Bluescreen

Red Scare

2004-11-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

Good Morning, Everyone.

I would like to thank those of you who have sent email and left messages regarding the outcome of the election last week. Many of us are still trying to make sense of what happened, and I am no exception. There has been a tremendous amount of Monday morning quarterbacking over this election, the strategy of the Democratic party, and the reasons for the Republican party's success. While I have some opinions about why things happened the way they did, I do not pretend to have any silver bullets. I do, however, have some thoughts I would like to share with you, my family and friends. Some of you are Republicans, many are Democrats or Independents. I think that these events are significant enough to concern us all.

First of all, it is unjustified to cast the events of November 2nd as an unqualified disaster for the Democratic party. John Kerry lost the popular vote by 3 points-- that's it. 51 to 48. That means that 48 percent of the people who voted wanted John Kerry to be sworn in as the new Commander-in-Chief. 58,978,616 people voted to elect George W. Bush this time, compared to 55,384,497 who supported John Kerry. That's a difference of about 3.6 million people-- roughly the population of Los Angeles, proper. That's what tipped the popular vote in Bush's favor. In fact, Bush's victory was the narrowest margin for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. Young adults supported Kerry by a margin of 54 to 44 percent, despite the fact that turnout for the youth vote was less than expected. And, remember, had Ohio tipped to Kerry-- just that one state-- we would have a new president-elect right now.

Had Democrats claimed significant victories outside the presidential race, say, in Congressional elections or state ballot measures, I doubt we would be feeling such a sense of malaise. It's when you consider the fact that each of the 11 states that voted to ban gay marriage, did. It's when you consider that both Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, two of the most extreme wingnuts around, beat their moderate Democrat challengers. It's that Tom Daschle, ineffective though he was as Senate Minority Leader, lost his re-election bid. It's that the only Democratic victories worth raising your glass to were Salazar beating Coors in Colorado and Barack Obama, whose victory over Alan Keyes you could have bet your retirement on.

I mean, if we have to get excited about an Obama win, isn't this indicative of how bad it's gotten?

It's when Sean Hannity holds up a map showing the breakdown of presidential voting by county that looks like this:

that we start to wonder if New Zealand really is as pretty as it appears in Lord of the Rings. Our faith is not increased when we see--

Is it really defeatist to say that something is wrong in this country when such statistics are hurled at us? And so the blame-game begins: Kerry was too wooden, and could not live up to the charisma of our last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. The Dems should have followed the Republican lead and spoken the language of "values" that resonates with so many Americans. The Dems needed a better platform for Kerry besides the fact that he "wasn't Bush". Kerry should have responded sooner to the Swift Boat attacks. Take your pick.

What is not commonly understood is that maps like the first one above are designed to emphasize the geographic extent of Bush's supporters-- not their numbers. Remember, Bush squeaked by with the smallest margin of victory in 92 years. If you take that map above and add a third dimension to show its respective populations, you come up with this:

Another way to adjust for population is to view the electoral results through a cartogram-- a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population. In other words, states are drawn not according to their physical size (which has little to do with politics), but by the number of people living in them. The statewide results from election night--

Appear differently as a cartogram. Rhode Island, for example, appears about twice the size of Wyoming, since Rhode Island's 1.1 million inhabitants are about twice the number of Wyoming's 500,000 residents:

In other words, this country is a whole lot bluer than you think, despite the events of last week. (For those who find this cartographic counterpunch medicinal, I recommend a quick visit to: www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ for some serious map-a-palooza.)

But let's not equivocate: something is seriously wrong with the Democratic party today. Many of us on the left were saying this long before November 2nd. One must honestly consider whether Kerry's candidacy would have been viable had it not been for the influx of organizational help from outside the Democratic National Committee. Indeed, if Kerry had won, he would have owed a considerable debt to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, MoveOn's Wes Boyd, filmmaker Michael Moore, and Air America co-founder Al Franken.

But he didn't win. And instead of the liberal backlash that so many of us predicted, we watched the electoral map creep westward on Tuesday night with mounting disbelief. I was reminded of an old newsreel from the '50s in which an animated Soviet Union is shown bleeding over China, until the latter nation is completely covered in the red of communism.

Different fanatics, same great color.

1. What's wrong with the Democratic party?

How did it come to this? How is it that a majority of our countrymen voted in a man like Jim DeMint in South Carolina who believes that gays should not be allowed to hold teaching jobs in public schools? How did we elect Tom Coburn, a former physician who, when treating a patient with an ectopic pregnancy, decided to remove both of her fallopian tubes because God seemed to suggest that she was unfit to bear children?

One component is undoubtedly the role of evangelical Christians. Of the nearly 59 million votes Bush received, roughly 21 million, or 36%, came from this segment. Karl Rove's strategy of getting out the Christian vote was flawless in its execution: 4 million evangelicals who did not vote in 2000 came to the polls this year to hand Bush his victory.

Kerry lost by 3.6 million.

So we have a group of folks who believe that killing, lying, and supporting the powerful over the weak are sins: and they just handed the election over to Bush. Remember that, because we're going to talk about George Orwell's idea of doublethink in a bit.

A colleague sent me the following a few days after the election:

Kind-of says it all, doesn't it? American history is being rewritten to advance the inaccurate view that this country was founded upon Christianity, with Jesus at its center. The fact that the men who created our government were nearly all deists who seldom, if ever, mentioned Jesus in their private correspondence is not raised. Nor is the fact that they were all heavily influenced by the thinkers of-- gasp! --the French enlightenment, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire. Of course, the Puritan influence on early American history is significant, but Puritans didn't create our government-- intellectuals did.

Some believe our society is rushing towards theocracy, and that this trend towards religious fanaticism ("American Taliban") provides the overall context in which many other problems-- homophobia, racism, the endless war on Islam, FCC censorship, and new encroachments upon our civil liberties --must be viewed.

Indeed, it is a compelling case. Many GOP Congressmen, emboldened by their recent victory, have taken off the mask altogether in laying out their new moral agendas-- overturning Roe v Wade, increasing the power of the FCC to censor radio, TV, and film, passing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, using the Department of Education to mandate that evolutionary theory is only one way of looking at the world, and ordering public schools to teach "scientific creationism" as an alternative, an amendment providing the right for Christian prayer in public schools, and an amendment guaranteeing the permanency of the phrase "Under God" in the pledge of allegiance. This last amendment may seem innocuous enough, but couple this with the possibility of mandatory citizen loyalty oaths, floated earlier this year, and you've suddenly made theism a requirement for full citizenship.

Consider that many of the Republicans who either won or retained their seats in Congress last week have already enacted such legislation concerning gay marriage, creationism, and prayer within their home states. They know that Bush is now beholden to his religious base, and they are now turning their focus on the nation at large. A recurrent theme in post-election interviews with religious activists is that Bush owes them, now that they have delivered the vote.

One supporter told Bush in September: "Your presidency is an inspiration. I feel God is in the room." A voter in North Carolina responded to an exit poll interviewer by saying that he had cast his for "for Christianity."

I know several readers are particularly interested in the growing power of the FCC in censoring media. Think this is about to tone down, now that Bush has his "mandate"? Listen to right-wing strategist Richard Viguerie from a November 5th interview:

...there is a war against Christians out there. We would like to make sure that the president, and he's inclined to do this, understands how there's an anti-Christian environment in the culture, at the national level, in Hollywood, television, the media generally, a lot of the institutions -- legal institutions, educational institutions. We want to change that.

In practice, this means giving the FCC a new charter: protect Christians from the media war being launched against them by all those nasty liberals. Punish those who criticize evangelicals, if necessary, the same way you punished Stern and the NFL over Nipplegate. Of course, I would imagine the rabid anti-Muslim statements being made by right-wing radio hosts will somehow continue unabated. And so we create a situation in which the government takes upon the role of protecting Christianity from criticism. Keep in mind, too, that the networks are going to follow the money and voluntarily increase their amount of avowedly religious programming to tap into this red-state viewership.

History shows that we Americans nearly always require an evil "other" against which to define ourselves-- the British, the French, Native Americans, the Spanish, African-Americans, Communists...

and now? When I was wrapping-up my political science degree at Loyola in the mid-90s, all academia was abuzz, wondering who the new enemy would be. The Russian mafia? Chinese agents after our nuclear secrets? The poverty-stricken Third World? Such questions are now passe: The enemy is Islam.

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the nature of Christianity's relationship to Islam has been one of conflict and opposition. To the American evangelical wondering what to do with his time since the fall of godless communism, 9/11 provided a perfect answer: It's the Jihad, stupid. Evangelicals believe that 9/11 occupies a special place in Jesus's cosmic calendar. Remember, George W. Bush is a hero to these people, and George W. Bush believes that Jesus spoke to him in the depths of his alcoholism and told him that he would one day be president and help guide the world to Armageddon. According to this view, Jesus cannot return to earth and begin his 1,000-year reign until Israel is purged of the Palestinian people.

Just one month ago, Republican evangelical Pat Robertson stated:

I see the rise of Islam to destroy Israel and take the land from the Jews and give East Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority…I see that as Satan's plan to prevent the return of Jesus Christ, the Lord.

I know what you're thinking-- come on, Sagar. Who takes Pat Robertson seriously?

Well, who thought that 59 million Americans would take George W. Bush seriously after My Pet Goat? The fact is that dispensational Christianity is now the dominant form of religion practiced in America, and these folks believe that God hand-picked Bush to lead us to the end times as described in the book of Revelations.

And what response do we hear from the leadership of the Democratic party? Do they stand their ground against the American Taliban? Not a chance. Remember, the Dems desperately want to be, in their own words, "a party that wins elections." Even the most liberal of us have a hard time watching Terry McAuliffe on TV and not see him as a used-car salesman. The Dems will do whatever it takes to start winning elections again, and they have already signaled their intention of catering to evangelical voters.

2. Goldwater and McGovern? Phooey-- make sure this doesn't become a Mondale Moment

Much virtual ink has been spilled by those wishing to compare last week's election to the ones in 1964 and 1972. While such analogies are instructive, they do not hit upon one of the main obstacles in the prevention of a true liberal party: Democrats.

1964 saw the crushing defeat of uber-conservative Barry Goldwater. A self-avowed extremist whose platform was antigovernment, antiunion, and anticommunist, and who earned the support of the John Birch society and the Ku Klux Klan, Goldwater won only 6 states against incumbent Lyndon Johnson, and received a popular vote of less than 40%:

Goldwater supporters were devastated. Not only had their candidate lost, but he had lost by so great a margin as to make them scratch their heads and ask, "How could we have called it so wrong?" Goldwater's base did not see themselves as extremists-- they saw the rest of the country as hopelessly liberal. To them, Goldwater was simply a correction to the misdirection America had been suffering from for quite a while.

The key here is what happened next. Rather than reconsider the wisdom of their views and adjust themselves against the mainstream that handed Johnson his second term, Goldwater supporters began building infrastructure to move culture over to their side. The media was widely seen by Republicans as being biased towards liberal causes, especially racial integration. Remember all those "purple heart band-aids" handed out to Republican delegates at their convention last September in an attempt to belittle John Kerry's military decorations? At Goldwater's convention in '64, lapel pins were handed out that read "EASTERN LIBERAL ESTABLISHMENT". Former president Eisenhower railed from the podium:

So let us particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators because ... these people couldn't care less about our party.

The crowd exploded with applause.

When Goldwater had his electoral head handed to him by LBJ a few months later, it may have been the end of his candidacy, but it was only the beginning for his followers. They looked at the map above and saw the great divide which separated them from the rest of the nation-- and they launched a 30-year project to bring the nation over to their side. This is important. At no point did Goldwater's supporters interpret their defeat at the polls as a sign of being out-of-step with the country. It was the nation as a whole, rather, that needed to change. How did they do it? How did they win the hearts and minds of the people over to ultraconservatism?

By controlling the media.

Republicans blamed the media for conspiring against their candidate. They launched a highly coordinated effort to co-opt print, radio, and especially television. In 1971 former Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell came up with the idea of creating a culture of think thanks to serve as a hub from which the GOP could push conservative talking points out into the press, whose laziness made them eager to receive spoon-fed stories, regardless of their ideological spin. In that same year, Paul Weyrich took what was a ragtag bunch of disconnected Southern preachers whose livelihoods consisted of railing against women's rights, homosexuals, and communism, and organized them into a movement that would one day become the Christian Coalition. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's FCC Chairman, Mark S. Fowler, abolished the Fairness Doctrine, a critical piece of media regulation that guaranteed a balance of viewpoints between opposing sides. A decade later, Newt Gingrich met with top media moguls to broker a deal: his Republican-controlled Congress would pressure the Justice Department to turn a blind-eye to media consolidation if the barons promised favorable coverage to the Republican party.

These are highlights from a very layered story. For an in-depth, chilling look at the 30-year infiltration of the media by neoconservatives, I highly recommend David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and how it Corrupts Democracy. So while Goldwater lost, his ideals eventually won acceptance into the mainstream: a mere 16 years later saw the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House. Besides being a former governor of California, Reagan was also a far-right Republican who had been a staunch supporter of Goldwater's candidacy. The Republican infiltration of the media succeeded in winning wide acceptance for political views that a decade earlier were seen as being far outside the mainstream.

Those who urge John Kerry's supporters to make this our "Goldwater moment" urge us to continue building the infrastructure we have begun this year. Organizations like Air America radio and DemocraticUnderground.com, Media Matters for America, and George Soros's Phoenix Group are helping lay the groundwork for a future liberal agenda, according to this view.

Commentators contrast the Republican's hidden victory in 1964 against George McGovern's failed bid for the presidency in 1972. A far-left liberal whose platform included amnesty for draft dodgers, unlimited welfare for all, and a federally-guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, McGovern received a crushing defeat at the hands of incumbent Richard Nixon:

McGovern won one state-- Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. McGovern was the first Democratic candidate since the New Deal to lose the white working class vote. He, and others within the Democratic party had decided that they the party should start loudly advocating boutique issues, like amnesty for draft dodgers and unlimited welfare for all, over traditional support for working Americans. Working class America found themselves at odds with the exoticism of these views, and turned to the more moderate Richard Nixon, handing the Republican party an electoral coup. Never before had Republicans succeeded in courting the working man. As in the case of Goldwater, what's important is what McGovern's followers did next: they did nothing. No regrouping the party around working individuals, no building of infrastructure, no well-laid plans to regain their base and slowly turn mass culture to their point of view, no initiatives to win back these voters.

Nothing.

We liberals must see the defeat of John Kerry as our Goldwater moment, commentators tell us, for this at least contains the seeds of future victory. Regardless of who takes the White House in 2008, unless we succeed in gaining acceptance of our values, any individual victory will be phyrric, at best.

While the exhortation to build our scaffolding is a good one that should be followed, I believe we do ourselves a disservice by not acknowledging a third course of action-- a dangerous one that the Dems are even now beginning to flirt with: we must not make this our Mondale Moment.

In 1984, Democrats ran Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan's bid for a second term. The results weren't pretty:

Democrats were in full crisis-mode at this point-- not only had Carter, the last Democratic president, squeaked by with just over 50% over the popular vote, but 1/3 of registered Democrats had voted for Reagan once in 1980, and again in 1984. Stanley Greenberg conducted a series of focus groups among these so-called "Reagan Democrats" and argued that the traditional liberal agenda of racial integration, reforming the justice system, welfare, and standing by the working class no longer held sway with the American public. His findings prompted a soul-searching within the Democratic leadership, and along came the DLC.

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was born in an overt attempt to pull the party to the right. They eschewed traditional liberal stances on welfare, race relations, and workers in favor of cozying up to big business. They felt the Democratic party had to "get back into the business of winning elections again". Even if it meant abandoning their base in favor of an emerging market of new conservative voters. The situation was so dire, that DLC founders believed they needed to take emergency measures in order to "save the Democratic party." The speed with which the DLC came to dominate the party may be revealed by a glance at its early leadership and founding members: Bill Clinton, Albert Gore, Joseph Leiberman, and Terry McAuliffe are just some of the names. Before long, the Democratic party had re-cast itself as "the other big business party", as demonstrated by Clinton's signing of NAFTA into law, his push for welfare reform, and lukewarm support for abortion rights.

In other words, the Dems suffered a crushing defeat-- just like the Republicans in '64 --but decided to move in the exact opposite direction. While their positions drew much more to the right than McGovern, they sought to regain their lost working class votes by swinging conservative on social issues, instead of re-framing the party around the well-being of these working Americans.

The result? Dems officially stopped being the party of working people. With this important historical distinction gone, Republicans wasted no time in pointing out the few important differences that now existed between the two parties: Gay rights. Permissive lifestyles. Abortion, abortion, abortion.

Wedge issues that once existed on the periphery of political discourse now moved to the center of the debate. Ann Coulter began to regularly refer to the Dems as "The National Abortion party, otherwise known as the Democrats". Pundits succeeded in re-casting the very real class consciousness historically associated with the heartland away from economic differences, and into cultural ones instead.

Democrats were arrogant. Intellectuals. Know-it-alls. Beemer-driving, latte-sipping liberals. The rage that Kansans once heaped upon the wealthy during the 1930's was re-trained away from the rich and onto those meddling liberals. Red-staters actually believe that a vote for George W. Bush is a vote for the little guy, a vote against the mighty and powerful. Republicans have done a brilliant job of eliminating economics from red-state consciousness. This is no accident. If red-staters were to realize that a vote for Bush was also a vote for Enron, WorldComm, Halliburton, and their own low wages, they might think twice. But Rush, Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly have succeeded in banishing economics to fringes, and the sensationalistic media has predictably stood in line to sip the Kool-Aid. Red-staters are trained to respond to wedge issues, and it is these very issues that decided the outcome of the election two weeks ago.

If you read one book this year, check out Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? A native Kansan, Frank examines with fascinating insight how red-state liberal rage was corrupted by the Republican party into a new constituency. Kansas is also worth reading because it gives you a peek into what the Republicans are going to do now with their enhanced national standing.

3. Dumb and Dumberer

Sometimes you've just got to say it like it is. We may take solace knowing that most of world sympathizes with us--

--but dumb we are. We somehow have to put up with Chimpy for another four years.

Given the divisions that so clearly exist in our society today, you would think that the first task for the president would be to repair the rifts that separate us. You would think that, right? In his concession speech, John Kerry shared some details about his conversation with Bush:

Earlier today, I spoke to President Bush, and I offered him and Laura our congratulations on their victory. We had a good conversation and we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need – the desperate need – for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today, I hope that we can begin the healing.

Even Bush supporters commended Kerry for his concession speech, and echoed his call to heal the divisions within our country. And the guy from Crawford? Despite his razor-thin victory, Bush claimed to have received a "mandate" (again, religious overtones), and vowed to use it:

"When you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . "

"I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals."

"Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style."

For those of you who don't speak Cheney, allow me to translate:

Join me or shut the fuck up.

There is another important reason why we can expect to see a radicalized Bush during the next four years: he owes his ascendancy to the religious right. And he knows it. 23 million evangelicals expect to be taken seriously for getting him back in the White House. Consider Viguerie's comments above. Look at this sample mailing from the party faithful:

A day after Bush's victory, Republican senator Arlen Specter had the audacity to suggest that Bush should reconsider appointing judges to the Supreme Court who intend to reverse Roe v Wade. A controversy erupted against the recently-galvanized extremists calling for Specter's dismissal from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Conservative evangelical James Dobson called upon his flock to denounce Specter and urge Bush to replace him as Senate Judiciary Committee chair:

His unapologetic support of abortion makes him the wrong man to run point in the fight for Bush's judicial nominees over the next four years. He has a long history of dismissing pro-lifers as 'extremists' and has gone so far as to advocated stripping his party's platform of its formal opposition to abortion... The next few days likely will determine whether Specter weathers the storm...

Just today, The Hill announced that Specter's troubles were far from over:

Bob Jones, racist, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, and founder of Bob Jones University, issued his demands to Bush after the events of last Tuesday:

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America-- though she doesn't deserve it --a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. you owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

And so the Night of the Long Knives begins. Moderates, take note-- your presence is no longer required. You must feel like a fish out of water. I know some of you reading this only voted for Kerry because he was 'not Bush', but what are you going to do now? Become a born-again Christian? Mount this above your door?

Start worrying that the public schools are secretly trying to turn your children gay? Do you really see yourself turning into the kind of person your party had in mind when it send out the following flyer to voters in Arkansas?

I mean, come on, guys. I understand you want your tax breaks, but how far are you willing to go to get them? How far along the path to theocracy until we say 'enough'? Yours is no longer "the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decry profligacy and waste", as Garrison Keillor puts it. A vote for the Republican party today is a vote for the American Taliban, plain and simple. You may have started appealing to the religious kooks with a wink and a nudge, but they've taken on a life of their own, and I don't think the leadership exists on your side to control this Frankenstein.

If the rise of religious extremism, preemptive military engagements, a contraction of civil liberties, aversion to intellectuals, and the preference for charismatic leaders sounds familiar, it's because we have observed this historical pattern before, and have given it a name: fascism.

4. Big Brothers I have known

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

I didn't understand most of Orwell's 1984 when I first read it in, um, 1984. Like zen koans, the party's slogans seemed to offer insights into the human soul that refused to reveal themselves before my politically-naive eyes. Re-reading Orwell's vision of the future after Bush's first term is a startling experience. We now have living embodiments that testify to Orwell's understanding of the inner workings of the totalitarian state.

Since declaring the "War on Terror", we Americans have been persuaded that as long as we never give up the fight, the terrorists will be unable to hurt us again. The key to our own security, we are told, lies in our determination to never give up the fight. This contradictory idea allowed us to attack a sovereign nation which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. It forged the doctrine of military preemption, which I suspect will be used to first-strike more than a few other nations before it runs its course.

War, in other words, is peace.

At the same time, we are urged to willingly surrender many of our precious liberties in the name of routing out the enemies within. The misnamed Patriot Act strips us of rights forged over the course of 100 years. Foreign-born and native-born Arabs are held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay for years without charges. Military tribunals are allowed to proceed from the premise that the accused stands guilty until he can prove his innocence. Patriot Act II is already in the works. By giving up these rights, we ensure that our way of life can continue unhindered.

Freedom is slavery.

Many of us watched the Bush-Kerry debates on TV. Most honest observers handed the victory to Kerry, largely for his command of the issues, his in-depth knowledge of the war on terror, and the carefully-reasoned way in which he answered each question asked of him. Bush, by contrast, acted impulsively. He sighed. He rolled his eyes. He stammered. He interrupted the moderators, and overrode their directions when it suited him. He did everything but curse Kerry out in front of the audience. (For those unlucky enough to have missed the reactions, you can watch them here)

Despite this, Bush supporters claimed the debates a win for their candidate. Those of us on the other side of the aisle dismissed them as being either disingenuous or out-of-touch with reality. In hindsight, however, we made a key failure in misreading the GOP mindset that could call the debates for Bush. How many times have we heard Bush supporters justify their appraisal of the president by intoning that "at least I know where he stands"? The fact that Bush was ignorant of important facts that Kerry seemed to possess in droves did not rouse concern in the breast of his fans. To them, Kerry's intellectualism repelled. The fact that Kerry visibly thought-out his responses signalled a failure to lead from his gut. Bush leaped to his feet and stammered out misstatements, but goddamit, the man felt it. Polls showed that this very refusal to reconsider positions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary translated into strong leadership in the minds of voters. They consistently felt that Bush was better able to protect the country than Kerry, despite the latter being a highly-decorated war veteran.

Ignorance is strength.

It is important to condition the populace to accept mutually-exclusive tenets in order for these contradictions to be sustained. Orwell knew this, and even had a term for it: doublethink. The ability to hold two mutually-contradictory propositions in the mind and believe them both.

Bush is a regular guy who I'd like to have a beer with/ Bush is a man of God who has been chosen to guide us to the end times

Kerry is an intellectual snob who attended Yale/ Bush is smart enough to be president because he went to Harvard and Yale

Kerry's contributions to the Vietnam war are negated by the fact that he went to gain exposure to launch his political career/ Bush understands war because he served in the Texas Air National Guard

The economy was stagnant when Bush took it over/ Bush's tax cuts will return us to the prosperity of the 90s

They will greet us with flowers and sweets/ We always knew it would be a long war

We are going to war to destroy their weapons of mass destruction/ We went to war to remove Saddam Hussein

etc.

5. What we need to do now

First, crucify any Democrat who argues that we must start speaking "the language of values" in order to gain electoral victories. Such victories, if any are to be had by following this disastrous course, will be empty. Phrases like "the language of values" mask the real right-wing agenda of homophobia, racism, and misogyny. As Obama reminded us at the Democratic Convention, Dems have plenty of real values to be proud of: we have black friends, and white friends. We even know gay people. Our tolerance for ways of life different than our own is one of our defining characteristics which is worth celebrating. Treat "the language of values" like what it is: a pretty phrase that masks an ugly feeling. The South never went to war for slavery. They went to war in order to protect "the Southern way of life."

Democrats need to stop being "the other party of big business" and reclaim their base: working Americans. Those of us with other hot-button issues need to have the political courage to put them behind our first priority of taking back the working class. This segment, frankly, finds many of our views strange. But if we can show them that a vote for the Dems is a vote for their own economic well-being, then we can begin reintroducing social issues. We will never win the working class back unless we shift attention from these issues and back to economics. Convince people who work for a living that Dems are looking out for them, not Bill O'Reilly, and you start to undo the damage started by McGovern and you begin reclaiming red states.

Pie in the sky? Consider:

Arkansas: Bush, 54%, Kerry 45%
Georgia: Bush, 58%, Kerry 41%
South Carolina: Bush, 58%, Kerry 41%
North Carolina: Bush, 56%, Kerry 44%
Virginia: Bush, 54%, Kerry 45%
Tennessee: Bush, 57% Kerry 43%
Kentucky: Bush, 60%, Kerry 40%
Arizona: Bush, 55%, Kerry 44%
Colorado: Bush, 52%, Kerry 47%

It is entirely within our ability to take back these states, not to mention to more obvious electoral prizes of Florida and Ohio. Minorities, particularly African-Americans, need to be reached out to by the Democratic party, which has too-long taken their votes for granted. Black and Hispanic voter turnout for Republicans was stronger than expected. Who cares if 90% of African-Americans still votes Democratic? Why did the other 10% vote for Bush? Were they sleeping during all that race-baiting in the weeks leading up to the election?

Goldwater, McGovern, and Mondale Moments aside, let's not forget that this was not a landslide defeat for the Democrats. Bush won the slimmest electoral margin since Woodrow Wilson won in 1916. The number of votes that determined the winner was about the size of LA proper. When you see them posturing about their mandate-- that's all it is: posturing. 49% of voters supported John Kerry. That's significant.

Democrats need to get some balls. We now have a charged-up electorate, composed of re-energized liberals, homegrown populists, progressives, disenchanted conservatives, and lots of young people for whom the events of this year served as a political initiation. We cannot afford to let them slouch back into the caves of indifference and apathy. We must organize ourselves as smartly as the Republicans did after 1964. Luckily, we have lots of clever people on our side. Why, we even invented the Internets.

"An organized minority will always triumph over a disorganized majority". So sprach Friedrich Nietszche, and the Republican party proved it with their 30-year odyssey from extremist fringe to mainstream electorate. One of the ways they did it was to create a proliferation of right wing groups and then organize them through the Republican party. As a result, Karl Rove can push a single talking point and within hours we find ourselves bombarded with it from radio, Internet, TV, and print sources. One of the main hubs to this wheel is Townhall.com. If you want to see the number of think tanks that coordinate with the RNC on issue agreement, try the drop-down menu and see what you find (just click on the image and try it yourself):

We have nothing like this on the left.

Then there is the Republican echo chamber: the sheer number of voices spewing and affirming the same opinion confers upon that opinion a veneer of legitimacy. We liberals need to create our own echo chamber, our own punditocracy, our own talking points, and our own long-term plans. If building long-term infrastructure means losing in 2008, so be it. We must stop the Democrats from being a party that simply wants to win elections and back into a party that actually stands for something important, something more than "not the other guy".

Now is the time create an external group to help pull the Democratic party back to the working class. While getting the direction completely wrong, the DLC did one thing right: they knew they could never reform the party from within. The same may be said for us today. The amount of institutional inertia within the parties works against true reform. It will be considerably easier moving this donkey to the left if we get off and pull him there.

Stung by the effect of ads by 527 groups, Republicans are now pushing legislation through Congress to close the campaign finance loophole that allowed groups like MoveOn to flourish in the first place. Despite this inevitability, we still have time to coalesce such groups into a true counterweight to the conservative voices within the DNC. The leadership is there. The ties to deep pockets are there. The membership lists are there. We just need to do it. The long-term influence of such an organization upon the DNC would be considerable.

Within a few years Republican pollsters might find themselves scratching their heads at focus groups indicating their loss of sway over red-state voters. It's time we started driving the agenda. Those red-state votes are out there, waiting for us, if we have the political courage to think long-term.

6. Black Box Voting, and the very real possibility that Kerry won the election

Sour grapes.

That's what you're thinking, right? We liberals should just face facts and accept that this country is a whole lot more screwed-up than we think.

Well, sure-- look at all the state initiatives that passed banning gay marriage. Look at the procession of unsavory senators who just claimed victories over their challengers: Bunning, Coburn, and DeMint, just to name a few. Hell, look at the fact that it was even close, given what we all know about BushCo by now.

Republicans love to make anyone who questions the validity of Bush's claim of victory last week look like, well, a sore loserman. But consider the facts:

1. http://www.votergate.tv Watch the video-- especially the part with Howard Dean about halfway through where he changes the database figures. (Skye-- the computer scientist from Johns Hopkins in the beginning looks a bit like you, don't you think?)

2. One of the main manufacturers of electronic voting machines is Diebold Voting Systems. In an August 14th memo, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell wrote that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The memo, incidentally, was part of a fund-raising letter sent to Republican voters.

3. Diebold machines are entirely electronic. They do not issue a paper trail. This means that recounts are impossible to perform, and the only sign that voter manipulation may have occurred is the presence of discrepancies in exit polls.

4. Exit polls done in states without electronic voting machines proved to be consistently more accurate than exit polls done in states with a large number of electronic machines:

The only way this can be explained is for one to believe that voters in states with electronic voting machines lie more often to exit poll interviewers about the ballot they just cast than voters in states with manual voting machines. The response from the media? Exit polls are now passe and should be abolished. This would effectively remove the last indicator that voting fraud has occurred.

5. The 29 voting precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters, to be precise. Remember, Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes.

6. Florida counties that used optical vote scanners experienced strange results. In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used and the results fed into central servers. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Remember, Bush only won Florida by 377,216 votes.

7. In Ohio, Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

8. Ohio Secretary of State Jim Blackwell was sued in 2004 because 21 Ohio counties were wrongly informing ex-felons that they had no right to vote. Blackwell’s office agreed on Sept. 3 to inform all ex-felons of their voting rights in time for the registration deadline but later backed out of the agreement. In addition to his duties as Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell was the head of Bush's re-election campaign for Ohio.

9. When asked if he feared becoming the new Kathleen Harris (Florida's Ms. Fix-It in 2000), Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, noted that Harris's efforts had landed her a seat in Congress.

10. International poll observers were banned by Ken Blackwell from monitoring polls in Ohio. "From my long experience of international election observation, my suspicions are immediately aroused when officials appear to want to deny observers access to polling sites," said Owen Thomas, Chief Executive of Electoral Reform Services in London. "International observation throws light on the workings of democracy. Why would anyone be against that?"

Does all of this prove that the election was manipulated? No. That's the thing about paperless voting machines-- there will never be any evidence that malfeasance took place. But look at the preponderance of circumstantial evidence and ask yourself if this makes sense.

The first network to call Florida for Bush in 2000 was Fox News Channel. Michael Moore found that the person in control of the decision desk at Fox that night happened to be Bush's first cousin. Given Fox's extreme right-wing bias, this may not come as a shock to many people. What is less known is that the next network to follow suit was MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric. GE CEO John Welch reportedly leaned over the decision desk that fateful night and said, "What would it take for you to call Florida for Bush?" Besides owning MSNBC, General Electric happens to have a very lucrative business in weapons manufacturing. GE is the 8th largest recipient of war contracts from the US government, having received $7.7 billion in military contracts between 2000 and 2003 alone.

Well, this time it was election night redux. While the rest of the media was waiting for the votes to be tallied in Ohio, Fox again jumped the gun and became the first network to call it for Bush. MSNBC promptly followed suit-- just like they did four years earlier. Unlike last time, however, the rest of the media held off until more information was known. Compare the following screenshots I took between midnight and 2 am Wednesday morning:

NPR calls Ohio still undecided at 1:35 AM ET:

CNN calls Ohio undecided at 1:57 AM ET:

Fox News calls Ohio for Bush at 12:41 AM ET:

As in 2000, MSNBC follows Fox's lead and calls Ohio for Bush by 1:40 AM ET:

Another interesting twist was CNN's silent switching-out of their Ohio exit poll results. The following results were representative of Ohio's exit poll results throughout election day:

But at 1:41 AM EST, CNN quietly posted new exit poll figures for Ohio which agreed with the story Republican pollsters were framing about Bush taking the state. Suddenly, Kerry's 51-to-49 advantage over Bush among males was reversed into a 52-to-47 win for Bush. Similarly, Kerry's 53-to-47 lead among women in Ohio whittled down to a 50-50 tie with Bush:

These new numbers are extraordinary, considering that all of CNN's exit poll figures had been uniformly siding with Kerry right up to the updated timestamp of 1:41 AM. CNN never explained this dramatic reversal of Kerry's Ohio numbers.

I simply do not understand the ability of some people to shrug off the fact that this election may have been stolen. "Look at Kennedy and Nixon-- stolen happens", a friend recently told me. True. If ever a case for stuffing the ballot box could be made, one need look no further than Joseph Kennedy's collusion with the Chicago machine in securing the presidency for his son in 1960. But the difference is this: although Kennedy stole the election in '60, the Dems didn't install machinery which would consistently deliver the vote to their candidates beyond that election. Republicans today have planted hardware in voting precincts across the country-- particularly in Florida and Ohio, where the greatest cache of electoral votes reside --that are paperless, unauditable, and that can demonstrably be hacked, as Bev Harris's demonstration to Howard Dean illustrates. When you consider the stated views of Grover Norquist, Republican highroller, to change America into a one-party state, dire consequences emerge.

Yes: the Democrats need to focus on fixing their party.
Yes: Kerry should have presented himself as more than a war hero at his convention.
Yes: Kerry should have responded to the Swift Boat ads faster.

No argument there.

But this does not mean that we should take the possibility of a stolen election lying down. Kerry has already conceded, so this is not about trying to undo the results of November 2nd. Rather, it is about getting answers to some difficult questions surrounding black box voting. It is about investigating these serious discrepancies (which, incidentally, tend to only favor Bush) and finding out who is responsible for them. The fact that we know, in our hearts, we could have run a better campaign does not alleviate us of this responsibility.

Some Democratic members of Congress are trying to answer these very questions. Sign the petition at MoveOn.org and lend your voice to others that are calling out for Congress to investigate the 2004 vote:

MoveOn's Petition.

This will also help draw attention to the problem of paperless electronic voting systems.

7. Finally

In the aftermath of Richard Nixon's disgraceful resignation from office, three young congressional aides sat around the ruins of the Republican party, wondering what went wrong. They decided to start a conservative lunch club to begin sorting it all out. Unbenowst to themselves, they were laying the groundwork for not only their party's future success, but their own place within its history. George F. Will, Paul Weyrich, and Trent Lott are household names today. But had they shrugged their shoulders and conceded defeat to the dominant ethos of their time, history would have moved on without them.

May the opponents of American theocracy possess the same far-sightedness today.

Regarding Edward N. Luttwak's review of Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command"

2004-10-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

(Letter to the Editor, LA Times)

Edward N. Luttwak's October 3rd review of Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command suffers from several shortcomings, related, no doubt, to Luttwak's status as a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The CSIS is headed by John J. Hamre, formerly deputy secretary of defense, and is dominated by pro-military members, many of whom continue to work for large defense contractors like General Electric and Halliburton. Selecting a member of the CSIS to critique the man who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal is like appointing Enron to investigate the cause of California's power crisis.

Luttwak attempts to diminish Hersh's authority, which is considerable in the world of investigative journalism, by throwing speculative non-issues before the reader's eyes. We are told that Hersh did not actually "break" the Abu Ghraib scandal anymore than he "broke" My Lai. In both cases, military investigations were already underway by the time Hersh became involved. This only diminishes Hersh's significance if you believe that the public does not have the right to know of the military's record of abuse and torture. There is little chance that the military would have voluntarily shared such information with the American people at large-- the same American people who ultimately exercise control over the Armed Services. We are told that a previous Hersh work, The Samson Option, contains "melodramatic speculations." This same book, however, was called "a convincing description" by the journal Foreign Affairs, the premiere text of the diplomatic community. In any event, facile dismissals of Hersh's previous books have nothing to do with the work under review.

When coupled with highly partisan comments contained elsewhere in his review, Luttwak's agenda becomes clear: to vindicate the current administration of the crimes at Abu Ghraib as much as is feasibly possible.The reader is encouraged to spread the blame for Abu Ghraib among the US's allies, including the Swedes, "those champions of humanistic posturing." We are consoled that if we Americans have committed abuses against innocent civilians, at least we are not like other Arab countries, where "they are routinely tortured." Luttwak makes statements where his right-wing agenda shines forth more clearly. We are told that there is still hope for the CIA, because "Former Rep. Porter Goss, the new CIA director, actually knows the business and recognizes that he must rebuild espionage expertise from almost zero." This, despite strong concerns among both Democratic and Republican members of Congress that Goss's partisan attacks earlier this year make him unfit to hold such a sensitive position. (A view, incidentally, also held by Goss himself, who confessed to filmmaker Michael Moore earlier this year that he could not hold a job at the CIA today because he was out of touch with today's intelligence community.) Luttwak condones the abuses of Abu Ghraib because "it remained for our troops to discover that 95% of Iraquis are entrapped by tribalism, fanatical religion and the gross ignorance of the clerics they blindly follow." Apparently, Luttwak's book reviews do not include the works of George H.W. Bush, who wrote that he did not commit US troops to long-term service in Iraq, because there was no viable exit strategy, and that they would be seen as occupiers in a bitterly hostile land.

This is not a book review. It is an excuse for Edward Luttwak to diminish the significance of Abu Ghraib and advance his own conservative agenda. If I wanted unbalanced right-wing opinion, I would have subscribed to the National Review.

Sincerely,
Sagar M. Jethani

George W. Bush's Resumé

2004-09-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: This individual seeks an executive position. He will be available next January, and is willing to relocate.

RESUMÉ

GEORGE W. BUSH

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Law Enforcement:

I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under
the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's
license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

Military:

I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to
take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the
Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:

I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

I ran for U.S. Congress and lost.

I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas, in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas.

The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.

With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:

I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies,
making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston
replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of
billions in borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any governor in
American history.

With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my
father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing
by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a
criminal record.
I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of
over one billion dollars per week.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S.
Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S.
history.

I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in
any 12 month period.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12 month
period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of
the U.S. stock market. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans
lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any
administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice,
has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I set the record for most campaign fundraising trips by a U.S.
President.

I am the all-time U.S. and world record holder for receiving the
most corporate campaign donations.

My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best
friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud
in U.S. History, Enron.

My political party used Enron private jets and corporate
attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my
election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against
investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating
the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the
biggest corporate rip-offs in history. I presided over the biggest energy
crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.

I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be
awarded government contracts.

I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any
President in U.S. history.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest
bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.

I've broken more international treaties than any President in
U.S. history.

I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United
Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war"
detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations
election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).

I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any
President since the advent of television.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any
one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided
over the worst security failure in U.S. history.

I garnered the most sympathy ever for the U.S. after the World
Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated
country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to
simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering
the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked,
preemptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did
so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens,
and the world community.

I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a
cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families in wartime.

In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for
attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.

I am the first President in history to have a majority of
Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and
security.

I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker
Buster," a WMD.

I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin
Laden to justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my
father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.

All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my
bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my
Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in
secrecy and unavailable for public review.

PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN 2004!

Exit, Stage Right

2004-09-12T17:31:00.000-07:00

The protests are over. The delegates have returned to their states of origin. And the last balloon has long since deflated. Like Kaiser Soze, the 2004 Republican National Convention appeared amid much anticipation, did its thing, and—like that!—was gone.

Well-publicized reports in the print media emphasized the pains taken by Republican strategists to present a moderate face to the American electorate. The ideological cicadas who normally surface every few years for public consideration were all but banished from the podium this year. Rather than present its true face, the Republican National Convention was a commercial for how the GOP wants the public to see their party.

Consider the line-up of prime time speakers: Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani. Here you find none of the fiery wingnuts normally associated with the GOP. Here you will find pro-choice Republicans and immigrant stories. Republicans who favor stronger protection for the environment. Republicans who believe that stem cell research should be supported, but that a constitutional ban on gay marriage should not.

Even the ubiquitous House majority leader Tom DeLay kept a conspicuously low profile, prompting some to ask: “Who hid the hammer?”

In an eyebrow-raising moment, Arnold Schwarzenegger declared what many took to be the GOP’s formal blessing of the big tent:

And maybe, just maybe, you don't agree with this party on every single issue. I say to you tonight I believe that's not only okay, that's what's great about this country. Here we can respectfully disagree and still be patriotic, still be American and still be good Republicans.

Good to know the Republican will still take your vote, even if you don’t agree with them.

Those who were surprised at the Republican’s reining-in of its extreme elements would do well to consider what was not picked up by the network cameras: the not-so-subtle cross emblazoned on the wooden podium which conveyed a special message to the religious right. The closed conferences at hotel meeting rooms throughout New York where Republican leaders did their best to convince ideologues that their extreme agendas were still at the heart of their party.

“We will win this culture war”, announced a triumphal Senator Sam Brownback to a packed, invitation-only crowd at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ballroom. Billed the “Family, Faith, and Freedom” rally, the event featured religious speakers such as ex-Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed, Timothy Goeglein, the White House liaison to Christian groups, and Brownback himself, a strong supporter of a constitutional ban on abortion. “You are the heart and soul of the party”, Brownback assured rally attendees who felt miffed at their banishment from the main stage. “We are going to keep moving this agenda forward.”

Attendees then watched a film reminding them of George W. Bush’s strong evangelical credentials that ended with the eerie admonition more fitting to Mao Tse-Tung than an American president: “Will the faith of George Bush be sufficient to keep us in God’s hands today? Perhaps if we all join our faith to his.”

By invoking references to a culture war, Brownback openly acknowledged that the paradigm first raised by Pat Buchanan during his infamous Nuremberg speech at the 1992 GOP convention was still current in today’s Republican party. Contrast this with the Republican hand-wringing that followed Senator Zell Miller’s fiery oration and you begin to see that this year’s convention was all about perception over reality. Had Zell-fire delivered his revivalist sermon during one of the many meetings that took place off the main convention floor, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But his public stance threatened to expose the party’s agenda in a manner that risked alienating voters watching at home.

Another series of rallies took place during the convention’s off-hours between GOP leaders and religious interest groups. Party chairman Ed Gillespie, top White House aide Matt Schlapp, and Senator Brownback addressed a group of 300 Catholics at the Westin Hotel to help coordinate a nationwide effort to align Catholic voters behind their party.

Gillespie sought to identify compassionate conservatism with the Church’s mission of social welfare:

Compassionate conservatism is all about helping people, and I am very proud to tout this president’s commitment to the idea of greater cooperation between government and church-based charities.

Absent were any references to the war in Iraq (opposed by Pope John Paul II) or the war on terror—themes endlessly trumpeted from the convention stage. Instead, Republicans reminded Catholics that their party alone stood for a constitutional ban on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Bishop Edmund Carmody urged attendees to vote only for candidates who opposed abortion. In a manner which bore overtones to the “justifiable homicide” acolytes within the pro-life movement, he endorsed the idea that anyone who voted for a pro-choice candidate was “guilty of formal cooperation with evil.”

Orthodox Jews were also courted by Republicans during the convention in New York. Tevi Troy, the Bush campaign’s official liaison to the Jewish community, met with 200 Orthodox rabbis at the Waldorf-Astoria where he pressed them to deliver the Jewish vote for the Republican party. Officials no less than Vice-President Dick Cheney met with the Republican Jewish Coalition where he emphasized his administration’s support for Israel and the latter’s continued construction of settlements in occupied lands. The rabbis were reminded that Republican speakers specifically stated their party’s support of Israel from the convention pulpit several times, whereas Democrats had failed to do so even once during their convention in Boston.

Not all the meetings off-camera included members of the religious right. Party stalwart and avowed homophobe Phyllis Schlafly participated in a book signing ceremony for her contribution to the RNC-backed anthology Thank You, President Bush. One of the ceremony’s speakers intoned against the failure of anti-sodomy laws by declaring: “We can’t leave that up to the states.”

Hardly the language of inclusivity.

Despite the inclusion to the Republican platform of a so-called “unity plank,” which allows for members of good will to disagree, no specific mention is made of potentially divisive issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research. This vacuum is hardly unintentional, allowing, as it does, the silent hand of the party extremists to quietly maintain control over them.

Many on the left anticipated this bait-and-switch approach before it began. Speaking before the convention on ABC News’s This Week, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said:

They're going to run a kind of Potemkin convention, where they will have people on the stage who don't run the Congress, don't run the administration, but are going to be putting the kinder and gentler, compassionate-conservative look on this administration.

Despite the blatant stage-managing, Right-wing cheerleader George F. Will exulted in the Washington Post that the Republican party had returned to a “libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions”, and that the challenge now remained keeping cultural fissures like abortion and same-sex marriage closed. In one of the more bizarre comparisons of the year, Will compared George W. Bush to the late Senator and firebrand Barry Goldwater, whose libertarian spirit, according to Will, smiled down upon this year’s GOP convention. In a nod to ideologues, however, Will conceded:

The Republican party remains firmly on the side of the pro-life and religiously motivated social conservatives. But here this week the party began in earnest the task of making others not only more comfortable within the party but eligible to rank among its leaders.

Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

The reference to Goldwater is telling, but not in the way Will intended. Whereas Goldwater could crow during his 1964 RNC acceptance speech that “extremism in the name of liberty is no vice!”, today’s Republican party seeks to banish any semblance of its extreme agenda to the wings, adopting a strategy of false advertising in order to hawk its shoddy wares to American centrists. This approach is about as thinly-veiled as Janet Jackson’s right tit, and much less appealing.

What happened in New York two weeks ago was political reality TV. No serious viewer could mistake the events onstage with the real face of the Republican party. Just as the narrative decisions behind Survivor are made behind closed doors by the show’s producers, so too was the RNC carefully stage managed by party strategists Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Tom “the Hammer” DeLay. Speeches were carefully vetted and sanitized for primetime consumption, while core agenda items were either pushed to earlier slots in the schedule when viewership was known to be light, or simply offshored to the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel away from the cameras altogether. Party chairman Ed Gillespie could have taught Mark Burnett a thing or two about how to drive a false narrative through Gillespie’s perfect selection of party moderates who hold sway with voters, but none with actual GOP decision makers.

Of course, all conventions have their secret deals struck behind closed doors, away from the scrutiny of the cameras. But the Republicans have created something fundamentally new. From now on, parties with extreme agendas like the GOP will simply produce fake conventions to sell themselves to the mainstream electorate, while brokering all ideological deals away from public view. The importance of secrecy was demonstrated when Republican leaders discovered that a New York Times reporter had attended their closed door “Family, Faith, and Freedom” rally. Their outrage persisted despite his subsequent production of a legitimate invitation.

In the film American Beauty, Kevin Spacey’s character, Lester Burnham, explains to his neighbor why he is not bothered by his wife’s infidelities. He may as well have been talking about the Republican party and its convention:

“My marriage is just for show—a commercial for how normal we are, when we’re anything but.”

A kinder, gentler Republican party?

Look closer.

Swift Boat Veterans for Trash?

2004-08-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

(LA Times Letter to the Editor. Note: Shortly after writing this, several major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, ran articles describing even deeper ties between the Swift Boat veterans and the Republican party.)

In their August 17th article “Veterans Battle over Truth,” Maria L. La Ganga and Stephen Brau conclude that debate continues to surround John Kerry’s Vietnam war record because important details remain “murky.” Unfortunately, the omission of several salient points by La Ganga and Brau not only contributes to this ambiguity, but inadvertently lends credibility to those who would attempt to sully John Kerry’s war record.

The first point concerns the identity of John O’Neill, co-founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Joe Klein describes in the January 5 issue of The New Yorker how John O’Neill was carefully groomed by the Nixon administration to counter John Kerry, who had returned from Vietnam and appeared before Congress to call for an end to the war. Former Nixon chief counsel Charles Colson recounted to Klein that Kerry was:

…an immediate target of the Nixon administration… He was a thorn in our flesh. He forced us to create a counterfoil.

The counterfoil? John O’Neill.

We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group.

Brian Williams further corroborated Colson’s claims in a March 15, 2004 NBC News segment titled: “Nixon Targeted Kerry for Anti-War Views”:

Colson was Nixon’s point man against Kerry, and he found a weapon in another veteran: John O’Neill. He was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, which backed Nixon administration policy in Vietnam, and in turn was supported by the White House.

Thus was the predecessor of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth born.

But O’Neill’s political ties are not consigned to the past. Since 1990, he has given $14,650 to a slew of Republican-only federal candidates and national political organizations. O’Neill clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1990, and was re-introduced to the mainstream media in 2003 through the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine.

Despite this, O’Neill claimed on an August 10th broadcast of CNN’s Crossfire: "I've had no serious involvement in politics of any kind in over 32 years."

O’Neill is only described by La Ganga and Brau as: “…a former Swift boat commander who served in Vietnam and a longtime Kerry foe.” John O’Neill is not simply a longtime Kerry foe: he was carefully cultivated by a Republican administration as an anti-Kerry attack dog, and continues to receive backing from the right wing media machine. The authors fail to include this critical information in their discussion.

Another important player in Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is Jerome Corsi, who accused Kerry in 1971 of treason for supposedly advancing a covert communist agenda by protesting the Vietnam war. This, despite a December 1971 interview with the Boston Globe in which Kerry stated:

I don’t like Communists. In fact, I hate them… I’m totally dedicated to representative, pluralistic, free democracy.

Jerome Corsi is also a regular contributor to the ultraconservative online forum FreeRepublic.com, where he has expressed a number of offensive views. Corsi calls Muslims "ragheads," refers to John Kerry as "John F*ing Commie Kerry," accuses Hillary Clinton of being a lesbian, and claims that the Pope does not mind the sexual assault of children by Catholic priests.

SBVFT’s connections to FreeRepublic.com do not end there, however—Robert A. Hahn, who directs the Free Republic Network also doubles as the web designer for SBVFT website.

La Ganga and Brau include Republican Senator John McCain’s condemnation of the Swift Boat organization. They fail to mention, however, the personal history that exists between anti-Kerry veterans organizations and Senator McCain.

Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry was founded by Ted Sampley. Among other distinctions, Sampley has created a name for himself by accusing former POW John McCain of being a member of the KGB, and of being brainwashed during his imprisonment into a “Manchurian candidate” who is an agent of a foreign government. These efforts were undertaken during McCain’s bid for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000, and bear unmistakable similarities to tactics used by the Bush campaign that same year. In an effort to smear McCain, Bush strategists push-polled South Carolinians with false statements that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child.

Sampley’s longstanding hatred of John Kerry is evidenced by a 1993 doctored photo by Sampley in which John Kerry was depicted shooting an American MIA soldier. Nine years later, Sampley told the Boston Globe in February 2004:

If Kerry wins the South Carolina primary on Tuesday, we’ll be coming after him. We will do what is politically necessary to stop John Kerry…

I am disappointed that La Ganga and Brau failed to delve into the political pasts of figures like O’Neill, Corsi, and Sampley. The first two are co-founders of Swift Boats Veterans for Truth, and co-authors of the upcoming book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, which defames John Kerry’s war record. The long history of their sponsorship and support by the Republican party is critical information to the reader who would attempt to decide whether there is any substance to their charges. Sampley, while not officially linked to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is nonetheless important as he helps explain why John McCain has special insight into those within the Republican party who are not above disparaging a war hero’s record—even when the war hero happens to be a Republican.

Sincerely,

Sagar M. Jethani

Operation Hollywood, by David L. Robb (Prometheus Books, 2004)

2004-08-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

At first glance, many Americans might not be shocked to learn that the military exercises a degree of creative control over the films which feature its equipment, bases, and personnel. After all, shouldn't the Armed Forces have a right to get something back for lending its assistance to filmmakers?

According to the military's own rules, as outlined in the Pentagon's A Producer's Guide to US Army Cooperation with the Entertainment Industry, the dual goals sought by the military in its decisions to work with Hollywood producers are:

To ensure historical accuracy in all depictions of military operations, personnel, and technical specifications, and

To aid in the recruiting of young persons into the military

Robb's work is not so much an indictment of the military's relationship with Hollywood as it is a record detailing the military's failure to adhere to its own rules. It takes no great effort of the intellect to imagine scenarios where these two cardinal rules contradict each other. Operation Hollywood details the military's inability to address complex situations where a truly accurate portrayal of its actions casts the Armed Services in a less-than flattering light that does not aid in the recruitment of young people. When such conflicts occur, the military consistently rejects accuracy in favor of its recruitment goals. The end result is the widespread dissemination of an image of our Armed Services that may aid in recruitment, but does not show us the military as it really is.

The history of the Military-Hollywood relationship may come as a surprise to those who imagine this relationship to have started with the testosterone-driven 1990s films of Jerry Bruckheimer. The Air Force-assisted silent documentary Wings was released in 1927 and received an Oscar at the first Academy Awards later that year for its never-before seen aerial dogfights. Since that time, the relationship between the military and filmmaking communities has grown into a vast network of professionals who reside within the Pentagon, Armed Services, Central Intelligence Agency, and each of the main Hollywood studios.

This early phase lacked organization from either parties. Filmmaking had not yet become the public entertainment medium of choice. The next important event would not happen until the march to war in the late 1930s. In order to help increase public support for the war, many of the Hollywood studios released anti-Nazi propaganda films such as Daffy the Commando, and Disney films like The Spirit of '43, which featured Mickey Mouse making sport of Adolph Hitler.

These early propaganda films had not gone unnoticed by either the military or Hollywood. Each side began to realize the immense influence that a carefully crafted stream of nationalistic content could have on the citizenry. Robb neglects to mention these early animated shorts as part of his historical narrative of the military's relationship with Hollywood. His thesis seems less concerned with targeted propaganda that is directed towards a specific military action (such as the US entering World War II) than he is with the steady stream of continuous pro-military fare released each year which creates a general misconception of the Armed Services.

The years following the war represent the height of the military-Hollywood alliance. Film after film was released featuring upstanding American soldiers using military battleships, aircraft, and other equipment. Far from censoring such content, leaders at the Pentagon were largely the recipients of an avowedly pro-military film establishment whose scripts could not have cast the military in a better light. The longstanding relationship between The Mickey Mouse Club and the Department of Defense originated from the show's producers in a 1957 appeal to the DOD for military assistance. Producers of the television show Steve Canyon, about the comic-strip Air Force pilot, initiated a similar relationship with the Pentagon by requesting military assistance in 1955:

In addition to entertaining the public, I am confident that this series will offer an opportunity to the Air Force for portrayal of many of its vital activities as well as providing educational and public relations values. There would seem little doubt that the series could be of vast value to Air Force recruiting.

Such requests resulted in the show's producers submitting their scripts to the Pentagon for approval prior to going into production on a new episode. In many cases, content was altered to enhance the accuracy military events. In many cases, however, content was altered so as to avoid casting the military in anything other than a glowingly positive light– even when such changes contradicted the military's stated principle of promoting accurate depictions of its unclassified operations.

Producers of The Mickey Mouse Club, for example, were excited about airing an episode shot in Alaska which featured the following dialogue:

In addition, [the 5004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron] are able to interrogate prisoners in a total of eight languages. To help keep an eye on the doings of our Soviet neighbors, we have enlisted the aid of Eskimos the length and breadth of Alaska's vast interior. The 5004th's people really get around!

The Pentagon decided that America's children did not need to know that US troops stationed in Alaska ran interrogations. The episode was changed to the training of dogsled teams– content deemed much more kid-friendly than the idea that our soldiers might conduct interrogations. The major in charge of supervising the show instead announced that the revised segment would feature photogenic youngsters who "[…] will harness the dogs, drive the sleds and in general put on a whale of a show." When the resulting program later aired, producers and military liaisons alike were ebullient in their praise for an episode that could not fail to attract millions of young boys into the Armed Services.

The 1950s saw the peak of the public's faith in the military to protect the country. US Forces had saved Europe by smashing the Fuhrer's war machine to pieces. The enemy in the East had been defeated through the use of atomic weapons. The vassal of Great Britain no more, America had arisen to a position of global domination in which its citizens enjoyed privileges on a scale unimagined before. And the military was perceived as the harbinger of this golden age. Lassie, West Point, Men of Annapolis, and Steve Canyon joined The Mickey Mouse Club in exchanging creative control of scripts in return for military assistance in the production of their episodes.

The 1960s, however, challenged this easy relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon. The increasing American presence in Southeast Asia created dissent in a society that had been used to trusting its political and military leaders. As protest began to take root in the youth culture, Hollywood was placed in an awkward situation. On the one hand, it obviously needed the military in order to obtain access to its weapons, machinery, and personnel. On the other hand, it did not want to turn off an increasingly alienated viewership. Elements in the youth culture were beginning to grow suspicious of the press and its coverage of the Vietnam war.

It was against the backdrop of such changing times that John Wayne approached the Pentagon in 1967 for assistance on his upcoming film The Green Berets. Wayne had been a long-time supporter of the military. He felt that positive role models of personnel serving in the Vietnam war were necessary to counter the many negative images portrayed by the press. The Duke had written Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to discuss his reasons for making The Green Berets:

We are fighting a war in Vietnam. Though I personally support the administration's policy there, I know it is not a popular war, and I think it is extremely important that not only the people of the United States, but those all over the world, should know why it is necessary for us to be there.

The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium. Some day soon a motion picture will be made about Vietnam. Let's make sure it is the kind of picture that will help our cause throughout the world.

Despite this unabashedly pro-war stance, Wayne's script came under severe criticism from the Pentagon owing to its realistic depictions of brutality used by the American troops against their North Vietnamese captives. In reviewing Wayne's script, Charles W. Hinkle, director of Security Review at the Department of Defense wrote: "The script should be amended beginning at page 78 to delete the incident of brutality shown towards a prisoner by the Vietnamese officer, and the approval of it by the Americans… This is grist for the opponents of U.S. policy in Vietnam."

Another change Wayne would have to make concerned the script's mention of the incursion of US forces across the Vietnamese border into neighboring Laos. Francis W. Tully Jr, director of the State Department's speech review staff, told him that he would have to remove any mention of Green Beret soldiers crossing the border into Laos. In fact, Tully said, it would be best to remove all references to Laos altogether.

Tully also objected to the use of derogatory references on the part of US soldiers towards the North Vietnamese: "The script accentuates terms of contempt, such as 'maggots', for Viet Cong personnel. Use of this terminology might be useful in propaganda against the US forces." It is significant that the accuracy of such events was never called into question—only that they could be used by the anti-war movement."

Ironically, after Wayne had accepted these substantial revisions to his script and had filmed and delivered the final cut of Berets to the Defense Department, his problems did not end. Don Baruch, the head of the Pentagon's film liaison office insisted that all end credit references thanking the military for its assistance be removed. His answer was a telling one. He explained to a baffled Michael Wayne (John Wayne's son and producer of Berets) that the resulting film was so clearly pro-war that he was worried it would attract criticism from Congress. It would be better to remove all references to the military for its assistance lest it lead to uncomfortable questions arising about how the military provides assistance to films in general.

Wayne reluctantly agreed.

The removal of derogatory references to the Vietcong was not the only time the Pentagon knowingly traded accuracy for propaganda value. The television show Pensacola: Wings of Gold was excitedly described by Major T.V. Johnson, director of the Marine Corp's film liaison office in Los Angeles to his superiors in Washington as "…pretty much a 45-minute commercial for Marine aviation that reaches 3-5 million homes per week. That's where our payoff is. If we can shape the script so that the Marines and other service members depicted always do the right thing in the end, we've made our money."

A example demonstrating the Pentagon's proclivity for rewriting history emerged during the first season of Pensacola. The show's writers submitted a script entitled "Grey Ghost", in which a character dies from the effects of a biological weapon used by terrorists, but developed by the US during the Cold War. The Corps was not pleased, and made its offer of assistance contingent upon the following changes:

"Must eliminate all references to U.S. government involvement in bio-warfare, past, present & future," wrote Major Nancy LaLuntas, head of the Marine Corp's Los Angeles office to the show's producers. "It's too subtle that the [US biological weapons program] effort took place in the past. Recommend replacing 'US' with 'Old Soviet' or 'old Warsaw Pact.'"

Faced with the threat of losing military support, the producers acceded.

Examples such as these are sprinkled throughout the pages of Operation Hollywood, effectively demonstrating that while it claims the right to withhold assistance from producers for failures in accuracy, military leadership really prizes recruitment value above all other considerations. Phil Strub, the head of the Pentagon's Film Liaison office, put it simply: "Any film that portrays the military as negative is not realistic to us."

Recruitment of young men and women is so important to the Pentagon's film office, in fact, that there is an inherent bias against lending support to projects that will likely result in an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. "If distributed as an R", wrote Colonel Donald Burggrabe, chief of public affairs for the Air Force in Los Angeles, about the motion picture The Right Stuff, "it cuts down on the teenage audience, which is a prime one to the military services when our recruiting goals are considered." As a direct result of his influence, the resulting film saw a large reduction in its use of foul language, and received a PG rating upon completion. Exposure to recruitment-aged youngsters was thereby ensured.

Indeed, recruitment potential is so important to the military's film liaison offices that they assiduous track box office receipts for films they assist. Calculations are made based upon average audience populations and number of screens nationwide to arrive at total exposure counts. Estimates are then submitted to management in "after-action" reports detailing the number of youngsters successfully exposed to assisted films.

But it doesn't stop there—the Pentagon uses its many contacts in the entertainment industry to track military-themed films about which it is not approached. Some of the best military films of all time are those which never stood a chance of receiving assistance—Dr. Strangelove, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July, for example. Such films typically take a critical look at the military, and delve into the darker sides of war and human nature. Hardly good recruiting material.

Robb documents how the film An Officer and a Gentleman was denied the use of jet fighters by the US Navy because it was deemed "damaging to the Navy and to its recruiting potential." The film's producers then approached the Canadian military for the use of jet fighters, and the latter said it would be happy to cooperate—until the US Navy called.

"I obtained the phone number for the 'Snow Birds' in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, and spoke to the executive officer…to ascertain if the Snow Birds were aware that the U.S. Dept. of Defense had not authorized cooperation with the film", wrote Captain Dale Patterson, director of the Navy Office of Information in Los Angeles. "I emphasized…that I was not suggesting that the Snow Birds not participate in the filming of 'An Officer and a Gentleman', but that I felt it was important the Snow Birds know that the film had not been granted cooperation by DOD."

Within days, the film's producers were told that the Snow Birds would not be assisting them after all. A U.S. Navy internal memorandum was sent out a few days later stating:; "Snow Birds will not—repeat not—participate in Paramount Pictures filming mission."

The Pentagon-Hollywood bond was cemented further by the unprecedented effect of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson's blockbuster hit Top Gun. As a result of Bruckheimer/Simpson's paean to naval aviation, the Navy witnessed a 500% increase in recruitment after its release in 1986. So successful was Top Gun in drawing young men to enlist in the Navy, that recruiters were instructed to set up recruiting booths in select theaters.

After Don Simpson's death in 1996, Bruckheimer went on to spearhead a cottage industry of unabashedly pro-military films, including: Con Air, The Rock, Crimson Tide, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down, and Armageddon. The relationship between the military and the entertainment industry had survived the culture of dissent of the 1960s, and had emerged stronger than ever.

***

Operation Hollywood could have been an important book. Instead, it undermines its own argument through self-indulgence, ho-hum outrage, and a failure to ask tough questions.

Films are texts—vast, social texts that are much more vulnerable to censorship and manipulation than their literary counterparts. A single author can write a book; a film the magnitude of 20th Century Fox's Behind Enemy Lines requires the coordinated efforts of thousands of people. When one considers that the use of military equipment such as aircraft carriers, jet fighters and submarines lies beyond the financial means of all but the largest film budgets, it becomes apparent that the military grants access to these resources in a manner similar to the way a monopolist permits selective access to its company plants. With one important difference: we, as taxpayers, own the plants.

"Congress has never given these offices such authority or approved the use of public funds and resources to shape public opinion", writes Professor Jonathan Turley, in the forward to Operation Hollywood. "The military equipment, films, and property withheld by the military do not belong to the military. They belong to the American people."

Unfortunately, Robb fails to pursue this thread of constitutionality and ownership, preferring instead to incite the reader's outrage through brief, polemical chapters-- one page long, in some cases. These mini-chapters seldom serve any other purpose than to share production stories that illustrate the military's contradictory policies. It is as if Robb prefers to engage in Drudge Report-style set gossip than to tackle thornier, but more important, aspects of his subject matter.

Why, for instance, did Congress's two previous attempts to overhaul the military's censorship of the entertainment industry fail? What constitutional implications would be involved in the creation of a front-end disclaimer to films that accepted military assistance in exchange for script modifications? ("This film has been modified for your enjoyment by the US Military") How will the proliferation of CGI (computer-generated imagery) affect the future relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon?

Rather than address any of these questions, Robb adopts a sensationalist tenor throughout Operation Hollywood which often borders on the puerile. Robb re-prints a scene from The Great Santini which was scrapped in order to receive military assistance with the introductory comment: "This is the scene from The Great Santini that the Marine Corps didn't want you to see. It is seen here for the first time ever."

The scene? One in which a Marine Corps drill officer terrifies his new recruits by making them think he has killed one of their number for failing to comply to an order. Hardly the stuff of outrage. In fact, Robb fails to notice that in several instances, the military's meddling has actually resulted in an improved final script, as in the case of Clear and Present Danger, in which the military insisted that derogatory language used by the President of the United States to describe his Latin American neighbors not make it into the final cut. The result was a scene in which the President (masterfully played by Donald Moffat) struggles to restrain himself while subtly instructing his subordinates to take forceful action against Colombian drug lords without actually saying so.

The book ends with a section titled "Heroes and Villains", where Robb enumerates filmmakers who stood their ground against making changes to their scripts in exchange for assistance, and those who did not. As many of the villains are those who provided candid, honest reflections to Robb during his research, the reader is left feeling somewhat complicit in Robb's subsequent trashing of these individuals, many of whom must have been quite surprised to find their accessibility rewarded with demonization.

Robb concludes his work with a wild-eyed call for the American people to file a class-action lawsuit against the Pentagon. It is clear that Robb feels outraged by the military's censorship of the entertainment industry. The fact that he imagines the bulk of his readership to have joined him by the end of Operation Hollywood demonstrates his failure to connect with or understand them. Most readers will be left in the role of the silent others mentioned in the book's opening acknowledgements:

"I would like to thank … my cousin Don Chrystal … who truly understood the significance of the Pentagon's meddling in the content of movies when others would say, 'Well, doesn't the Pentagon have to get something back from Hollywood in exchange for its assistance?'"

Letter to Paul Brownfield, LA Times

2004-07-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

(Written in response to Brownfield's cover story critical of John Kerry's lack of personal warmth.)

Good Morning, Mr. Brownfield.

I write to thank you for your article in today's Times, "Read his lips, not his face". As a Kerry supporter, I have long held concerns that John Kerry's seemingly expressionless face would fail to do justice to the man. In fact, it was only after reading Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty that I began supporting the Kerry campaign. Time and again, I found myself looking up from my reading of Kerry's Vietnam experiences to exclaim to my wife: "You won't believe this! Listen to how Kerry earned his Silver Star!", or, "Wow! John Kerry's father would fly the two of them over Mount Vernon when John was only five years old". The extent of my surprise, I later conjectured, could only be accounted for by the fact that Kerry seemed either unable or unwilling to share these experiences with the public.

This reticence upon his part, while perhaps doing justice to his early experiences, was not helping people who wished to learn more about him. I also realized that not everyone would take the time to actively acquaint themselves with candidate Kerry by picking up a book.

Another facet to John Kerry that risks working against him this year is his distanced, formal oratorical style. For all of Bush's public foibles, you have to credit him for possessing a casual, down-to-earth speaking style. This characteristic effectively belies the fact that Bush could not be more difference from the common men and women whose interests he claims to represent. While neither candidate may be representative of the average voter, particularly when each candidate's financial situations are concerned, it is clear that John Kerry will act more on behalf of these average citizens as did his Democratic predecessor, William Jefferson Clinton.

I believe this combination of Kerry's reticence, formal speaking style, and expressionless face all originate from the same place within candidate Kerry. Whereas George W. Bush plays the part of the common man, John Kerry plays that of the Roman senator– distanced, educated, and somewhat aloof from the personal warmth that we have come to expect from candidates seeking high office.

Given this late stage, John Kerry should not now seek to change something as fundamental about himself as his facial expressions or speaking style, but must remain consistent with his personal expression and trust that the public will be shrewd enough to forgive him his distance. I applaud the Kerry camp's decision to let John Edwards compensate for Kerry's weakness in this area, rather than attempt an eleventh-hour PR-transformation. Such an attempt would only backfire on Kerry, as voters would rightfully feel the disingenuousness of such an attempt.

The specter of Al Gore hangs over the remainder of his campaign if he does.

Sincerely,
Sagar M. Jethani