Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

Photo by Lindsay Beyerstein, from Steve Gilliard's News Blog site

I haven't written anything before now on the death of Steve Gilliard, who was one of the pioneers of the liberal blogosphere. He was one of the original front-page bloggers at Daily Kos. I learned a lot from reading his blog. And I'd like to think I've incorporated a couple of elements of the non-nonsense bluntness of his writing style into my blogging.

The blogging I most appreciated of Steve's was his work on military affairs. He was extremely good at reading between the lines of official statements that were designed to hide problems in the Iraq War. He never lost sight of the fact that events on the ground were going to drive the course of the war there. Or, as the military puts it, the enemy has a say in the outcome.

I also found his writing on African-American politics, and on the neo-Confederate and other far-right ideologies, very helpful. In particular, he was very good about stressing that we shouldn't get too distracted by the religious talk of the Christian Right, no matter how "sincere" their beliefs may be. Because he always kept a focus on the fact that white Christian fundamentalists and white folks who really don't like black people are two groups that heavily overlap. So, for instance, mealy-mouthing about abortion rights isn't going to win the Democrats any votes from people who vote for the Republicans because they see them as the White People's Party.

Steve will be greatly missed. He left us far too soon. If there's a Heaven, I'm sure he's there right now, trying to set straight any Republicans who also may have gotten in.

Steve's passing reminds me that as valuable as the blogosphere has been in American politics the last 6+ years, it has a somewhat more transient nature than non-virtual media. The notice at Steve's blog says that his site will be taken down in a few weeks, which is a real loss for the online community. I hope that someone somewhere - university libraries, the Libarary of Congress, major public libraries - are archiving his posts so that they will be available in the future.

The clowns in our mainstream media - Steve might have used the term "assclowns" - who meekly repeated the White House line on the Iraq War for years were dead wrong about that war. Steve Gilliard was right about the war far more often than they were. Historians in the future could benefit by having his material readily available.

Tags: steve gilliard

Demonstration phobia: I don't get it

Steve Gilliard is one of my favorite bloggers on political and military topics.

But he is completely down on the idea of antiwar demonstrations. In Myth and reality 01/28/07, he even argues, absurdly, that:

... the anti-[Vietnam]war movement failed. Badly.

It alienated the middle class, it failed to gain any congressional victories and anti-war legislators were defeated (Al Gore,Sr, Ralph Yarborough) while US troops were in Vietnam. It also led to two Nixon elections.

This is all but incomprehensible to me. The "antiwar movement" against the Vietnam War was always a lot more than demonstrations, though demos loom large in television retrospectives because they were dramatic.

But the antiwar movement, with not just demonstrations but "teach-ins" and alternative newspapers and political actions and various educational campaigns did raise public awareness about the problems of the Vietnam War and the unjustness and unnecessariness (if that's a word!) of it.

Since "antiwar movement" is a vague term convering people of diverse political interests, then and now, it's painfully simple to find this or that to object to about "the movement."

Also, its true that Nixon's use of what we now call "culture war" themes was partly directly at antiwar demonstrators. But you don't have to look any farther than our esteemed President today to find good white, conservative Republican and even prowar families who were not thrilled about the prospect of their own darling boys going off to fight the Great Communist Menance in Vietnamese jungles.

But saying the antiwar movement "led to two Nixon elections" is as ahistorical as what we expect to hear from our Big Pundits. To quickly mention some of the factors, you would have to include: the fact that the Vietnam War was rightly perceived as an enterprise of the Democratic Party; Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war; the shock of the Tet Offensive in early 1968; worries over drugs and teenage promiscuity and the birth control pill and guys wearing their hair long

Then there was not only the peaceful civil rights movement and its successes, which a lot of white folks chose to interpret as something like the collapse of civilization. There had also been several major urban riots that were freaking out the public. In 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King sat off an unprecedented series of urban riots. White voters no doubt reacted absurdly to some of those events. But were Nixon voters in 1968 or 1972 more worried about guys with long hair and women in tie-dyed clothing and jeans demonstrating against an unpopular war than about their overheated images of rioting urban dwellers and "uppity" black people? I don't think so.

I don't know about Gilliard in particular. But I've always thought that the sqeamishness a lot of liberal bloggers seem to have about the whole idea of street demonstrations must be partially a reflection of the decline in union membership in the US. If you've ever been out to picket your employer, or even a part of a union that was prepared to do so, demonstrating in public probably doesn't seem like a terribly shocking thing to do.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, nixon, steve gilliard, vietnam war

A passionate view on how Democrats should deal with Karl Rove trash politics

Steve Gilliard has some good comments on how the Democrats could stand to show considerably more passion:

It isn't that Rove's arguments make sense, but that Dems refuse to call him a traitor and a liar every time he opens his mouth, afraid that they will be attacked by the media.

Iraq War: Trouble in Washington, Trouble in Iraq

Steve Gilliard writes in a more rough-and-tumble way than most of the blogs I read regularly. But he comes up with a lot of good articles, and his commentary is usually on the mark, though sometimes acidly expressed. He found this one in the London Guardian:

The Pentagon has long been a notoriously badly run agency. It cannot even lock people up in Guantanamo Bay without making a mess of it. It wastes taxpayers' dollars on an epic scale. It buys pork-barrel weapons systems nobody needs; it often simply cannot account for its spending; it hands out jobs-for-the-boys to people like Iran-Contra's John Poindexter. Now it emerges that it has been blithely selling surplus biological weapons equipment on the internet. Why anybody ever imagined that the Pentagon, of all organisations, was competent to manage Iraq is a great mystery of our time. Why Mr Rumsfeld is still US defence secretary is an even bigger one.

From the same paper, he also points out an article by Suzanne Goldenberg (who I quoted a few days ago) about another of Viceroy Jerry Bremer's great ideas in Iraq (my emphasis in bold):

[T]he occupation authority is making preparations to dismantle the food distribution system which gave free rations of flour, rice, cooking oil and other staples to every Iraqi.

Described by the UN as the world's most efficient food network, the system still keeps Iraqis from going hungry. But the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, views it as a dangerous socialist anachronism. The coalition provisional authority (CPA) is planning to abolish it in January, despite warnings from its own technical experts that this could lead to hunger and riots.

Gilliard's observation on that news includes this (but go read the whole thing):

The UN food program works. What in God's name do they plan to replace it with when they can barely supply US troops as is. When they tried to sell water in Umm Qasr, there were riots. You take the food out of Baghdadis mouths, Sadr City will swarm over CPA headquaters like locusts.

Tags: iraq war, steve gilliard