Ted Kennedy and Spiro Agnew

I've been tormenting myself by skimming through a 1971 Audubon paperback called Collected Speeches of Spiro Agnew. Although his prose is on the tame side compared to what Republican Party head Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and many other spew out on a daily basis. But I'm still struck by the intensity of the bile in these speeches. A lot of Democrats are still telling themselves that the Spiro Agnews are some kind of aberration, and that soon that kind of politics will go away. Meanwhile, two generations of Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys have been practicing this brand of politics for decades and will keep on doing so for the foreseeable future.

In a speech to an Ohio Republican Dinner in Cleveland on 06/20/1970, the sleazy Vice President singled out Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was one of the leading critics of the Vietnam War. Agnew had been engaged for months in a verbal jihad against opponents of the war. At the time of this speech, the Kent State and Jackson State murders were just weeks in the past. Politics were polarized. College campuses had exploded with protest, including violent ones, after Nixon's April 30 announcement of his invasion of Cambodia, a significant escalation and widening of the war. Hundreds of colleges shut down for a period of time; dozens were occupied by the National Guard (most notoriously including Kent State). Vietnam veterans were playing an increasingly role in antiwar protests. Organized labor was turning against the war: the Teamsters, AFSCME and the United Auto Workers had come out against the war. Congress was putting tremendous pressure on Nixon to get US troops out of Cambodia immediately and out of Vietnam soon - hard as that may be to picture after our experience during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars up until now.

So Agnew was intent on denouncing and smearing the antiwar movement, in particular to downplay the role of Vietnam veterans and labor. In this Cleveland speech, he cited Ted Kennedy:

And what is one to believe is the position of the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy?

In August of 1968, just prior to the Democratic convention, Senator Kennedy put forth to the world his program for peace in Vietnam. Let me read it to you.

"Specifically, our government should undertake as soon as possible:

First, to end unconditionally all bombing of North Vietnam;
Second, to then negotiate with Hanoi the mutual withdrawal from South Vietnam of all foreign forces, both allied and North Vietnamese;
Third, to accompany this withdrawal with whatever help we can give to the South Vietnamese in the building of a viable political, economic and legal structure that will not promptly collapse upon our departure; and
Fourth, to demonstrate to both Hanoi and Saigon the sincerity of our intentions by significantly decreasing this year the level of our military activity and military personnel in the south."

Let's assume for now that Agnew was quoting Kennedy correctly. Agnew here is indulging the ever-popular political trick of quoting an opposing politician seeming to contradict himself. Agnew says in what follows that Kennedy's "program and ideas were tried in their entirety" and didn't bring peace. I could write for hours about how dishonest a statement that was. Short version: Nixon was not seeking a negotiated peace and had even deliberately sabotaged the 1968 talks while he was running for President. In any case, it was even more painfully obvious then that it may seem from the perspective of four decades later that the situation in the Vietnam War in August of 1968 was quite different than it was in June of 1970. And no negotiated settlement had been reached.

But Agnew's polemics against Kennedy certainly have a contemporary ring after the kind of hoo-ha we have heard from supporters of the Iraq War for years:

As the Senator recommended, the President has stopped all the bombing of the north. He has cut all air operation over 20 per cent. He has announced the withdrawal of more than quarter of a million men. He has offered to withdraw all our men if they will withdraw theirs. He has agreed, along with the South Vietnamese to abide by the outcome of internationally supervised free elections. Every offer to negotiate we have made to the enemy remains on the table.

That August, Senator Kennedy said: "These steps would enable us to end our participation in this war with honor . . ." Well, we have taken all those steps and more—and the enemy has not reciprocated a gesture.

The Senator's program and ideas were tried in their entirety, and they have not moved the enemy an inch toward peace. Yet the Senator persists in blaming the continuation of the war on the lack of United States initiatives. Well, the President of the United States is not listening to the counsel of defeatists who blame every deadlock at the conference table and every impasse in negotiation on the United States. ... [three paragraphs quoting John Kennedy]

It is not President Nixon blocking the road to peace; it is Hanoi - and Hanoi's most effective - even if unintentional - apologists today are not in Paris [site of the peace talks]; they are they are in the United States - they are in high places, and their prescription for ending the war amounts to surrender.

It's very clear in this context that his reference to apologists for Hanoi was meant in particular to include Ted Kennedy, who in 1970 was the Democratic candidate that Nixon feared the most for the 1972 election.

This kind of intimation of (what Agnew doesn't quite call) treason in "high places" represented McCarthyist language that Agnew was newly mainstreaming into the Republican Party. Those familiar with the conspiracy theories that were very common among the John Birch Society and other far-right groups would recognize the language. We also see here the framing of criticism of bad, even disastrous US foreign policy decisions as stemming from what rightwing pundits now call "the Blame America First crowd."

Not that any of Agnew's fans then or Rush Limbaugh's today would actually care, but it's worth noting that nothing that Agnew quoted from Ted Kennedy even remotely qualifies as "blaming America first", much less anything remotely treasonable.

Today's Republican Party leader Limbaugh was telling Glenn Beck on the latter's FOX News hatefest on 08/26/09 that President Obama "is purposely using his Attorney General to make the United States the villain of the world." Same playbook as Agnew was using in 1969. Except that what Limbaugh is defending was a torture program ordered by a Republican President and Vice President.

At another Republican dinner in Las Vegas on September 14, 1970, shortly before the mid-term elections, Agnew returned to trashing Kennedy. It also has the most familiar kind of ring. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen/Weather Underground actually were active in violent protest back then, and the nation had seen large demonstrations and serious campus unrest that year.

Neither Kennedy nor any other Democratic Senator had endorsed political violence or condoned it. Since Kennedy had lost two brothers to political violence, that is not at all surprising in his case. But Agnew ridiculed him for speaking out against it:

In San Diego the other day, I started the Come-Lately Club. Its membership consists of those men in control of the opposition Congress [Agnew's odd phrase for the Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress] who have for years winked at disorder and in this Congress have blocked the President's anti-crime legislation. But now that election time is near, they suddenly lift high the banner of law and order.

Just today, we enrolled our newest member. He denounced campus radicals and compared them to the Palestinian terrorists. His blast at these "apostles of force" sounded tough. Oh, it sounded hardline - but it did not sound at all like the man who was saying it. Now, who do you suppose is the latest to lash out at what he calls "the campus commandos"? None other than that newest member of the Come-Lately Club, Senator Ted Kenned. Kennedy Come Lately - it's about time.

Not that Agnew bothers to cite even a single example of Ted Kennedy or another other Democrat "wink[ing] at disorder".

Agnew went on to attacks the advocates of "radical liberalism", pretty much a complete oxymoron in terms of American politics, and not a phrase that has survived in that form. But it's an older version of the conceptually bizarre conflation of liberalism, socialism, communism and fascism that today's Republicans so commonly use. He used language like the following, which has proved to be effective in rallying conservative whites to the Republican causes over the years. Citing a sentence from an editorial in the Las Vegas Sun criticizing Agnew's demagoguery, he said:

There you have it all, my friends - the contemptuousness, the elitism, the condescension toward the good people of this country that are the hallmarks of the radical liberal. ...

Well, people of Nevada, I don't believe that we are "unthinking masses" and I don't believe we need any "young intellectuals" to tell us how we should conduct our lives. I believe the people of America and the people of Nevada have the independence, the intelligence, the judgement and the wisdom to make up their own minds - and let's send the so-called "young intellectuals" back to the Ivory Towers where they belong.

In other speeches, he's careful to make some ritual acknowledgment that there are good young people out there after he's made cracks like this, but not in this case. This was part of a conscious strategy of trying to stigmatize the antiwar movement in particular as the work of irresponsible young college students with bad attitudes.

He goes on to beat the drums of a favorite culture war theme, drug abuse. He uses the theme to bitch about rock music, pointing out supposed drug references in the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" and the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit". He didn't go into some of the more exotic ideas about secret messages instructing people to sin being played backwards on those sinister rock songs. (How that was supposed to induce anyone to do anything was never clear to me.) But he does pander to the aging Republicans who in 1970 were still thinking that Elvis Presley was a degenerate who played "race music" or whatever and that the Beatles with their long hair were making healthy young men into sissies. He told his Las Vegas audience:

These songs present the use of drugs in such an attractive light that for the impressionable, "turning on" becomes the natural and even the approved thing to do.

And all the while that this brainwashing [sic] has been going on, most of us have regarded it as good, clean, noisy fun.

I wonder what Spiro would have had to say about Rush's OxyContin habit?

In a reference to the Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper movie Easy Rider, he says:

A popular recent movie - I will not name it here because I don't want to promote it - has as its heroes two men who are able to live a carefree life off the proceeds of illegal sales of drugs. When they come to a violent end, the villain, it turns out, is an allegedly repressive society. No sympathy is wasted on the wrecked lives of the people who bought their drugs and financed our heroes' easy ride.

Yes, this is superficial pandering to fears of problems real and imagined. But it has been effective for Republicans for decades.

By the way, I've seen Easy Rider more than once. But I never realized before that the end, in which a guy in a pickup-truck shoots the Fonda and Hopper characters with a shotgun, meant that "the villain" was "an allegedly repressive society". I would have thought it represented the end of a self-destructive course which their lives were taking. But who am I to question a great film critic like Spiro Agnew?

Tags: edward kennedy, spiro agnew

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009)

There are many tributes to Ted Kennedy that describe his life and accomplishments. I'm going to add my tiny bit to them. First, here's the text of a speech by Kennedy on the Iraq War, broadcast on C-Span 01/14/04:

I believe that this Administration is indeed leading this country to a perilous place. It has broken faith with the American people, aided and abetted by a Congressional majority willing to pursue ideology at any price, even the price of distorting the truth. On issue after issue, they have moved brazenly to impose their agenda on America and on the world. They have pursued their goals at the expense of urgent national and human needs and at the expense of the truth. America deserves better.

The Administration and the majority in Congress have put the state of our union at risk, and they do not deserve another term in the White House or in control of Congress. ...

War in Iraq was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. It was a product they were methodically rolling out. There was no imminent threat, no immediate national security imperative, and no compelling reason for war. ...

... we are reaping the poison fruit of our misguided and arrogant foreign policy. The Administration capitalized on the fear created by 9/11 and put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth to justify a war that could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy. We did not have to go to war. Alternatives were working. War must be a last resort. And this war never should have happened. [my emphasis]

The Republicans are cynically praising Kennedy's willingness to compromise. They like to pretend that if Kennedy had been healthy, he would have caved in and helped them block health care reform by now:he would have caved on health care by now: The media miss the clear implications of Republican comments about Kennedy by Jamison Foser, Media Matters 08/26/09.

Joan Walsh is far more realistic in Ted Kennedy's last battle Salon 08/26/09:

Democrats must actively refute Hatch's (now multiple) statements insisting healthcare reform would have Republican support if Kennedy were still in the Senate, glad-handing and arm-twisting.

That's completely dishonest. If Kennedy moved hearts and minds in the Senate, it would be by moving Republicans towards sanity. Since I don't believe Republicans have any interest in bipartisan compromise, a healthy Ted Kennedy would be kicking Republican asses -- while possibly treating them warmly in person. A healthy Ted Kennedy would never have put up with the unhealthy politics of the Republican Party on healthcare -- and Orrin Hatch should be ashamed, on the occasion of Kennedy's death, to have said otherwise. [my emphasis]

Aimai at No More Mr. Nice Blog spanks the Republicans who think Democrats shouldn't find political advantage in Kennedy's memory: Friends, Romans, Countrymen... 08/26/09

As inevitable as the use of the funeral, or the memorial, by partisans is the attempt to repress the funeral or the memorial by the forces of reaction. Wherever funerals are an important social setting--a safe place for people to turn out, grieve, communicate, and organize there will be attempts from above or below to prevent any mobilization around the body, or the cause. In Iran, to give just one example, the state decides who is a "martyr" and whose death will be publicly solemnized, and it has for years interfered with families trying to publicize or socialize the deaths of their loved ones if those deaths looked like they would cause trouble for the government. The recent death of Neda was one such occasion. In the US, of course, we have struggled for years over who owns or appropriates public deaths like those of the 9/11 victims, the Katrina dead, and our soldiers.

Its not that Republicans don't use death, and death(s) to score political points or create policy. ... Not a Republican death per se, but certainly a recurring image in the pageant of right wing martyr funerals. Religious anti abortion rights activists routinely use the imagery of death and the fetus to compel policy changes they favor. Fred Phelps and his family routinely picket other people's funerals to make their political/religious points. And, of course, 9/11 was the greatest political funeral orgy in American History since Pearl Harbor. And the party that ran with the most necrophilic and abusive use of those deaths was, IIRC, tagged with an R. And they are still mourning their loss of the use rights to those deaths. A right which, apparently, goes with control of the Presidency.

Celebrity pundits Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks discussed Kennedy on the PBS Newshour of 08/26/09, Kennedy Leaves Legacy as Champion for Health Care. "Liberal" pundit Mark Shields, one of John McCain's biggest fanboys, offered his "liberal" take on Kennedy which was, uh, identical to that of the Republicans, i.e., Kennedy was great because he compromised on stuff:

What it was, was an incredible ability, which has been touched on in the earlier discussions. He never demonized the other side, a colleague across the aisle. He always viewed today's adversary as tomorrow's potential ally. And it was a gift.

And whenever you stood in the Senate press gallery and watched him go on the floor, I don't care when it was, other senators would flock to him, and he always had a personal note for each of them, and a good-natured needle.

It was a remarkable ability to be at the same time someone you always knew where he stood on an issue and what he stood for, yet at the same time he was the one who could establish compromise and consensus. It wasn't just transactional trying to find the middle ground. It was an incredible gift, and he was a gifted, gifted legislator.

I've become so accustomed to our Big Pundits' obsession with the glories of "bipartisanship" - at least when it's Democrats going along with Republicans - that I'm hardly surprised by dreary recitations of the press script like Shields' any more.

But here outside of Pundit District 9, that doesn't really make jack for sense. By virtually all accounts, Kennedy was a very skillful legislator. But that can't be reasonably equated with a willingness to compromise. Any fool can do that. Using compromise to usher decent legislation through the Senate is a real accomplishment.

And Kennedy sometimes go rolled, as he memorably did on the No Child Left Behind program, one of George W. Bush's few semi-credible claim of bipartisanship. But the deal was that the Democrats would approve the dubious national testing requirements in exchange for the Republicans providing substantially increased education funding in the following years. So the bill with the testing was passed, and then Bush and the Republicans refused to provide the increased funding. I wouldn't fault Kennedy for that. He presumably had reason to think the Republicans would stick with their deal. They didn't. So in the end, that "bipartisan" compromise had a bad result.

Shields' portrait of Kennedy as a saintly character above that petty partisanship that is considered so unseemly (in Democrats!) there in Pundit District 9 is also ludicrous. Shields' word "demonized" is a weasel-word in the context. Because Kennedy could certainly make partisan and policy judgments on the often severe failings of those on "the other side of the aisle". In the 2004 speech linked above, we find Kennedy saying of Bush and the Republicans, in addition to what I've already quoted:

The Administration and the majority in Congress have put the state of our union at risk, and they do not deserve another term in the White House or in control of Congress.

I do not make these statements lightly. I make them as an American deeply concerned about the future of the Republic if the extremist policies of this Administration continue.

By far the most extreme and most dire example of this Administration's reckless pursuit of its single-minded ideology is in foreign policy. In its arrogant disrespect for the United Nations and for other peoples in other lands, this Administration and this Congress have squandered the immense goodwill that other nations extended to our country after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. And in the process, they made America a lesser and a less respected land. [my emphasis]

The advocates of war in Iraq desperately sought to make the case that Saddam was linked to 9/11 and Al Qaeda, and that he was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear capability. They created an Office of Special Projects in the Pentagon to analyze the intelligence for war. They bypassed the traditional screening process and put pressure on intelligence officers to produce the desired intelligence and analysis.

As the world now knows, Saddam's connection to 9/11 was false. Saddam was an evil dictator. But he was never close to having a nuclear capability. The Administration has found no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons. It has found no persuasive connection to al-Qaeda. All this should have been clear. The Administration should not have looked at the facts with ideological blinders and with a mindless dedication to the results they wanted. [my emphasis]

Barely four months had passed since the worst terrorist atrocity in American history. Five bin Laden videotapes had been broadcast since September 11th, including one that was aired after bin Laden escaped at the battle of Tora Bora. President Bush devoted 12 paragraphs in his State of the Union Address to Afghanistan, and 29 paragraphs to the global war on terrorism. But he had nothing to say about Bin Laden or al-Qaeda.

Why not? Because of an extraordinary policy coup. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz -the Axis of War - had prevailed. The President was changing the subject to Iraq. [my emphasis]

And there's more, just in that one speech. I wouldn't call any of that demonizing, because he was describing the situation straightforwardly. But it was far from the powder-puff, Republican-friendly image that McCain fan Mark Shields offered.

Ted Kennedy fought for peace and nuclear disarmament, for education and civil rights, for universal health care and against the disgusting and criminal Cheney-Bush torture program. In Pundit District 9, his significance lies in the fact that he "could establish compromise and consensus." For we Earthlings, his significance was in the fact that he contributed to substantial positive accomplishments and kept fighting for critical needs like universal health care. Obama and the Democrats will not get a solid health care reform is they insist on "reaching across the aisle" the way the star pundits insist they must. Historian Ellen Fitzpatrick in the PBS segment linked above did manage to make a similar point:

... what's remarkable about Ted Kennedy is that, for a 50 -- almost a 50-year period, a half a century, he provided a very visible reminder of a kind of liberal idealism that first came to the fore with the election of his brother in 1960, and that was kept alive after his brother's assassination with the candidacy of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and that Ted Kennedy himself then carried through in the ensuing years.

There's a kind of continuity to the story, and it's one that is intertwined with that of the nation itself over almost a 50-year period. Whether liberalism was in or out of fashion, the idea was to use the power of the federal government to assist those most in need, to ensure that all Americans had a decent standard of living, decent health care, access to education, to a good job, and to a clean environment, to their most fundamental rights.

Think about the fact that, when Ted Kennedy began his senatorial career, he worked first on legislation to get rid of the poll tax and then lived to see Barack Obama elected as the first African-American president, something that could never have happened had they not gotten rid of the poll tax and segregation itself. So the two are totally intertwined, in my view.

Tags: barack obama, racism

Stigmatizing dissent: Bush weighs in

Bush says his critics shouldn't be uncivil. Oh, my, isn't that a nice thought? It would be funny if it weren't so cynical. Bush made the comment in an interview scheduled to be broadcast in full Monday on Fox News, the unofficial but faithful voice of the Republican Party:

I don't mind people trying to pick apart my policies, and that's fine and that's fair game. But, you know, I don't think we're serving our nation well by allowing the discourse to become so uncivil that people say - use words that they shouldn't be using.

What makes this a sad joke are the endless rantings of drooling-at-the-mouth Republican cheerleaders like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Fox's own Bill O'Reilly, and many others of their kind. Being civil would wreck their whole act.

I'm sure the Republicans would like the war critics to tippy-toe around with their criticisms, while the likes of Ann Coulter run around accusing the Democrats of being traitors. As one of Clint Eastwood's characters said, "I don't think that's gonna happen."

Bush was responding to the comment last week by Senator Edward Kennedy:

There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office showed that only about $2.5 billion of the $4 billion being spent monthly on the war can be accounted for by the administration. "My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he said.

Bush's comment follows House Republican firebrand Tom DeLay saying that the Democrats "have spewed more hateful rhetoric at President Bush than they ever did at Saddam Hussein." This is the Bush Republicans' idea of civil discussion.

And it's a continuation of a trend I discussed in earlier posts of the Republicans trying to deligitimize criticism of Bush and his policies.

Tags: bush, edward kennedy, iraq war, tom delay