The Fantasy Years

I met an Iraqi tonight. An Australian-Iraqi. As an American I had to say something. After all my country and her parents’ homeland were enmeshed, as it were. She was curious to know about what was happening in politics in the United States. I asked her if Muslims really hated Jews. She said “just Zionists” but really “it was all based on misunderstandings.” It was nice having a calm conversation about such inflammatory subjects, talking about Middle East turmoil while sitting in this far off corner of the world. I mentioned my wife was in publishing. She asked if I knew anything about publishing cookbooks. She wanted to publish a cookbook of her mothers’ recipes and strangely, for reasons I can’t explain, the ordinariness of the moment made me feel a little more hope for the world.

John Howard lost to Kevin Rudd in Australia today. Labor swept into power by a wide margin of — as of writing — with a 25 seat majority in a 150 seat house. Americans will think it’s about Iraq, but I think it’s more of a rejection of Howard’s overreach in workplace relations laws in Australia. He changed the law and essentially locked new employees into one-on-one contracts with their employers. Australians did not like this idea from the get go. It was shoved down their throats. And it smacked of what it was – a big giveaway to corporate Australia. It was overreach. Now he’s been voted out. It looks like he has not just been voted out as PM but that he’s lost his seat in parliament, which is a pretty significant loss in the Westminster system of government. Rudd has pledged to pull out Australia’s fighting troops from Iraq, although leave them in Afghanistan. Time changes. Leadership changes in Australia. And the unions, which the Australian Labor Party are connected to, celebrate.

This so true, as my book The Fantasy Years shows. Race in America…it really doesn’t even have to be verbalized. It doesn’t have to be articulated. Since the end of Jim Crow, political correctness and the rebuke of a progressive society have together dashed their words of racists and constricted their ability to demean and intimidate with overt words. Instead, the language is couched. It’s coded. And so much is understood ‘in other words.’ And it all comes down to fear of The Other. See later chapters of the book.

Republicans and Race
By Paul Krugman

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.

The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.

The centrality of race — and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans — is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.

The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.

True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”

Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.

The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The “macaca” incident, in which Senator George Allen’s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.

And because conservative ascendancy has depended so crucially on the racial backlash — a close look at voting data shows that religion and “values” issues have been far less important — I believe that the declining power of that backlash changes everything.

Can anti-immigrant rhetoric replace old-fashioned racial politics? No, because it mobilizes the same shrinking pool of whites — and alienates the growing number of Latino voters.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image.

Government seeks to redefine privacy

By PAMELA HESS
Last updated: November 11th, 2007 02:17 AM (PST)
A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people’s private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.

Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people’s privacy without court permission.

The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

thenewstribune.com/tacoma/24hour/politics/story/201082.html

…it’s these sorts of things they’re referring to. Because the fact is, the Bush Admin is blazing a new trial of lower standards that undoubtedly other administrations will follow. This merits reposting in its entirety. (From the Washington Post.)

FEMA Official Apologizes for Staged Briefing With Fake Reporters

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 27, 2007; A03

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized yesterday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions.

“We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straight forward and transparent,” Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA’s deputy administrator, said in a four-paragraph statement.

“We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment,” Johnson said, a view repeated yesterday by press officers at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, who criticized the event.

FEMA announced the news conference at its Southwest Washington headquarters about 15 minutes before it was to begin Tuesday afternoon, making it unlikely that reporters could attend. Instead, FEMA set up a telephone conference line so reporters could listen.

In the briefing, parts of which were televised live by cable news channels, Johnson stood behind a lectern, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency’s response to this week’s California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

“It was absolutely a bad decision. I regret it happened. Certainly . . . I should have stopped it,” said John P. “Pat” Philbin, FEMA’s director of external affairs. “I hope readers understand we’re working very hard to establish credibility and integrity, and I would hope this does not undermine it.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino said yesterday that “it is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House. We certainly don’t condone it. We didn’t know about it beforehand. . . . They, I’m sure, will not do it again.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke called the staged briefing “totally unacceptable,” adding, “While it is an isolated incident, that does not make it any more tolerable.” He said reprimands are “very probable.” FEMA is part of DHS.

“Trying to manipulate the press and the public will only tarnish their [FEMA’s] current success,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said.

Philbin’s last scheduled day at FEMA was Thursday. He has been named as the new head of public affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODNI spokeswoman Vanee Vines said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007
/10/26/AR2007102602157.html
(subs. req.)

From Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz in the Huffington Post, Sept. 27, 2007

As Media Matters reported today, Rush Limbaugh, on his show said that those troops who come home and want to get America out of the middle of the religious civil war in Iraq are “phony soldiers.” I’d love for you, Rush, to have me on your show and tell that to me to my face.

Where to begin?

First, in what universe is a guy who never served even close to being qualified to judge those who have worn the uniform? Rush Limbaugh has never worn a uniform in his life — not even one at Mickey D’s — and somehow he’s got the moral standing to pass judgment on the men and women who risked their lives for this nation, and his right to blather smears on the airwaves?

Second, maybe Rush doesn’t much care, but the majority of troops on the ground in Iraq, and those who have returned, do not back the President’s failed policy. If you go to our “Did You Get the Memo” page at VoteVets.org, there’s a good collection of stories, polls, and surveys, which all show American’s troops believe we are on the wrong track, not the right one, in Iraq.

Does Rush believe, then, that the majority of the US Armed Forces are “phony?”

Third, the polls and stories don’t even take into account the former brass who commanded in Iraq, who are incredibly critical of the Bush administration, and it’s steadfast refusal to listen to those commanders on the ground who have sent up warning after warning. Major Generals John Batiste and Paul Eaton left the military and joined VoteVets.org for that very reason.

Does Rush believe that highly decorated Major Generals are “phony soldiers?”

Finally, as Media Matters notes, just recently, members of the 82nd Airborne in Iraq wrote a New York Times op-ed, very critical of the course in Iraq, and suggesting it was time to figure out the exit strategy. Two of them just died. Will Rush call up their grieving parents and tell them that they should stop crying, because they were just “phony soldiers?”

Get the point here, Rush?

You weren’t just flat out wrong, you offended a majority of those of us who actually had the courage to go to Iraq and serve, while you sat back in your nice studio, coming up with crap like this.

My challenge to you, then, is to have me on the show and say all of this again, right to the face of someone who served in Iraq. I’ll come on any day, any time. Not only will I once again explain why your comments were so wrong, but I will completely school you on why your refusal to seek a way out of Iraq is only aiding al Qaeda and crippling American security.

Ball’s in your court.

My wife and I watched the 1970 classic ‘Joe’ a few weeks ago. The movie, starring Peter Boyle who was excellent and Susan Sarandon who was, well, young was set in New York in the late 1960s and directly concerned the cultural and generational clash known as the Generation Gap. Joe was a “hard hat”, an intolerant, racist, sexist, WWII veteran factory worker. Joe is in state of unceasing backlash against the liberals and hippies. He makes common cause with the ad exec father of Susan Sarandon. Both Joe and the ad exec, who oh-by-the-way bashes in the brains of his daughter’s junkie boyfriend, represent the so-called “silent majority” in two different classes. The “silent majority” was the group of fearful, law and order lovers who helped Nixon to victory in 1968. On the other side are the smug, high, lascivious flower children, who in their 19 and 20 year old arrogance, and highness, believed like millions of adolescents before them, that they were going to teach the elders how the world really worked. To me, in retrospect, it turns out the real factor driving the messianic, stoned sense of mission many hippies must have felt was simply numbers: demographically they had the squares outnumbered. And so everything must have felt possible.

What I like about this movie is that it shows neither side of society in a positive light. You cringe listening to Joe spout off hate filled invective for blacks, women, anyone. You cringe watching the hippies preach to their elders, even as they steal the cache of drugs the ad exec takes from his dead victim. And the orgy scene is enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.

Yet at a distance of 37 years, it’s hilarious too.
You feel thankful in the end that the hardhats are gone. And watching the hippies, I’m reminded of the warning that seems to come with every generation, “We’ll be lucky if society survives these sociopaths.”

I first heard that sentiment about what I guess would be Generation Y. A friend who later became a cop told me: “It’s not a matter of reforming them; it’s a matter of us surviving them.” Now as I watch the nightly news, I wonder if the most destructive generation threatening us today are the Baby Boomers. Bush is one. Osama is one. Bill was one and he sold out the Democrats just for the sport of the game. Yeah, it’s the older generation, which as I write it does make me sound like a flower child in 1968 talking about the squares.

Two things.

First, the film’s portrait of the hard hats and the flower children delineated the original fissure in American culture that would be successfully exploited by Republicans using the “Southern Strategy” for years, culminating in 2004 and crashing by 2006. Now, I wonder what will replace it. All the culture and political stake holders are in play – everyone from evangelicals to good governance people. Of course whatever replaces the hard-hard- vs. hippies divide won’t be an invention of the Republicans or Democrats alone but an emerging, intractable disagreement between the two.

Second, there is a scene where Joe and the ad exec talk about their lives and earnings. Joe asks how much the exec earns. The exec hedges. Joe tells him how many dollars an hour he makes. The exec explains that he’s paid by the year.

Joe takes another stab at it, telling the exec he has $10,000 saved and how much, he asks, does the exec have saved? The exec hesitates again saying his lifestyle costs were higher. Then, out with it, he says, $18,000.

$10,000 in 1970 would be $53,595 in 2007.

$18,000 in 1970 would be $96,471 in 2007.

And that one exchange in this gritty look at America circa 1970 said volumes about America today. Today the working class is so beleaguered, so broke and so busy, they can’t imagine the wealth of the well-to-do. And in fact, the well-to-do can’t imagine the wealth of the wealthy. In this way, the ugly portrait of America in a time of turbulence looked almost quaint.

Al Gore’s inability to be anyone else than himself, particularly someone less annoying, is the former Vice President’s most enduring and nettlesome problem according to one Alan Ehrenhalt, writing a review of Gore’s book ‘The Assault on Reason.’
(sub. req.)

Al Gore possesses a skill that no other American
politician can match – or would want to. He has a
consistent ability to express fundamentally reasonable
sentiments – often important ones – in ways that annoy
the maximum possible number of people.

After lauding Gore for speaking out against the war, his efforts to raise awareness of global climate change and his use of technology to enhance civic participation, Ehrenhalt gives us this:

Even as a citizen activist, however, free from the burdens of office and campaigning, Gore nearly always manages to sound like Gore.

And what does Gore sound like? “Smug and self-centered” and “unable to consider even moderately differing points of view.” So it’s with great irony that a review of Gore’s book, which is by and large about the alarming decline of American political discourse, a decline that gives us caricatures of the personal rather than the substance of the political, concentrates on Al Gore’s presumed personality.

Ehrenhart unwittingly proves Gore’s point. And the man who was dismissed as too “wooden” and “robotic” to ever be president, and characterized as a “serial exaggerator” by his opponent’s spinmeisters, a man whose personality is mischaracterized – like many Democrats of recent years – suffers yet another attack.

Like millions of others , I don’t care about a politician’s personality ticks if they can lead and if they have integrity and if they have vision. If these traits come in “man desperate to display his erudition at every possible moment, appropriate or not,” so be it.

This sneering attack on Gore reminds me of a time in Clinton’s presidency, or on the road to it at least, when his opponents mocked him for having said – or admitted, as the spin goes -to once owning a pickup truck with Astroturf in the bed.

I touch on this in an upcoming chapter of The Fantasy Years since it is such classic Clinton-era negative press because ya know, how could a man who owned a pickup truck with Astroturf in its bed ever be a suitable president? Think about it: how could this ever be?

From everything I know of the ex-VP’s book, the themes of The Assault on Reason and the themes of The Fantasy Years overlap. Considerably. The Fantasy Years is about the irrational caricatures of political beliefs, -personalities and -history that grew through the 1990s, clouding sensible debate, and dissociating cause from effect in the American political mind. The Fantasy Years is about how the rightwing media machine created a generation of Rush-listening, Fox-watching post-modernists for whom objective reality ceased to exist. Oh, it’s also about people’s lives filled with personal triumphs and daily despairs.