In 1948, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Harry Truman’s
approval rating was in the 30s. He was universally expected to lose. So Truman
sent Congress a Roosevelt-scale program that he knew Republicans would vote
down, and he went on the road to remind voters of the difference between
Republicans and Democrats.
In 1964, Democrats were in solid control of both houses, but Lyndon Johnson,
campaigning for the presidency against a lot of suspicion in his own party, in
mourning for our handsome young murdered president from Massachusetts and not
sure how we felt about the unelected Texan, did something rather similar. In May
he gave a commencement address at the University of Michigan calling for the
United States to become a "Great Society"—
It's the day when conservatives who vilified Dr. King as a communist for 40-odd years nowadays come out to tell us he was really a conservative, and "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" somehow turns out to mean that he was against affirmative action. Including Sarah Palin reporting Alveda King's (false) testimony to King's (imaginary) anti-abortion views, with some very stirring prose:
Today, it is uplifting to see honor bestowed on he who will forever be seen as the face of the movement to ensure equal opportunity for all....
As powerful, the movement led by King caused long-overdue cultural change resulting in equal treatment regardless of skin color. It would be the norm. It would be unfathomable to think otherwise.
Unfathomable indeed!
All the troops on our side are out nowadays explaining that this is wrong, so I thought I'd rerun an old piece (January 2013) suggesting King—a real radical in praxis, not a hipster radical with a purist theory—might not have been an opponent from "the left" of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party as it is today either.
Getting stoned before it was mainstream. Sorry, that's pretty cheap. Uncredited image (20th-c. Greek?) from some larcenous Christian's blog.
On Saturday [January 26 2013] came the stately March On or About Washington, the first of two commemorations of the 1963 March On Washington, an often moving ceremony, and a bizarre Internet storm around a series of Tweets from David Sirota, who wanted to tell us how Dr. Martin Luther King would have felt if he had been able, like Tom Sawyer, to attend the service, which quickly degenerated from dumb to dreadful as he stumbled into lecturing black people on the subject of what black people think.
You get the feeling that if MLK was around now and slammed a Dem POTUS like he did LBJ, much of the left would criticize him as an "emoprog"
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 24, 2013
Vivid piece by Jeff Stein at Newsweek about the Israeli-style assassination of the Hezbollah terror architect Imad Mugniyah in Damascus in February 2008, which turns out not to have been Israeli at all but our own CIA.
Mugniyah was apparently a very dangerous and bad man, too, the alleged planner of the 1983 bombings of the US barracks and embassy in Beirut and many other bombings, murders, and kidnapings, including the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994. On the other hand, his involvement in these things has never been proven, and it's not clear that he was up to anything at the time of the killing other than visiting one of his wives, and the assassination looks very much like one of those bad things of which Obama is always being accused, an extrajudicial execution without trial.
But a curious detail of the story, noted by Laura Rozen, is that Bush's DCI, Michael Hayden, was worried himself that the strike might be illegal:
Obama admin far worse than Bush admin in trying to thwart accountability reporting about govt agencies http://t.co/R52iNuU8Zx
— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) October 10, 2013
I'm putting together what may be a kind of lengthy piece on and around the subject of Leonard Downie's analysis of "The Obama Administration and the Press" written for the Committee to Protect Journalists in which I will be in danger, not for the first time, of appearing to agree with some people I absolutely can't stand and opposing some people with whom I ought to have a great deal in common, like young Kevin there, who is completely wrong on this point, and before I do I'd like to put out the following statement of clarification.
I call myself a leftist, and I like President Obama. Notice I said "and", not "but". It's not that I think Obama is a leftist (though there's always a chance the wingers are right about this one, and he's really a secret Fabian planting the socialism seeds that are going to germinate 50 or 60 years from now, if there's any part of the country left that hasn't either drowned or burned). It's that I think his nonideological-pragmatist goals are somewhat better than just compatible with my leftist ones, and that he's been really, really skillful in navigating a terrifyingly bad set of circumstances. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt skillful, but let's-face-it like FDR nonleftist too (remember it took FDR some seven years to stop campaigning for a balanced budget, apparently in the sincere belief that it was not only possible but would do the country good). I can't agree with him on lots of stuff, as I wouldn't have been able to agree with FDR, and I can sometimes wonder if he isn't really willfully stupid on this issue or that (especially education, as readers are aware), but I can't accept that he's wrong because he's evil; say, that his military policies in West Asia and the Middle East can be truthfully described as "slaughtering Muslim children by the dozen" or that he has tasked the NSA with spying on US citizens. Gandhi and King were unquestionably far better human beings than Nehru and Johnson, but it is in some respects a good thing Nehru and Johnson were around to do some of the needful lying, manipulation, and strongarming to put some of Gandhi's and King's ideas into practice. I get along better with Obama than with Nehru or Johnson.
I do not get along with certain centripetalist Democrats who would support Obama if he ate babies for breakfast; who cheered in the last term for plans to break the Social Security compact and more recently to destroy Syria because they believed (mistakenly, as it happily turned out) that that was what he wanted, and booed the sentencing of Chelsea Manning because they thought it wasn't long enough for a "traitor" (I've said more than once that Manning should be pardoned). I'm a card-carrying ACLU member (actually I don't know where my card is, but I know how much money I send them every month, and I started doing it specifically during the 2008 presidential campaign when Senator Obama went back on his promise to vote against immunity for telecommunications companies illegally cooperating with abusive US intelligence practices; and if I'd been blogging at the time I would have posted a statement that it was money I'd otherwise have given to Obama, because that's what I had in mind; I never have given him any money, in fact, except $3 in 2012, because I'm still fairly pissed off about the way he lied to me, and singlehandedly destroyed the hard-won public presidential campaign financing system, five years ago).
But "far worse than Bush admin"? Uh, no. Not in any respect whatsoever.
Getting stoned before it was mainstream. Sorry, that's pretty cheap. Uncredited image (20th-c. Greek?) from some larcenous Christian's blog.
On Saturday came the stately March On or About Washington, the first of two commemorations of the 1963 March On Washington, an often moving ceremony, and a bizarre Internet storm around a series of Tweets from David Sirota, who wanted to tell us how Dr. Martin Luther King would have felt if he had been able, like Tom Sawyer, to attend the service, which quickly degenerated from dumb to dreadful as he stumbled into lecturing black people on the subject of what black people think.
You get the feeling that if MLK was around now and slammed a Dem POTUS like he did LBJ, much of the left would criticize him as an "emoprog"
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 24, 2013
Navy Judge Cmdr. Marcus Fulton ruled that President Barack Obama's comments on military sexual assault could affect the sentencing in two cases, according to Stars and Stripes.
During pretrial hearings in the cases, Fulton said “unlawful command influence” derived from Obama's remarks could influence a potential sentencing in the two cases, according to according to court documents obtained by Stars and Stripes. The judge's ruling could have an impact on other sexual assault cases in the military. (via HuffPost)
Let's see, firebaggers, I guess that means Obama's really in favor of more military rape. Like I know he said he was against it, but that would be just to mollify his base. Plus it gave this judge what he needed to let his defendants off. Besides, has Obama actually put an end to rape yet? I think not!
There was the strangest little panic swarm of emoprogs—I think—over at Kos this morning, around an extremely well-made guide by Armando to today's Supreme Court arguments. They all seemed to have just heard for the first time about the Republican theory of the individual health insurance mandate being unconstitutional because what part of the interstate commerce clause says government can force everybody to buy stuff? and to have been totally taken in by it, thunderstruck and terrorized.
Schrödingers Katze. By Niklas Pix Bodin, at Kunstnet.
It could be one of those beyond-left-and-right things I'm too old to understand, where there's some similarity that escapes me between bombing Afghan wedding parties and providing universal health insurance; but then they seemed to have a pretty weak understanding of the Constitution—one of them wrote,
Bill of Rights
Was not part of original Constitution. Any understanding of Congressional limits has to apply pre-amendment
under the apparent impression that the amendments were just added to confuse us; and another,
There has to be a rational basis for all laws. Unless a state or the federal government can articulate one, the law is unconstitutional
which is a remarkable theory indeed.
Anyhow, it struck me that this is another of those crypto-Heisenbergian cases where we may be observing things faster than they are actually happening, in ways that could tend to have unpredictable effects on the way they turn out.
Indeed, as the day wore on, it was fun to watch the interpretations bend, starting with this morning's inexplicable Times fluff piece on Randy Barnett, the originator of the most idiotic argument against the mandate (that Congress has no power to "regulate inactivity") biasing the punters in his favor (they're thinking, if Cheryl Gay Stolberg and Charlie Savage both take him seriously, won't Kennedy take him seriously too?). Through the afternoon, the pro-mandaters were sinking gradually into despair, as Kennedy seemed to vibrate, so to speak, at a Barnettian frequency, but by the end of the day Think Progress had found a classically sour liberal compromise between hope and rage: Kennedy was going to vote for the mandate, they figured, but for completely wrong reasons.
But the Times is still dubious as bedtime approaches, and wonders whether there's a plan B. My plan B is, we know it's constitutional for the government to force people to buy insurance if it's government-run insurance (unemployment, workmen's comp, Medicare, social security), so if Justice Kennedy really wants us to go with the German plan, that's fine with me. Bend that observer's paradox my way!
Maori prisoners in the Waikato Wars. Illustrated London News, February 1864, from New Zealand History Online.
You read it here first. Or you could have, anyway, if you wanted to. When President Obama issued his signing statement with the signature of the noxious National Defense Authorization Act, last New Year's Eve, I was online almost instantly to let you know that it didn't look so bad after all—that I was pretty sure that he at least really really disliked putting people under indefinite military detention.
The tempest over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation massacre as it unfolded Thursday and Friday put me in mind of a problem on a blogospheric scale that I have meant to address for some time, the Heisenbergian way the Internet has of dealing with uncertainty—you can perceive the velocity of a story as it travels through the Tubes or its position, but not both at the same time, and the aspect you choose has an effect on what the story actually is.
The news that SGK had reversed its decision to withdraw funding for breast examinations [jump]
