Or is he enough of an independent thinker to tell them to take a hike?

Should be interesting to watch…

In the past, I have commemorated the anniversary of D-Day by trying to relate the courage and bravery of those men who stormed the beaches of France with our current military and their effort in the Middle East. It seemed to me at the time to be vitally important that we recalled that heroism exhibited by our “Citizen Soldiers” from so many years ago in order to steel ourselves for the challenges we face on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as future battlefields as yet unnamed.

But the road I’ve travelled these past months has caused me to see the conflicts in which we are currently engaged on a more personal level. A young man falls on a grenade and saves the lives of his comrades. Who was he? What was he like? Or perhaps the story of a mother serving her country while her husband and children try to make do at home, missing her terribly with the children not understanding why their mom can’t be with them.

The fact is, we can talk all we want to about the grand strategy in this war and the political fights at home to end it. But the truth is, it all comes down to the guys with the guns who volunteered to serve the larger purposes of their government. No matter what side of the war you are on or what you think about the government that is prosecuting it, you are a small minded person indeed if you can’t see past your boosterism or denigration of the war itself and recognize that individual American citizens, trained and equipped better than any army in the history of civilization, are placing themselves in harms way every day to fulfill a private compact they made with we, the people of the United States. Quite simply, they took an oath to protect us. They promised to take up arms and fight when our freely elected government determined that it was necessary for them to do so.

It is obvious that a sizable majority of them in Iraq believe quite firmly that their efforts are worth the price they are paying. When more than 70% of them re-enlist in order to return despite the extended tours, the hardship the war is causing their families, the personal discomfort of serving in a war zone, and the dangers of combat, even the densest among us must realize that the desire to serve a cause greater than themselves outweighs all else.

You may disagree vehemently with that cause. But who are we - any of us - be we supporters or opponents of our involvement in Iraq to tell these people that they are either right or wrong in what they believe? It seems to me that they have more than earned the right to follow their own lights and don’t require our pity or thanks for that matter. But their actions and sacrifices demand our respect. And that they will have from me until my dying day.

I’ll leave you this D-Day Anniversary with an extended excerpt from one of the participants. Felix Branham was a demolitions expert in the 29th division who went ashore in the second wave at Omaha Beach. His compelling story is told in its entirety here.

We didn’t talk of dying, unless it was a joke. We used to kid a guy named Gino because he carried a big wad of money, $700 or $800, and he had a beautiful ring.

I would say, “Ferrari, when you hit that beach and you fall, man, I’m going to be getting your wallet out.” And another guy would say, “Yep, I’m going to have that ring of yours.”

And we sat around and thought about that, never thinking it would really happen. But what else did we have to talk about?

[...]

We wanted to go. This sounds crazy, but we had come this far and we’d been sitting in England so long, we wanted to get this thing over with and get the hell home. Well, as it was, we had to settle for another day. We loaded again on Monday afternoon. The rain was letting up some and we started to move out about 10:30 or 11:00 that night. It was still light.

We got twelve miles from Normandy and stopped. We had been told there was a sand bar about 50 yards off shore. [We were also told] if our coxswain on our landing craft let that ramp down, don’t let him do that. Make him go over sideways, but don’t let him let the ramp down because people will drown. Well, that came to pass. A lot of people drowned that way.

We were in the second wave. When we got to the beach, there were 2nd and 5th Rangers piling in with us at the same time. We had a regimental commander named Charles D. Canham and he went in leading us. He was our colonel. There he was firing. He got his rifle shot out of his hand and he reached down and used his .45. He was about 55 years old and was the bravest guy and one of the finest leader. We had lots of leaders. Our platoon leaders, our platoon sergeants, we had good leaders. There’s no question. If we hadn’t had good leaders, we would have never made it off of Omaha Beach.

My boat team was the first one to go over the sea wall; I saw some of my friends die. In my boat team of thirty men we had only lost about five or six men. We were lucky. God knows we were. We followed the line that the engineers had laid out and we got through. We went up the hill then went parallel to Omaha Beach through this little town. Mingled in with us were the 2nd and 5th Rangers. They were scattered about and so forth. Of course, there was a lot of scattering about on Omaha Beach.

[...]

The first man I saw from my company to die was a guy named Gene Ferrara. He was little Italian boy out of Jersey City. He was the kid we teased about carrying $700-$800 in his wallet. I landed and told him to move up. He moved up and then I got ready to move up, too. We were going leaps and bounds, trying to get cover and get behind the sea wall. I moved up ahead of him and happened to look back. The tide was beginning to take him back; he had been killed.

It was chaotic. No one can realize it until they were right there to see it. But you hear so many tales about it. Each one of us had our own little battle field. D-Day was D-Day, and it was awful.

That’s all I can tell you. When we landed on Omaha Beach, we were well trained, we had good leaders, and the Lord God Almighty was with us, and that’s all I can say. That was D-Day, June 6th, 1944.

I have never been back there, but I would love to go. I can’t think of anything that I would rather do right now than to go back to Normandy and see it. I have a little bottle sitting in my living room with sand from Omaha Beach in it. I would love to go and shovel some up in my hand myself and see what I saw on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Ordinary men exhibiting extraordinary courage. And there were 30,000 stories from the beaches that day, all of them equally poignant but all of them different.

Remember them all today…

I first read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s searing account of US government depredations against Native Americans, the summer before my senior year in high school. The book hit me like a ton of bricks. At that age, such knowledge is like a cold splash of ice water in the face, an eye opening bracer that fosters a certainty in the righteousness of a young person’s point of view.

I must have been insufferable, telling anyone who would listen that the US government was worse than the Nazis and that all whites had blood on their hands. Of course, Viet Nam was tearing the country apart at the time and trust in government had hit an all time low. Placed in that perspective, Brown’s account of government misdealings and misdeeds seemed to amplify already deeply held beliefs about the evil nature of our government and the lie that was America.

Slowly, over many years, I gained more perspective on the extraordinarily complex and tragic history of Native Americans and their contact with white Europeans and Americans. It is a perspective that doesn’t lessen the severity of the crimes committed against Indians but does allow for the recognition that other factors were at work over the 500 years of contact between the two cultures. Most notably that what was happening between the two races and cultures had occurred many times before in many different places on earth as one society moved in to displace another.

This is a story best told by Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempts to answer the question “[W]hy history unfolded differently on the different continents over the last 13 thousand years.” Where early Americans believed that the reason they had guns and steel (and not incidentally, more potent germs) was because they were superior human beings to native Americans, Diamond shows that the reason for the disparity had much more to do with the shape of continents and the subsequent development of agriculture based on indigenous crops and livestock.

Simply put, Eurasia had many times more wild food sources and wild animals conducive to being domesticated by man than anywhere else in the world. The early onset of organized agriculture forced people to form ever more complex social entities which eventually led to nation states and the conquering of indigenous people.

But the drama of displacing native peoples was an old one by the time whites arrived on the North American continent. On every continent as wave after wave of the peopling of our world occurred, more advanced cultures with better weapons, better organization, and sheer numbers overtook and threw out the original inhabitants. And when whites first arrived on our shores, the fate of Native Americans was sealed thanks largely to the power politics of Europe and the zealotry of missionaries.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee wasn’t about perspective. It was an indictment. In that, it succeeded beyond the author’s imaginings. And while the movie concentrated only on the history of the Lakota people from Little Big Horn in 1876 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the book chronicled the equally tragic history of most of the plains Indians as the US government forced Native Americans on to reservations, cutting them off from their culture, their ancestral homes, and most importantly, their spiritual core.

As the movie made crystal clear thanks to a fine acting turn by Aidan Quinn as Senator Henry Dawes, the “do-gooders” actually contributed in no small way to this tragedy. In a classical sense, those who wished to “help” the Indians by tearing them from their land and forcing them to assimilate committed the sin of overarching hubris. This attitude was not as uncommon in America as one might think. Every President from Washington to Teddy Roosevelt spoke of treating the Indians with respect and dignity while showing them the error of their savage ways and turning them into farmers or ranchers. But the reality was much darker, bloodier. In the name of commerce, or settlement (to fulfill Manifest Destiny) or to grab valuable resources, treaties were broken, wars were begun, massacres occurred, and sickness and death descended on the tribes thinning their ranks until the survivors were herded onto barren, desolate parcels of land that the whites didn’t want.

The film brings out this conflict in stark relief. And what makes it so compelling is that the movie resists the temptation to portray most whites as one dimensional evil doers hell bent on blood and destruction of native Americans. The violence done to the Indian is more subtle and concentrates on how forcing Native Americans to subsume their culture and heritage to fit in to white society was every bit as damaging as any war ever fought to subdue them.

The character of Sitting Bull - a powerful performance by veteran actor August Schellenberg - is pitch perfect. What we know of the historical person was that he was a proud resistance fighter against white encroachment who in some ways ended up the very caricature of a cigar store Indian only to redeem himself at the end of his life in the eyes of his people. Schellenberg did not flinch from portraying some of the more unattractive qualities exhibited by Sitting Bull which made his strength and determination all the more evocative. A sure fire Emmy nomination is in the offing for Schellenberg’s outstanding performance.

The final major character of Charles Eastman was perhaps one of the weaker links in the narrative. Part of the reason was the impossibility of trying to show the inner turmoil that Eastman - a Native American ripped from his boyhood home by his assimilated father - must have felt as he made the transition to his own assimilation as a college graduate and doctor. Adam Beach was more than adequate in the role of the Lakota doctor who goes to the Pine Ridge reservation to minister to his people only to end up disillusioned with his own role in forcing the Indians to assimilate while witnessing the atrocity at Wounded Knee.

And that horrible tragedy was portrayed quite well in the film. The story of the Ghost Dance and the role it played in the massacre at Wounded Knee has always touched me to the very depths of my heart. To be so desperate for spiritual comfort to believe that by dancing you can bring back the buffalo, make the white man disappear, and become immune to their bullets sums up the helplessness and hopelessness of tribal people who never could quite come to grips with the destruction of their culture. It is tragedy piled on top of tragedy. And its portrayal on the screen was extremely well done.

No doubt this production will be nominated for numerous Emmy awards. The photography is gorgeous. The script is spare and realistic. The direction is crisp and clean. And the acting is uniformly excellent. My guess is that it will receive numerous nominations next month and sweep the awards in September.

And deservedly so. It’s the best movie of its genre to be made in a while and shows once again that HBO has the best original movies of any network on television.

C: I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Pardon the lengthy introduction, but The Dead Parrot Sketch is one of Monty Python’s most important contributions to the humor of western civilization. Or not. I suppose it depends on whether you like Monty Python.

Be that as it may, the sketch is also instructive regarding the imminent demise of what we used to call “The Grand Old Party” which became the nickname of Republicans back in the day when “The Grand Army of the Republic” - Union veterans of the Civil War - pretty much ran the party. Those 400,000 or so veterans elected every Republican president from Grant to McKinley. Their endorsement carried huge weight with a grateful electorate who recognized the veteran’s sacrifices and honored them even beyond the effective life of the GAR.

Now the party is run by cynical hacks and jackanapes who, despite all evidence to the contrary, insist that the parrot isn’t dead, it’s just resting. The plumage may still be pretty. But maggots have already begun to eat away at the insides.

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker–”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

Peggy Noonan is not some turncoat, traitorous, weak kneed Republican pantywaist. She helped put Ronald Reagan’s ideas and thoughts to some of the most beautiful rhetorical music of 20th century politics. But she, along with many of us, are tired and dispirited. We have seen the Republican party run into the ground and then stepped on by an Administration and a President who have gone beyond taking most of us for granted and instead have declared war upon those who have sustained his presidency in the face of the most vicious and determined opposition to his policies. We have been slapped in the face, kicked in the teeth, stabbed in the back. And the smug, self-righteous mountebanks who are taking the party with them to oblivion could care less.

In fact, given all that has transpired since the 2004 election (which coincided with the last time the Bushies even paid lip service to the base) one could say that this President has seemed most determined to destroy the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan leaving behind only a charred husk for the rest of us to live with. They have decided that Götterdämmerung is in order; if they can’t prevail, then they will destroy what is left of the grand coalition that changed the face of America and the world in the 1980’s and in a fit of either pique or ignorance, leave it for the next crew to cobble together something else.

I will say that it didn’t take much to destroy what was left of that coalition. Since the end of the cold war - the single uniting expedient of the Republican party for more than 30 years - the GOP has been adrift. Uniting against Clinton was fairly easy although that unity was a mile wide and an inch deep. It was based on the absolute worst of political bargains; the cold, calculus of how to get power and keep it. So for ten years Republicans played the special interest game, feeding the lobbyists a steady diet of earmarks and favors, reaping huge amounts of campaign contributions in return, while selling out their basic principles of smaller, less intrusive government and fiscal discipline.

And now, there’s precious little left. No ideology. Little loyalty. Less desire to help this gang of cynical galoots maintain what power and position they have remaining. Witness the news from the Republican National Committee:

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times.

The national committee yesterday confirmed the firings that took place more than a week ago, but denied that the move was motivated by declining donor response to phone solicitations.

“The phone-bank employees were terminated,” RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail in response to questions sent by The Times. “This was not an easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable.”

Fired employees acknowledged that the committee’s phone equipment was outdated, but said a sharp drop-off in donations “probably” hastened the end of the RNC’s in-house phone-bank operation.

“Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by the end of 2007,” said one fired phone bank solicitor who asked not to be identified.

Not dead. Just resting.

The real danger, of course, is that come November next year GOP candidates simply won’t be able to compete in the 70 or so seats in the House that the Democrats are licking their chops to see change hands. With little available help from the national party and a base that will not only sit on their wallets but probably sit on their hands come election day, the chances are growing that a truly remarkable collapse will occur, an historic implosion that, like a tidal wave, will change the political contours of the country once it recedes. The stars are not quite aligned yet for such a disaster. But the tumblers are beginning to click into place and it remains to be seen whether anyone or any group in the GOP can alter history’s course.

Meanwhile, the Bushies continue to employ their scorched earth policy toward critics:

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill–one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions–this is, always and on every issue, the administration’s default position–but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

Indeed. The President’s famous stubbornness - a quality that held him in good stead early in his Administration - has now morphed into a pathological, ego-centric belief that since he is always right, his critics are not only wrong but evil to boot. I guess six years of enduring the unhinged, BDS paranoia and conspiracy theories of the lickspittle left can do that to a man.

The fact that this self righteousness has permeated his entire Administration as well as most supporters of his Let’s-Not-Call-It-Amnesty-Even-Though-It-Is bill only makes many of his erstwhile supporters wonder is there anything left to expend the time and energy defending. Some would say the Administration’s policies in Iraq are worth going to bat for. But given recent news that the President is about to undercut even his Iraq War supporters by withdrawing a substantial number of troops for no more reason than the Democrats have given, it would appear the betrayal of even these, his most loyal and true acolytes, will eventually be complete.

Meanwhile, world events rush forward. Iran continues to thumb its nose at everyone. Pakistan becomes more unstable by the day - with its 60 nuclear weapons poised to possibly fall into the hands of Taliban lovers. Afghanistan still bleeds despite small successes. Lebanon is in danger from a desperate Syria who seeks to undermine its government to prevent an International Tribunal from declaring President Assad a common, murderous gangster. Chavez is taking Venezuela to hell. And the terrorists continue to plan murder on a cosmic scale.

A lame duck President without much of a base, a rabid dog opposition, and a party coming apart at the seams means a time of maximum danger for the United States. I wish it weren’t so. But the palpable feeling of impending disaster that I feel to the marrow of my bones requires me to cry out in anger and despair at those who have taken us down this road and who will now reap the whirlwind for what they have sown these past few years.

UPDATE

Allah channels the parrot:

The RNC spokesman denied that there has been a falloff at all. Yup, there’s nothing wrong in the GOP family these days. Nothing at all. Nothing to see here, move along.

UPDATE II: FROM THE “HOLY CHRIST!” FILES

Michelle links to a Mary Katherine Ham post on a verbatim transcript with an RNC solicitor:

Caller: “Well, that’s not Republicans. Just the President loves that immigration bill.”

Caller: “That’s ridiculous.”

Indeed. You lost me at “hello”…