April 13th, 2009
On Point with Tom Ashbrook did a segment on conservative hate speech being spewed by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, right-wing talk radio and their counterparts on Fox News. Here’s how the program is teased:
[T]he language lately on air has grown particularly fierce and apocalyptic: President Obama called a dictator and sympathizer with terrorists. His policies called socialist, Marxist, Bolshevik, dangerous. Americans called to rise up in revolt. All this while the economy tanks and gun sales surge.
That last line is the operative and, frankly, scary one: while the economy tanks and gun sales surge. Let’s not forget that conservative right-wing blowhards animated, if not inspired, two recent terrorist incidents: 1. A gunman that opened fire at a church for its liberal views, 2. A second man in Pennsylvania ambushed police officers because, he thought, they and Obama were coming to take his guns away.
I wish Tom Ashbrook, the host of On Point, had been unabashedly critical of the vile rhetoric being spewed by conservatives on Fox News and talk radio; but, like a good “journalist,” Tom maintained his objectivity and largely agreed that liberals were guilty of similar offenses during the Bush years. To which I simply respond: bullshit! When was the last time any liberal went on TV or radio to call for armed revolution against the US government? Tom Ashbrook’s default fallback of journalistic objectivity is simply weak, and irresponsible in this instance.
August 2nd, 2008
One of the biggest challenges for progressives aligned with the Democratic party is figuring out how to keep the party honest and accountable. And, as we’ve observed since 2006, this is no easy task.
After the mid-term elections of that year, many progressives hoped that elected Democrats would aggressively push back against Bush-republicans and their conservative allies. However, elected Democrats in Congress proved themselves to be largely ineffective on the big policy issues of the day (see: Iraq war, FISA, Guantanamo prison, republican corruption – i.e., Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, et al.).
To be fair, many elected Democrats did put up a fight, and pushed back against Bush and his conservative allies. Unfortunately, since 2006, some of Bush’s conservative allies have included so-called Blue Dog Democrats, which have allowed Bush & Co. to continue the Iraq war, to perpetuate the republican culture of corruption, and to infringe on civil liberties.
So, what’s a progressive to do against these so-called Blue Dog Democrats? Fight back, of course!
Which is where blogger, activist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald comes in, he writes:
If simply voting for more Democrats will achieve nothing in the way of meaningful change, what, if anything, will? At minimum, two steps are required to begin to influence Democratic leaders to change course: 1) Impose a real political price that they must pay when they capitulate to — or actively embrace — the right’s agenda and ignore the political values of their base, and 2) decrease the power and influence of the conservative “Blue Dog” contingent within the Democratic caucus, who have proved excessively willing to accommodate the excesses of the Bush administration, by selecting their members for defeat and removing them from office. And that means running progressive challengers against them in primaries, or targeting them with critical ads, even if doing so, in isolated cases, risks the loss of a Democratic seat in Congress.
Those goals are the basis of the recent campaign that I helped launch — along with progressive bloggers such as Jane Hamsher and the Blue America PAC — to target selected Democratic members of Congress who have been responsible for some of the worst acts of complicity and capitulation. The campaign we launched, which raised over $350,000 in a very short time largely from dissatisfied progressives, has run multimedia ads criticizing the likes of Blue Dog Rep. Chris Carney and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, despite the fact that neither has a primary challenger and despite the fact that Carney is quite vulnerable in his reelection effort this year.
Some of you may be thinking, but won’t this jeopardize Democratic control of Congress? The short answer is, No!
If you’re interested in a more elaborate answer, you’ll need to see Glenn Greenwald’s explanation:
Many progressives and other Democratic supporters are reflexively opposed to any conduct that might result in the defeat of even a single, relatively inconsequential Democratic member of Congress or the transfer of even a single district to GOP control. No matter how dissatisfied such individuals might be with the Democratic Congress, they are unwilling to do anything different to change what they claim to find so unsatisfactory. Even though uncritically cheering on any and every candidate with a “D” after his or her name has resulted in virtually nothing positive — and much that is negative — many progressives continue, rather bafflingly and stubbornly, to insist that if they just keep doing the same thing (cheering for the election of more and more Democrats), then somehow, someday, something different might occur. But, as the cliché teaches, repeatedly engaging in the same conduct and expecting different results is the very definition of foolishness.
As foolish as it is, this intense aversion to jeopardizing any Democratic incumbents might be considered rational if doing so carried the risk of restoring Republican control of Congress. But there is no such risk, and there will be none for the foreseeable future. No matter what happens, the Democrats, by all accounts, are going to control both houses of Congress after the 2008 election. Their margin in the House, which is currently 31 seats, will, by even the most conservative estimates, increase to at least 50 seats. No advertising campaign or activist group could possibly swing control of Congress to the Republicans this year, and — given the Brezhnev-era-like reelection rates for incumbents in America — it is extremely unlikely that the House will be controlled by anyone other than Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi for years to come.
The critical question, then, is not who will control Congress. The Democrats will. That is a given. The vital question is what they will do with that control — specifically, will they continue to maintain and increase their own power by accommodating the right, or will they be more responsive, accountable and attentive to the political values of their base?
If yo agree that the Democratic party should be more “accountable and attentive” to you, than accommodating to Bush & Co., then please donate $15 or more to Glenn Greenwald’s Blue America campaign.
November 14th, 2007
Conservatives religiously defend Reagan’s exploitation of racial tensions to get elected, and when confronted with the evidence, conservatives are quick to say, Well, it’s complex.
Bob Herbert, of the NY Times, reminds us that, indeed, things were complex and that there’s a certain context in which Reagan’s use of racial prejudices must be observed:
Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.
Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.
[...]
It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.”
After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable.
[...]
He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.
And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.
[...]
To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.
I agree with Mr. Herbert, Reagan apologists have reason to be ashamed of his actions, but have no right to change the meaning of history.
