George McGovern (1922-2012)

To the liberal Democratic faithful, Mr. McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing even as his name was routinely invoked by conservatives as synonymous with what they considered the failures of liberal politics.

He never retreated from those ideals, however, insisting on a strong, "progressive" federal government to protect the vulnerable and expand economic opportunity, and asserting that history would prove him correct in his opposing not only what he called "the tragically mistaken American war in Vietnam" but also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

-- from the NYT obit by David Rosenbaum (who,
by the way, we're told died in 2006)

by Ken

My friend Paul passed along the NYT obit with this note:

My first vote was for George McGovern in '72. He was thoroughly trounced by the incumbent, Richard M. Nixon. We all remember how well that turned out. George was a WWII hero and an incredibly decent human being who led the charge against the Vietnam War before Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy got involved.

RIP, George. I still have your campaign button.

I'll leave you to read the NYT obit, which you can do now without using up one of your precious NYT clicks.  Let me just highlight a couple of things:

* Paul's point: "George was a WWII hero and an incredibly decent human being who led the charge against the Vietnam War before Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy got involved." And, as the NYT obit points out, he "oppos[ed] not only what he called 'the tragically mistaken American war in Vietnam' but also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan." We'll come back to this, especially that part about his being "an incredibly decent human being." But first --

* The fascinating disclosure made by the NYT in the biographical note for the obit, which is bylined "By David E. Rosenbaum": "David E. Rosenbaum, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times, died in 2006. William McDonald contributed reporting."

Now we all understand. The major media outlets all stockpile advance-written obituaries of famous people for whom they know they will need obituaries when the time comes. The normal practice, as I understand it, is that at certain intervals the obituary is dusted off and brought up to date, so that when it's finally needed it just requires a final freshening up. In this case, reporter Rosenbaum obviously hasn't been available to do any tinkering since 2006.

It's certainly no discredit to Senator McGovern that he was obituarized (is that a word? for our purposes I think it'll have to be) by a dead guy, and a not-all-that-recently dead one at that. On the contrary, since David Rosenbaum was indeed a highly respected political reporter, his assignment to the job originally -- which I'm guessing was well before 2006 -- would seem to do credit to both gentlemen. And the way life works, there's no reason to assume that the designated obituarist won't predecease the subject. Is that any reason to chuck the product? What you do is just what the Times did: You disclose, and give some sort of credit to the person who shepherded the piece as it stood into print.

Still, there's something about this -- I don't know, some sense that for the last however-many years Senator George has been reduced to the status of "waiting to kick the bucket." Yes, he may once have had a certain place in the fabric of history, but now -- in this case going back at least to 2006 (and, as I've already suggested, likely going back a good bit farther) -- there has been just the one thing left for him to do, and how he's done it.


NOW LET ME GET BACK TO THAT PART ABOUT GMcG
BEING "AN INCREDIBLY DECENT HUMAN BEING"

Yes, he was.

And he was, as Paul says, "thoroughly trounced" by a man who was an incredibly indecent human being, who nevertheless has come to look like a statesman and pious visionary by comparison with most of the presidential candidates who have followed him, especially those of his party, and notably including the ones who were actually elected -- Reagan, G.W.H. Bush, and G. W. Bush, not to mention this Willard Inc.

The sad, or maybe tragic, thing is that we seem to have no use for incredibly decent human beings except to chronicle their passing.


WHICH LEADS ME TO SOME THUMB-SUCKING
I COINCIDENTALLY JUST DID TO A FRIEND

There isn't any question about why Republican office-seekers like, is there? (A: God tells them to.)

My friend had mentioned in a note I saw when I got back from my long-awaited "Day on the J Train" with urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum (short version: it was exhausting but incredibly exhilarating) this evening:

I am working on an essay titled 'Why Democrats cannot tell the truth when they run for office." I have doing some thinking on it for quite some time.

It is part of the frustration.

Maybe it wasn't entirely coincidental that I dashed off the reply I did. Maybe somewhere in the tangle of my brain this was connecting to the news of the passing of my kind of patriot, this incredibly decent human being George McGovern. In what I wrote I realize now I took for granted the answer to the question of why Republicans can't tell the truth when they run for office. In the event that it might ever occur to one to consider doing so. Anyway, here's what I wrote:

Good subject, M. As usual, there's a range of factors, depending first on which kind of D's you're talking about.

If it's the new-style corporate-whore D, what are they supposed to say? "Sure, a reasonable person might assume from my network of big-money corporate contributors that I'm in the bag to them. However, I can assure you that I will nevertheless give every consideration to you, my precious constituents." You see how already this last part is a lie?

If, on the other hand, we're talking about the kind of D who actually believes the kind of stuff we believe, and only sort of mumbles about it when no one in particular is paying attention, then I think we have to assume that the person has been persuaded, on the basis of carefully selected "evidence," by corporate-whore political masterminds and consultants like Rahm Emanuel, that talking about deep-seated progressive convictions will cause them to lose.

And you know, there's some basis of truth in this, to the extent that saying such stuff, which if well said might cause considerable spontaneous enthusiasm among potential voters, could at the same time constitute a red flag to the Forces of Darknesses whose financial purse strings were pretty well loosened even before Citizens United. Look what happened to Alan Grayson when he made himself a big enough target. Which is one reason I would dearly love to see him sent back to Congress, without his having in any way stilled or compromised his public voice.

Cheers,
K

RIP, George.


MY FRIEND PAUL ALSO PASSED ALONG
TODAY'S SUNDAY DOONESBURY STRIP

Somehow, it seems part of this discussion (for want of a better word).

DOONESBURY, by GB Trudeau

[Click to enlarge.]

#

What would Ayn Rand make of Lee Camp? Or of Johann Hari skewering Republicans and their new BFF the Donald?

Lee Camp's latest "Moment of Clarity" video: "Hedge Funds Make More in an Hour Than You Make in a Half Century"

What level of obscene does this need to reach before we stop respecting and supporting this system? . . .

We've created a cancer, and one of the hardest parts about defeating cancer is finding it. But we know where this one is, and as it grows larger, we seem to celebrate it. We admire these billionaires. As they grow, we think, "Man, if only I could be as cancerous as them. Man, if only I could suck up the resources of this country while others go hungry and homeless and live in tent cities, being lorded over by some bearded tent-city mayor with a mangy sheepdog and a divining rod like a smelly Moses. Then I would have the American dream."

Should it bother us that by obtaining a monstrous version of the American dream these people effectively destroy the American dream for so many others? Let's have a race for the cure for this. . . .

by Ken

Watching Lee Camp's latest "Moment of Clarity" video set me to rooting around my brain for something I just recently read. Finally I remembered: It was a column passed along by a colleague by The Independent's Johann Hari: "Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans."

ABOUT JOHANN HARI

Johann Hari has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde and others. He has won many of the most prestigious awards in British journalism, including the George Orwell prize (he is the youngest ever winner), the Martha Gellhorn Prize, the Amnesty International Journalist of the Year award twice, for his reporting from the war in Congo, and Dubai. At the British Press Awards in 2010 he became the youngest person ever to be shortlisted for the Journalist of the Year award.

-- bio on The Independent's website

"Every six months," Hari writes of U.S. Republicans since the election of Barack Obama, "the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale." After dispatching Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, he writes (emphasis added),

I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

You'll have to read the column for three of the trends. The first is "towards naked imperialism," referencing the Donald's prescriptions for Libya ("I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff") and Iraq ("We stay there, and we take the oil"). The second is "towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it," referencing the Donald's gleeful embrace of birtherism. The fourth is "to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower," referencing the debt-ceiling follies (Trump: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart," to which we might say yeah, but compared with you . . .), the problem of oil prices, and growing Chinese economic clout (Trump "will order them to stop manipulating their currency. . . . This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America –- or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one").

But it's Hari's third trend -- "towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself –- and exempting them from all social responsibility" -- that was rattling around my head as I watched Lee Camp's video. (Again, emphasis added.)

Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects –- which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump –- and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

Hari allows that "Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee,"

but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly.

He reminds readers that the party "has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, which "halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance" and "pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services." Hari points to Ryan's declaration that he got involved in politics based on reading Ayn Rand.

"The tragedy," Hari writes,

is that Obama needs serious opposition –- but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running –- but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

As we just heard Lee camp ask, "What level of obscene does this need to reach before we stop respecting and supporting this system?"

#

Isn't that something, Fox Noise recusing itself from coverage of all the 2010 governors' races?

by Ken

You have to wonder if those wonderful folks at Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, who drive themselves so tirelessly to turn the world into the shithole they see in their heads (or the shithole that is their heads), really thought this through when they decided to give $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, a gift that seems to have startled even Politico superhack Ben Smith:

The company's media outlets play politics more openly than most, but the huge contribution to a party committee is a new step toward an open identification between Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and the GOP. The company's highest-ranking Democratic executive, Peter Chernin, recently departed.

The Benster apparently received a frosty e-mail from NewsCorp:

UPDATE: News Corp. Spokesman Jack Horner emails, "News Corporation believes in the power of free markets, and the RGA’s pro-business agenda supports our priorities at this most critical time for our economy."

The giant check to the RGA dwarfs low four-figure checks from Fox's PAC to Democrats including Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer.

Obviously this means that NewsCorp "news" subsidiary Fox Noise won't be covering any gubernatorial races in this election cycle. I mean, how can they? At least not without preceding each such on-air piece with a disclaimer along the lines:

"NewsCorp, the parent company of Fox Noise, is a $1 million contributor to the Republican Governors Association."

(Of course they could perhaps soften this disclaimer with the disclosure that their primary consideration was the free RGA toaster the RGA gives you at the $1 million giving level, in addition to the free RGA totebag. They probably won't mention, though, that the toaster is made in Malaysia.)

Now, what's got me puzzled is why, if the NewsCorp grandees thought the governors' races were important enough to pour those million smackeroos into, why were they so willing to forego Fox Noise coverage of them? If I've got the number right, there are a whopping 37 gubernatorial contests this year, and among other considerations the governors elected will be presiding over the reapportionment that results from the 2010 census. You'd think the amount of propaganda the Fox Noisemakers would have dumped into those 37 races would be worth vastly more than that measly million.

DISCLAIMER: Let me say upfront that, stunned as I am by the size of this unabashedly political cash gift by the parent company of a putative newsgathering company, I really have no idea about the real-world limitations, if any, dictated by law, regulation, or custom. Especially now that the putative newsgathering companies are buried so deep in those behemoth-style megacorporations, I really don't imagine that, say, GE, which still owns an 80 percent share of Universal NBC, is a political-cash-giving virgin. But then, as noted above, Ben Smith sure didn't seem to think the NewsCorp news represented business as usual.


AFTERTHOUGHT: WHAT? YOU DON'T THINK FOX NOISE WILL
REFRAIN FROM PROPAGANDIZING THE GOVERNORS' RACES?

Really? You think so? Gosh, that never occurred to me.


AFTER-AFTERTHOUGHT: RE. THOSE FOUR-FIGURE
FOX PAC CHECKS TO REID, SCHUMER & OTHER DEMS

I mean, like, what about them? Which four figures are we talking about? ("Four figures" covers a range from $1000 to $9999, which is kind of a significant spread.) Did we all know about this? Are we all cool with this? And in Ben Smith's phrase "Democrats including Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer," who exactly are the unspecified other Dems included in the inclusion? How many? How much? I'm just wondering.

For starters, would Senators Reid and Schumer care to comment?

#

AFTERTHOUGHT: Fox's Role In Developing And Pushing GOP Talking Points Is Worth Far More Than A Measly Million Dollars

-by Howie

Without a Republican in the White House, the organizing messages come from lots of disparate sources-- McConnell, Boehner, the RNC, ideological splinter groups, lobbyists, the Chamber of Commerce-- but it's been Fox and Hate Talk Radio hosts like Limbaugh who have the biggest say and it is their messages that get the biggest resonance. When politicians like Boehner and McConnell were backing away from the Tea Party, it was Fox that fueled it with millions of dollars in free promotion to the point where it has become a vital component of the GOP and, in many cases-- think of the wreckages of the candidacies of dozens of mainstream conservatives who were replaced by fringe sociopaths like Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Ken Buck, Marco Rubio and Paul LePage. Last night I read this in John Amato's and Dave Neiwert's new book, Over the Cliff:

Fox News’s role in driving these crowd sizes cannot be understated; without its open promotion of the Tea Parties, it’s unlikely the movement would have attracted more than a quarter of these crowds in a much smaller number of cities. And as you might expect, on the day of the protests, Fox’s coverage was full-throated.

Things started off swimmingly with Fox Business Network anchor Cody Willard reporting from a Tea Party in Boston. He told his interview subjects: “I’m on your side. I’m trying to take down the Fed.” Willard became even more excited a little later, exclaiming: “Guys, when are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating the country? The fascism-- the definition of it is big business and government getting in bed together. That is what these people are fighting. We have about 700 people here. They are starting to rally!”

Glenn Beck’s event in front of the Alamo in San Antonio was more of the same, only on a bigger stage. His star guests were gunwielding rocker Ted Nugent, conservative actress Janine Turner, and libertarian comedian Penn Jillette. Beck also set aside time to interview a Houston man named Joe Horn, identified by a Fox News graphic as having “shot 2 illegals burglarizing home” while Beck lauded him for his heroic defense of American principles: “Joe, what kind of world are we living in that people don’t understandyouhavearighttolife,liberty,and the pursuit of happiness?” (In reality, Horn had shot in the back two unarmed men he caught burglarizing his neighbor’s home, after telling a 911 operator, “I’m going to kill them.”)