Reagan speeches to explain conservatism?

Elesha Coffman, a history professor at the Baptist-affiliated Baylor University (where the legendary Deplorable, Ken Starr, was President until recently), tells an interesting story about she went searching for a different speech to use in a lecture about 1980s conservatism for her students, Which One Is "The Speech"? Religion in American History, accessed 11/19/2016. She had previously been using a speech of Ronald Reagan's from August 1980 to a group of evangelicals. She wanted to stick with a Reagan speech, I suppose because the image of St. Reagan has become so prominent in the US conservative "imaginary," as the academics say these days. And, more obviously, he was such a prominent conservative figure in the 1980s. She finally settled on one:

I ended up bringing before my class a different speech, the Neshoba County Fair "states' rights" speech of August 3, 1980. I found this speech (video and transcript here) useful less for its content--it's more folksy than forceful--than for the way it shows (1) how political dog whistles work, and (2) why interpretations of history matter. In 2007--27 years after the event!--David Brooks wrote for the New York Times that Reagan was falsely accused of racism on the basis of this speech. Four days later, Bob Herbert wrote for the same paper that the speech was absolutely evidence of racism, and to argue otherwise was "woefully wrong-headed." I read my students portions of both NYT columns and asked, how might both of these perspectives contain elements of truth, and why is an inability to agree on what constitutes racism a huge problem? (Incidentally, my favorite piece on that last question also comes from the NYT, "The Easiest Way to Get Rid of Racism? Just Redefine It.")

One landmark Reagan speech I didn't go over in class was 1987's "Tear Down This Wall." The irony was so thick, I choked on it.

Hillary vs. Republican radicalism - oh, make that Trump radicalism

Earlier this week, I linked to a good article by Rick Perlstein that illustrated the intensity gap between Democrats and Republicans, in which the Republicans are more than happy to smear the Democratic Party in general and all its candidates, while the Democrats are hesitant to hang Donald Trump's radicalism around the necks of all his Party's candidates. Or even the Party itself!

Hillary Clinton provided a good illustration of this on Thursday when she took on Trump and his "alt-right" allies in a speech that was presumably well-received by her strongest supporters. But it's also obvious that she was giving down-ballot Republicans an alibi rather than lumping them together with Trump. Maria La Ganga reports for the Guardian (Clinton slams Trump's 'racist ideology' that ushers hate groups into mainstream 08/25/2016):

The speech, a kind of throwing down of the patriotic gauntlet, came eight days after Trump named Steve Bannon as the new chief of his struggling campaign. Bannon is a Breitbart News executive and a key figure in the anti-establishment revolt that has captured the Republican party.

“The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘alt-right’,” Clinton declared. “A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican party. All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.

“Of course, there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment,” she continued. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.” ...

“This is not conservatism as we have known it,” she continued. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women, all key tenets making up the emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right.”

Aside from trying to make this a Trump issue and not a Republican Party issue, it also strikes me as lazy speech writing. The Democrats in 1964 rightly charged that the Goldwater movement represented a "fringe element" that had "effectively taken over the Republican party," to use Hillary's words, a "paranoid fringe" whose 1964 version inspired Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which all the star reporters seem to have at least heard of, though it's doubtful if many of them have actually read it.

Richard Nixon made the "Southern Strategy" into a permanent feature of Republican politics, encouraging and exploiting white racial hatred against blacks and other minorities. When Reagan emerged in 1976 as a strong Presidential contender and then became the Republican nominee in 1980, Democrats were making similar arguments about how Reagan represented a "fringe element."

And all the while, the bounds of respectability in Republican politics kept being pushed further and further to the right. Now rightwingers like Ted Cruz and John Kasich appear responsible and sensible in contrast to Trump because they aren't quite so crass in their rhetoric. Kasich even got to position himself as the Last Moderate Republican during the Republican primaries.

But Hillary's rhetoric positions herself as though she's closer to the Real Republicans than Trump is. Letting a radical, obstructionist party largely off the hook for building the radicalism that resulted in Donald Trump as their nominee.

Adn there's this: "On Thursday, Reno’s mayor, Hillary Schieve, who describes herself as an independent, introduced Clinton to the crowd and endorsed the woman she described as 'a true consensus builder'." But those nice, reasonable Real Republicans Clinton's rhetoric assumes are phantoms. And the problem is not just rhetorical, though failing to frame major issues in Democratic terms is a genuine problem in itself. If Hillary Clinton is serious about having a chance to enact the things she's been promising, she's going to need Democratic majorities. And that means aggressively contesting Republican-held Congressional seats, not just now but in 2018, as well.

President Obama chased the legendary Moderate Republicans for his entire Presidency. After 7 1/2 years of dedicated obstructionism on their part, he still can barely give a speech without putting things a conservative framing, as thought those Moderate Republicans are still out there somewhere waiting to finally emerge. When they are actually about as much in evidence as the fabled "Syrian Moderates."

The Washington Post has made the entire prepared text of Clinton's speech available, Hillary Clinton’s ‘alt-right’ speech, annotated 08/25/2016.

Just to be clear, I do like the fact that she named names and called out some of the specific hysterical rightwing memes flying around. That part of it sounds like the Hillary that is willing to fight Republicans.

But she didn't frame the speech as an attack on the Republican Party, only on Donald Trump.

But then how can she also say, "This is not conservatism as we have known it." Yes, this is conservatism as we've known it since 1978-80. Even if the messaging coming from Trump is tackier than most. But is Trump's rhetoric very similar to, say, Sarah Palin's? You bet'cha!

A minor (but intriguing) Nancy Reagan-related mystery

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon did a obituary on Nancy Reagan for the New York Times, Nancy Reagan, an Influential and Protective First Lady, Dies at 94 03/06/2016.

It's an informative biographical sketch. But there are a couple of places where I did a double-take. Like this one, one how Nancy and "Ronnie" met:

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name Nancy Davis appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Miss Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

The meeting took place over dinner at LaRue’s, a fashionable Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Strip. Mr. Reagan, recovering from multiple leg fractures suffered in a charity baseball game, was on crutches. Miss Davis was immediately smitten.

Cannon's account is echoed by this one from the Reagan Foundation (Nancy Meets Ronald Reagan 1944-1966 2010):

On October 28, 1949, the Hollywood Reporter, an industry paper, published a list of suspected Communist sympathizers. Nancy Davis was shocked to see her name included. At that time, the political activities of many in Hollywood were being scrutinized, and those who were believed to be Communists were in danger of being blacklisted. Nancy was terrified that she would be placed on that list and her career would be over. She sought the help of Mervyn LeRoy, the director of East Side, West Side, the movie she was working on at the time, in order to clear her name. LeRoy suggested that the president of the Screen Actors Guild might be able to help. His name was Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan assured LeRoy that there were several actresses with the name Nancy Davis, and that she shouldn’t worry. Meanwhile, Louella Parsons, the gossip columnist, wrote that it was another Nancy Davis who was a leftist sympathizer, and the Hollywood Reporter issued a clarification. But Nancy wouldn’t be satisfied until she was sure she was above suspicion, and wanted personal reassurance from the president of the Screen Actors Guild. Mervyn LeRoy arranged for Ronald Reagan to call her, and they made plans to meet over dinner.

When Ronald and Nancy arranged their date, each wanted to give themselves the opportunity to end the evening early if it didn’t go well. Ronald told Nancy he had an “early call” to the set the next morning, and Nancy said she did, too. Of course, neither of them had an early call. They went to one of the trendiest restaurants on the Sunset Strip, and had a wonderful time. After dinner they went to a show at a nearby nightclub, and enjoyed themselves so much they stayed for the second show. By the time the evening was over, they both confessed they didn’t have early calls after all.

Jon Wiener in Nancy Reagan and the Problem of the Two Nancys The Nation 03/06/2016 (adapted from his original article of 10/03/1987) gives an idea of the uncertainties around the story. For instance, the Cannon and Reagan Foundation accounts restrict themselves to call that other Nancy Davis a "leftist." Wiener:

Nancy Reagan, who died March 6, often explained that she and the future president met cute. She had been threatened with blacklisting in the early ’50s—by mistake, she said, after having been confused with another actress who had the same name—Nancy Davis. The other Nancy Davis, Nancy and Ronald Reagan said, really was a Communist. Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, helped the first Nancy prove she wasn’t the Communist Nancy Davis, and she was able to work again. Along the way, they fell in love, and the rest is history.

In 1987, I found the other Nancy Davis working at a snack bar in Ventura, California, and interviewed her for The Nation. When I asked about the first lady, she said, “She’s been lying about me for years.... I never was a Communist. I told Reagan back in the fifties that if she didn’t stop saying I was a Communist, I’d sue her.”

Wiener cites an account by St. Reagan himself suggesting that not only the names but the mailing addresses of the two Nancys were being confused by others:

Ronald Reagan wrote in his autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, that because his wife-to-be was assumed to be the other Nancy Davis, “her name kept showing up on rosters of Communist front organizations, affixed to petitions of the same coloration, and her mail frequently included notices of meetings she had no desire to attend, and accounts of these meetings as covered by the Daily Worker.”

The Daily Worker was the name of the Communist Party's newspaper until 1958. I still see rightwingers today sneering at some comment that don't like by saying it sounds like it came out of the Daily Worker. Which is kind of strange, because if you do the math, someone who turned 18 in 1958 would turn 76 this year. In other words, if you have adult memories of the Daily Worker as a current newspaper, you're already deep in the FOX News prime market segment.

The other Nancy wasn't happy about the way the Reagans handled the two-Nancys problem:

Nancy Reagan repeatedly described the other Nancy Davis as a Communist.

“It’s not true,” the other Nancy Davis told me. (She had skated in several Sonja Henie movies.) “I didn’t have anything to do with the Communists. I never signed anything about the Hollywood Ten. After I threatened to sue her, she stopped saying those things for a while. Then in the eighties it’s begun again.”

“It is true that we were confused with each other,” the other Nancy said. “I’d get her paychecks, and she’d get mine. Hers were bigger. We’d exchange them. And once I got an invitation to a fancy event at the Beverly Hills hotel; it said ‘bring Mr. Reagan.’ I brought Tony Reagan; he was a casting director at Paramount.”

The other Nancy recalled that she was summoned to a meeting with SAG president Reagan in 1953 to discuss the two Nancys problem. “He told me I had to change my name,” she recalled. “He suggested I use ‘Nancy Lee Davis.’ I told him I wouldn’t; I was the first Nancy Davis in the Guild, so under the rules she had to change her name. But he was the boss, and he insisted. I realized he could cause me a lot of trouble. So I changed my name.”

But if that is so, just who was the supposedly Communist Nancy Davis out there?

Wiener also cites another biographer, Anne Edwards, who offered a somewhat different account of the Nancy-Ronnie first meeting:

[T]hey had met in 1949, when, according to Edwards, Nancy told producer Dore Schary’s wife, Miriam, that she wanted to meet Reagan, and the Scharys invited both to a small dinner party. The Scharys’ daughter, author Jill Robinson, recalled the evening: Reagan described the evils of communism, and Nancy “kept smiling at him in agreement.” Soon, brother Neil Reagan told a friend, “It looks as if this one has her hooks in him.”

The story of their first meeting, in other words, seems a bit dodgy. This Los Angeles Times article from 1987 (Jesse Katz, Her Role With Reagans Left Her Bitter 11/05/1987) makes it a bit more clear than Wiener's does why Anne Edwards' account makes the standard story sound a bit hinky (the "other" Nancy in 1987 was now named Nancy Davis Hunt):

The story of their mix-up is made more peculiar by Anne Edwards' 1987 biography, "Early Reagan," in which she contends that the Reagans' account of their meeting could not have happened.

According to Edwards, the Reagans met at a dinner party in 1949 on purely social terms, and it was not until 1953 that Nancy Reagan--who already was married at the time--encountered trouble over alleged connections to communist organizations.

Besides, Edwards writes that Nancy Lee Davis did not work in Hollywood from 1945 to 1952, and thus could not have been taken either for a communist or for the other Nancy Davis.

The Reagans, however, both write in their autobiographies that they met as a result of the mix-up, and the First Lady recalls the year as 1951. Hunt, meanwhile, insisted that she worked in the film industry during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 24: St. Reagan and segregation

These days a revisionist view of Ronald Reagan and his politics have settled in among the punditocracy. The latest variant has him being a much more responsible fellow than these wild Tea Partiers today.

So it's worth remember that Ronald Reagan built his political career on pandering to segregationists. The fact that the segregationist mentality is now fully triumphant within today's Republican Party is due in major part to Reagan, now regarded as more of the saint of the Republican Party than Abraham Lincoln.

Lou Cannon wrote in his excellent President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991):

But Reagan never supported the use of federal power to provide blacks with the civil rights systematically denied to them by southern states since the end of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century. He opposed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was overwhelmingly supported by congressional majorities of both parties. Reagan cited constitutional grounds for his position, but many suspected that his position also involved an element of political calculation. Reagan avidly courted the support of white southerners during the mid-1960s, and he consistently refused during his abortive campaign for the presidency in 1968 to criticize George Wallace's segregationist advocacies. This seemed to me like political pandering, although Reagan always denied any such motive. But Reagan told Laurence Barrett in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been "humiliating to the South." While he made political points with white southerners on this issue, Reagan was extremely sensitive to any suggestion that his stands on civil rights issues were politically or racially motivated, and he typically reacted to such criticisms as attacks on his personal integrity. [my emphasis]

Today we hear this constantly. Every time a Republican elected official or Party operative or professional propagandist is called out over some racially prejudiced or outright bigoted remark, they profess to be deeply offended at the slur on their personal integrity. It's part of the standard whiny-white-people repertoire. With his acting experience, Reagan became quite adapt at appealing to whiny white folks with this schtick.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, ronald reagan, slavery, white racism

Honoring public figures when they die

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued that the only truly unselfish kind of love we experience is love for the dead. Because one has no hope of reciprocal reward in loving a person who has passed away.

While this is an insightful and even beautiful thought, it would be hard to defend it unequivocally. Freud's concept of mourning deals with how the ego holds on to the cherished individual even after their passing, a process not without elements (ego needs) that could be called selfish. Familial and inheritance considerations can also affect both the public and the individual experience of mourning, again elements not without their selfish aspects.

And the public mourning of famous individuals moves into a different dimension, in which selfish or partisan interests often stand at the forefront.

Glenn Greenwald recalls how this process worked in a thoroughly propagandistic way with the passing of Ronald Reagan. The media was happy to cooperated with Republican politicians in canonizing him as a secular - or even more than secular - saint. (Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths 12/17/2011):

... the most notable aspect of that intense public ritual was the full-scale canonization of this deeply controversial, divisive and consequential political figure. Americans - including millions too young to remember his presidency - were bombarded with a full week of media discussions which completely whitewashed Reagan’s actions in office: that which made him an important enough historical figure to render his death worthy of such worldwide attention in the first place. There was a virtual media prohibition on expressing a single critical utterance about what he did as President and any harm that he caused. That's not because the elegies to Reagan were apolitical - they were aggressively political - but because nothing undercutting his deification was permitted. ...

The key claim there was that "politics is put aside." That’s precisely what did not happen. The entire spectacle was political to its core. Following Woodruff's proclamation were funeral speeches, all broadcast by CNN, by then-House Speaker Denny Hastert and Vice President Dick Cheney hailing the former President for gifting the nation with peace and prosperity, rejuvenating national greatness, and winning the Cold War. This scene repeated itself over and over during that week: extremely politicized tributes to the greatness of Ronald Reagan continuously broadcast to the nation without challenge and endorsed by its "neutral" media - all shielded from refutation or balance by the grief of a widow and social mores that bar one from speaking ill of the dead. ...

Though he became more popular after leaving office (like most Presidents), it was that week-long bombardment of hagiography that sealed Reagan’s status as Great and Cherished Leader. As media and political figures lavished him with politicized praise, there was virtually no mention of the brutal, civilian-extinguishing covert wars he waged in Central America, his funding of terrorists in Nicaragua, the pervasive illegality of the Iran-contra scandal perpetrated by his top aides and possibly himself, the explosion of wealth and income inequality ushered in by "Reagonmics" which persists today, his escalation of the racially disparate Drug War, his slashing of domestic programs for the poor accompanied by a deficit-causing build-up in the military budget, the racially-tinged (at least) attacks on welfare-queens-in-Cadillacs, the Savings & Loan crisis resulting from deregulation, his refusal even to acknowledge AIDS as tens of thousands of the Wrong People died, the training of Muslim radicals in Afghanistan and arming of the Iranian regime, the attempt to appoint the radical Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, or virtually anything else that would undermine the canonization. The country was drowned by a full, uninterrupted week of pure, leader-reverent propaganda. [my emphasis]

Glenn makes an important distinction that loops back to Kierkegaard's concept: "This happened because of an unhealthy conflation of appropriate post-death etiquette for private persons and the etiquette governing deaths of public figures. They are not and should not be the same." Honoring the departed out of love or personal respect does include the kind of unselfishness to which Kierkegaard referred.

As the title of Glenn's article indicates, he is applying these reflections to Christopher Hitchens' passing and the generally highly positive commentary he received in even left-leaning media. As he puts it, Hitchens " particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent."

Not least among those was his rabid support of the Iraq War. Glenn retweeted a comment by cartoonist Matt Bors, "Why aren't Iraqis writing tributes to Christopher Hitchens?"

And he suggests that the general cheerful refusal to take Hitchens to task in the commentary last week has a lot to do with the Look Forward Not Backward view of the Iraq War: "Part of that is the by-product of America's refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq."

Tags: christopher hitchens, glenn greenwald, iraq war, ronald reagan

Three decades of neoliberalism: Robert Perry on how Reagan blazed the (destructive) path the US is on today

Robert Perry looks at how the Presidency of St. Reagan framed the disastrous situation in which the US found itself right now.The Dangerous Reagan Cult Consortium News 08/16/2011:

... Reagan had set the stage for the tragedies that would follow. When George W. Bush grabbed power in 2001, he simply extended the foreign and economic policies of the Republican cult leader: more tax cuts, more militarism, less regulation, more media manipulation.

Soon, the gap between rich and poor was widening again. Soon, the United States was at open war in two countries and involved in secret wars in many others. Soon, the nation was confronted with new scandals about torture and deception. Soon, the federal budget was flowing with red ink.

And near the end of Bush's presidency, the de-regulated excesses of Wall Street pushed the country to the brink of a financial cataclysm. Bush supported a bail-out to save the bankers but didn’t do much for the millions of Americans who lost their jobs or their homes.

And Perry also explains how the Republicans very consciously built Reagan up into a kind of idol for neoliberal/deregulation/Washington Consensus/austerity economic policies.

By and large, the Democrats saw these gestures, like attaching Reagan’s name to National Airport, as another way to demonstrate their bipartisanship.

But Republicans knew better. They understood the strategic value of elevating Reagan’s legacy to the status of an icon. If everyone agreed that Reagan was so great, then it followed that the hated “guv-mint” must be that bad.

Increasingly, Democrats found themselves arguing on Republican ground, having to apologize for any suggestion that the government could do anything good for the country. Meanwhile, the Clinton-era stock market boom convinced more Americans that the "market" must know best.

Tags: republican party, robert perry, ronald reagan

Reagan's lasting negative legacy

Robert Parry, who has done extensive reporting on the dark sides of St. Reagan's Administration, summarizes Reagan's legacy in Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs Consortium News 01/28/2011:

... Reagan’s current historical reputation rests more on the effectiveness of the Republican propaganda machine – and the timidity of many Democrats and media personalities – than on his actual record of accomplishments.

Indeed, many of today’s worst national and international problems can be traced to misjudgments and malfeasance from the Reagan years – from the swelling national debt to out-of-control banks, from the decline of the U.S. middle class to the inaction on energy independence, from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

He also notes two aspects of Reagan's legacy that don't get sufficient attention in the popular press reports: his attempts to politicize the CIA and his concentrated efforts to co-opt the mainstream press by getting them to absorb Republican narratives. On the latter he writes:

... well-financed right-wing operatives and administration officials worked to marginalize mainstream journalists (the "liberal press") who raised troublesome questions about Reagan's domestic and foreign policies.

The impact of these information strategies [toward the CIA and the press] had deadly consequences even years later, such as when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney essentially dictated the intelligence "analysis" on Iraq’s WMD to the CIA and the Washington press corps fell in line behind the march to war.

Even today, President Barack Obama complains that his options for addressing the nation's growing problems are limited by what he calls the Reagan "narrative," demonizing government.

Tags: ronald reagan

Reagan and nuclear weapons

The best achievement of Ronald Reagan's Presidency was the new beginning he made with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms control during the latter part of his second term in office.

But a large part of the reason it was such a significant achievement is that it (partially) reversed the course on which he had put the country and the world during his first Administration. The Carter Administration had negotiated the SALT II Treaty, which Reagan opposed during the 1980 campaign. Although Reagan never pushed Congress to ratify it during his Presidency, he did agree to abide by the terms of the treaty.

On the other hand, he started a huge military buildup, including nuclear arms - large at least by the standards of that time. As Andrew Bacevich recently reminded us, "The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a 'peer competitor'"! (Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable Tom Dispatch 01/27/2011)

Reagan also kicked off a major push for what may literally be the single largest boondoggle project in the history of humanity: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),or Star Wars as it came to be known, "missile defense" in current jargon. In Reagan's original conception, the US would create a missile defense shield based on a combination of rockets and laser beams based on satellites and the ground that could reliably block all incoming Soviet rockets if a nuclear war broke out. For a brief description and timeline of the project up to 1998, see Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), The Fifteenth Anniversary of "Star Wars" Global Security 03/17/1998; also from UCS US Ballistic Missile Defense Timeline: 1945-2008 11/24/09.

There were two basic problems with the program which were widely recognized by experts in the field from the very beginning. One was that it wouldn't work, at least not at any cost the United States could manage, even assuming (as Reagan's Administration did in practice) that deficits were no obstacle; the missile shield was expensive, but countermeasures for the other side were relatively cheap. The other was that it would destabilize the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union; the nuclear balance of terror was based on the appropriately named doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and anti-missile defenses were incompatible with it. Gary Guethner's article from that time, Strategic Defense: New Technologies, Old Tactics Parameters Autumn 1985, discusses the issues involved.

But the project proceeded, to the great profit of the military-industrial complex.

Star Wars remains a boondoggle to this day, as Pavel Podwig explains in The false promise of missile defense Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 09/14/2011.

Reagan's turnaround on nuclear arms control, interestingly enough, may have been influenced by the left-leaning peace groups of which he was part in the years just after the Second World War. Nancy Reagan also pushed him to get something down on arms control during his second term so that he could leave some clear peace legacy. Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione summarizes his arms-control legacy in Reagan the Abolitionist Huffington Post 03/03/2011:

He and Mikhail Gorbachev famously discussed abolishing all nuclear weapons at their 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two leaders came very close but failed to reach agreement on a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons within ten years. Their talks, however, paved the way for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 that eliminated all of the thousands of medium- and intermediate-range US and Russian nuclear missiles that threatened Europe. To this day, neither nation has nuclear weapons of these ranges, and several experts would like to take this treaty global, eliminating these missiles from the few other nations that have them.

Reagan outlined his views on an INF treaty in a speech three years before Reykjavik, concluding: "I support a zero option for all nuclear arms. As I've said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."

Sadly, he was never able to sign a comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons, but Reagan did establish a framework for mutual and verifiable reductions -- through the INF treaty and original START treaty -- that the United States and Russia continue to this day.

Tags: military industrial complex, nuclear nonproliferation, ronald reagan

St. Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair

The Iran-Contra scandal was the event that detracted the most from Ronald Reagan's image during his Presidency, though his hardcore admirers enthusiastically supported the controversial operations involved. This report from the National Security Archives has a good general summary and many links to more recently available documents, The Iran-Contra Affair 20 Years On 11/24/2006:

On November 25, 1986, the biggest political and constitutional scandal since Watergate exploded in Washington when President Ronald Reagan told a packed White House news conference that funds derived from covert arms deals with the Islamic Republic of Iran had been diverted to buy weapons for the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

In the weeks leading up to this shocking admission, news reports had exposed the U.S. role in both the Iran deals and the secret support for the Contras, but Reagan's announcement, in which he named two subordinates -- National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter and NSC staffer Oliver L. North -- as the responsible parties, was the first to link the two operations.

The scandal was almost the undoing of the Teflon President. Of all the revelations that emerged, the most galling for the American public was the president's abandonment of the long-standing policy against dealing with terrorists, which Reagan repeatedly denied doing in spite of overwhelming evidence that made it appear he was simply lying to cover up the story.

Despite the damage to his image, the president arguably got off easy, escaping the ultimate political sanction of impeachment. From what is now known from documents and testimony -- but perhaps not widely appreciated -- while Reagan may not have known about the diversion or certain other details of the operations being carried out in his name, he directed that both support for the Contras (whom he ordered to be kept together "body and soul") and the arms-for-hostages deals go forward, and was at least privy to other actions that were no less significant. [my emphasis]

From St. Reagan's address to the nation in which he admits having "traded arms for hostages":



The Federation of American Scientists, a great resource for a lot of things like this, has a copy of The "Walsh Report", the final report from Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. It's formal title is Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters 08/04/1993.

Congress investigated the matter, as well. Their findings are an important part of the historical record on Iran-Contra. See Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair by Lee H. Hamilton, Daniel K. Inouye. Excerpts are also provided by the American Presidency Project at UC-Santa Barbara.

Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney's Iran-Contra defense would provide to be a significant step onto the road that took the United States into invading Iran and directly employing sadistic torture as a terror measure in foreign policy.

Tags: iran-contra, iran-contra affair, ronald reagan

St. Reagan and white racism

Paul Krugman reviewed the record succinctly a few years ago in Republicans and Race New York Times 11/19/2007.

St. Reagan pursued the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon eagerly, which included using race-baiting. The episode mentioned most often is his speech in Mississippi expressing his support for "state rights", which in the Deep South's political jargon meant support for segregationist ideas and attitudes. He also reminds us of this:

There are many other examples of Reagan's tacit race-baiting in the historical record. ... 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.

In a more recent assessment, The divisive underbelly of Reagan's sunny optimism Salon 02/03/2011, historian Matthew Dallek describes how St. Reagan used race and other culture-war issues to polarize voters in his favor:

Throughout his three decades in political life, he repeatedly seized on people's hopes, but also found their anger and played on their fears. In Reagan's lexicon, optimism competed with anger.

For instance, while he spoke of unleashing Californians' individual initiative during his first 1966 gubernatorial campaign, he also tapped voters' fears that the social order was beginning to crumble and that liberals and their allies had caused the crumbling. He campaigned by charging that "a small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates" had "brought shame" to the University of California at Berkeley, an elite, publicly funded school in the state's higher education system. Describing California's city streets as "jungle paths after dark" and college campuses as hotbeds of sexual licentiousness and immoral behavior, Reagan rode to power by depicting California as an overly liberal, permissive society. He vowed to crack down as one of his first priorities in the governor's mansion. Appropriately, he had a sign in his capitol office that said: "Obey the rules, or get out."

Nor was Reagan above using the hot-button social issue of race to further his political agenda by tacking rightward. At one news conference during his campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, Reagan refused to criticize Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who had become a leading symbol of segregation and white Southern resistance to the civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s.

As president, Reagan mocked "welfare queens," implying that African-American women on public assistance habitually cheated taxpayers out of their hard-earned money. President Reagan also defended segregation academies such as Bob Jones University (where interracial dating wasn't allowed)... [my emphasis]

Tags: ronald reagan

Obama on Reagan, 2008

Republicans will be using the upcoming 100th anniversary of St. Reagan's birthday February 6 to celebrate his mythological legacy. Given the strange dedication to achieving an equally mythological post-partisan state of affairs by President Obama, it's worth looking back at Candidate Obama's praise of St. Reagan. This is from his interview of January 6, 2008, with the Reno Gazette-Journal on Jan. 14:



In this video segment, Obama brags that he had been the most-requested surrogate campaigner for Democratic candidates in swing districts in the 2006 election because he is "somebody who can reach out to independents and Republicans, uh, in a way that, you know, ah, doesn't, uh, doesn't offend people". (my emphasis) I'm showing the quotes here with the kind of "uhs" and "you knows" that journalists typically edit out of quotes like these. Because they illustrate the observation David Bromwich about Obama's two kinds of diction:

Any observer of Obama realises that, by contrast, he is always slow, always circumspect, and he has two distinct registers of diction: one for talking to very clever but abstracted people, the other for talking to well-meaning people who are very young or very old and certainly need remedial help. In the higher idiom he talks of a 'critique' of policy and 'trend lines' and the ways to 'incentivise' better care and 'prioritise' the next steps of government assistance to show that we are 'doing everything we can to accelerate job creation'. It is the language of a technocrat, the man at the head of the conference table. In the lower idiom, there are lots of 'folks', 'folks who oppose me', 'a whole bunch of folks', interspersed with vaguely regional comfort words like 'oftentimes'. [my emphasis] (The Fastidious President London Review of Books 11/18/2010)

In his Reno interview on the video, Obama was operating more in the second type of diction.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, uh, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He, he, he put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies and you know, government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. And, I think, you know, people just tapped in, he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, uh, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, and, and, you know, uh, uh, entrepreneurship that had been missing, all right?.

He says there that he thinks voters are tired of seeing the two parties "bogged down in the same arguments". He notes that the Republicans had been the Party of ideas and had challenged conventional wisdom, though he adds that their current solution for almost everything, tax cuts, can't actually solve problems like the energy issues.

It's striking now that Obama then in 2008 was promoting his value as a Democratic Party candidate and Party leader on the basis that he could appeal to independents and Republicans by speaking in a way that "doesn't offend people". Because you can't change the prevailing narrative to a more Democratic one without offending Republicans. Because to hear the we're-the-victims whining that regularly issues from Republican spokespeople and propagandists, their delicate feelings are very easily offended.

And in that 2008 statement, Obama reinforced the Republican narrative about "all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies" and the evils of Big Gubment. Sadly, he's still doing it today.

Robert Perry in Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan 01/19/2008 provided a reaction at the time that focused on the concept of accountability in government:

Though Obama's chief point was that Reagan in 1980 "put us on a fundamentally different path" – which may be historically undeniable – the Democratic presidential candidate went further, justifying Reagan's course correction because of "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability."

While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse Reagan's conservative policies, the Illinois senator seemed to suggest that Reagan's 1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the U.S. government. In reality, however, accountability wasn't part of Reagan’s medicine for America. Indeed, one could say the opposite. [my emphasis]

Perry goes on to talk primarily about Reagan's anti-accountability approach in foreign policy, especially his Administration's policies in Central America, which was the area in which St. Reagan let the neoconservatives run wild. Perry argues that St. Reagan's foreign policy "was one of the most brutal, most corrupt and least accountable in American history." The Cheney-Bush Administration, of course, far surpassed the Reagan Administration's in all those ways.

But he also connects Reagan's anti-accountability position to his neoliberal (to use the economics term) economic policies:

On the domestic side, Reagan oversaw the dismantling of regulatory structures that restrained the excesses of Wall Street investment banks, the energy industry and other economic powerhouses. Many of today’s problems – from the mortgage meltdown to the nation's wasteful energy policies – can be traced to Reagan's contempt for that type of accountability.

The Obama Administration's approach to accountability is far too close to that of the Reagan Administration. As Bromwich also points out:

The truth is that Obama exposed himself to the worst the Republicans can do by his conciliatory tone from the first days of his administration. He gave assurance when he entered office that he would not look exactingly into the conduct of the last administration. Bush and Cheney received from him a legal indulgence for any conceivable transgression, on the theory that after the bombings of September 2001, anything that public servants did was a hasty but honourable response to a dreadful emergency by well-meaning persons. To Obama at the time, this must have seemed a magnanimous deed as well as a signal of non-aggression to tamp down the savagery of the Cheney circle. Yet his decision to make justice begin today achieved a different end. It made sure that none of the people from whom Obama had most to fear would ever fear him. It also robbed of reality all his talk of a profound commitment to justice – a justice which he had suggested went beyond considerations of bridge-building for the sake of domestic policy or national expedience. By broadening the claim of state secrets to prevent the disclosure of evidence of torture and extraordinary rendition, the Obama administration has lent credence to the original claim of Bush and Cheney that their actions were dictated by necessities of state. In doing so it has foregone the only assurance the law affords against the repetition of such acts. [my emphasis]

On the regulatory front also, this Administration's approach to accountability has been awfully permissive toward reckless financial Masters of the Universe who crashed the world economy in the financial crisis of 2008.

The full text of the recently-released Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee Report is available online. And it gives a damning account of the fecklessness of federal regulators under the Cheney-Bush Administration in the face of clear signs of serious problems in the mortgage business and the derivative securities based on mortgages.

But Obama's position on such matters is to Look Forward Not Backward. And in doing so, he passes up opportunity after opportunity to discredit the stewardship of the Republican Party during the last Administration and also to shift the general political and economic narrative toward a more Democratic-friendly viewpoint. St. Reagan was weak on accountability for his foreign policy and on accountability for reckless business practices that damaged consumers and endangered the general health of the economy. But he was very good in blaming the previous Carter Administration for all his own Administration's problems. President Obama doesn't want anything to do with that kind of accountability, either.

After all, holding people accountable isn't easy to do in a way that ""doesn't offend people" who are being held accountable.

Tags: barack obama, ronald reagan

Reagan, Iran and Republican impunity

Robert Parry reminds us of the long-term consequences of St. Ronald Reagan's shady deals with Iran in The Tricky October Surprise Report Consortium News 06/17/2010:

The significance of Reagan’s victory on modern American history can hardly be overstated. For instance, while Carter wanted to use his second term to press for U.S. energy independence and to secure a lasting Middle East peace, Reagan had little use for such policies and instead pushed through an anti-government agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of corporations.

Three decades later, the United States remains addicted to oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to bedevil U.S. policy-makers, Reagan’s (and later George W. Bush’s) tax cuts have contributed to massive federal deficits, and the concept of corporate self-regulation has led to financial and environmental disasters.

Today, as Republicans anticipate major congressional gains in November, Reagan’s anti-government mantra has become a Tea Party and GOP rallying cry again.

Perhaps even more important, the notion of Republican impunity – to get away with pretty much whatever audacious action they undertake – pervades national politics.

Since the 1970s, Democrats have shied away from holding Republicans accountable for a string of national security scandals, with the failed investigation into the 1980 October Surprise case serving as a kind of template, not dissimilar from President Barack Obama’s refusal to investigate President George W. Bush’s complicity in torture and other war crimes.

The Democrats seem to believe that if they "look forward, not backward" regarding Republican crimes that they can secure some measure of bipartisanship, even if there is little evidence of that.

As Perry explains, the famous bipartisanship Democrat, former Congressman Lee Hamilton, played an important role in constructing that dubious record of achievement. The kind of "bipartisanship" that allows Republican officials to break the law with impunity is a very bad thing.

Tags: iran-contra, ronald reagan

Obama's nuclear developments

Obama has had several major news events on the nuclear front lately. He completed a Nuclear Posture Review: Nuclear Posture Review (or Nuclear Public Relations?) by Stephen M. Walt Foreign Policy 04/06/10; 'Obama's Nuclear Strategy Is a Small Revolution' Der Spiegel International 04/07/10. He held a nuclear summit in Washington, "the largest such gathering on U.S. soil since the San Francisco conference that launched the United Nations in 1945", according to John Aloysius Farrell in Nuclear security summit: a historic gathering Global Post 04/12/10. And he negotiated a new START Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear armaments: Arms Deal More 'Illusion than Reality,' But Still a Good START Der Spiegel International 04/09/10.

As the titles of the articles I linked may hint, I'm cautiously optimistic about these developments. In the grand scheme of things, nuclear arms control is still the most important responsibility of world leaders, even if the politics don't play out that way. If we can't avoid a big nuclear war, global warming won't have time to devastate the planet.

It's hard to imagine that any treaty Obama negotiated would be able to get through the Senate with the Republicans pursuing their policy of fundamental (just-say-no) opposition to the President and the Democrats. And we can no longer count on the Republicans to honor such agreements even though they were signed but not technically ratified, which is what the Reagan administration did with the SALT II Treaty. With the precedent now of the Cheney-Bush administration "unsigning" the International Criminal Court treaty and the Republicans firmly committed to a unilateralist foreign policy, we can't count on them acting rationally even about a major nuclear arms-control treaty that is very much in the national interest.

And speaking of the Reagan administration, I've always given Reagan credit for three significant, constructive accomplishments: the Social Security financing plan; his 1985 tax reform (not to be confused with the "supply side" tax cuts of 1981); and, his intermediate nuclear-arms treaty with the Soviet Union.

Joe Conason has a good column on the latter today as he refutes Sarah Palin's pseudohistory about Saint Reagan, What Sarah Palin forgets (or never knew) about Ronald Reagan Salon 04/12/10:

Beginning in November 1985, at a meeting in Geneva, Reagan and Gorbachev sought to slash nuclear weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and the Soviet Union by 50 percent or more. A year later they met in Reykjavik to discuss proposals to completely eliminate nuclear weapons from the arsenals of both nations. The U.S. president's approach was so radical -- and radically sincere, according to everyone close to him -- that it alarmed many of his more conservative advisors. His hawkish defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was appalled. Relieved when the Reykjavik talks ended without agreement because of a fundamental disagreement over missile defenses, the hawks were disturbed, to put it mildly, when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.

The INF treaty was truly historic, both because of its own deep cuts in the superpower arsenals and because of its symbolic portent of the imminent end of the Cold War. No treaty between the U.S. and the USSR had been signed and ratified by the Senate for 15 years by then -- and this agreement stipulated the drawdown and destruction of nuclear weapons by both sides for the first time ever.

Morever, at a moment when conservative opinion widely distrusted Gorbachev and urged Reagan to maintain bitter antagaonism [sic] toward "our enemies," he employed summitry and arms negotiations to reassure the Soviets that they could pursue liberalization without fear. It was a decisive moment in world history and one for which the intuitive president deserves great credit. [my emphasis]

The Republicans with their postmodern "reality is what you want it to be" approach to history have transmogrified a theatrical moment of no practical significance - Reagan in Berlin saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" - into a symbol of how bluster and belligerence "defeated" the Soviet Union. But Conason has it right. Stating it slightly differently, the most significant step Reagan took that encouraged the developments that lead to the end of the USSR was the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, not the useless "Star Wars" boondoggle or backing the fanatical Muslim terrorists brave mujaheddin freedom fighters in Afghanistan.

My understanding of Reagan's actions in the matter of the INF Treaty is in line with Conason's. Despite his dogmatic conservatism, the influence of his and Nancy Reagan's being active in peace groups in the years immediately following the Second World War remained with him. Nancy pushed him to achieve something that would be remembered as a substantial legacy for peace. And the INF Treaty qualified.

It's always tempting for liberals to look back to some period ten or twenty years ago and try to say, oh, look how much more sensible conservatives were back then. Conservatives play the same game. But when it comes to crackpot rightwing radicalism, Richard Hofstadter's famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", published in 1965 in book form, reinforced that particular tendency for liberals. And it's become kind of a bad habit. In most matters of domestic and foreign policy, Republicans are being realistic when they look to Reagan as having blazed a trail for them. Reagan's "Iran-Contra" foreign policy adventure became the template for the entire foreign policy of the Cheney-Bush administration.

But on the issue of nuclear arms control, Conason is right on the mark in contrasting the constructive nature of Reagan's nuclear arms policies in his second term with the unreflective militarism and reckless worship of nuclear arms that prevail in today's Republican Party.

Tags: nuclear nonproliferation, ronald reagan

Worst recession since St. Reagan?

I was struck by this article, US faces worst recession in 26 years by Krishna Guha Financial Times 10/19/08:

The US economy appears to be plunging into what many experts believe will be its worst recession since 1982.

Senior officials at the Treasury and Federal Reserve are confident that the rescue plan for US banks will succeed in preventing a financial system meltdown and ensure there will not be a repeat of the Great Depression. But they know that a sharp economic downturn is already baked in the cake. They do not,however, know how deep or protracted it will be. ...

“The actual deterioration in the data in the last few weeks has been much more severe than anyone was expecting,” said Frederic Mishkin, a professor at Columbia university and former Fed governor.

Consumers, who account for 72 per cent of the US economy, are pulling back amid a brutal tightening of credit conditions on everything from car loans to credit cards and home equity lines. Meanwhile, foreign demand is also weakening.

Alan Blinder ... said it was all but certain the US would face a recession worse than in 2001 or 1990-1991.

"The game is now about making sure this recession is less deep and less long than the 1982 recession." [my emphasis]

It's worth remembering that St. Reagan who the Republicans all idolize induced a sharp recession with his drastic cutbacks in domestic economic stimulus when he took office as President. Republicans have a way of bringing on economic disaster.

Tags: ronald reagan, us economy

Remembering St. Reagan realistically

St. Ronald Reagan with Dixiecrat Republican (and Trent Lott hero) Strom Thurmond

Obama has understandably drawn criticism from both Clintons and from John Edwards for his praise of Reagan and his bizarre statement that the Republicans have been the idea party for the last 15 years or so. Paul Krugman, who has been a sharp critic of Obama's daydreams of bipartisan harmony, writes on St. Reagan and his historical legacy in Debunking the Reagan Myth New York Times 01/21/08:

... [T]he furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Krugman asks the perfectly legitimate question, "why would a self-proclaimed progressive say anything that lends credibility to this [conservative, pro-Reagan] rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?"

Obama or some of his staff might also want to consult this essay by Nicholas Lemann, "The Best Years of Their Lives" New York Review of Books 06/30/1988. Lemann writes:

It is going way too far to call Reagan a pure conservative. Even so, there is no question what his overall impact on the country has been. He staked out a basic position that was outside the consensus of the national leadership on practically every issue from relations with the Soviets to affirmative action to environmentalism. By proving that his position would not seem eccentric - that in fact it would win elections - he caused the consensus to move in his direction. By the mid-Eighties ideas were being discussed in respectable Washington that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the decade. Groups of intellectuals and interest groups who had been on the fringe in the Seventies were now "part of the process," as Larry Speakes would say—it seemed actually to matter, for the first time ever in government, what the editor of Human Events, or rogue businessmen like Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife, thought. The constant pressure from the Republican right, combined with the disappearance of the Republican left, had the effect of making even the much despised Republican pragmatists more conservative than they used to be. The panoply of conservative interest groups became bolder, spent more money, and in several cases underwent internal revolutions in which the right-wingers unseated the moderates. For a while there seemed to be a direct line from the hothouse conservative policy world to the White House, although this feeling has disappeared in the final, peacemaking phase of Reagan's presidency.

American politics is usually described by experts as essentially centrist, but Reagan moved the location of the center. This is a far more important achievement than staying awake in meetings or remembering the names of Cabinet members. In the play of interests and ideas, the Reagan years were not one long snooze, and the insider books that portray them as such are very soon going to seem dated. (my emphasis)

This is an aspect of the Reagan administration that is far more important than vague observations of how he reflected public opinion. He took his Party the next step toward being the Party of neoconservatives, shameless plutocrats and Christianist theocrats that it is today.

Reagan didn't come in on a wave of public support for his "supply side" tax cut theories, although the property-tax "revolt" of that day undoubtedly contributed to his appeal. He didn't catch up to Carter in the opinion polls until the last weeks of the 1980 campaign. And without the Iranian hostage crisis, it's certainly an open question whether he ever would have. And, yes, I think the circumstantial evidence accumulated by Gary Sick and Robert Perry is persuasive that the Reagan campaign had an "October suprise" arrangement to delay the release of the hostages until after the election. But you don't have to accept that notion to recognize that the perceived national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis was a decisive factor.

There's also this timely note on Reagan and his "era", On Martin Luther King Jr. Day: 26 pages in the history of the holiday by Robert Smith San Francisco Chronicle 01/21/08:

Twenty four years ago, when President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, he praised the civil rights leader for "awakening something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be color-blind." In a 1986 message to the Congress of Racial Equality marking the observance of the holiday, Reagan was even more effusive in his praise, describing King as a "truly prophetic voice that reached out over the chasms of hostility, prejudice, ignorance and fear to touch the conscience of America."

Yet, throughout congressional consideration of the legislation, President Reagan opposed the idea of a national holiday for King. Indeed, Reagan associated himself with the views of North Carolina's Sen. Jesse Helms, the legislation's most obdurate congressional opponent. During the Senate debate, Helms called for the opening of the FBI files on King, which he claimed would show that King was a communist or at least a communist sympathizer. When asked in an October 1983 news conference about Helms' allegations, Reagan responded, "We will know in about 35 years, won't we?" (referring to the time for the opening of the FBI files).

Reagan went on to say, "I don't fault Sen. Helms' sincerity with regard to wanting the records opened up. I think that he is motivated by a feeling that if we are going to have a national holiday named for any American, when it's only been named for one American in all our history up until this time, that he feels we should know everything there is to know about an individual." (my emphasis)

Tags: nicholas lemann, paul krugman, ronald reagan

The evolution (or creation?) of authoritarian Republicanism

Reagans and Nixons: the good old moderate pragmatic days of the Republican Party?

Former Republican - should I say "recovering Republican"? - Ariana Huffington writes in Midnight in America: the Mainstreaming of the GOP's Lunatic Fringe Huffington Post 10/22/07:

The most significant takeover of the past decade isn't to be found among the telecoms, the big oil companies, or in Silicon Valley. The reconfigured entity is headquartered in Washington, but we can see and hear the results everyday on your television, radio, and computer screen. And America is much the worse for it. I'm talking about the takeover of the Republican Party by its lunatic fringe.

Reagan's GOP has been replaced by the dark, moldering, putrefied party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Malkin. Morning in America has given way to Midnight in America.

Of course, there the Republican Party has always had it Jesse Helmses, Spiro Agnews, and Lee Atwaters. But they were the minority, far removed from the mainstream of the Party - Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, the first George Bush.

My first impression in reading something like this is to think, yeah, that's really what's happening.

But I feel like I need to restrain my enthusiasm in this case. Because Arianna, bless her heart, (that's what you say in the South when you about to criticize somebody) is using a polemical technique that been around for at least 40 years, and probably much longer. That's to go back 10 or 20 years and compare leading lights of the other party unfavorably to the degenerate specimens of today.

The political appeal of that is obvious. You're inviting people who used to support the other party to support yours without having to fully admit to themselves that they themselves have changed that significantly in their political outlook.

A classic usage of this technique is in historian Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Hofstadter was analyzing the Goldwater movement in the wake of Goldwater's landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election. He used isolationist Sen. Robert Taft of the early 1950s as an example of a pragmatic conservative, in contrast to the dogmatic Goldwater of 1965. There was more of polemics than analysis in that comparison, which was largely frivolous.

During the Carter administration of 1977-1981, liberals using the same polemical technique would point to Barry Goldwater as the pragmatic conservative model in contrast to the dogmatic conservatives of the Reagan movement. Now, Arianna points to St. Reagan as the pragmatic conservative in contrast to the Dick Cheneys and the Karl Roves of the present.

The latter two comparisons are also more frivolous than serious, though not totally without merit. Goldwater had a strong skepticism toward religious activists in politics, surely influenced by his bitter opposition to the civil rights movement, in which religious leaders and organizations were prominent. He was never on good terms with Religious Right leaders like Jerry Falwell. Falwell's Moral Majority newspaper even once suggested than Goldwater was a closet partisan of "unilateral disarmament", which was an insane charge. Goldwater was also enough of a libertarian to dissent from his Party's anti-gay orthodoxy, saying for instance of gays in the military that what was important for soldiers was not that they were straight, but that they could shoot straight.

Likewise, Reagan did have some substantial achievement that were liberal, or at least non-conservative. His genuinely bipartisan Social Security reform of 1983, his post-reelection tax reform which included many basic ideas of liberal tax reformers, and most important his agreement with the Soviet Union on the Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty were key achievements that were not in line with vision of the dogmatic conservatives of his party. In the 1988 Presidential race, the liberal Democrat Michael Dukakis supported Reagan's 1985 tax reform and the Republican Old Man Bush opposed it.

But it's simply ahistorical to imagine that each of these lurches into authoritarianism and dogmatic conservatism by the Republican Party were discrete departures from normality. The Goldwater movement of 1964 failed in that immediate election. But it determined the direction of their Party to this day. Richard Nixon had a more pragmatic foreign policy than Dick Cheney could even imagine. But his Vietnam War policy was driven by dogma and vague notions of Will. And no administration had gone so far in its embrace of police-state methods as Nixon's prior to the Cheney-Bush administration.

The continuities are more important than the breaks. What we have from the Goldwater takeover of 1964 is a long-term trend of the Republican Party becoming increasingly authoritarian and rightwing. That nice moderate Jerry Ford had Dick Cheney as his chief of staff and Rummy as first chief of staff and then Secretary of Defense. Ford is as responsible for the stab-in-the-back myth of the Vietnam War as any civilian politician, a myth which has become absolutely central to the authoritarian Republican Party worldview.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense for Old Man Bush during the 1991 Gulf War. Though that was a very different kind of war than the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are still important connecting trends between the two.

And the fundamental style, disregard of legality, extreme secrecy and unilateral arrogance that defines the entire Cheney-Bush foreign policy were all there in Reagan's Central American policy and the closely related Iran-Contra affair. Cheney took it much further after he started running foreign policy in 2001. But St. Reagan's Central American and Iran policies were the template for today's disastrous foreign policy approach.

St. Reagan and Old Man Bush

And whether or not you are convinced by the circumstantial evidence of the "October Surprise" in the 1980 campaign as described by Gary Sick in October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (1991) and Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004), the Bush Dynasty has been one of the most important connecting threads in the descent of the Republican Party into today's authoritarian state. The Bushes brought together the worlds of great wealth, the energy industry, the Republicans' Southern Strategy of appealing to white voters on a more-and-more explicitly racial basis, and covert intelligence operations in a way that has had a decisive effect on their Party and the country as a whole.

Walter LaFeber, in his The American Age (1989) that I've been quoting a lot lately, writes about other aspects of American foreign policy that will sound all too familiar to those who have followed the Iraq War fiasco:

William Clark served as NSC adviser during much of the president's first term, and while he was a close personal friend, Clark knew little about foreign policy and had even less experience in it. His one conviction was that the Soviet Union was "a bizarre and evil episode of history whose last pages are even now being written." Another powerful official, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, had more sophisticated views, but they ended up at the same place: the Soviets could be handled through a major arms build-up; no serious talks should be held on arms control and little talk held on anything else except human rights inside Russia. Not one top Reagan official between 1981 and 1984 had significant experience dealing with the Soviet Union. (my emphasis)

Neocons like Richard Perle had a strong influence on Reagan's foreign policy, though they didn't prevail on policy toward the Soviet Union in the end. That last sentence in the quote also reminds us that foreign policy amateur hour, of making policy with grotesquely inadequate information and expertise about keys adversaries, didn't begin in the current Republican administration.

Speaking of Perle, if it had been up to him and like-minded policy advocates, the INF Treaty would never have been negotiated. Conservatives have their own favorite dogmas about what caused the Soviet Union to fall. But the relief in tensions that the INF Treaty in particular brought about surely pushed that process forward and allowed Gorbachev to pursue his reform policies. LaFeber explains:

As he began running for re-election in 1984, Reagan had not scored one important diplomatic success. During the previous year, his announced intention of building SDI (Star Wars) and, in September 1983. the Soviet shooting-down of South Korean Airliner 007, which killed 269 including a U.S. congressman, poisoned superpower relations. The Soviets claimed that the airliner, which was 350 miles off course, had intentionally strayed over some of their most sensitive military installations for the purposes of U.S. intelligence. The president countered that it was not an intelligence mission, and even if it had strayed off course, the Soviets should never have fired on a civilian airliner. U.S.-USSR relations reached their lowest point since the worst days of the cold war in the early 1950s.

Then, as both sides began to worry about rushing down a dead-end road that ended in a superpower confrontation, they searched for side exits. Reagan began softening his rhetoric. "The fact that neither of us likes the other system is no reason to refuse to talk," he noted in early 1984. which he then defined as "a year of opportunities for peace." Not wanting to frighten Americans during an election year, the president also declared that his military build-up had reached the point where negotiations could now be profitably held. (He doubtless, also realized that major budget problems prevented any such future arms build-up.) Shultz's State Department fought endless battles to check Perle and other in the Pentagon and White House who wanted to ignore the informal SALT II arms limits (signed in 1979) and to force the allies to get tough with Moscow. On at least two occasions, Shultz kept Reagan on the path to negotiations by threatening to resign if the president ditched efforts to cap the arms race. (my emphasis)

So, when tempted to recall the good old days of that moderate pragmatist St. Reagan, we should remember that the good old days often just aren't what they used to be.

Tags: authoritarianism, neoconservatives, republican party, richard perle, ronald reagan

Reagan's 1987 military clashes with Iran

Continuing with my blogging on The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (1989) by Walter LaFeber, here is a reminder that the United States engaged in active, overt military hostilities with Iran in 1987.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq had attaked Iran in 1980, thinking it would be a quick and decisive war. Instead, it dragged on for years in what was little more than a bloody stalemate that took many lives on both sides. The Reagan-Bush administration was officially neutral in the war but was actively supporting Iraq, including allowing materials to be sent from the United States to facilitate Saddam's chemical and biological weapons program. In 1987, the US actually became a belligerent on Iraq's side for a brief period of time.

As LaFeber summarizes it:

In early 1987, [the Reagan-Bush] administration concluded that Iran threatened the oil exports of Kuwait (which was pro-Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war). The Kuwaiti exporters depended on free movement of their tankers through the Persian Gulf. The president put Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and used a U.S. fleet to protect them against attacks by Iranian gunboats. Behind that decision lay Reagan's and Shultz's determination to reassert their power in the region as well as to try to intimidate [Ayatollah] Khomeini [leader of the Iranian Revolution and the top person in the Shi'a theocratic government at that time]. Reagan had been told that the nine U.S. warships in the area were sufficient for the job. Within two months, however, he had to send forty-one combat vessels to the region and spend $10 million to $20 million each day on the operation. Even then, the Iranians disabled a number of U.S. and non-U.S. flagships. Americans and Iranians were virtually at war with each other. In 1987, an Iraqi missile killed 37 sailors on a U.S. ship. In mid-1988, a U.S. naval commander mistook an Iranian airliner for an attack jet and shot it down, killing 290 innocent civilians. The passageway was kept open, and the U.S. Navy, with the help of a few allies, continued to carry off a difficult and dangerous task. Critics believed that, given Iranian policy and naval strength, the passage would have remained open without such a U.S. commitment. (my emphasis)

One of the key players in the Cheney-Bush administration's Middle East policy has been Elliot Abrams, who was also around in the Reagan years. LaFeber writes of his notorious role in the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Abrams was convicted of a felony but was pardoned by Old Man Bush when he was President:

The State Department's point man on Central America, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, had also lied to Congress when he told it, in November 1986, that no third-party funds were going to the [Nicaraguan] Contras [a rightwing anti-government terrorist group supported by the Reagan-Bush administration], even though he personally had begged for some of those funds from the sultan of Brunei. Abrams became an outcast on Capitol Hill (Minnesota Republican senator David Durenberger said that he would trust Abrams no further "than I can throw Oliver North"), but Reagan and Shultz kept him in the State Department. Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton from Indiana, chairman of the House investigation committee, summarized the affair by declaring that the "policy was driven by a series of lies - ... lies to our friends and allies, lies to the Congress, and lies to the American people." Hamilton concluded that "the policy achieved none of the goals it sought. The Ayatollah got his arms, more Americans are held hostage today [and] subversion of U.S. interests throughout the region by Iran continues." Reagan's confusion throughout the three-year affair was exemplified when reporters asked him if the late William Casey had engaged in secret CIA activities without the president's knowledge. Reagan replied, "Not that I know of." (my emphasis)

That Lee Hamilton has more recently been known as the second half of the name of the Baker-Hamilton Commission.

Good quote from Hamilton: Reagan's policies on Nicaragua and Iran were "driven by a series of lies - ... lies to our friends and allies, lies to the Congress, and lies to the American people." That pretty much describes the entire Cheney-Bush administration, doesn't it?

Tags: elliot abrams, iran, iran-contra, iran-iraq war, lee hamilton, ronald reagan

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