Will Bunch2013-05-25T03:51:52-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=will-bunchCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Will BunchGood old fashioned elbow grease.The Day the Obama Administration Went All Nixon On Ustag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32716372013-05-14T08:46:50-04:002013-05-14T12:04:53-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/
Okay, I'm one of those folks who obsesses about the late 1960s and early 1970s, but this time it's really important. Because today that is the rallying cry for any presidential scandal, that this one is "worse than Watergate." But the Watergate break-in happened 41 years ago, which means that more than half of all Americans weren't even born yet, so you can't blame a lot of voters if they don't know much about what Watergate and the related scandals of Richard Milhous Nixon were all about.
One of the biggest drivers of Watergate was the seemingly unending war in Vietnam. As opposition increased to a foreign war that ultimately killed 58,000 Americans, for goals that were murky at best, so did government paranoia. At the core of Watergate was a team of shady operatives that were nicknamed "the White House Plumbers" -- because they went after news leaks... get it? In May 1969, after news reports about U.S. bombing activities in Cambodia, Nixon and his then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger enlisted J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to wiretap journalists and national security aides.
Later, one of the worst governmental abuses occurred after whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the massive Pentagon Papers that exposed governmental lies about the conduct of the war in Vietnam. Nixon's "Plumbers" broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to dig up dirt to discredit him. Here is what one of Nixon's former aides, Egil Krogh, wrote about it in 2007:
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation's security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
No doubt. Luckily for America, not everyone agreed. Over the next couple of years, criminal charges against Ellsberg were tossed because of the government's misconduct, and Nixon resigned facing certain impeachment over the activities of his Plumbers and the ensuing, elaborate cover-up. The nation mostly rejoiced. The system worked... for a while.
Flash forward to 2012. America had at that point been in an undefined "war on terror" for 11 years -- the same amount of time from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that greatly expanded the Vietnam War to the 1975 fall of Saigon. Just as during the 1960s and early 1970s, this terror war had provided government with an excuse to greatly expand its domestic spying on American citizens -- some of that through a law called the Patriot Act and some of it even more dubious, constitutionally.
Then, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press published an article about the Obama administration's conduct of its war in a country that we'd never declared war on (it was Cambodia in 1969, but Yemen in 2012) and Obama's Justice Department -- for reasons not yet fully known -- went crazy over the leak. This, then, is a reminder of why history matters so much.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
The AP's CEO said last night that "[t]here can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters" -- and I could not agree with him more. This revelation is deeply troubling -- and has the makings of a major scandal. Sure, you could try to mitigate it by noting, fairly, that accessing these phone records isn't as bad as wiretapping. But that is small solace, indeed. There's every reason to believe that Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on this unwarranted assault on the First Amendment, and if so, he ought to be canned (hasn't he overstayed his welcome, anyway?). Also, you might try to excuse this as a one-off, an ill-advised but isolated incident.
Except that it's not.
Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses anything that Nixon or any other president has done. Since 2009, the Obama administration has brought espionage charges against six whistleblowers. And most of these whistleblowers have been criticizing that way that America conducts its neverending war of the 21st century. One, Thomas Drake, blew the whistle on the illegal warrantless wiretapping that began under George W. Bush. John Kiriakou dropped the dime on illegal U.S. torture -- and was sent away to prison, even as the perpetrators of torture from Dick Cheney to John Yoo continue to walk freely among us.
Nixon had Daniel Ellsberg, and Obama has Bradley Manning of Wikileaks. Okay, so they didn't break into the office of Manning's psychiatrist, but they have detained Manning in a solitary confinement that a UN torture expert called "cruel, inhuman and degrading." Do you feel better about that? Because I don't. The war on whistleblowers, the treatment of Manning, and now this investigation of journalists are all hallmarks of a White House that promised transparency but has been one of the most secretive -- all to the detriment of the public's right to know.
Let's be clear -- this is about Obama... and it is about much, much more than Obama. It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about -- trading liberty for security, and geting neither. To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.
Let's work together. Let's start by repealing the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Force, declare victory in what was formerly known as the war on terror, and resolve that never again will this nation enter into a perpetual and constitutionally dubious war. Let's repeal the most egregious aspects of the USA Patriot Act, hold public hearings on the true extent that the U.S. government has spied on citizens without warrants -- and then bring those practices to an end. And as today's events made crystal clear, let's make America a nation where journalists and other truth-tellers can write stories or reveal information that the government might not like...without fear of intrusion or reprisal. Ironically, many of those type of changes were supposed to happen after Nixon, after Vietnam But they either didn't last, or they didn't come at all.
If greater liberty comes from the latest revelations, Obama's sins -- however bad or not bad they may turn out to be -- will not make things worse than Watergate. This time, it -- the aftermath, anyway -- will be better than Watergate.]]>Of Course the Media Failed in Iraq -- Here's Whytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29547742013-03-26T08:49:21-04:002013-03-26T08:49:26-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/the Washington Post spiked a highly critical op-ed about the media's role by Greg Mitchell but did run a very defensive piece by a Post staff writer, Paul Farhi.
The Farhi piece -- with the rather ridiculous headline (presumably not the author's fault) "On Iraq, journalists didn't fail. They just didn't succeed." -- is kind of a round-up of the various reasons and excuses of why the media accepted false claims of unconventional weapons in Iraq and links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, none of which existed, and why it treated a U.S. invasion of a country that had not attacked us as kind of runaway train that simply could not be stopped.
In fact, it's a kind of a greatest hits package of Iraq media excuses. We did have the critical stories in the newspaper, if you had only bothered to turn to page A18. Administration officials who -- we later learned -- had no idea what they were talking about went on the record, while CIA agents and other mid-level officials who knew the truth had to remain anonymous. The Democrats were so cowed by 9/11 they thwarted our standard "on one hand, on the other hand" narrative. And frankly, we journalists were a little freaked out by what happened in 2001. Wasn't everyone? Hey, it was a crazy time.
Please, stop it. Just stop. By any standard, the failure of the America media in 2002-03 was the worst collapse by any press corps anywhere since the 1930s. In a profession where the highest value is on truth telling, false information -- about metal tubes for nuclear bomb-making, yellow-cake uranium and meetings in Prague -- was presented as fact on front pages night after night. In a profession that is supposed to inform citizens and foster debate, large swaths of the public wrongly believed that Iraq was behind 9/11, and a major war was launched with hardly any serious debate at all.
The underlying argument of Farhi and others who've defended the Iraq coverage -- when you strip away everything else -- is that journalists didn't fail in 2003 because we played by the rules... as we have always understood them. It doesn't matter that the outcome -- an unwarranted invasion that killed more than 100,000 Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans, or more than the death toll of 9/11 -- was a preventable disaster. Do my journalistic colleagues realize how ridiculous an argument that is? That once you realize what the defenders are really saying, it is as if the manager of a soccer team called a game a success because none of his players earned a yellow or red card...even though they lost 4-0..
When something goes as terribly wrong as this did, I think what journalists need to do (and this is what I did, essentially) is take a deep breath and ask yourself: Why do I get up and do this every morning? Of course, there's no simple one-word answer -- most journalists like to write or be in the center of action, or both. But I think most folks in the business would agree that we should want to get as close to the real truth of any given situation -- by any means necessary. And most journalists at least started our careers with the idea, somewhere in the back of our heads, that covering the news the right way would make the world a better place than we had first discovered it.
And if the rules of journalism didn't achieve those ends, then guess what. It's time to change the rules!
Frankly, I think a lot of people who entered the media in the 1970s and 1980s were folks who might have been activists in earlier times, but absorbed a lesson from Watergate (some of it myth, we belatedly learned) that while hippies didn't take down the corrupt government of Richard Nixon, journalists did. That already confused lesson had become seriously warped by the 2000s, because of a church-like devotion to the "process" and also because --inside the Beltway. In particular -- access to high-ranking officials became viewed as more valuable than truth-telling. It's no accident that in 2003 you found better journalism -- most famously Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau but also folks like Greg Mitchell or Atlanta's Cynthia Tucker (even me in my little Philadelphia tabloid, for God's sake) -- in the outermost rings from power.
The indisputable failure of pre-Iraq War coverage shouldn't even be a debate in 2013 -- we should have moved on to a discussion of lessons learned, of valuing actual documents or the past contradictions of officials more than what a high-ranking White House aide tried to sell over a fancy lunch, or of journalists who trust their reporting enough to reach bolder conclusions and editors who trust their reporters enough to shout them from Page 1, phony balance and false equivalencies be damned.
And the next time that an innocent civilian or an American soldier dies overseas in service of such a goal as dubious as the war in Iraq, in a mission spurred on by ignorance and a lack of debate, that will not mean it's time for a conference or another long discussion of the journalistic process.
It will mean simply that the media failed the American people. Again.]]>Reagan Would Be 102 -- and Against Obama's Drone Policytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26335252013-02-07T11:39:59-05:002013-04-09T05:12:01-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/Tear Down This Myth." Why focus so much on a man who left the Oval Office 24 years, who died nearly eight years ago?
The main and most important reason is that the modern Republican Party has warped Reagan's legacy for its own 21st century political purposes -- twisting his actual views and his official actions on everything from war to taxes into a right-wing vision that the Gipper himself probably wouldn't recognize. So it's useful from time to time to remind ourselves who Ronald Reagan really was -- and wasn't -- in order to beat back dumb ideas in the present.
Beyond that, I'm a huge fan of recalling our history, in general, because remembering where we've been can teach us a thing or two about where we are going now. As we debate reducing the federal deficit, for example, it's useful to remember that Reagan saw raising taxes -- something he did 11 times as president -- as part of the solution. The tale of how Reagan deregulated the savings-and-loan industry -- with disastrous results -- should have warned us about deregulating the banksters, even though it clearly didn't.
Let's be clear that there was quite a lot about the real, non-mythical Ronald Reagan not to like -- his encouragement of a Gordon Gekko economy that created a yawning gap between the rich and poor, his embrace of death squads and other atrocities by U.S. surrogates in Central America, and his failure to address problems from the AIDS crisis to growing homelessness. But there's one overlooked aspect of Reagan's policy that I keep coming back to, because it's so relevant in 2013: His views on addressing international terrorism -- and on using techniques such as torture, military tribunals, and military strikes to combat them.
On that score, Reagan -- for all other flaws -- did a very good job of upholding the values that once seemed to be embedded in our national DNA -- a belief in our unique system of justice, and that "American exceptionalism" only meant something if the United States wasn't a nation that tortured people or bombed far-away countries willy-nilly.
In 1988, Reagan signed the UN Convention Against Torture, which was later ratified by the Senate in 1994. It states in part: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." It also bars nations from transporting prisoners to other nations knowing they'll be tortured there -- the practice that we've come to call "rendition." The George W. Bush administration would later call the treaty that Reagan signed "quaint" as both waterboarding and frequent rendition took place during the 2000s.
In addition, the Reagan administration made it very clear where it stood on the question of whether terror suspects should be tried before traditional civilian courtrooms -- or by special military tribunals or commissions. In the late 1980s, after a spate of attacks in the Middle East such as the murder of cruise ship passenger Leon Klinghoffer. America ultimately took custody of several terror suspects -- who were tried before civilian judges and juries. In a major irony, the official who articulated Reagan's policy was Paul Bremer -- later to become the first overseer of post-invasion Iraq. Bremer said: "[A] major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against them."
The question of drone strikes gets a little trickier -- since today's sophisticated flying death robots weren't around in the 1980s, But I think it's pretty clear where Reagan would have come down on both the "shock and awe" laid down on Iraq during the Bush years and on the expansion of drone strikes -- and the collateral damage that comes with them -- under President Obama. He would have almost certainly opposed both.
After the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, which included the death of the Navy diver [Robert] Stethem, [Lou] Cannon wrote in the Post that Reagan stunned some of his aides, such as the bellicose Patrick J. Buchanan, with his unwillingness to use force in response to terrorism. "Reagan, always more tender-hearted when dealing with real people than with abstract ideas, decided that retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed is 'itself a terrorist act' -- a view he expressed publicly at his June 18 news conference," Cannon wrote. He noted that just two days later the president had to overrule a military response to an attack on Marines in El Salvador, and he wrote that "Reagan asked [National Security Advisor Robert] McFarlane whether an attack could be carried out without killing civilians -- a yardstick that surprised Buchanan." In fact, avoiding collateral damage to civilians and their property was a cornerstone of Pentagon thinking, and Reagan's, in the 1980s.
It's true that under Reagan, America did undertake a highly dubious invasion of Grenada and did drop bombs once, in Libya, in response to a terrorist bombing that killed two U.S. soldiers in Berlin. Those actions were the exception, though. History later revealed the list of proposed military moves he rejected was much longer, such as a blockade of Cuba to stop arms shipments to Nicaragua or an invasion of Panama -- something his successor George H.W. Bush didn't have a second thought about carrying out his first year as president.
This is important to understand, because it puts our messed-up present in the proper context. Reagan, indefatigable Cold Warrior and conservative advocate for American strength, did not believe in torture, rendition, military tribunals, or in military strikes with a high risk of killing innocent civilians. This was because he was simply upholding traditional American values, as virtually everyone understood them for more than two centuries.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I'm thinking that if Ronald Reagan were here today he's be wondering how we got to this point, this endless state of war with its slippery slope of moral justifications -- and how can we make it stop.]]>Aaron Swartz and the Questions That None Dare Ask Obamatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24756682013-01-15T08:13:46-05:002013-03-17T05:12:01-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/press conference yesterday, billed as the last one of his first term. He was asked the predictable questions, mainly about the debt-and-spending battle with Congress, with one off-speed pitch, a query about a lack of White House diversity and also why he doesn't socialize with Congress more. No one asked the president about Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old Internet-freedom activist who, facing controversial federal criminal charges, committed suicide last week. That's not a surprise -- honestly, what might Obama say about the specifics, to the extent he may or may not have even followed the story. But what happened to this young crusader raises much deeper questions about our government, about transparency, secrecy, people's right to know and the abuse of power. Questions that need to be answered for the American people.
Full disclosure: I'm not going to pretend that before this week that I know much about Swartz, a computer prodigy who created a website that evolved into the popular Reddit site at age 14, and then campaigned for freedom of information over the Internet, fighting against the Internet-copyright bill known as SOPA through a group called Demand Progress. He was well-known to the community of activists seeking to reduce government restrictions on the flow of information, if not to the broader public. But the broader battles that he devoted his all-too-brief life to fighting -- against a government that is way too invested in conducting its business in secret and in limiting information to the select few -- are familiar to most of us.
Outside of the activisit community, there really wasn't much publicity about the 2011 federal charges lodged against Swartz -- the case that threatened to send him to prison and which family and friends say was closely linked to his death, by hanging himself in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday. It's a complicated case, but essentially the activist had used the computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, to download millions of documents -- academic and scholarly papers -- that were behind the wall for paying subscribers at the site JSTOR. There's no evidence that Swartz intended to enrich himself or others, but the act instead appears by all accounts to be a manifestation of his belief that knowledge -- especially research that in many cases is underwritten by our federal or state tax dollars -- is for the public.
When someone breaks a law not for personal gain but because he or she thinks the law is wrong, that's called civil disobedience -- the tactic used by famous people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, whom the nation pauses to honor on Monday, and by millions of people who are not famous but are very brave. They are brave because they know they may and quite likely will be punished for what they do -- but Aaron Swartz had the misfortune of taking his civl action in a nation that seems to treat crimes committed with a computer more harshly than crimes committed with a gun.
Swartz was arrested on 13 federal felony charges that carried the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and a prison sentence of 35 years, and the U.S. Justice Department (encouraged, reportedly by MIT) did not back away from its over-the-top prosecution of Swartz -- even though JSTOR, the supposed aggrieved party, didn't want to press charges and in fact announced just days ago that 4.5 million documents would be made available for free (with some limits).
Just last week, prosecutors offered Swartz a "deal" that still would have mandated at least six months in prison. A short time later. his body was found. Of course, it's impossible to know everything that's on a person's mind, and while family members say he had his struggles with depression, there is little doubt that the prosecution is what was weighing most on Swartz in his final hours. His family released a statement that was unambiguous: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office and at M.I.T. contributed to his death."
As news and shock over Swartz' passing spread on the Internet this weekend, much of the focus of anger has been at MIT -- which is now conducting an internal investigation -- and at Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. Her ouster has been called for though an ever-growing online petition while Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has called for an investigation of the federal prosecutor. Those responses are all appropriate -- but people should use this occasion to look even deeper.
On one level, this might be a time for Americans to ask ourselves why the full hammer of the government was coming down on this brilliant young activist whose alleged crime was so dubious, when the same Justice Department has all but ignored the double dealing and financial chicanery that crashed the world economy that erased billions of dollars in 2008, and it has completely looked the other way when it comes to the torture practices that reversed decades of established law and which have been so harmful to America's reputation.
But let's look even beyond that. The persecution of Aaron Swartz can't be passed off as an isolated incident. Instead, with Swartz' suicide, it feels more like the exclamation point on an administration whose commitment to maintaining secrecy, blocking transparency, limiting the flow of information and squelching dissent has been both unexpected and rather shocking.
After all, it was four years this week that Barack Obama became the 44th president, bringing hopes not just that he would stem the economic bleeding and end two seemingly endless wars -- but that he would undo the broader expansion of power and secrecy that took place during the Bush-Cheney years. President Obama has proved -- for reasons that are in many cases not his doing -- to be a remarkably polarizing figure, still seen after four years as a savior by some, while to his enemies he is somewhere on the spectrum between a socialist and the Antichrist. The reality is that while he's a necessary counterweight to the radical extremism of ther Tea Party and has soke praiseworthy accomplishments on issues from health care to gays in the military, he's also expanded the power of the presidency at the expense of the public, just like every other modern chief executive before him. Sometimes alarmingly so.
The reality of the Obama administration so far is that the folks who promised in 2009 "most transparent administration in history" have instead turned down Freedom of Information requests at a much higher rate than the oft-criticized Bush administration, have continued to classify documents at an alarming level, and even made unsuccessful attempts to water down a key FOIA provision and to keep White House visitor logs a secret.
The administration that pledged to undo the excessive secrecy of the Bush years has seen its Justice Department prosecute six people under the Espionage Act who've tried to blow the whistle on government corruption, including unlawful torture -- which is double the number prosecuted under all past presidents put together. The presidency that surged into office four years ago promising to wipe away the moral stain of the Iraq War years has instead chosen to conduct the cornerstone of its anti-terrorism -- drone strikes against purported terrorists on a "kill list" -- in utter secrecy; it imposes a death penalty, even against an American citizen, in a program with zero oversight, whose very existence it refuses to confirm to the citizenry. And a relatively tame form of legal public dissent -- the Occupy Wall Street movement, which dared to ask some of these questions -- became the target of surveillance by the FBI and an umbrella of other federal agencies.
Taken together, this is the great failure of the Obama legacy, and the Aaron Swartz case is just one thread of this much, much larger and deeply troubling canvass. But if there is one thing to take from this tragedy, it is the knowledge that the current president has shown he can change course when the public outcry becomes great enough. Before Newtown, the Obama administration had an abysmal record on gun violence -- given an "F," in fact, by the Brady campaign, but the horrific events of Sandy Hook have forced the White House to focus on an issue it spent four years working to ignore.
Now, will the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, and the backwards-looking policies that surrounded his case, cause the president to re-examine his broken promises on transparency and openness? It's the question that should have been asked today at the president's press conference -- but wasn't. As with gun sanity (and also climate change, which is forcing the hand of policy makers), this weekend's second inauguration gives Obama a four-year do-over to finally keep his promises on transparency and the free flow of information. But it will never happen if no one asks the right questions.]]>How to Marginalize an Extreme Fringe Group Called the NRAtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23215322012-12-18T09:34:39-05:002013-02-17T05:12:01-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/"The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire," [said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.] The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes." Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians have done their best to stoke those fears and demonize President Obama in the process.
It's time for America to wake up to a new reality -- that for more than a generation, a radical fringe group has held sway over the American political process, a cadre that now traffics in conspiracy theories as loony as many militias or "Patriot" groups, that has with no evidence accused the president of planning to grant himself dictatorial powers while embracing "black helicopter"-style tropes about the U.S. surrendering its power to the United Nations, a posse that's clashed with America's police chiefs over issues like so-called "cop killer" bullets and has thwarted all efforts to eliminate weapons that are only good for committing mass murder.
This is not about the millions of decent, law-abiding American gun owners who are not only responsible in handling their weapons but who overwhelmingly support reasonable steps toward preventing violence. No, this is about the leadership of the National Rifle Association -- a group that has veered far, far away from its 20th century origins as a sensible gun-safety group -- and about their allied merchants of death who've learned that paranoia can be profitable, and about a handful of radical foot soldiers who pretend to speak for all.
The horrific events that took place Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School -- the systematic mass murder of 20 first-graders and six teachers and administrators -- should make America finally think differently about the NRA, and any role it will play in in the national conversation. The NRA should not be silenced -- that, too, would un-American -- but it must be marginalized, pushed to the far fringes for promoting hysteria and enabling violence, drowned out by the voices of the majority of Americans who desperately desire gun sanity.
Candlelight vigils in the wake of our all-too frequent mass killings are just the first baby step of a thousand-mile journey. This must be a radical movement -- brave Americans willing to take direct action to get in the face of the extremists who run the NRA... every single day. Politicians who've accepted money from the NRA and done its bidding should be shamed, and then defeated, regardless of their party, and the cities that agree to host its convention should be embarrassed, even boycotted.
It must be shameful to have your name linked to the NRA. That's radical. But that's what it takes.
It didn't have to be this way. The overwhelming majority of Americans -- regardless of ideology -- support reasonable, well-regulated (in the language of the 2nd Amendment) gun ownership, and there was a time when the National Rifle Association served the interests of its members well. It's hard to believe now, but the NRA -- in addition to supporting gun safety and proper training -- actually endorsed the common-sense, limited gun control measures enacted in 1934 and again in 1968, the year that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated.
That was all before the great unraveling, the post '60s backlash and the rise of a radical right-wing that learned that learned through its talk-radio megaphone what the gun manufacturers soon also discovered: That selling fear and paranoia could be hugely profitable, and maybe win a few elections in the process. After the 1994 passage of an assault weapons ban and the NRA's role (along with a lot of other factors) that fall in ousting some of the Democrats who voted for it, the Gun Rights Express veered further and further to the extreme right.
I saw this firsthand in 2009 and 2010 as I reported my book on the rise of Tea Party movement. I spent a couple of days in Kentucky at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot (yes, that's a thing) where the NRA set up a tent in the center -- telling anyone who would listen about Obama's gun or ammo confiscation, or both, that was surely coming even if he hadn't even mentioned guns in his early days in office -- while groups like the Ohio Valley Freedom Fighters militia worked the fringes. Later, I spent time in a Pittsburgh-area gun shop called Braverman Arms, which featured an NRA-produced poster highlighting Obama as "Firearm Salesman of the Year," since fear of our first black president and his "coming gun ban" had sparked record sales. It was there that a troubled young man named Richard Poplawski made weapons purchases -- before his fear of the supposed Obama firearms confiscation fueled his murder of three city cops.
Incredibly, the NRA grew even more extreme in the years that followed, to the point where its official, high-level rhetoric differs little from some of the fringe right-wing groups that have been cited as hate groups by watchdog groups like the SPLC. Just read this:
In a fundraising letter last spring, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre charged that, "all of our freedoms, all of our rights, all of our values ... All of them will be lost if Barack Obama is reelected." In an October column in the NRA's flagship publication, "First Freedom," LaPierre wrote: "With four more years of Obama, your firearms freedoms are gone. And we'll spend the rest of our lives mourning the freedoms we've lost... Every freedom we cherish as Americans is endangered by Obama. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Meanwhile, extreme rhetoric dovetailed with extreme policies. In the last generation or so, the NRA has opposed any and all regulation of firearms -- even when its opponents are admired law-enforcement officials like the police chiefs. The NRA has thwarted any number of common sense proposals from background checks at gun shows and other private sales (comprising 40 percent of gun transactions) that could prevent weapons from reaching criminals or the mentally ill, as well as legislation to stop the high-capacity magazines that allow mass killers to kill and maim so many people in a matter of seconds. In this crazed climate, there are far more guns in U.S. circulation than ever before, even as fewer households own weapons, and a corresponding rise in mass killings, leading to the current crescendo of violence.
The NRA has created an un-virtuous cycle. Its fear mongering over the non-existent threat of government gun confiscation has caused gun sales -- and donations from members -- to soar, enriching the gun manufacturers who return some of those profits back to the NRA and its political arms. In recent election cycles, the NRA has outspent the overwhelmed gun-control groups in both donations to politicians and in lobbying by ratios as high as 25-1. That's created the current climate, where even an assassination attempt on a U.S. congresswoman did not spur her colleagues to action, where even a tepid gun-control commentary like the one from NBC sportscaster Bob Costas provokes an outburst of hateful scorn. In July, an unnamed Democratic congressional staffer said of the NRA to GQ: "We do absolutely anything they ask."
The irony is that the leadership of the NRA has grown so extreme that it no longer represents its own members. Most Americans don't even realize that even before Newtown, some 74 percent of NRA members said they support background checks for all weapons purchases, and most support other reasonable regulations. And yet we've allowed the NRA's highly paid cadre of extremist leaders and its most radical supporters, who flood the airways and newspaper comment sections, to control the debate.
Today, in the wake of Newtown, the decent majority Americans will have to reassert themselves. with numbers -- and with dollars. It will be hard work, and time consuming. When the NRA gets its most fanatical 60,000 to show up in Houston in May for its convention, the gun sanity folks should ring the building with 70,000 people. The gun sanity movement should outspend the NRA 25-1 instead of the other way around. And it will mean difficult political choices, backing gun sanity candidates not just against Tea Party Republicans but in primaries against Democratic enablers.
Frankly, I never thought this could happen until today, when a Democratic congressman, New York's Jerry Nadler, declared that "we are at war" with the NRA leadership, when leading gun-control activist Sarah Brady called for radical action against the pro-gun lobby and when the editors of Mother Jonespublished this, which I could not agree with more:
What would such a movement look like, arising out of Newtown? Would it be mothers -- of those slain children, or those who never want to find themselves in their place--donning black and holding candlelight vigils each Friday night? Would it be fathers, siblings, loved ones of children murdered in schools and shopping malls and their own living rooms across the nation, taking to Facebook and to the National Mall? Would it look like Argentina's Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who dared the world to forget their disappeared kids? Would such a movement take a page from Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, who led 200 children, some missing limbs from mining accidents, in a march on Teddy Roosevelt's home? Instead of "We Want to Go to School and Not the Mines," would the placards read "We Want to Be Safe at School"? Yes, it might sometimes appear corny, sometimes crude, sometimes cringe-worthy, but movements that make a difference are sometimes all those things. They engage the gut as well as the brain. They batter down cynicism and conventional wisdom and groupthink, and they take on the merchants of doom.
Personally, I think it would look like the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s, brave young men and women who took the matter of desegregating interstate buses into their own hands, risking life and limb -- and winning. Real social change only comes through courage, and never from compromise. And so who will be the Freedom Riders of gun sanity?
When I started researching this piece, I wondered if it was fair and appropriate for society to label the NRA as a hate group. That's probably not the right term -- the traditional definition of a hate group is one that targets a defined racial or religious minority. But then the reality is that when a group will so callously fan the flames of fear and intolerance and promote societal inaction while gun violence claims so many U.S. lives, it doesn't really matter what we call them. What matters is that we push the leadership of the NRA off to the far sidelines of the American playing field, while the rest of us fight for our better future.]]>Bob Costas Learns the Right Time to Talk About Guns in America: Nevertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22347322012-12-04T08:47:20-05:002013-02-03T05:12:01-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/shot his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins, the mother of their infant child, and then drove to Arrowhead Stadium and shot and killed himself in front of his coach and his general manager. Costas is the dean of NBC Sports, and so at halftime of Sunday Night Football, the top-rated show on U.S. TV, he was granted some 90 seconds to talk about the tragedy, which -- in case you've already forgotten -- involved a man killing his girlfriend with a gun and killing himself with a gun.
Amazingly, Costas choose this occasion to talk about... guns.
Actually, I didn't watch it live, and so at first I didn't realize that Costas had said the G-word on live TV. Instead, I started seeing the reaction on Twitter, and judging from the comments, I thought Costas must have made a joke about the Pope having gay sex with the Dalai Lama, during a two-hour Fidel Castro-style harangue, because that was the level of vitriol that was burning up my computer screen Sunday night.
So what type of crazy, farting-in-the-church-of-pro-football thing did Costas actually say?
Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports, would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective. You want some actual perspective on this? Well a bit of it comes from the Kansas City-based writer Jason Whitlock, with whom I do not always agree, but, who today, said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article. "Our current gun culture," Whitlock wrote, "ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher's actions, (and its possible connection to football), will be analyzed. Who knows? But here, (wrote Jason Whitlock) is what I believe, If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."
That was it. There was no call to take people's guns, or repeal the 2nd Amendment, not even a plea for anything mildly specific like limiting the number of guns a person can purchase each month or seeking background checks at gun shows. Just a discussion meant to start a discussion, beginning with this notion that maybe a nation that has some of the least stringent gun laws on the world and also has the highest rates of gun violence among industrial nations... by far... should take a closer look at the problem.
For that, Bob Costas was all but crucified. You can read the comments on a conservative, gun-friendly site like Free Republic, where the veteran sportscaster is called "ridiculous," "a pompous little jerk" and "a disgusting leftist midget," among the comments I can print. (The discussion thread is headlined "Vanity," a consistent theme, that the only reason one would want to talk about gun violence is to call attention to himself.) The chatter on Twitter, from the famous or non-famous, were only slightly better. Some disagreed with what Costas said -- all fine and good -- but many more were outraged that he raised the subject, even during a block in which he delivers commentary every week.
The worst of the worst, in my opinion, was a pretend journalist for Deadspin named Sean Newell who was so delighted to see the formation of a torches-and-pitchforks crowd on the Internet that he raced as fast as he could to get to the front of it -- the better to get tons of traffic for his website by attacking Costas and his "sanctimonious horse(bleep)."
The courageous Newell wrote that the murder and suicide was "sad and abhorrent"...
But it is only relevant, unfortunately, to many of us because he is an athlete. So how does the team react? Will they mourn him? Honor him? Is that appropriate? How will media paint the picture? These are all interesting questions to expose to a national audience. Instead the day ended with just another angry old guy yelling from his porch.
There you have it, America. How the (2-10, for what it's worth) Kansas City Chiefs react to a young woman's murder is "important." Gun culture, not important.
Bob Costas broke the fundamental rule of American discourse: Not knowing when or where it's appropriate to talk about guns. Rule No. 1: It's completely inappropriate to discuss the gun issue within 48 -- no, actually make that 72 hours after any kind of high-profile use of guns. This was the point that Brian Kilmeade made so astutely this morning on Fox & Friends, when he said:
I just don't know if it's appropriate enough on a Sunday night, less than 24 hours after the guy took his own life and killed his girlfriend, the mother of his baby, to make that stance.
Actually, it was 36 hours, but point taken. And you can multiply this factor when there's a multiple killing. Many commentators reminded us of that when an apparently deranged young man killed 12 people in a Colorado movie theater this July, and New Jersey's Chris Christie -- our national hero of the moment -- said TV discussions of gun control were "grandstanding," and media critic Howard Kurtz seemed to agree with him.
The funny -- OK, not funny -- thing is that there's victims of gun violence in the United States every day. This weekend, five people were murdered with guns in my hometown of Philadelphia-- so is it too soon to talk about how gun laws and culture contributed to their death?
Or too late?
The reaction to Costas proves what he should have already known -- that a pro football game isn't the time to talk such a serious issue. Or any sporting event. Or any entertainment-based program, the firmament of our American dreamland. And you know where else it's completely inappropriate to mention guns? A U.S. presidential election. The Washington Post even made this point, noting that gun control is "a topic taboo for even presidential candidates."
So if Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were afraid to talk about guns (and they were), no wonder America was so shocked when Bob Costas spoke Sunday night, shocked that a man in his position didn't know the right time to talk about guns in this great nation.
Never.
Call me crazy, but I'm not sure that's how it should be. I was only 5 years old in 1964, but over the years I've read and seen one of the greatest speeches on the cause of free speech, which was delivered that year by a Berkeley college student named Mario Savio. As the years pass, I think of his words frequently. He said:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
Look, I'm a politics fanatic and a sports fanatic -- and I don't want to see stark political commentary become a regular halftime feature. But every once in while, there is something that that, in Savio's words, makes you so sick at heart that exercising your right to free speech -- in a place and at a time that will shock some people, to wake them out of their slumber -- isn't just brave, but it is absolutely necessary.
Bob Costas threw himself on the gears Sunday night, even as the me-too machine of "popular" opinion chewed him up. It was absolutely the right thing to do.]]>McGovern's Patriotism -- And How the 2012 Campaign Dishonors Ittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19986552012-10-21T22:33:58-04:002012-12-21T05:12:01-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/In the literature and music of our children we are told, to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. And for America, the time has come at last. This is the time for truth, not falsehood. In a Democratic nation, no one likes to say that his inspiration came from secret arrangements by closed doors, but in the sense that is how my candidacy began. I am here as your candidate tonight in large part because during four administrations of both parties, a terrible war has been chartered behind closed doors. I want those doors opened and I want that war closed. And I make these pledges above all others: the doors of government will be opened, and that war will be closed. Truth is a habit of integrity, not a strategy of politics, and if we nurture the habit of truth in this campaign, we will continue to be truthful once we are in the White House. Let us say to Americans, as Woodrow Wilson said in his first campaign of 1912, "Let me inside the government and I will tell you what is going on there."
The time for ex-Sen. George McGovern came earlier today: He died at the age of 90, after a lifetime of speaking out for the things he believed in. He was too-quietly idolized by many on the left, and held up by many on the right as a subject of ridicule, loser in 1972 of one of the worst landslides in modern presidential elections, a candidate whose decency didn't matter to critics who called him a candidate of "acid, amnesty and abortion."
The real George McGovern was nothing like the cartoon character of his conservative critics. Although McGovern wasn't the only man to seek the Oval Office with an exemplary military career, his record of war bravery was remarkable. In World War II, he flew dozens of missions over Austria, Germany and Italy and won the Distinguished Flying Cross after his plane was shot down over Czechoslovakia. His experiences in war inspired him to become a man of peace -- just as his experience growing up among dirt-poor farmers in the Great Depression inspired him to fight poverty and hunger.
It's hard to believe that 40 years ago, there was a candidate for president who supported a guaranteed national income for all Americans, national health care and legislation for clean air and clear water, but what's even more remarkable was that he was McGovern's opponent, the "conservative" incumbent Republican Richard Nixon. Which goes to show just how far to the extreme right the playing field has tilted. To be sure, McGovern supported all those things too, and, yes, his platform was certainly the most progressive of any major presidential candidate in my lifetime. He was also remarkably naive during his 1972 campaign of the extent that social unrest and programs ike school busing for racial integration were driving blue-collar whites out of the Democratic Party.
But if you think of George McGovern, I challenge you to re-read his remarkable acceptance speech from 1972, delivered in the dead of night under trying circumstances. This is the plain prairie talk of a modest but committed American patriot, a man who knew that the only way this country could ever fulfill its dream of higher greatness was to be honest about its mistakes and its flaws.
You can see by reading his brutally candid words or watching the first few minutes of the speech in the video below -- self-deprecating and flat-out funny -- that McGovern pre-dated the era of the high-priced political media consultant. They would have told him to play up his World War II heroism (actually, he probably should have) and stop going on and on about this Vietnam thing. If he done that, maybe he only would have lost to Nixon (and his bag of dirty tricks) by 55-45. But we would not recall McGovern as fondly, either -- for in the South Dakotan's death we see the things that are so lacking in our politics today. The same is true about his life after he left politics in 1980, a victim of the Reagan landslide: He could have made millions as a D.C. lobbyist, but he went back to the prairie, where he taught college kids, wrote a few books, and remained an unvarnished critic of unwarranted American militarism.
So with McGovern in mind, let's be as honest as possible: The 2012 campaign is a disgrace to his legacy and to all the things he believed in. McGovern's era was a time when fighting poverty was seen as an American crisis, an essential mission not just of "the government" but of a society that aspired to world leadership. It's shocking that in just four decades we've gone from that fundamental sense of decency and fairness to see the poor as a greedy entitled class with its hand out --to the extent that we talk about poverty at all.
But frankly, neither candidate in 2012 meets the McGovern standard for candor when it comes to Afghanistan -- both President Obama and Mitt Romney would rather run out the clock than explain why we're still there after 11 years. In 1972, McGovern called for a fair tax code that didn't reward millionaires, and yet that situation has gotten progressively (no pun intended) worse.
Forty years ago this summer, George McGovern urged America: "From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick -- come home, America. Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward." It is for that refrain that his speech is still remembered: "Come home, America."
It is sad that George McGovern died today, even after living such a full life and giving back so much. But the sense of tragedy is that it may be a long time before America sees another like him, at that level of national politics. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again.]]>The Real Victims of Romney's Americatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18966472012-09-19T11:49:58-04:002012-11-19T05:12:02-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/ it's easier to become president when you're a Hispanic (because... we've had so many of these?) or where he claims that it's "high risk" to appear on TV's The View, suggesting that confronting Putin may not be as hard as going toe-to-toe with Joy Behar.
No, the worst thing about Mitt Romney and his hedge-fundy Florida host -- the vulture capitalist and part-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers Marc Leder -- is their audacity, to "offshore" thousands of good-paying U.S. jobs to China and to use fiscal shenanigans to strip workers of their hard-earned pensions, and then to sneer at those people as "victims."
Indeed, as much media coverage as the slow-motion release of the secret Romney tapes has received over the last 24 hours, and deservedly so, there's been a surprising lack of context. Yes, it is stunning that the Republican candidate for president could use such harsh words and such a smug tone to describe 47 percent of the electorate. But in addition to Romney's appalling lack of understanding of what Americans do not pay federal income taxes and why, the symptoms of this "victim"-hood he so deplores -- such as a rising number of citizens receiving food stamps -- were in large part created by the practices of Wall Street types like Marc Leder, Mitt Romney, and his millionaire and billionaire campaign donors, from the beaches of Boca to the canyons of Wall Street.
In the growing scandal over the Romney videotapes, I'm waiting for the other shoe -- a Chinese-manufactured shoe, if you will -- to drop.
Let me explain, and indulge me in the background if you will. There's also another purported video of Romney speaking to campaign donors posted by the same YouTube user -- "Anne Onymouse" -- who has been identified as a source of the now-verified "47 percent" video. This video -- like the Boca video -- has been circulating for at least several weeks. In it, the speaker identified as Romney speaks of traveling to China to buy a factory that makes small appliances -- a brutal plant ringed by barbed wire and a guard tower (to keep people out, not in, the speaker explains) where as many as a dozen young girls are squeezed into a single dorm room.
Bain Capital did invest in a small-appliance factory in Dongguan, China, in 1998, when Romney was still the firm's CEO. When asked about the video, top Romney campaign official Ed Gillespie didn't attack its veracity but told reporters to talk to Bain; CNN's Jim Acosta tweeted today that unnamed Bain sources told him the factory in the videotape was not purchased -- which certainly sounds like a backhanded confirmation of the tape's veracity. Stay tuned.
Despite some confusion over the videotape, we already know from reporting by David Corn of Mother Jones -- the same journalist who confirmed the "47 percent" tape -- that the Romney-led Bain Capital did invest in the Dongguan factory then known as Global Tech. And it happened at the same time that the U.S. companies that "offshored" the manufacturing of toasters and the like to Global Tech -- including Sunbeam, which was run in that era by the notorious "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, as well as Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor-Silex, Revlon, and Vidal Sassoon -- were laying off thousands of American workers, many in the swing states like Ohio where Romney now trolls for votes.
This is the offshoring that forced so many American workers into early retirement and off payrolls -- where they became part of that "47 percent" that Romney now rails against. In the video posted by "Anne Onymous," Romney says the moral of his trip to the rugged Chinese factory was that "95 percent of life is settled if you are born in America." But how can that be, when so many American jobs are shipped overseas at the same time that CEO salaries soar and taxes on the wealthy fall?
Romney's hedge-fund host down in Florida, Leder, certainly learned at the feet of the master, literally. Leder has said that he was inspired by Romney's work and visited Bain to learn the business as he was creating his own company, Sun Capital. After doing so, Leder came to epitomize the business practices that even a GOP stlawart like Rick Perry dubbed "vulture capitalism." The New York Times reported earlier this year of the Sixers' co-owner:
To his critics, he represents everything that's wrong with this setup. In recent years, a large number of the companies that Sun Capital has acquired have run into serious trouble, eliminated jobs or both. Since 2008, some 25 of its companies -- roughly one of every five it owns -- have filed for bankruptcy.
Among the losers was Friendly's, the restaurant chain known for its Jim Dandy sundaes and Fribble shakes. (Sun Capital was accused by a federal agency of pushing Friendly's into bankruptcy last year to avoid paying pensions to the chain's employees; Sun disputes that contention.) Another company that sank into bankruptcy was Real Mex, owner of the Chevy's restaurant chain. In that case, Mr. Leder lost money for his investors not once, but twice.
The letter Mae Pelissier received from the Friendly Ice Cream Corp. was dated Jan. 5, but did not arrive in her mailbox until the 13th. It did not contain good news.
It began, "Dear Retiree," and said benefits Pelissier had earned from a 28-year career as a Friendly's restaurant employee were being terminated as of Jan. 9 as a result of the Wilbraham-based company's bankruptcy filing."
Four days before I'd even gotten the letter, all my benefits were already cut off," said Pelissier, 82, who worked at the Friendly's restaurant on King Street in Northampton in two stints, the final one from 1968 to 1988.
Those benefits included a $72 monthly pension, supplemental health coverage and a $6,000 life insurance policy, she said.
Look, nobody likes being described as a "victim," with its implication of helplessness -- especially not the millions of Americans who struggle on a daily basis in such a difficult economy. We labor in a world that was crashed down on us four years ago by Wall Street banditos who not only went unpunished but -- unlike Romney's "dependents" -- got bailed out. But most of us have been there -- even at my own company, I've taken pay cuts, watched good people forced out of a job and our valuable real estate asset peddled off, all by anonymous hedge funders who cut and ran.
The sad truth is, "victim" is perfectly appropriate for those of us who, in the word of Bruce Springsteen, have been held up without a gun. It's hard to know what is more utterly infuriating about Mitt Romney right now. Is it his baffling denial of his role in creating the very state of affairs that he now decries, for cheap political gain? Or is it his insistence on spitting at the people he's already knocked to the ground? This is a question that's been asked before in a different context, but it needs to be asked tonight of Mitt Romney, Marc Leder, and their millionaire pals.
Why do they hate us?]]>From Miami Beach to Tampa, 40 Years of Fear and Loathing Democracytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18348752012-08-28T08:50:07-04:002012-10-28T05:12:04-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/
With politics, that is.
Forty years ago, Miami Beach -- a half-day's swamp drive across the sweltering Sunshine State from the hockey-rink home of the 2012 Republican convention -- was the pulsating heart of U.S. politics. Terrified by the violence and unrest of the 1968 Democratic confab in Chicago, both parties saw the beachside city, with its gated, spread-out rococo resorts, hippie-friendly police chief and distance from the hubs of campus protest, as the last safe place in America.
Indeed, the GOP convention was utterly forgettable but for the sight of Sammy Davis Jr. hugging the awkward President Richard Nixon. But the Democratic gathering in mid-July was a completely different affair.
The hook was that the party bosses were threatening to derail the likely -- but far from assured -- nomination of the anti-war, anti-establishment candidate Sen. George McGovern, even though the South Dakotan had won the most primaries. The "McGoos," as the left-leaning McGovern acolytes were known, beat back the challenge -- but what sideshows!
"The streets of '68 are the aisles of '72!" shouted gleeful reformers, as recounted by author Rick Perlstein in his epic tale of the era's politics, Nixonland. Battles over the party platform and issues like women's rights and abortion were waged not behind closed doors but on the podium, where America heard a delegate plead for gay rights for the first time. The cast of characters in Miami Beach included Abbie Hoffman, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Miller... and George Wallace, all of it recorded, in a purple haze, by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
It was impossible for me to avert my adolescent eyes. The tiny 9-inch black and white TV set in my bedroom flickered until 4 in the morning, when the delegates stopped squabbling long enough for the networks to finally play the "Star Spangled Banner" and cut to the test pattern. On the final night, a roll call for vice president lasted for hours as votes were cast not just for McGovern's doomed choice Thomas Eagleton but Yippie Jerry Rubin, newsman Roger Mudd, even Mao Zedong.
It was crazy. It was messy. It was weirdly beautiful. It was democracy.
And so they made sure it never happened again. When Nixon trounced McGovern -- who'd given his acceptance speech at 2:45 in the morning, because of the whacked-out VP balloting -- in November, leaders of both parties took extraordinary steps to guarantee that TV viewers would never see dissent, a.k.a. free speech, a.k.a. democracy. Platform fights were moved out of prime time and into what Mitt Romney would call "quiet rooms."
The notion of debating policy in the public forum of a convention became a quaint relic of the era before television and before the Vince Lombardiazation of American politics, before winning wasn't everything but the only thing.
I've thought about 1972 a lot this week, especially when I saw that Romney's forces down in Tampa were using the excuse of Tropical Storm Isaac to go extreme lengths to keep down challenges from a small band of a couple of hundred delegates supporting libertarian Ron Paul -- who hasn't fully endorsed the ex-Massachusetts governor.
The Republican Party has already imposed a rule that a candidate's name can't even be placed in nomination without a majority of delegates in five states (Paul has but three). Now, Team Romney wants to move up by one day the roll call of the states -- where the candidate actually claims the nomination, a one-time highlight that's going the way of the manual typewriter -- because it's afraid Paul's small band of backers will raise a ruckus.
The funny thing is that conventions are where candidates are supposed to show voters they're the kind of guy who can stand up to the Iranians or the Chinese or the American enemy du jour. Yet here is Mitt Romney, practically cowering under a table at the idea of giving the Paulities 10 minutes to talk about the gold standard or their fence to keep Americans from fleeing to Mexico.
How sad.
It's been a long, strange trip in the decades since reporters saw Hunter Thompson peeling out from the driveway of his Miami Beach hotel in his red convertible, a six-pack of beer in the front seat. Democracy was in his rear-view mirror.]]>You Know Who Else Needed to Learn 'How to Be an American?' Dwight Eisenhower!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16813352012-07-17T21:00:10-04:002012-09-16T05:12:12-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/News item from earlier today:
A high-profile surrogate for Mitt Romney's campaign said Tuesday that he wished President Obama "would learn how to be an American" and argued he doesn't understand the U.S. economy because he spent his youth "smoking something."
Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu was talking to reporters on a conference call organized by the Romney campaign when he said, "I wish this president would learn how to be an American."
He made the jaw-dropping remark while criticizing Obama for arguing in Virginia on Friday that government investments in infrastructure and education have helped contribute to corporate profits, ABC News reported.
John Sununu made an interesting point, and it certainly got me to thinking. Like, you know who else should have learned "how to be an American"? Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States! Now there's somebody who didn't understand how this great nation worked.
I mean, think about. Check out this picture of Eisenhower when he was younger, "smoking something" -- probably in a foreign land...
Then Eisenhower spent several years honing his un-Americanism at the Ivy League's "Columbia boutique," where as president in the early 1950s he set the stage for the future schooling of his comrade-in-arms, Barack Hussein Obama.
He went straight from that pink-ivory tower on New York's Upper West Side to the White House, where he taxed the rich at a rate that would make today's European socialists blush -- 91 percent!
Do you know what Ike did with that money that he took from America's job creators? He built roads. Not just your old-fashioned Pony Express trails, but a massive, Soviet-style Interstate highway system. Eventually, the vast big-government ribbon of asphalt grew to an astonishing 47,182 miles. Eisenhower's lack of understanding of how America is supposed to work was staggering. Before 1956, hard-nosed entreprenuers were able to blaze their own free-market trail across God's earth with a machete, or a trusty axe. Now, you could only drive from New York to San Francisco on the precise path that Big Brother had mandated for you.
That wasn't the end of it. Two years later, after the Russkies had launched Sputnik into orbit, Eisenhower responded with his biggest Big Government power grab of all time. He rammed through the Orwellian-sounding National Defense Education Act, which called for centralized funding of better education in math, science and engineering. It would take decades for freedom-loving Americans to successfully re-direct those funds so our children could once again learn how dinosaurs and humans have shared the planet.
The fact that the American economy took off like an Apollo rocket during the 1950s, and that the era saw unprecedented expansion of a prosperous middle class, is a true tribute to the spirit and drive of everyday Americans. They found a way to succeed even as the man that political pundit Joseph Welch rightly pegged as a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" sat in the Oval Office, attacking the rich and giving away "free stuff"... like roads.
There's one other way that Eisenhower brandished his un-Americanism in the face of America. When this great nation went to war, I understand that Ike spent most of the time over in Europe. He even spent the most important part of the war driving around France!
And you know who else drove around France during a war!]]>What Woodward and Bernstein Got Wrong About Watergatetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16052082012-06-18T08:51:37-04:002012-08-18T05:12:12-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/
I can tell you exactly where it was the night when it all went down, when those burglars were arrested inside the Watergate Hotel. I was asleep in my bedroom in a suburb of New York, a 13-year-old boy, still trying to make sense of this strange world I'd been born into, where police in blue helmets fought young people in the street, and great men were gunned down in their prime. The arrest of the Watergate burglars may have happened in the dead of night, but what came in the months ahead was truly an awakening.
This was our time, our story. My friends' older brothers and sisters had Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and Kent State. But we were the backwash of the Baby Boom. We had Watergate.
From the age of 13 to 15, I embraced the scandal with all the geek force that puberty could muster. Sunburned from swimming laps in the forced labor of summer recreation camp, I raced home so I could catch John Dean's afternoon testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, and the next summer I read the paperback version of the committee's report by flashlight at a campground along the Delaware River, while raccoons scurried under my tent. There are still, somewhere, embarrassing, Instagram-quality pictures of me wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a reel-to-reel tape-recorder that said, "Property of the Watergate Bugging Team."
It wasn't just me -- a culture was defined. Listen to the music that blared in static-y mono glory from 77, WABC, on the beach those Watergate summers, from Lynyrd Skynyrd ("Now Watergate does not bother me...") to David Bowie ("Do you remember your President Nixon?"). The Watergate scandal may officially date to June 17, 1972, but August 8, 1974 was truly the night they drove ol' Dixie down, as it were; I watched with a sense of awe and disbelief on a 13-inch black-and-white set as our President Nixon resigned, refusing to go to bed, watching his "political obituary" until they finally signed off and played the Star Spangled Banner at 2 a.m.
By the time the movie of "All the President's Men" -- the tale of how Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke some of the big stories of Watergate -- hit the theaters, I was 17 and seeing it with my first girlfriend. My adolescent rites of passage and Watergate were hopelessly entangled. I may have been an extreme case, but not a unique one. The next year, when I entered college determined to be a reporter just like the guys that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman had portrayed on the screen, there was a surge in enrollment in journalism schools.
I suspect that most people from the generations that came after mine don't really know that much about Watergate other than that a president resigned in disgrace, the only time that's ever happened. It was very complicated, then and now. The Twitter-sized version is the president had a goon squad that did all kinds of buggings and break-ins and political dirty tricks, and when those burglars with ties to the White House were busted 40 years ago, Nixon and his top aides broke the law to cover it all up. But their crimes unraveled in slow motion over those two years -- aided by one tough judge, a feistier Congress than we could comprehend today, and some skillful journalists, of whom Woodward and Bernstein became the most famous and best remembered.
The greater significance of Watergate was something that was hard to grasp in 1974, but seems crystal clear now, at least to me. By June 17, 1972, what Hunter S. Thompson had famously called "the crest of a high and beautiful wave...." of the 1960s had crashed and dissapiated. Five long years of unruly marches and campus takeovers hadn't toppled the Establishment. But then two by-the-book (sort of) dudes with wide ties and spiral notebooks -- Woodward and Bernstein -- came along in stoppage time to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
I can't tell you how many times back then that Americans -- looking for a silver lining in the cloud of Watergate -- uttered this phrase: "The system worked." The role of Congress and the courts -- where even Republicans refused to turn a blind eye to a Republican president's wrongdoing -- was critical to this belief, but it was the journalist at the very top of this moral pyramid. The idealized journalist of the Watergate era and beyond was wedded to the highest ethical standards and driven only by truth, not by ideology. These were the values, after all, that purged America of the evil Richard Nixon -- not the dirty (bleep)ing hippies.
So much has happened since then. We're lucky to have Woodward and Bernstein -- so young in 1972 -- still with us. And so the other day they wrote a lengthy piece -- their first joint byline in 36 years -- trying to correct all the myths about Watergate that have risen in the years since. To many, the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, where the burglars were bugging phones that belonged to the Democratic National Committee, and the ensuing cover-up still don't make sense.
In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars -- against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon's: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.
This was the lesson of Watergate: Nixon Exceptionalism, that the 37th president was so "uniquely and pervasively" corrupt that the fair and decent American "system worked" and removed him on the basis of the objective, indisputable fact of his evil. It was a takedown that transcended politics, transcended ideology.
Make no mistake (as Nixon himself was fond of saying), what Woodward and Bernstein accomplished from 1972 to 1974 was incredible and deserving of all the accolades they received at the time. They were tireless young reporters, fearless and not intimidated by the very powerful people they were investigating. But even they seemed to take the wrong lessons from what they'd done.
Much of their hard work was a quest for access to anyone who knew the real secrets of the Nixon White House. When they found such a player in their legendary source "Deep Throat" -- later revealed as deputy FBI director Mark Felt -- they seemed blind to the reality that Felt wasn't motivated by an altruistic loyalty to the nation or the truth but by blind career ambition and petty revenge. Of course, after the fame of "All the President's Men." Woodward -- the one who stayed in the Beltway journalism racket -- had all the access to the highest level officials that he had craved at the start of Watergate, and yet he remained clueless as to how such access could provide as much disinformation as truth.
Beyond that, the deeper problem of Nixon Exceptionalism is that it established new standards for what constituted presidential misconduct -- standards that weren't based on the discredited ideas of the 1960s, but the "objective" standards of the Watergate era. The truth that few wanted to confront was Nixon wasn't really unique at all -- just a peculiarly rotten and inept defender of a system, the national security state, that actually didn't work at all, that was corrupt to its very core. After a brief period of national self-examination and a few watered-down post-Watergate reforms, the sins that Woodward and Bernstein attribute uniquely to Nixon, including the squelching of dissent and the discrediting of journalism, resumed with an intensity just as great as the early 1970s.
Nixon Exceptionalism and the triumph of objectivity kept a focus on "what did the president know and when did he know it," the provable fact-based lie, liberated from anything that might be corrupted by debatable policy or ideas. Since the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan closed the lid on the post-Watergate era, we've seen a president who WASN'T impeached for evading Congress to cut secret arms deals in Iran and fund a secret war in Nicaragua, a president who WAS impeached for lying about his sex life, and a president who WASN'T impeached for lying the nation into a war that killed thousands of American soldiers and innocent civilians, while carrying out torture and other violations of human rights more "perverse" than anything during Nixon's presidency.
George W. Bush's Iraq War, in particular, was enabled by a docile press corps and by a feckless generation of lawmakers and judges -- largely the generation that came of age when I did, during those languid Watergate summers. Bob Woodward was at the very head of that pack, flaunting his access to the Bush White House while failing to ask the only question that really mattered.
Not, "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
But, "Is what the president doing moral?"
The real crimes of the last 40 years -- the political power of an American kleptocracy that has crushed the nation's middle class, the state of permanent wars abroad and the loss of the public square to a militarized police force at home -- didn't fit into the box that Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate scandal helped to create. In the end, the real exceptionalism of Richard Nixon was merely that he was dumb enough to get caught. The rest of them all got away with it.
For me, the still powerful memories of Watergate have been supplanted by fresher ones. In a very different summer -- 2011 -- I had the good fortune to visit Spain with my family shortly before sending my daughter off to college. And there we watched thousands of "indignados" flood the streets of Madrid, the precursor to Occupy Wall Street back home. The young protesters were arguably unlearning the false lessons of Watergate, that meaningful social change had to come from pounding the pavement, not just from pounding a keyboard.
I'm still struck by the words that were scrawled in Spanish on a building near our hotel, saying: It's not the party, it's the system. Back at home, you could cross out the word "party" and replace it with "Nixon." It's the system.
That writing was actually on the wall the whole time. It took some of us from the Watergate generation a long time to see it. Some people haven't seen it yet.]]>The NFL: The No Future Leaguetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14738292012-05-03T10:12:00-04:002012-07-03T05:12:03-04:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/
He was just 43.
And it was an apparent suicide, no less -- a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.
But while the Twittersphere and Facebookland erupted in the usual rituals of 21st Century celebrity death, with TMZ racing to report the grim news that Junior Seau had passed, inspiring thousands of re-tweeted RIPs and sad reminiscing about his glory days in the middle of the San Diego Chargers' defense, there seemed to be one element sorely missing.
Surprise.
And when people are no longer surprised at the sudden death of a 40-something icon of pro football, then something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
It was just 18 years ago that linebacker Seau helped lead his Chargers to the highest altitude in American sports, the Super Bowl, where they came within one Steve Young hot hand of winning San Diego's first and only world championship. And so you might assume that Seau is the first veteran of that team to perish, maybe the second.
But in fact, Seau is the 8th member of the 1994 Super Bowl Chargers to die. They left us in a variety of fashions -- a couple died in freak accidents, several died from heart conditions, and two of the deaths appeared to be linked to substance abuse or drunk driving. Yes, the case of the 1994 Chargers is a bit unusual, not only by a matter of degree,.
And increasingly we're learning that even those who manage to live into old age pay a steep price for their years of gridiron glory. I discovered this, somewhat unexpectedly, when I set about last year to report an e-book called Give It To Steve! about one of the most remarkable games in pro football history, the so-called "Blizzard Bowl" in which the Philadelphia Eagles slogged through a snowstorm at Shine Park to win the 1948 NFL championship, the franchise's first.
I found out that three Eagles' Hall of Famers from their golden post-World War II era -- Steve Van Buren, who rushed for the only touchdown in the 1948 contest; the late wide receiver Pete Pihos, and legendary two-way star Chuck "Concrete Charlie" Bednarik -- had been accepted into the NFL's 88 Plan, for ex-players suffering from dementia, so often caused by too many blows to the head.
Pihos' daughter and ex-wife -- they had divorced because of his increasingly erratic behavior -- are still reeling from the football great's 10-year battle with dementia, which ended with his death in the summer of 2011. Donna Pihos-Howell said she cried when a doctor showed her the results of her ex-husband's tests. "The bones in his neck were like steps -- they were jagged, jagged steps, not straight like they would be in a normal person's MRI," she said. The doctors said it was likely from the blows to the head that Pihos took while leading the Birds to two titles.
In January, I went with a son-in-law to visit the 91-year-old Van Buren in a nursing home in Lancaster County. The running back whose slashing style revolutionized the NFL in the 1940s is still a fighter, but his family looks at Van Buren's brother Ebert -- whose NFL career was much shorter and who still works as a Louisiana psychologist in his mid-80s. They wonder if things -- Van Buren's lifelong addiction to the horse track that began when his playing days ended, the memory loss that started in middle age -- could have been different if he hadn't played so many seasons, the last few shot up on Novocain, and taken so many hits to the head.
Junior Seau was going to be different, or so it seemed. It was harder for the American Samoa native than most to leave the sport, hanging on for a remarkable 20 seasons. But when he did, he had not only his three kids but a restaurant, a clothing line, and lot of charitable work to keep him occupied. But almost immediately after his last stint with the New England Patriots, it seemed like things were going quickly off track.
Less than a year after his last game, after a violent fight with his girlfriend, Seau drove his SUV off an 100-foot cliff at a Southern California beach -- and lived. He insisted that he had fallen asleep at the wheel. But then Wednesday morning, his girlfriend discovered him dead of gunshot wound.
He reportedly did not leave a suicide note. But many instantly speculated that Seau left a clue by shooting himself in the chest. It was just 14 months ago that the former All-Pro safety of the Chicago Bears, Dave Duerson, killed himself in exactly the same fashion -- right after texting his family that he wanted researchers at Boston University to examine his brain.
Those tests confirmed that Duerson suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE> -- the brain disease that is typically caused by multiple concussions and which is linked to dementia, depression, addictive behavior, and suicide. We may never know exactly why Seau committed suicide, or if it had anything to do with his two decades of pro football. But it's enough to know that other NFL legends were diagnosed with CTE after they died, or that scores of former NFL players have filed lawsuits over the last year claiming the league did not do enough to protect them.
Some folks say that these players knew what they were getting into, that they understood they were risking their future health for glory and riches in the present, and that there's nothing that can be done about this problem short of closing down the National Football League.
But the evidence is a lot more damning toward the NFL. Lawyers have found the NFL knew more about head injuries and concussions than it told players and the public as early as the 1920s, even before the likes of Van Buren and Pihos strapped on a leather helmet. Indeed critics believed the league went out of its way to downplay the health risks up until a couple of years ago.
But much more importantly, there is much that the NFL can do right now. One expert at BU that I spoke with earlier this year said that coaches at every level of the game could greatly reduce full-contact practices, since the risk of brain injury increases with the cumulative number of hits. For the same reasons, the NFL could surrender its scheme to increase the number of regular season games to 18. Others have urged the league to put neurologists on the sidelines of games, to make an independent assessment of whether a player should stay in a game. The league should do all of these things... and more.
"Depression & suicide are serious matters and we as current and former NFL players should demand better treatment. Lack of info... no more!!!"the retired Dallas Cowboys great Emmett Smith wrote on Twitter as word spread of Seau's death.
The league needs to tackle its inconvenient truth -- that for the remarkable athletes who've made their game into a $9-billion-a-year enterprise, the NFL is fast becoming the No Future League. When your players are dying 20 years before everyone else, when the suicide of a beloved and successful athlete in his 40s becomes a familiar headline, you do not have a public-relations problem. You have a full-blown crisis that is undermining the very essence of your sport.
Fixing this won't be easy. Football is an addiction, for the American fan and for the people who play the game. There was one thing I learned about Seau that really struck me. Even as his playing career inevitably ground to a halt, he refused to formally announce his retirement. Junior Seau lived as a pro football player -- and he died as one.]]>A Pennsylvanian's Guide to the Rick Santorum You Don't Knowtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11858332012-01-05T10:51:35-05:002012-03-06T05:12:01-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/Google problem." The one about the "man-on-dog sex" (prompting the greatest journalistic response ever, when the reporter told Santorum that he was "sort of freaking me out.") The one about how the Catholic Church's priest sex abuse scandal was caused by Boston liberalism, or the one about how President Obama should be anti-abortion because he's black and abortion is like slavery. And so on and so forth.
That's the Rick Santorum that America has come to know over the last 15 years or so -- an unapologetic and almost goofy culture warrior whose obsessions -- like thinking that gay sex is a gateway drug to bestiality -- make him a hero to social conservatives and often a laughing stock to most everyone else. Santorum's rise in the 2012 presidential race has people talking about whether his views on social issues -- talk of annulling gay marriages, seemingly questioning the right to even birth control -- make him too extreme to be president -- and that's an important topic to discuss.
But I also think Santorum's weird sexual bluster can obscure who he really is, and what truly matters about his suddenly surging campaign. As a Philadelphia-based political reporter, I arrived in town just seven months after Santorum became my state's junior senator. I followed his 12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I think people obsessing on the "man-on-dog" stuff are missing the bigger picture. For one thing, the self-styled "family values" expert has a surprisingly ambiguous record with his own personal ethics. Also, Santorum's legislative record shows that his real workaday agenda was not so much waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1 percent, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party. You could say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that would be giving him too much credit.
Here's a Pennsylvanian's brief guide to the Rick Santorum you don't know:
1.This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum's political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity's money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum's finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum's charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity -- which didn't register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.
2.Likewise, a so-called "leadership PAC" created by Santorum that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him.My investigation of the America's Foundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates, less -- and typically far less -- than any other "leadership PACs." What America's Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum's then-hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures at Walmart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC's expenses -- paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen and lobbyists -- were "unconventional," at best and arguably not legal. Santorum also funded his large Leesburg "McMansion" with a $500,000 mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.
3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with the everyday work of raising political cash. In 2005, Santorum made headlines -- not all positive -- for visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy. What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baer later exposed was that the real reason he was in the Tampa, Fla., area was to collect money at a $250,000 fundraiser organized by executives of Outback Steakhouses, a company that shared Santorum's passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses and other rank-and-file workers. Santorum's efforts were also aided by his unusual mode of travel: Wal-Mart's corporate jet. And he canceled a public meeting on Social Security reform "out of respect for the Schiavo family" even as the closed fundraisers went on.
4. Santorum didn't seem to be against government waste when it came to his family. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginia and rarely if ever seemed to use the small house that he claimed as his legal residence, in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. So Pennsylvania voters were shocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 for the home cyberschooling of five of Santorum's kids, hundreds of miles away in a different state. The cash-strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of its money back from Santorum.
5. Washington's lobbyist culture -- Santorum was soaking in it. The ex-Pennsylvania senator spent much of his final years in government trying to downplay and defend his involvement in the so-called "K Street Project," an effort created by GOP uber-lobbyist and tax-cutting fanatic Grover Norquist and future felon and House majority whip Tom DeLay. By all accounts, Santorum was the Senate's "point man" on the K Street Project and he met with Norquist -- at least occasionally and perhaps frequently -- to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence other Republicans.
6. Santorum had no problem with big government if it was supporting his campaign contributors in Big Pharma. It's little wonder that Santorum ultimately supported Medicare Part D, a prescription drug plan for the elderly that has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit and was drafted in such a way to best help pharmaceutical companies maximize profits from all the unbridled spending. When Santorum was defeated for a third term in 2006, an internal memo at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline said his departure from Washington "creates a big hole that we need to fill."
7. The defender of family values was also slavish in his devotion to a large American corporate behemoth, Wal-Mart: In the wake of the report about Santorum's travel in the Wal-Mart corporate jet, I counted the many ways that Santorum had done the bidding of the world's largest retailer in the Senate, including battling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and seeking to make changes in overtime rules that would benefit the company and hurt its blue-collar workforce, tort reform to limit lawsuits against what is said to be the world's most-sued company, and changes in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate tax that would benefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.
8. Santorum has frequently insisted that his political values are guided by his religious values, and that John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech describing a separation between the two had done "much harm" in America. But despite inviting such scrutiny, there's been little discussion of Santorum's ties to ultra-conservative movements within the Roman Catholic Church. Santorum's comments about JFK were made in Rome in 2002 when he spoke at a 100th birthday event for Jose Maria Escrivade Balaguer, founder of the secretive group within the church known as Opus Dei. Although Santorum says he is not a member of Opus Dei -- which has been criticized by some for alleged cult-like qualities and ties to ultra-conservative regimes around the world -- he did receive written permission to attend the ultra-conservative St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Va., where Mass is still conducted in Latin and a long-time priest and many parishioners are members of Opus Dei, mingling with political conservatives like Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and former FBI director Louis Freeh.
9. Santorum isn't above big government-funded boondoggles -- when they're linked to his allies and campaign contributors. Consider the type of project that the Tea Party loves to hate, a $750 million energy plant in Schuylkill County, Pa., that was to convert coal to liquids but needed massive subsidies. Santorum boasted of his rule in securing an $100 million federal loan for the project -- which had hired Pennsylvania's top Republican Party power broker of the 2000s, Bob Asher, as a lobbyist and paid him at least $900,000. Despite Santorum's efforts, the plant has not been built.
10. Santorum apparently believes in "an entitlement culture" when it comes for former politicians. After Tuesday night's virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, the Pennsylvanian spoke eloquently about his immigrant grandfather working for decades in the Pennsylvania coal fields and his massive hands; the grandson probably won't have that problem. Losing an election in 2006 allowed Santorum to become a poster child for how ex-pols quickly and easily cash in in America, as a lawyer-rainmaker and joining a "think tank" (that for a time was called America's Enemies) and as an analyst for the Fox News Channel and as a board member for Universal Health Services, an ethically challenged company where executives had supported his Senate campaigns. The New York Times' Gail Collins noted that Santorum had earned $970,000 in 2010 despite seeming sort of unemployed.
The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of self-interest, loose ethical standards, and careerism in a career that's been largely devoted not so much to the social causes about which he makes headlines as looking out for the interests of big corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. It's a shame that more voters don't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually deserves.
]]>The Accidental Truth-Teller: Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and Racetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11458322011-12-13T12:26:14-05:002012-02-12T05:12:01-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/
Why is everyone overlooking the role that race -- some would call it racism, but I would describe more broadly and more typically as racial anxiety and fear -- played in the rise of the Tea Party Movement, and thus in the current state of the Republican Party, the big dog that's been wagged for nearly three years by its right-pointing, tea-laden tail?
You may have heard by now that Beck -- in an appearance on the Fox Business channel, sister to the Fox News Channel that he left so ingloriously this summer, speaking with the like-conspiracy-minded Andrew Napolitano -- lashed out on Friday at Newt Gingrich, whom he sees as a big-government promoter in the vein of the Beck-hated GOP progressive Teddy Roosevelt. He added:
"So if you've got a big government progressive or a big government progressive in Obama, one in Newt Gingrich, one in Obama, ask yourself this Tea Party: Is it about Obama's race? Because that's what it appears to be to me. If you're against him but you're for this guy, it must be about race. It's the policies that matter."
Completely by accident, Beck stumbled onto a greater truth. In recent months, a myth has been allowed to fester and take root about how the Tea Party Movement came about, and what it stands for. In particular, it is the falsehood that the Tea Party came about because of anger against the 2008-09 bailout of big banks and Wall Street. It was disturbing to see this lie repeated so often -- usually in the context of trying to make forced and ultimately confused comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- and not just in the usual conservative media sources, either.
I lost count of how many times I've read assertions like this one put out there by Charles Gasparino in the New York Post on Oct. 27, 2011:
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements were both born out of the despair following the 2008 financial crisis, and both have tapped into the public's anger over the unfairness of bank bailouts and huge bonuses for the risk takers while the rest of the country has struggled with unemployment, falling home prices and anemic economic growth.
At their core, both groups formed in response to populist anger in the wake of the U.S. government's decision in 2008 to bail out the nation's largest banks. In an effort to stave off what policy makers at the time felt was the impending collapse of the global economy.
No. No. No. No. No. No.
The rise of the Tea Party had nothing to do with bank bailouts.
Remember, the federal government and the Bush administration (remember them?) started bailing out Wall Street and the banking industry in the fall of 2008, six months before the first Tea Party rally, or anything remotely like it. There was no great outpouring of anger from the rank-and-file of the American right. The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was signed into law by Bush on Oct. 3, 2008. It was supported by Bush's successor, then-Sen. Barack Obama, but it was also supported by Sen. John McCain, his running mate and future Tea Party queen Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and even by none other than Glenn Beck. Simply put, there was no Tea Party movement, and no public protests by conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in 2008.
Instead, the Tea Party formed within days of Jan. 20, 2009, the date that Barack Obama became America's 44th president. The famous "Tea Party rant" by Rick Santelli credited with helping to launch the protests wasn't about bailing out banks or Wall Street but the idea that Washington would provide relief for middle-class homeowners who were under water. Another seminal moment came less than a month into Obama's presidency when a young Seattle conservative activist named Keli Carender organized a public protest. Against the bank bailouts and TARP? No. It was against the first major action of the new president, the $787 billion stimulus proposal that included infrastructure projects, saving blue-collar government jobs, and tax cuts (yes, tax cuts) for the middle class.
The events were meant to protest government spending, particularly the Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus package and its $3.5 trillion budget.
Later on, it adds:
In downtown Houston, there were some in the crowd of 2,000 that poured into the Jesse H. Jones Plaza who also wanted Texas to secede. They were joined by other conservative groups like anti-abortion activists, Libertarians and fiscally conservative Republicans. American flags abounded, along with hand-painted placards that bore messages like "Abolish the I.R.S.," "Less Government More Free Enterprise," "We Miss Reagan" and "Honk if You Are Upset About Your Tax Dollars Being Spent on Illegal Aliens."
Among the words or phrases not appearing anywhere in the article are "Wall Street," "bank bailouts," or "TARP" -- because that had nothing to do with it. As a Philadelphia Tea Party activist admitted this year, the movement was never mad at Wall Street. So what was it all about, then?
In the latter part of 2009 and early 2010, I interviewed scores of rank-and-file Tea Party activists for a book called The Backlash. More than anything else, I wanted to know what motivated these people -- many of whom didn't have a background in political activism -- to join the movement. Again, I can assure that TARP and the bank bailouts didn't come up. Instead, I heard many variations on this theme: That they were uneasy, if not terrified, by the arrival of an American president named Barack Hussein Obama -- often because of the information they had learned about Obama from Fox News or from right-wing radio hosts such as Glenn Beck.
I made multiple visits to the Delaware 9-12 Patriots and spent considerable time with its leader, the weathered Vietnam veteran Russ Murphy, whose activism had been inspired by his fondness for Beck and Beck's favorite book, The 5000 Year Leap (by an author who believed that slave owners were the real victims of slavery), by reports on Fox News about Obama's ties to '60s radical William Ayers and ultimately by his belief that the president "is fundamentally not American." His movement cohort Theresa Garcia "felt very uncomfortable" the first time she saw Obama on TV. In Chester County, Tea Party support Lorraine Whayland told me that she'd learned from Fox's Sean Hannity that Obama was tied to the Chicago mob. And so on and so forth.
It's remarkable the extent to which the birther movement -- the notion that America's first black president must not be a citizen of America, which was widely believed during my travels among the Tea Party, before the long-form birth certificate was made public -- has been tossed down the memory hole. When I spent a weekend at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky, no one mentioned TARP, but merchants sold Photoshopped pictures of a young Barack Obama with Adolf Hitler. These recurring images and ideas were undeniably tied to anxiety about social change in America which had a racial component -- from the abstract notion that whites would eventually be a minority in the United States in the 21st Century to the not-so-abstract notion that an African-American was suddenly in the Oval Office.
Of course, it's patently ridiculous for Glenn Beck to claim to have suddenly discovered this -- since Beck's 2009 spike in popularity was fueled in attacks on black allies of Obama like Van Jones and when he famously accused the president of harboring "deep-seated hatred" of white people. It's also quite strange that Beck would just now be questioning whether race had something to do with the Tea Party's bonding with Gingrich, himself a former longtime Fox analyst who just last year accused Obama of "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior" and who -- rightly, in my opinion -- has been tagged for sending "dog whistles" in several recent remarks, such as calling Obama a "food stamp president." This outburst doesn't seem to be a case of the former "Morning Zoo" jock Beck becoming perceptive overnight, but more likely a fit of pique that the candidate who seems to be backed by many right-wing pundits for an array of conflicted reasons -- i.e., Mitt Romney -- is going down in flames.
But whatever his reason, the idea that Beck re-injected into the national conversation -- that race and the Tea Party are linked -- is an important one. The media needs to re-ground itself in the fact that on the playing field of social movements, Occupy Wall Street, despite its flaws, is rooted in a reality of billionaire-bought economic injustice, while the Tea Party is based heavily on an emotion. The ideology that was created in the wake of that emotion -- distrust of any government steps to ease a jobs crisis, distrust of elites even if that means not believing in established science such as man-made global warming -- continues to steer the current debate, even if actual Tea Party activists have all but vanished the scene. So any dose of honesty is a breath of fresh air, even if emerges from the fetid swamp of Beck, Inc.
]]>October 1, 2011: The Day the Future Crossed a Bridgetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10307262011-10-25T14:46:57-04:002011-12-25T05:12:01-05:00Will Bunchhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/It started with a bridge. It always starts with a bridge. Take a look around to Selma, Alabama. In 1965, John Lewis and his young revolutionary cohorts didn't march with the lawyer-drafted language for a voting rights law in their pocket. Yes, the civil rights movement of the Deep South had a list of grievances, too - the right to vote and to attend better, integrated schools - but on the "Bloody Sunday" morning of March 7, 1965, all that Lewis and 600 other people wanted was to walk as free men and women across the Edmund Pettus Bridge without Alabama state troopers whacking the living daylights out of them. And when they couldn't, it heightened the contradictions of an unjust society. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came in due time. (Just ask the president of the United States, Barack Obama.) In 1996, another president named Bill Clinton promised Americans a new kind of bridge, "a bridge to the 21st Century," but when the actual 21st Century came and Clinton's promised passage didn't materialize, it took an afternoon army of 1,000 to claim the damn bridge themselves, at 4 'o clock on a Saturday, October 1, 2011. The jobs, the new schools, repairs to the infrastructure and solar and wind power, that stuff may come. But it can't get there until the future takes a bridge.
That's the preface to my brand new Amazon Kindle Single (long-form journalism, available as an e-book that's longer than a magazine article but shorter than a conventional book), priced at 99 cents for the 99 Percent; it's called October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's the very first "book-like thing," as my friend Greg Mitchell called it, about Occupy Wall Street.
The goal of the narrative is quite simply to humanize the protests -- in the face of so many efforts by the usual suspects on the political right to dehumanize it as a bunch of "dirty, smelly hippies" -- by revealing the everyday American citizens who took part, against the backdrop of one day that changed everything. On the morning of Octover 1, 2011, Occupy Wall Street was a small band of revolutionary dreamers struggling to capture both the attention of the media and the imagination of the U.S. middle class. By a damp, rain-soaked nightfall, it had both -- thanks to a tense showdown between marchers and the New York Police Department, resulting in 700 arrests in the middle of the world's most famous bridge.
But there's a much deeper story behind the Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge and the lasting significance of the events of 10/1/11. Over the last generation, and especially in the 10 years and one month since terrorists knocked down the Twin Towers that stood just a block and a half behind the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, police and other authorities have systematically squelched the right of protest and public dissent, around the Western world but especially here in the United States -- and particularly where the shadows of the World Trade Center once fell across New York City. Law enforcement, and the 1 Percenters they protect and serve, have increasingly clamped down on where, when and how everyday Americans can exercise their right of free speech and their freedom of assembly in the public square.
The trend actually began after 1999, when chaotic street protests against a World Trade Organization confab in Seattle rocked the Establishment; police departments responded with widespread use of a tactic called "kettling," in which a blue wall of law-enforcement officers will surround a large group of protesters and let them boil in an enclosed "kettle" for hours; sometimes the demonstrators are arrested, and sometimes they are merely deprived of their freedom to move about. Either way, the goal is through discomfort (i.e., lack of food or opportunity to use a bathroom) and frustration to not only quell a current protest but to make citizens think twice about taking to the streets in the future -- regardless of what it says in the Bill of Rights.
Before Occupy Wall Street, the lowpoint of "kettling" and related tactics such as pre-emptive arrests came outside the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York; some 1,800 people were scooped up, including non-protesters like a 15-year-old girl trying to get to a movie, and some were taken for hours to a dank and uncomfortable pier called "Guantanamo on the Hudson." Most of the charges were tossed and the city paid out millions in damages, but in the post-9/11 world of the Patriot Act and homeland-security-on-steroids, few citizens noticed. In 2011, the NYPD and a billionaire mayor thought they could get away it all over again.
They didn't realize how much the world has changed in the last few years.
As October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge shows, the circumstances of how hundreds of Occupy Wall Street marchers ended up in the main roadway of the bridge, and why they were arrested, remain muddled, but this much is clear: The NYPD hoped that by detaining the marchers in cramped, rain-soaked darkness descending on the center of the bridge, and by arresting 700 people, it could break the back of the protests against corporate greed and the American plutonomy, to end them before their movement spread.
A subsequent class-action civil rights lawsuit that's been filed against the NYPD alleges several officers told marchers they were being detained so that they couldn't return to the Financial District and continue the protests there. My own reporting for this piece confirmed that; indeed, one of the marchers -- Nicole Capobianco -- told me that she and four other female protesters were allowed off the Brooklyn Bridge by a command ("white shirt") officer under one condition: That they promise not to return to Zuccotti and resume their perfectly legal protest.
But this time the NYPD actions on the Brooklyn Bridge -- coupled with the unprovoked use of pepper spray by a high-ranking officer the week before -- backfired spectacularly. They didn't understand that frustration in America has grown so great -- over the lack of jobs, the mortgage and student-loan scamsters, the tidal wave of wealth flowing to the top 1 percent, and the corporate buyout of both political parties -- that a few hours of "kettling" had no impact whatsoever. Every arrestee returned to Zuccotti burning with new passion, and thousands of on-the-fence observers angered by the police actions joined them. When the sun rose on October 2, 2011, there were plans for Occupy protests in all 50 states and around the globe.
Here's what the elites don't get. The Occupy protests aren't even about a political demand or agenda in a conventional inside-the-Beltway sense. The occupation itself is the message. Millions of long-ignored Americans simply want to be seen and heard, and to reclaim the public square that has systematically been taken away from us. The Brooklyn Bridge -- a symbol of American know-how and ingenuity from when the nation was still the world's leader in inventing and making new things -- is the most powerful symbol of that nearly lost public square that we have left. In Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, a 1 Percenter was famously warned, "You think the future can't cross a bridge?"