Should the Democrats be trying to "distance themselves" from MoveOn.org?

The dirty hippie Commies are coming to kidnap your daughters

As mentioned in the last post, I had to shake my head about Mark Shields' latest episode of tangling himself hopelessly in the Republican trap about MoveOn.org. I mentioned in an earlier post that Shields fell into the trap of repeating the Republican huffing-and-puffing about MoveOn's criticism of our Saviour-General David Petraeus. Friday night he had a new reason to bitch about it (Democrats Debate Health Care, Senate Debates Iraq 09/21/07). Now he's upset about it because "Americans do not like to have people's names made fun of."

As the Daily Howler likes to write, try to believe he said it! Or maybe another Howler favorite would be more appropriate: gaze on the empty soul of your press corps.

Here's a longer quote of Shields latest PBS Newshour pronouncement on the vital question of whether it's permissible to insult the divine presence of Saviour-General Petraeus:

I think it's an embarrassment to the United States Senate that they cannot decide anything about Iraq. They can't come to any conclusion, and they can stand up there and berate an ad, which I found and have said was, I thought, tasteless and counterproductive.

First of all, Americans do not like to have people's names made fun of. Everybody has had the experience, him or herself at one time, having their own name made fun of. And to do it in this unflattering, unfair fashion was beyond the pale.

But for Republicans who've been on the defensive, put in a defensive crouch on Iraq, been pummeled about the shoulder and head, now all of a sudden they can come out and they can go on the offensive. And, my goodness, now they're not going to ever let go of it. They're just going to continue.

The Democrats - I agree with Rich on this point, Jim. The Democrats should have taken a leaf out of Ronald Reagan's playbook. Ronald Reagan, when he was running for governor of California, the big issue - some big issue, we always have big issues - was the John Birch Society and whether Reagan would accept their support or their endorsement.

Reagan had a very simple, straightforward statement: I welcome the support of all law-abiding, freedom-loving Californians, because anybody who endorses me doesn't mean I have endorsed them. And they should have done the same thing.

You know, I welcome the support. That does not mean I'm endorsing MoveOn. That is not my platform; that is not my party. But, quite frankly, they did - enough of them didn't do it well. (my emphasis)

Bring out the smelling salts! MoveOn.org showed bad manners! What is our world coming to? Heck, if the Democrats don't rush to denounce it, the Republicans might start showing bad manners! Oh, the horror!

Maybe it's getting time that PBS should look for, say, someone who writes editorials for a union paper to replace Mark Shields to present the liberal side of these discussions. They won't, of course. But maybe they should.

Oh my gosh! MoveOn didn't just accuse him of betraying the public trust when he agreed to be the Cheney-Bush administration's political spokesman to lie to the public about the Iraq War. No, it's not just that. They made fun of his name! Dirty stinking hippies! Have they no shame? At long last, have they no shame?

Digby picked up on this latest idiotic turn in press conventional wisdom (Rulz Hullabaloo blog 09/22/07):

Village rule number one:

You can't employ a play on words that any Republican might be able to use as an excuse to run to the fainting couch and have a good old-fashioned cry. Democrats must be as bland and technocratic as humanly possible in their political rhetoric. If they can put their audience to sleep within the first five minutes, so much the better. But that doesn't mean Republicans and the media can't have loads of nasty "pun" at the expense of Democrats. For instance everybody loves a good joke conflating Senator Obama with Osama.

She goes on to catalogue several examples from Republican Party philosopher Rush Limbaugh and others of making those plays on names that so horrified dainty Mark Shields when MoveOn did it with our Saviour-General Petraeus. Tasteless and counterproductive and unflattering, oh my!

I'm serious, the Democrats should beat Republican members of Congress over the head with examples like the one's Digby cites. How about a resolution expressing the wise opinion of the US Senate that Mad Annie Coulter's book Treason (which directs the charge against Democrats and liberals) is shocking, just shocking, and let's see if FOX News in their commentary declares her book to be "tasteless and counterproductive", as Shields did to the MoveOn ad. Oh, and unflattering and unfair.

I also wanted to comment on Shields' reference to Ronald Reagan's famous comment on the John Birch Society, the rightwing extremist and anti-Semitic group which admires Ron Paul's crackpot economic theories so much.

I've written before about the troubles of political coalitions with groups that are being targeted by the Republicans as unAmerican and unpatriotic. I concluded that post by referring to Reagan's comment about the John Birch Society:

Although the situations are different, there's probably something to be learned from Ronald Reagan on this. In his 1966 campaign for California governor, he was criticized because he was endorsed by the John Birch Society, a far-right group then known primarily for its dogmatic anti-Communism. He effectively dispatched that criticism by saying that if someone endorsed him, it meant that they were buying into his program, not that he was buying into theirs.

On the other hand, he did explicitly reject the endorsement of a Ku Klux Klan group in his Presidential campaign in 1980. Different group, different circumstances.

But it's worth thinking about the context of Reagan's comment. My earlier post was focused more on groups like International ANSWER, which allegedly started as "front groups" for Marxist parties.

First of all, in the real world there is no comparison between the crackpot John Birch Society which claims the country is run by The Insiders, which they are careful not to call "The Jews" in their official publications, though that's most likely how most of them understand The Insiders.

The John Birch Society came up as a controversy at the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater for President on what was widely seen as an extremist rightwing platform. there was a debate over whether the convention should condemn the extremism of the John Birch Society, whose supporters were suspicious of Goldwater, most likely in large part because his parents had been Jewish. (Goldwater himself was a Protestant Christian.) In a book published that same year, The Strange Tactics of Extremism, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet wrote of the Birchers and their founder and leader, Robert Welch:

In brief, guided by a line that Robert Welch lays down for it, month after month, the John Birch Society operates to blur the meaning of the term Communist; to substitute facile stereotypes for hard realities; and to plant suspicion where faith is needed, and fear where we need to have confidence.

Secondly, when Reagan made that comment about the John Birch Society in his gubernatorial campaign two years later, he was signalling to rightwing Republicans not only that he was willing to accept the Birchers' support without necessarily endorsing every point of their platform. He was also signalling that he was not willing to disassociate himself from the Birch Society the way Goldwater had been in 1964. He was giving new respectability to a far-right organization who directed quite a bit of their bile toward Reagan's own Republican Party.

But when Reagan explicitly rejected the endorsement of some tiny Ku Klux Klan group in his 1980 Presidential race, he showed that he was perfectly willing to "distance himself" from a group whose support would be politically inconvenient for him. The Birchers, on the other hand, had appeal to rightwing Republicans (including some very wealthy ones) whose support he wanted and who would be useful in mobilizing activists on particular issues, and we would later see.

To give a sense of where the Birchers stood on the spectrum of American politics at that time, I'll quote again from the Overstreets, who discussed a book by Robert Welch, The Politician, which circulated apparently in manuscript form among Birchers and other associates of Welch in the 1950s, and which Welch finally published in 1963. The politician of the title was Dwight Eisenhower. The Overstreets wrote:

The book could scarcely have failed to arouse controversy; for what it amounts to is an elaborated "proof" that Eisenhower, both as General and as President, was "completely controlled" by Communist influences.

"... these Communist influences made him put the whole diplomatic power, economic power, and recognized leadership of this country to work, on the side of Russia and the Communists, in connection with every problem and trouble spot in their empire. ... The explanation calls for a very sinister and hated word, but one which is by no means new in the history of governments or of nations. The word is treason."

Eisenhower, the Birch Society leader claimed, was guided in his appointments by the intent "to put actual Communists or Communist sympathizers into influential positions..." Eisenhower's militantly anti-Communist Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also fell under Welch's suspicion:

For many reasons and after a lot of study, I personally believe Dulles to be a Communist agent who has had one clearly defined role to play; namely, always to say the right things and always to do the wrong ones.

The Overstreets observed of Welch's characterization of Dulles:

... [T]he trick Welch uses against Dulles is an extremist favorite. When a person with a clear record of anti-Communist statements is to be liquidated, what he has said is offered as a proof of how subtly Communist purposes can be disguised.

Even in 2007, when the Republican Party has mainstreamed far-right ideas and practices to an extent that was scarcely imaginable to most people in 1966 after the Goldwater debacle of 1964, the John Birch Society remains outside the Republican consensus. Among the Presidential candidates, one of the distinguishing features of the far-right isolationist candidate Ron Paul is that the Birchers find his bizarre monetary theories compatible with their goofy worldview.

To repeat the two points I made above, whatever else you may say about MoveOn.org, it would be flat-out false to pretend that their politics is anything like the crackpot extremism practiced by the John Birch Society, then and now. MoveOn began as a citizens' group to opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton. And it's opposition to the Iraq War is far closer to the majority position in the US right now than the Republican Party's very unpopular position. And, with reference to Reagan, his politics in 1966 actually were far closer to the politics of the Birchers than most Republicans of that time. And his allegedly dismissive comment about the Birchers was actually a clear signal to the Republicans that he approved of the Birchers, even if in a nudge-nudge wink-wink form.

Reagan found himself on the same side as the John Birch Society a few years later in one of his most high-profile political battles, the fight over the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977-8. The Canal Treaty fight is often said to be the origin of what was then called the "New Right" that enabled Reagan to become President and the Republicans to grab control of the Senate in 1980. I would describe the origins of that movement in a different way, but there's no doubt that the Canal Treaty fight was of major importance in that process. It also helped in a major way to develop the militarized, xenophobic view that reached its apex (so far!) in the Iraq War and the Cheney-Bush torture policy.

Reagan had made Gerald Ford's willingness to continue the treaty negotiations with Panama begun during Nixon's administration a major issue in his run against Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Ford credited the issue with Reagan's victory in a number of Republican state primaries.

The treaty negotiations were completed in late summer 1977 under the Carter administration. The battle over the treaty stretched into 1978, when Carter won a hard fight to get the 67 Senate votes necessary to ratify the treaty. Carter wrote in Keeping Faith: A Memoir of a President (1982) about what happened when the treaty negotiations were completed and it was ready for Senate consideration:

The National Journal reported that several of the archconservative groups saw this year of debate as a way to capture control of the Republican party. Richard Viguerie, the publicist for conservative causes, who would send out hundreds of thousands of computer-printed letters on the subject, predicted, "The conservatives will prevail on this, with well over 40 votes, maybe even 44 or something like that." He went on, "It's an issue the conservatives can't lose on. ... Now conservatives can get excited about the Panama Canal giveaway and they can go to the polls, look for a person's name on the ballot who favored these treaties, and vote against him." This statement was an explicit threat to many members of Congress who were trying to decide how to vote on the Panama Canal treaties. Gary Jarmin of the American Conservative Union said, "It's a good issue for the future of the conservative movement. It's not just the issue itself we're fighting for. This is an excellent opportunity for conservatives to seize control of the Republican Party." This group sent out more than two million pieces of mail, trying to defeat the treaties.

Former Governor Ronald Reagan was a mainstay in this effort. He traveled the country and sent his radio and television tapes to hundreds of stations to rally opposition to the Senate ratification vote. We also had to face the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby [considered at the time to be a Bircher front group with a more anti-Semitic emphasis], the National States Rights Party, and similar groups, which banded together in a formidable array. (my emphasis)

The Birchers and their friends on the far right were active against the treaty even before it was completely negotiated. Historian Walter LaFeber wrote in his book The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (1978):

In April 1977 the Zonians [American residents of the Panama Canal zone] mounted a massive lobbying effort in Congress, presenting an eloquent petition against the pact to the sympathetic House Subcommittee on the Panama Canal. But the negotiations nevertheless continued. Perhaps their frustration was best demonstrated by the Zonian who took paintbrush in hand, and on a Panama City wall that publicized such student slogans as YANKEE GO HOME, wrote in bold strokes, KISS MY AMERICAN ASS.

Frustration grew even as other groups joined the Zonians. Most vocal were right-wing organizations: the Committee on Latin American Policy (part of the John Birch Society), the Liberty Lobby, the National States Rights Party, the American Legion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The Task Force on the Panama Canal sounded innocuous until it was linked to the American Council for World Freedom, a Washington-based conservative group whose president, Fred Schlafly, said it would spend $100,000 "to stop the surrender of the Panama Canal." Other right-wing groups organized letter-writing campaigns to local newspapers (letters notable for their often accurate if highly selective knowledge about the Canal's history) and set up downtown booths to dispense pamphlets about the "sell-out". (my emphasis)

It's ridiculous for Democrats, who are now being regularly and routinely accused of treason by Republicans leaders including Bush and by the various Republican-friendly media outlets and blogs, to be quaking in fear of being criticized for something that MoveOn.org might say. They need to buck up and fight for themselves and little more sensibly than that.

Tags: john birch society, mark shields, moveon.org, panama canal treaty, republican party, ron paul, ronald reagan, treason-baiting