Right Wing Nut House

John Cole alerted me to this story:

A conservative Christian group launched a boycott against Ford Motor Co. Tuesday, saying the second-largest U.S. automaker has given thousands of dollars to gay rights groups, offers benefits to same-sex couples and actively recruits gay employees.

“From redefining family to include homosexual marriage, to giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda, to forcing managers to attend diversity training on how to promote the acceptance of homosexuality… Ford leads the way,” American Family Association chairman Donald Wildmon said in a statement.

Yes…and your point is? If Ford Motor Company wants to include in its outreach programs Gay Rights groups, what the hell business is it of AFA and loonbat Wildmon?

Quite simply, this is getting embarrassing. Yes Bill Ford, CEO of Ford Motor Company is a moonbat of the first order:

Young Bill got a prep school education before going to Princeton and MIT. He is a tae kwon do blackbelt, a student of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and a folk guitar player.

His most notable contribution since becoming chairman 2 years ago has been to try to make Ford the most environmentally friendly automaker. He has horrified many in the industry — and many at the company — by publicly blaming auto emissions for greenhouse gases causing climate change. He speaks passionately about a future with cleaner alternative fuels, recyclable cars and compostable parts.

The fact that his most “notable” contribution since becoming chairman has been to turn Ford into a green oasis will catch up to him soon enough. One would think that the most notable contribution a CEO could make to his company is to, like, you know, make some effing money for the shareholders! The fact that his interests lie with Buddhism rather than profits may eventually be his downfall. And if he wants to waste the time of his managers on “diversity sessions” rather than building cars he better brush up on that folk guitar because the only job he’ll be able to get after the stockholders fire his ass is street musician.

Well, that won’t happen…after all he is a Ford.

This still doesn’t excuse the AFA and Mr. Wildebeast from going after companies that…do what”

Laymon added that other automakers — including General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. — provide benefits for same-sex partners and market their vehicles to the gay community.

“It is one of the things that makes us proud to be part of the auto industry,” Laymon said.

It’s high time that the Republican Party started to distance themselves from these crazies. You can’t tell me that a majority of Republican lawmakers find this sort of thing acceptable. You can’t tell me that 10% of Republican lawmakers agree with this. It’s loony politics. Why take a position that’s opposed by a vast majority of the American people who support most of the rights for gay people outlined in the boycott statement? I’m the first to line up against things like teaching 8 year olds the why’s and wherefore’s of gay sex (or any kind of sex for that matter). But this? This is nuts.

It’s hard to defend the religious right sometimes when people like Wildmon and Dobson constantly make such gigantic asses of themselves.

If the first rule of government spending is “Why have one when you can build two at twice the price?” then the first tenet of government rule making should be “Why make one rule when four will serve the same purpose?”

Friday, June 3 is the deadline for comments on proposed FEC rules affecting the internet. And while they’re aren’t any daggers aimed at the heart of bloggers, there certainly appears to be plenty of pins ready to prick us till we bleed.

The good news is most of the 10 million or so blogs in the Shadow Media will be totally exempt from the regs. If you mention how much you hate Bush in between stories of teaching toilet etiquitte to your tot, you are safe from the long arm of the bureaucrats. If however, your ambitions include using your blog as an advocacy platform, things get a touch more complicated.

Disclosure seems to be the goal of the Feds. If you’re taking ads from a candidate or being paid by a candidate to promote the campaign, you will have to declare that on your site. But where? The Online Coalition makes a good point in their response to the proposed rules:

Furthermore, we cannot understand how a disclaimer would work in practice. Must the site feature a disclaimer on every entry? Only ones related to the campaign that made the payment? Suppose the blogger is paid by the campaign but does not write about the campaign specifically, but instead debates important current events? Is there some kind of “express advocacy” rule? How would disclaimers work with sound or video files? While we strongly oppose a disclaimer requirement, if the Commission insists upon pursuing this idea, it must set forth clearly what is required to comply with the rule.

The way these rules are written, it’s abundantly clear that the FEC simply does not understand who or what a blogger is or what we do. Neither do they understand the technical aspect of blogs (I don’t either but I’m not attempting to curtail free speech by regulating it now, am I?)

Then there’s the FEC’s problems with the English language. Now, admittedly, English is one of the more difficult languages to master - just listen to Pamela Sue Anderson try to give a speech . But generally speaking, if you’re going to write the definition of a rule and then write the rule ignoring the definition you just made, you’re going to have more confusion than even Pamela Sue could imagine:

The exemption is crafted in such a way as to apply only to communications by any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication. This awkward wording suggests that the FEC means to distinguish between newspapers and periodicals, whose Internet media activities are exempt, and some classifications of other persons and organizations, which are not. Yet, the explanation for the proposed rule states “the proposed regulation expressly rejects a policy that only a bona fide press entity with an off-line component is entitled to protection in their online news stories, commentaries and editorials.”

In short, the rulemakers can’t seem to make up their minds. Are bloggers journalists? Are blogs on-line publications or commercials for candidates?

There’s an easy way to fix this entire mess. There is a bill in Congress to exempt internet activities from FEC scrutiny. Entitled The Online Freedom of Speech Act,” the bill would exempt bloggers and other online publications from rulemaking by the FEC.

All we can be certain of is this: If the FEC goes ahead with their proposals for the internet, there’s little doubt that those who are targeted by the rules will find a way around them. This has been the pattern every single time that campaign finance laws have been changed.

Every. Single. Time.

Earlier today, I highlighted the possibility that Al Haig could be a second piece in the composite Deep Throat puzzle. I still believe there’s more to discover about the sourcing of the Wood/Stein stories and the outing of Mark Felt as the one and only Deep Throat just doesn’t close the books as far as I’m concerned. I may be tilting at windmills here in trying to pin something on Haig, but I thought that this would be as good a time as any to look into what has to be one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the executive branch, the Moorer-Radford Affair and how a relationship developed between a young naval briefing officer for the Pentagon named Bob Woodward and the Assistant to the National Security Adviser, Alexander Haig.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had maintained a liaison office with the National Security Council for many years. This office kept the Chiefs informed of White House thinking on security matters as well as other items of potential interest to the military. There was nothing unusual about this as the Pentagon liaised with a number of committees and boards throughout the national security establishment.

Then Nixon was elected and things changed dramatically. Nixon’s paranoia made him suspicious of all but a handful of close aides. Couple that with Henry Kissinger’s well known desire to keep as much of the decision making power for national security in his own hands and the Joint Chiefs suddenly found themselves left out in the cold on matters vital to the military. The Viet Nam war was still raging at the time and Nixon’s back channel negotiations with the Russians and the Chinese along with his plans to draw down troop strength was done with very little input from the Chiefs.

When Admiral Moorer took over as Chairman of the JCS, he named Admiral Robert Weland as JCS liaison to the NSC. Weland reported directly to Moorer and brought along a Yeoman to assist him, one Charles Radford. Where in the past, there was little if any clandestine activity on the part of the liaison office with regards to the NSC, Welander began what became nothing less than a covert operation on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to try and pry loose the secrets Nixon so desperately wanted to keep from them.

It was at this point that a young Pentagon briefer entered the picture. Bob Woodward’s role in the affair has always been speculated on because it became clear after a while that in addition to Yeoman Radford rifling through secret papers and the like, the Chiefs were being assisted by someone else on the White House staff. This was revealed when Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist, published excerpts from highly classified briefings about the 1971 India-Pakistan conflict in which instead of being neutral, the US was “tilting” toward Pakistan.

Nixon was angry enough to sick John Erlichman on the leakers. What Erlichman discovered astonished the President. Accompanying NSC Deputy Haig on trips, Radford would return with gobs of information purloined from Haig’s briefcase. The Nixon tapes make clear that the President, Haldeman and Erlichman all believed that Haig was complicit in the Affair but could probably never pin anything on him.

The speculation about Haig centers on where his “loyalties” lay. Many observers believe that Haig could very well have been passing information on to the JCS due to his lifelong love and commitment to the military. And what better way to keep the Chiefs informed than by using the young Bob Woodward as a conduit back to Woodward’s boss Admiral Welander? At the very least, the briefings Woodward gave Haig in the basement of the White House establishes a prior relationship.

The final act of this drama was an anti-climax. After tracing the leaks to Radford, the Yeoman confessed his role in the spy ring and implicated both Welander and Moorer. When questioned, Welander implicated Moorer and perhaps even Haig, although some believe the record was expunged when Fred Buzzardt, Nixon’s lawyer and a good friend of Haig’s “reinterviewed” Welander sans the references to the former NATO Commander.

Nixon was in a quandary. Revelations like the ones made by Radford could roil the country even more than it already was in addition to lowering the stature of a military already suffering the effects of bad press from the Viet Nam war.

So Nixon sat on the scandal. It wasn’t until several years later that the Affair came to light. And by then, the impact of disclosure was muted by Nixon’s legacy of deceit. It just didn’t seem surprising that the JCS would have to spy on the executive in order to find out information they thought they were entitled to.

Some writers have taken this incident and run wild with speculation that the military somehow orchestrated Nixon’s downfall. What Moorer-Radford makes clear is that in the end, these guys weren’t clever enough to carry something like that off. Radford’s activities were amateurish and not very effective. Whether someone else was supplying the JCS with information is unknown to this day. Nixon’s idle speculation about Haig could very well have been a product of his penchant for paranoia with Haldeman and Erlichman as his chief enablers in this regard, always agreeing with him, always egging him on to more fantastic flights of fancy as to who was against him.

But one fact is undeniable and confirmed by Admiral Welander. Bob Woodward briefed Alexander Haig many times in the basement of the White House in the years 1969-1970. And when Woodward went to work for the Washington Post shortly after his leaving the military in 1971, he already knew where to go for information about the Nixon White House.

What was said between Nixon and his Chief of Staff H.R. Halderman during the infamous 18 1/2 gap on a tape from June 20,1972? The question has tantalized historians and Watergate aficionados since the information was confirmed by Judge John Sirica on December 7, 1973. At that time, Sirica was grilling poor Rosemary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary, about how she could have possibly accidentally erased such crucial evidence. Mrs. Woods explanation became part of Watergate lore.

Woods had been transcribing the June 20 tape when the phone rang. As she leaned over to answer it, her foot accidentally moved from the “play” function to the “reverse” function on the foot pedal controls for the tape recorder. At the same time, her hand must have accidentally pressed the “record” button on the machine.

Since experts later testified that there were between 5 and 9 separate erasures, Mr. Woods evidently got quite a few phone calls.

Of course, no one believed her. And it’s to Sirica’s credit I think, that he didn’t charge Mrs. Woods with obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, or any other serious crime. He must have realized that it wasn’t Woods who erased the tape in the first place.

If not Woods, who?

The answer to that question reveals the problem facing many Watergate buffs this morning. While Mark Felt was certainly in a position to reveal information to Wood/Stein about the FBI’s investigation, there’s very little doubt he could not have known about the tape gap. And yet, in a story dated almost a month before Mrs. Woods grilling by Judge Siraca, the intrepid Post reporters had the story of the tape gap and immediately recognized its significance.

Here’s Nixon biographer Jonathon Aiken:

This was the story in the Washington Post of November 8, 1973 saying that a crucial White House tape of June 20, 1972 featuring Nixon and his chief of staff, H R Halderman, had been “doctored” and that the problems on the tape were of a “suspicious nature”.

Deep Throat told Bob Woodward that this tape contained “deliberate erasures”. This was the sensational story of the 18-and-a-half minute gap on the tape. It remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Watergate because it contains the probable identity of Deep Throat.

When Deep Throat leaked the information about “deliberate erasures” to Woodward at some time in the first week of November 1973 only six people in the White House, or for that matter in the world, knew about the problem of the gap in the tape. They were Richard Nixon; Rose Mary Woods (Nixon’s personal secretary); Alexander Haig (The White House chief of staff); Haig’s deputy, Major General John C Bennett and two trusted Nixon White House aides, Fred Buzhardt and Steve Bull.

I saw Haig on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country last night and the old guy gave some very strange answers. He kept insisting he had Felt pegged all along as Deep Throat. He just couldn’t get the revelation to his publisher in time to make the deadline for the publication of his second book(!) And the look on his face when others on the panel were talking bordered on triumphant.

I may be imagining this because my personal choice for one of the Deep Throats had always been Haig. As many authors that chronicled Nixon’s last days have pointed out, Haig pretty much orchestrated the entire endgame of Nixon’s resignation. One book even goes so far as to attempt to tie Haig to a coup d’etat by the military and other elements in the national security apparatus who wanted Nixon out. The book’s claims are as sensational as they are loony. But it gave an accurate portrait of Haig as someone with vast contacts in many areas of government - contacts that he could have used to disseminate a lot of information about Watergate.

Many historians have speculated that Deep Throat is a composite of at least 2 and possibly 3 different people. That’s because Wood/Steins information came from someone or a couple of someones who were privy to information from both the Department of Justice and the highest levels of the executive branch. If Deep Throat were one individual, someone with that type of access would stick out like a sore thumb. Since no one person would seem to fit the bill, I believe it likely that Alexander Haig could be another, equally important source, for Wood/Stien’s Watergate stories.

The confirmation by Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstien of Felt’s role as Deep Throat said nothing about there not being another source. Bradlee seemed to go out of his way to put an exclamation mark on the story when he said “The last secret of Watergate” had been revealed. And Woodward himself may be relieved that Felt had taken some of the attention away from other candidates. That’s because Woodward’s association with Haig may reveal more than just the General being a source for Watergate. In a subject I’ll cover in full later today, Woodward’s commanding officer while he was in the Navy was Admiral Thomas Moorer who was involved in one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the executive branch, the so-called Moorer-Radford Affair. This incident is one of the least known and aspects of the entire Watergate matter. And Woodward, as an aide to Moorer, used to brief Alexander Haig on a regular basis.

This proves nothing, of course. But it’s interesting nonetheless. So until proven otherwise, I will continue to believe in multiple Deep Throats.

It ain’t over yet.

We’ve all heard by now that the Washington Post Watergate source Deep Throat “outed” himself yesterday in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. What few people have examined yet is the process by which that information eventually came to light and what’s shaping up to be an interesting story on the family of Mark Felt who saw the outing of Deep Throat as a way to fame and riches.

First let me say that I sympathize with Felt’s family in that the medical bills associated with Mr. Felt’s illnesses are probably substantial. And I admire the fact that his daughter opened her home to the former FBI #2 man and evidently took good care of him.

But there are several unanswered questions that the family is going to have to deal with over the next few days and weeks. First and foremost: Was Mark Felt of sound enough mind to make the decision on his own to reveal his identity as Deep Throat?

Apparently, when Bob Woodward received word this past weekend that Vanity Fair was going with the story, this was the first question that entered his mind. Woodward had seen Felt in 1999 at which time the family first approached him about writing a book with Felt about the mystery. Questions of Felt’s mental capacity bothered Woodward up until the moment the story broke:

Woodward and others at The Post were caught by surprise. Woodward had known that family members was considering going public; in fact, they had talked repeatedly with Woodward about the possibility of jointly writing a book to reveal the news. An e-mail from Felt’s daughter over the Memorial Day weekend continued to hold out the idea that Woodward and Felt would disclose the secret together.

Throughout those contacts, Woodward was dogged by reservations about Felt’s mental condition, he said yesterday, wondering whether the source was competent to undo the long-standing pledge of anonymity that bound them.

Then there’s the question of conflict of interest on the part of the Felt family attorney John D. O’Connor. Here he was representing the family in negotiations that spanned at least two years with various publishers and media outlets trying to get money for the family in return for the scoop. Then, when O’Connor got a tentative go ahead from Vanity Fair, he was actually writing the article for publication:

Vanity Fair’s story hinted at but did not answer a key journalistic question: Was Felt, who is 91 and in ill health from a stroke, of sound enough mind to have confirmed his identity to O’Connor, or to have told Woodward that their agreement had ended?

The Vanity Fair story muddies the issue somewhat. O’Connor notes in the story that Felt told him, “I’m the guy they called Deep Throat,” but the context is lacking. For one thing, O’Connor played a dual role: He was providing the Felt family with legal advice while also writing a magazine story, which meant that Felt’s revelation may have been information provided under attorney-client privilege and therefore not subject to unilateral disclosure.

What’s more, as O’Connor makes clear in his story, the Felt family was seeking to profit from Felt’s secret identity and therefore had an incentive to pressure a clearly conflicted Felt into going public.

Did Felt’s family see the old man as some kind of gold mine? The evidence so far would seem to indicate that the answer to that question is yes.

The ancillary question is did Mr. Felt understand that and did he approve?

The family was in a unique position, one that most people would envy but few would really understand. Depending on Mr. Felt’s mental capacity, their motivations could be both mercenary and loving at the same time. Why shouldn’t their father/grandfather receive the recognition as Deep Throat while he was still alive? He certainly looks happy enough in the picture above. And while the family received no money for the Vanity Fair piece, look for the “My Story” book coming very soon to your favorite book store and watch for the mini-series next May during network sweeps.

In short, the family is going to make a financial killing.

In a few months, they may wish that they kept their mouths shut. Along with the money will come more attention more quickly than they may be able to handle. That first interview (I predict either Barbara Walters or Larry King) will be one of the most widely viewed TV programs of the year. Total strangers will come out of nowhere and ask for money, for help, for autographs. And privacy will be a distant memory.

Our mass media culture consumes people like Joan Felt and Nick Jones. They’re about to discover what happens when the confluence of celebrity and news hits the purveyors of both; cable news. With an appetite more voracious than a pack of hyenas and the scruples of my pet cat Aramas, the Three Musketeers of media mayhem will flog and flog and flog this story until the scourging scene in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ will look tame by comparison.Come Saturday, when the cable news outlets have their navel-gazing “media on media” shows, watch for the head shaking and finger wagging from the panelists about how we’re overdoing this story, how the media is in another feeding frenzy mode, and how sad all this is for Mr. Felt’s family.

Do you think that will stop the hyenas from feeding?

Anonymous sources are a pain. You have to decide why they don’t want their names associated with the information they’re giving. What axe, if any, do they have to grind? Personal? Professional? Sexual?

In the case of Deep Throat, there was apparently another motivation. Sour grapes.

Woodward said Felt helped The Post at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy. He said the Watergate break-in came shortly after the death of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt’s mentor, and that Felt and other bureau officials wanted to see an FBI veteran promoted to succeed Hoover.

Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post.

Felt wouldn’t be the first Washington bureaucrat to dish some dirt as the result of being passed over for promotion. Information is power. And Felt’s talking out of school eventually made L. Patrick Gray’s position untenable to the point where the Acting FBI Director declined to be in the running as a permanent replacement for Hoover.

Now I’m sure that Felt sees in his own mind a nobility of purpose and purity of motive that blinds him to the more unsavory aspect of his deed. There’s a reason FBI reports aren’t made public; they alert the target of the investigation to the interest of the Bureau. And in Felt’s case, he guided Wood/Stein in such a way as to throw suspicion on people who could have been squeezed by the Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox before their names were associated with the crime. Would this have made a difference in the final analysis? Probably not. But it certainly made the job of Cox and his successor, Leon Jaworski that much harder.

And what about the $64,000 question? The counterfactual of counterfactuals?

What if Felt had kept his mouth shut? Would things have played out the same way? Would Nixon have been forced to resign?

The answer is a resounding yes. And that’s because Felt was more important to the Post than he was to the overall investigation.

The honor for the single most important cog in the Watergate investigation goes to a minor White House functionary named Alexander Butterfield. Butterfield had a rather unique job in in the White House. He liaised with the Secret Service to maintain the massive bugging system that Nixon, in what could only be described as revealing the tragic flaw of overarching hubris, had installed to record his every sentence, every word, every breath for posterity.

The story of Butterfield’s outing is a classic case of serendipity and best told here. And once the information about those tapes were out there, Nixon’s fate was sealed regardless of anything Deep Throat could tell Wood/Stein about the scandal.

So, the mystery is solved in something of an anticlimactic manner. There will be no more funeral watches of Watergate related figures for Woodward sightings. Instead, a very old and very sick man who may or may not have been angry at being passed over as Director of the FBI, tells a second tier monthly magazine a story that’s pretty much of surpassing interest only to political junkies and historians.

But it’s still a great story. And I’m glad it’s finally been told.

The revelation today that Mark Felt could very well be the “unnamed” source known as Deep Throat for Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s sensational Watergate exclusives has set off a wave of nostalgia among Nixon haters and a wave of revulsion among many others.

First, it appears that Woodward had contact recently with Felt looking to make a media extravaganza out of the revelation:

The Vanity Fair article said Felt’s family had convinced him that his actions during Watergate were heroic and worthy of acknowledgment and he should come forward. His daughter had spoken to Woodward, who visited Felt in Santa Rose in 1999, by phone more than a half-dozen times to discuss a potential joint announcement, Vanity Fair said.

But Woodward would often begin those conversations with a caveat, the magazine said, saying, ”Just because I’m talking to you, I’m not admitting that he is who you think he is.”

Couple this with both Bernstein and Woodward’s failure to immediately squelch the story and you have the makings of a pretty interesting news day.

That being said, what this will do is open a whole bunch of unhealed wounds on both sides of the Watergate divide. Anytime another set of Nixon White House tapes has been released by the National Archives, a veritable feeding frenzy by the press ensues in which Nixon’s every off the cuff utterance is given front page treatment. The themes are familiar; Nixon the racist, Nixon the anti-Semite, Nixon the madman.

Nixon may have been all of those and worse. But what doesn’t get much attention are the recent release of the Johnson and Kennedy tapes that reveal some pretty nasty stuff about those fellows too. When it does make the news (Johnson’s tapes have been written about by Presidential historian and TV talking head Michael R. Beschloss) Presidential peculiarities are chalked up to the “complexity” of the men, not any inherent evil present in their personalities.

With Nixon, it’s different. Any revelation about his Presidency is viewed as further justification for his fall from grace. What’s never addressed in this orgy of self congratulations is the very real role played by the national press in bringing down a President.

In short, unelected elites decided Nixon was guilty of not just the Watergate coverup, but a wide variety of crimes that necessitated his removal from office.

How much better would a Senate trial have been? At least we would have gotten the satisfaction of having representatives of the people remove him. And the consequences that have flowed from the realization of the mainstream press that they can make or break or even remove President’s have been dire. For going on 30 years, every journalist in America has dreamed of being the next Woodward and Bernstein. The fame, the riches, the adulation attendant to bringing down a President has motivated more than one journalist to make every “scandal” in Washington into a “gate.” Koreagate, Contragate, bimbogate…the list is endless.

This is unhealthy for the republic as well as being ridiculous.

If Mark Felt is indeed Deep Throat he probably should be applauded for bringing the corruption surrounding Watergate to the attention of the people through the Washington Post. But like all stories regarding Nixon, there’s very little context to go with the condemnation.

Will historians 100 years from now see things a little differently? Will they take into account that there thousands of Americans actively working to overthrow the government, who believed that by fomenting violence they could achieve a socialist paradise? Will they see that leaks from high government officials on issues like arms control were not only a threat to national security but a threat to human life on the planet as well? Will they see the shortsightedness of the press in their relentless pursuit of a President who they didn’t like personally?

I don’t know. I’m not an historian a hundred years from now. What I do know is that Nixon governed in the most difficult time in this nation’s history since the Civil War. There were thousands of people in the streets cheering for victory by an enemy that was killing American boys on the battlefield (We hadn’t yet become inured to this spectacle. When it happens today we pay it no mind because we’re used to American citizens wishing for the death of American servicemen). The social fabric of the nation was fraying at the edges not just because of Viet Nam but because the pent up demand for equality from so many deserving minorities was spilling out into the streets and rocking the establishment. Add to that Nixon’s secretive, almost paranoid personality that was manipulated by sycophantic aides - small, petty men of much ambition and little talent - who played on the President’s desperation as he tried to understand and deal with the maelstrom threatening to suck the country into a de facto civil war.

It’s too easy to forget that this is the way it was. And while Nixon should never be excused, I have a sneaky suspicion that historians of the future will indeed put his many accomplishments and spectacular failures into a perspective that neither his supporters nor detractors could possibly do today.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:

Captains Quarters
Wizbang
Political Teen has video of Felt’s grandson.

UPDATE…WITH A BULLET

WOODWARD, BRADLEE, AND BERNSTEIN HAVE CONFIRMED THAT FELT WAS IN FACT DEEP THROAT.

Here are some interesting (or not) articles from daily newspapers around the world (or at least here and Great Britain).

Bush Calls Human Rights Report “Absurd”

And so it is. Anyone who would compare Guantanamo with the Soviet gulag is a ninny.

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday dismissed a human rights report as “absurd” for its harsh criticism of U.S. treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the allegations were made by prisoners “who hate America.”

“It’s an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world,” Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

Kudos to the Prez for his use of non-diplomatic language to call a spade a spade.

C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights

“Guise” which is short for “disguise” kinda means, you know, SECRET!

While posing as a private charter outfit - “aircraft rental with pilot” is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency’s Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.

Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world

Maybe we could get the Valerie Palme special prosecutor to look into this.

Ex-FBI official says he’s ‘Deep Throat’

Mark Felt? Mark Felt?

W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after rising to its second most senior position, has identified himself as the “Deep Throat” source quoted by The Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation, Vanity Fair magazine said Tuesday.

“I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat,” he told John D. O’Connor, the author of Vanity Fair’s exclusive that appears in its July issue.

Felt, now 91 and living in Santa Rosa, Calif. reportedly gave O’Connor permission to disclose his identity.

In recent years, speculation had shifted from the White House to the FBI. This is because of Wood/Stiein’s promise to reveal the name of “Deep Throat” only after that worthy’s demise. And as aide after aide has died over the years, it’s become pretty clear that by simple process of elimination, it had to be someone pretty high up in the FBI or a Justice Department official familiar with the Bureau’s investigation.

No word yet from Wood/Stein on whether this is the rantings of a 91 year old man or if it’s true. If it’s true, I predict the blogswarm of blogswarms.

UPDATE: Washington Post issues “no comment.” Bernstien doesn’t deny it - says “We’re not going to say anything at this time. When the person is deceased we will identify him.”

Let’s see what happens when this story picks up steam. Bernstien and/or the Post may change their tune about commenting if the heat gets too great.

German Jobless Rate Down to 11.6 Percent

Re-elect Schroeder!

BERLIN — Germany’s jobless rate edged down to 11.6 percent in May, government figures showed Tuesday, but the drop reflected a seasonal upturn instead of economic improvement in Europe’s biggest economy.

The unadjusted jobless rate in May was down from 12 percent the previous month. The number of people without a job in Germany dropped to 4.807 million from 4.968 million.

Wow! Looks like the socialist policies of the German Chancellor have finally caused the economy to turn the corner with prosperity just around the bend and German workers able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Then again, it just might be a seasonal blip. There are no cliches for seasonal blips.

Face it: this treaty is dead, says Kinnock

We’re going to listen to a guy who lost 3 elections?

European leaders should accept that the EU constitution is dead after it was rejected in the French referendum on Sunday, said the former EU commissioner Lord Kinnock today.
The former Labour leader warned that any attempt to ratify the treaty against the wishes of the European people would merely serve to increase the alienation millions feel towards the EU.

Lord Kinnock called on the British government, which assumes the six-month EU presidency in July, to reconnect the EU with its citizens by introducing reforms to increase employment and prosperity.

Someday - not anytime soon - Europe will be united under one constitution with one currency and one foreign policy. Not even jolly old England can resist the political and intellectual elites who’ve been dreaming of this “Europe thing” at least since the founding of the European Union in 1919. The question I have is what will Europe look like when it occurs? Will it look like the culturally and racially homogeneous Europe of my ancestors or will it look more like a nightmare version of America where diverse peoples fail to assimilate?

Two Terms of Chaos, Comebacks and Crises

Ronald Reagan? George Bush? Nope.

In a new book, the Washington Post reporter John F. Harris, who covered the Clinton White House from 1995 through 2001, focuses on the Comeback Kid’s “survivalist ethic” - his ability to continually bounce back from adversity, his ability to make it to the end of two terms in the White House despite the ravages of impeachment proceedings, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Whitewater investigations and a noxious atmosphere of vociferous partisanship in Washington.

There is nothing terribly new about Mr. Harris’s assessment of Mr. Clinton in this book. Nor are there insights into his presidency that haven’t been served up many times before - in books by reporters like Bob Woodward, Joe Klein, Elizabeth Drew and John Brummett, in memoirs by former aides and administration members like George Stephanopoulos and Robert Reich, and in the reams of newspaper and magazine articles written about this most psychologically dissected of presidents.

Un. Be. Lievable. Note that the cheerleaders at the Post fail to put “Comeback Kid” in quotation marks. And the easy, dismissive tone about a book that promises to be an eye opener about our putative President in ‘08 as well as her jocular husband.

Some love affairs, you never get over. Just ask the Post.

I’ve complained many times that American history textbooks - especially for middle school children - have become nothing more than shallow, non-contextualized rants against America’s values, highlighting the very real sins of our past at the expense of conceptualizing our national “story.” And while giving some leeway to these same textbook authors due to omissions in the past, I’ve stated that by ignoring or trivializing vast swaths of American history, we’ve raised a generation of children who have no sense of a national narrative.

In Russia, they have exactly the opposite problem:

Russians remember the Siege of Leningrad–a brutal, 872-day blockade of Russia’s second-largest city by Nazi troops that killed 1.7 million people–as a dark, crucial moment in their history. Yet one of the most popular history textbooks in Russian classrooms casually distills the event into a mere four words.

“German troops blockaded Leningrad.”

Glaring omissions abound in Nikita Zagladin’s textbook, “History of Russia and the World in the 20th Century.” The Holocaust is never mentioned. The book barely acknowledges the Gulag labor camps.

And it flits past Russia’s 10-year conflict with separatists in Chechnya, reducing a pivotal episode in modern Russian history to seven paragraphs.

For some Russian academics, Zagladin’s penchant for smoothing over the bumps in Russian history is precisely the reason his textbooks have become mainstays in Russian classrooms.

Clearly, the Russians wish to create a national narrative without the inconvenient and embarrassing episodes that reflect badly on the overarching themes they’re trying to teach. But why?

When President Vladimir Putin met with historians at the Russian State Library in late 2003, he stressed that history textbooks should “cultivate in young people a feeling of pride for one’s history and one’s country.”

At the time, one of the most widely used history texts was Igor Dolutsky’s “National History: 20th Century.” For years, the book had been favored by teachers for its upfront discussion of sensitive topics, including Stalin’s purges, Chechnya and anti-Semitism in Russia.

“They said my book was `blackening’ Russian history,” Dolutsky said during a recent interview. “It was the first prohibition of a textbook in schools in 25 years.”

“Basically, they were dissatisfied with chapters devoted to Stalin’s regime and Putin’s leadership,” said Dolutsky, 51. “Sections that dealt with [Nikita] Khrushchev and [Mikhail] Gorbachev, they ignored.”

Trying to cover up the sins of Stalin’s murderous regime in which at least 20 million and perhaps as many as 40 million human beings were slaughtered is unconscionable. Not only is it dishonest, it leaves a gaping hole in modern Russian history. How can one explain Khrushchev without talking about Stalin’s ghastly regime?

This is what would happen in America if, say we wiped our history books of slavery or Native American genocide. Our modern history would make no sense. How did we get here from there?

Author Zagladin’s view of history in the classroom differs radically from Dolutsky’s. He agrees with Putin–a history textbook should make a pupil feel proud about Russia. It shouldn’t depress, and it shouldn’t shame.

“If a young person finishes school and feels everything that happened in this country was bad, he’ll get ready to emigrate,” Zagladin said during a recent phone interview. “A textbook should provide a patriotic education.

“It’s necessary to show Russian youths,” Zagladin continued, “that industrial development during the Stalin era was successful, and that the repressions and terror during that era did not touch all of the population.”

I’m very happy to learn that Stalin made the trains run - if not on time at least there were more of them to be late - but again, it’s hardly the point. And to be afraid the students will feel so much shame that they’ll leave the country is a novel excuse for cleansing textbooks of non-patriotic or embarrassing material. It assumes that students patriotism is shallow indeed.

Zagladin’s critics say Russian students do not need to be shamed, merely enlightened about history’s darker chapters, especially in a country where the truth has been lacquered over for so many years.

“According to polls, the majority of the population still considers Stalin to have played a positive role in Russian history,” said Yuri Samodurov, director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum. “And the problem here is, our schools don’t do anything to change this attitude.”

Where the Russians have a problem with selective scholarship about its sins, American textbooks (written by committee rather than by individual historians for the most part) give short shrift to national heroes like Washington and Jefferson in order to illuminate America’s “diversity.” This is a result of textbook publishers wishing to sell to as many markets as possible, yielding to multiculturalists (and the religious right in some cases) so that their products are as attractive to a school district in Nebraska as they would be in New York City.

Both approaches are wrong.

American history isn’t locked away in some closet being guarded 24 hours a day by CIA agents. The information is out there for anyone wishing to find it. I remember the brouhaha that erupted following the release of Stephen Spielberg’s excellent movie “Amistad” that told the story of slaves being shipped from the Caribbean to America who staged a mutiny aboard the vessel carrying them here (The Amistad), and the subsequent pleas made on their behalf by abolitionists that resulted in a Supreme Court decision granting them their freedom. Educators were outraged that this “fact” was kept from our school children because it wasn’t in any history textbooks. This is laughable. What isn’t in American history textbooks could fill a building the size of the Library of Congress.

The purpose of a textbook isn’t to “celebrate diversity” or keep students from emigrating. The purpose should be to make students hungry to learn more, to develop their minds by engaging in a little independent thought, or at the very least, to give students a basic idea of how we got here from there.

If Santayana is right - if “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” - both the Russians and Americans are in for some very bad times in the future.

UPDATE

Two interesting takes from opposite sides of the Shadow Media.

From Rob’s Blog:

This is not the example we want to follow. It would be like us censoring out the “bad parts” of our history and then making heroes of people like the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace, and those who furthered the institution of slavery (and later the practices of discrimination).

While Bush rubs elbows with his chum Mr. Putin, he would discourage this tendancy if he understood the implications himself. I doubt he really cares, though…the idea of complacent citizens who believe whatever the government spews out is probably to his liking, too.

While making a good point about heroes, I doubt whether the President would take it upon himself to lecture Putin about history textbooks. And how we got from Russian textbooks to eeeeeevil Bush wanting to turn the country into a bunch of spoon fed automatons is, well, a crock. If Mr. Rob has a scintilla of evidence to back up that statement (rather than his own outrageously ignorant bias) I’d like to see it.

And here’s a different kind of myopia from No Speed Bumps:

I don’t see any good coming out of grossly whitewashing your history, especially when you are overlooking one of the most prolific mass murderers in history. The Russians could find plenty of heroics to celebrate in their history, in spite of the relentless oppression they have faced throughout their history, without glossing over the hard parts. I know that the Russians are made of tougher stuff than that. In fact, I would think that they would want to know their real history. Some leadership is called for here: Putin get your head out of the sand.

Putin is leading - he’s leading the charge on this whitewash job because he senses that by resurrecting Stalin, his own plans for returning Russia to outright authoritarian rule will get a boost from historical precedent. So while I agree with the assessment that the Russians can take a little truth about their past, the point, unfortunately, is that Putin can’t.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

It’s a shame that the Memorial Day holiday has lost so much of its meaning to many Americans. Graves of veterans go unattended and unadorned in many towns and cities. The day has become little more than a marker for the beginning of summer, or of a long weekend filled with barbeque’s, blockbuster movie openings, and baseball games.

There are some exceptions:

Since the late 50’s on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the 1,200 soldiers of the 3d U.S. Infantry place small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. They then patrol 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that each flag remains standing.

In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the 150,000 graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as an annual Good Turn, a practice that continues to this day.

More recently, beginning in 1998, on the Saturday before the observed day for Memorial Day, the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts place a candle at each of approximately 15,300 grave sites of soldiers buried at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on Marye’s Heights (the Luminaria Program).

And in 2004, Washington D.C. held its first Memorial Day parade in over 60 years.

In an editorial today, the Washington Post has an excellent suggestion:

And while we’re at it on this formerly somber holiday, we’d like to offer a few words in support of a related movement that seems to be spreading spontaneously, with a little encouragement from people who have access to the public ear. It is the simple practice of saying “thank you” to men and women in armed forces uniform — on the streets, in office buildings, malls and other places.

Granted, this doesn’t come easily to a people who often are too self-conscious even to sing the national anthem at ballgames. This is especially true in our own city, where formality and restraint are more pronounced than in most. But in fact it’s here that gestures would have a special meaning to a lot of people — from service members assigned to the Washington area to traveling soldiers and Marines in airports to the young man in a wheelchair seeing his nation’s capital on a day trip out of Walter Reed. Such acts affirm that no matter what one’s view of the country’s current conflicts, there is a common and widespread appreciation of those who carry the burden of war. They deserve one more word from a city that produces millions of them every day, one that isn’t all that hard to offer: “Thanks.”

Thanks indeed. It’s the very least we can do. And in an op-ed piece in the same paper, John Wheeler has another great idea:

Unfortunately, no Memorial Day ceremony or war memorial that I have seen has explicitly honored the wounded. In fact, under House Concurrent Resolution 587 of Feb. 10, 1966, Memorial Day is simply for paying “tribute to those who gave their lives.”

This oversight needs correction. We need to honor the wounded as well as those who died. Their numbers are growing, and society needs to both acknowledge their sacrifice and understand their situation. And it needs, through this tribute, to give support and encouragement to the families of the wounded — families that bear great anguish, time devoted to care and economic loss.

Wheeler points out that because of improved body armour and medical advances, the wounded to dead ratio for the war in Iraq is at 8 to 1, better than the 5 to 1 during the Viet Nam war. Many of these veterans come back scarred in both mind and body - a living testament to the horrors of war and why we should never commit our men to battle unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Here are some links to where you can donate time or money to help wounded vets:

United Spinal Association
Purple Heart.Org
Military Family Network
Disabled American Veterans

And Operation Hearthfire supports wounded vets and has a couple of dozen links to other organizations.