Author: notanamerican

This book is an attempt to dig up Reagan’s remains, hang them upside down from the nearest palm tree, and subject him, at last, to a proper trial.

http://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Clinton%C2%BFs/dp/1932360824/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1
/103-7668678-8303066?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177565832&sr=8-1

http://www.alternet.org/story/50758/
Of all crimes, murder is the most difficult to explain. While we can pretty much assume that greed motivates insider trading, desperation petty theft, and misogyny and sadism rape, murder tends to resemble Tolstoy’s conception of the unhappy family. No two are alike. While certain kinds of murder, especially mass murder, often follow a sociological pattern – drive by shootings in the United States, for example, are almost always connected to gang violence – the suicidal rampage killer is by this time such a familiar part of the American cultural landscape that it would be foolish to generalize, wouldn’t it?

Mark Ames doesn’t think so. Ames, who’s part of the brilliant and acerbic group of American writers centered around the Moscow based alternative magazine The eXile, has written a book that attempts to explain not only why social misfits go on rampage killings, but how they fit into American culture as a whole and what they tell us about ourselves. But be warned. “Going Postal” is not for people who are easily offended. It’s designed to outrage. It’s a 242-page fuck you to conservative Americans. More importantly, it takes the conventional wisdom about rampage killers and turns it completely on its head.

http://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Clinton%C2%BFs/dp/1932360824/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1

/103-7668678-8303066?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177566759&sr=8-1

Dylan Klebald, Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho, Ames argues, are not villains. They’re freedom fighters.

Contrary to the way most Americans like to think of themselves, the United States is not a free society. Just the opposite. The American ruling class taken the art of repression to such dizzying heights that the idea of class conflict and political rebellion have become almost unimaginable. Unlike the British with their rowdy soccer clubs or the French with their labor unions and tendency to riot over government decisions not to their liking, there’s no social arena that allows Americans to take out their anti-establishment rage. There’s never been an American Lenin or Marx framing economic repression in starkly political terms. Even the most liberal Americans tend to blame themselves for their position in the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Not surprisingly, this very American combination of authoritarianism and individualism takes a particularly hard toll on the non-alpha male (and it’s almost always men), the kind of person most of us would call a “geek”. And forget all of the updated Horatio Alger myths, Ames argues. Being a loser who doesn’t get laid when you’re 15 by no means guarantees you’re going on to front an alternative rock band by the time you’re 20 or found Microsoft by the age of 30. More likely you’ll slip through the cracks and wind up as a loser who doesn’t get laid in college. You’ll go on to graduate to become a loser who doesn’t get laid at your shitty temp data processing job, and wind up as a 35 year old loser who gets downsized and pushed out into the great mass of unemployable middle aged losers living in their parents basement tapping out angry rants about Islamofascism on FreeRepublic in between episodes of 24.

So why not bring a sawed off shotgun into the office and preface your suicide by blowing away half your coworkers?

Indeed, Ames isn’t curious about why disturbed young men like Seung-Hui Cho commit mass murder. He’s curious about why there aren’t more of them, about what makes so many office drones, students at repressive suburban high schools and dreary public colleges like Virginia Tech, and low-level government bureaucrats so passively accept their horrible lives without going completely bonkers. The media asks the wrong questions, he argues. It’s not about the disturbed young man, his childhood or whatever chemical imbalances he has in his brain. It’s not about evil. It’s about the drab cubicles, the fluorescent lights, the bullying in gym class, the abusive supervisors, the threat of layoffs, the stress jamming and downsizing, the hundreds of little humiliations low level white collar office workers, college and high school students have to experience in their everyday lives. It’s not about the individual. It’s about the environment.

But Ames isn’t calling for compassion or understanding for the Dylan Klebolds, Eric Harrises and Seung-Hui Chos of the world.  He’s not a liberal trying to push us into figuring out a way to better assimilate these poor souls into the rest of society. On the contrary, he’s arguing that in a culture as perfectly authoritarian and as perfectly repressed as the United States, it’s not the Eugene Debs, Emma Goldmans or Martin Luther Kings who genuinely strike fear into the heart of the ruling class, the bullies, the corporate media, and the politicians. It’s the violent and insane, the premature revolutionaries who lash out without a voice and without a well articulated philosophy of rebellion, the John Browns, Nat Turners, the thousands of African Americans who burned down inner city America in the wake of the King assassination. These are the people who make leaders like King, Malcolm X and Frederick Douglas possible at all, who provide the real social energy necessary for radical change.

As I said, this is bound to outrage a lot of people and, of course, it’s purposefully designed to outrage. But Ames isn’t a teenage flag burner or an aging Gen X punk longing for the glory days of the Dead Kennedys and Suicidal Tendencies. And he’s not just glorifying violence. He’s making a very specific argument about a very specific type of criminal and locating him within a specific point and time in history.  As Ames describes it himself, “this book is an attempt to dig up Reagan’s remains, hang them upside down from the nearest palm tree, and subject him, at last, to a proper trial”.

If rampage killings, suicidal spree shooters and mass murders in the public square seem new, it’s because they are, the direct result of the squeeze Ronald Reagan and the victory of the New Right in 1980 put on the American working class, the breaking of the Patco air-controllers union, the freeze on hikes in the minimum wage, the increasingly authoritarian quality of the work place, and the unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to the wealthy. While terrorism and mass murder, even school massacres are nothing very new in American history (think only of the mass murder in Bath Maine or the bombing of the Morgan Building on Wall Street or the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma), the lone gunman showing up one day at work with a duffle bag full of sawed off shotguns and a murderous vendetta has a clearly identifiable beginning, 1986, when  Patrick Sheryl shot up the Post Office in Edmond Oklahoma and killed 14 people. Before that very few people had ever heard of rampage shootings at the workplace. After that,  it spread to post offices all over the United States, then to private industry, then to high school and finally now, it seems, to the university.

And it has clear economic causes. The Postal Service was the first government agency to be restructured by the new right. Nixon answered the disruptive postal strike of 1971 with “reforms” designed to jack up the stress levels, decrease the protection workers had under their unions, and to squeeze out as much work as possible for as little money. Not surprisingly, postal workers, who had been accustomed to the relatively easy going, low stress environment of the traditional civil service felt particularly squeezed and not surprisingly, some of their less stable individuals blew a gasket. Private industry was subjected to a similarly ruthless kind of reorganization. Labor regulations were loosened, owners brought in abusive management techniques, used temp agencies to undermine permanent employees, slashed health benefits, vacation days and Christmas bonuses, and ditched private offices for cubicle farms. High school students, while not subject to the kind of economic squeeze as government and low level office workers, were nevertheless subject to the winner take all, screw the weak and up with the rich and popular ethic that Ronald Reagan’s presidency had made respectable. Long gone was the easygoing hippie culture of the 60s and 70s. By the late 1990s, high schools were authoritarian hellholes where the weak and vulnerable were terrorized by cliques of bullies and jocks who made their lives a living hell. In the absence of strong labor unions, a resurgent anti-war movement or a libertarian culture, suicidal spree shooting became the only game in town. Conform or die, literally.

And what would Ames make of the latest rampage massacre at Virginia Tech?

“Going Postal” was written in 2005 before the Virginia Tech massacre but Ames has already written an article for Alternet, attempting to fit it into the pattern he discusses in the book. In fact, he reproduces long sections from the book in his post.

http://www.alternet.org/story/50758/

But the one sized fits all argument isn’t entirely convincing. Where he makes a very good case that the stress levels in post Reagan era cubicle farms and the authoritarian bullying present in Clinton era high schools can, in fact, become so unbearable that it would send an unstable person over the edge, it’s hard to see how this applies to a university, even a dreary, overgrown bureaucratic diploma mill like Virginia Tech. Colleges, especially public colleges, especially liberal arts departments at most public colleges are shelters from the grinding anxiety of the workplace, that brief space in between getting tormented by the football team and getting tormented by your supervisor where you get to drink, sleep around, go to political demonstrations, and where people may actually listen to what you have to say. The idea of class war simply doesn’t fit. Cho didn’t shoot up the American Enterprise Institute or Fox News, but, rather, a classroom full of strangers who were guilty, at worst, of ignoring him or of being too wrapped up in their own post adolescent angst to notice him. And an English major at a state school like Virginia Tech would be under nowhere near the level of stress that a science or engineering major at a more rigorous school would be. So while the media should, of course, take a good hard look at Virginia Tech and see what they find, it seems unlikely that it will turn out to be another Columbine high school or Edmond Oklahoma Post Office.

And while Ames’ uncompromisingly dark take on American history and swaggering I don’t give a fuck sneer is often exhilarating, it’s not entirely accurate. Indeed, while Ames does in fact get underneath the skin of the primitive rebels, the insane, the ordinary people pushed so far over the edge by class war and authoritarianism they just snap, he simply ignores the many times in American history where people have rebelled in a coherent, organized, and entirely non-violent manner, the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the sit down strikes and the gigantic protests against the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. What’s more, Ames also ignores how, even during the Reagan years, there was a flourishing anti-war and Central American solidarity movement. While he quite accurately points out that sometimes a mind not attuned to the rhythms of conventional, structured thought is more likely to rebel, he pays far too much attention to the violent oddballs like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and entirely too little attention to the non-violent oddballs like the redwood tree sitters, the yippies, the Merry pranksters or the beats.

But in spite of these caveats, Going Postal is well worth reading, not in spite of but especially because of the massacre at Virginia Tech. It’s an original and provocative take on a social problem that quite unfortunately will repeat itself and far more insightful than any one of 100 talking heads in the corporate media.

Full Disclosure. This is an Imus diary. You have been warned.
The gates of Neverland have swung open to admit radio shock jock Don Imus. He will now join the company of Anna Nicole’s boobs, Princess Diana’s cracked skull, OJ’s black glove, and Clinton’s penis in that special circle of hell only the American media can create. Enjoy the ignominious downfall of the pampered cowboy kleagle but be warned that nothing in Neverland is ever truly free. That well stocked playroom, that gallon of ice cream, that giant stuffed teddy bear with your name stenciled on each paw, the unintentional comedy of the latest well to do white male pundit tripping all over himself to explain how sitting around in the MSNBC studios tell jokes about “greedy Jews” and “nappy headed hos” isn’t racist, all of it comes with a price.

It’s time to come upstairs.

Don Imus has always been a bit like the homeless men inside Penn Station or the Port Authority Bus terminal in New York City, class politics and social pathology hidden in plain sight. The commuter who tries to avoid physically bumping into the poor soul smelling of vomit, Colt 45 and medication washing his feet in the sink of the bathroom of the New Jersey Transit terminal no more thinks of the deinstituationalization of the mentally ill in the 1980s then frequent Imus in the Morning guests like Craig Crawford and Frank Rich think of legal segregation and affirmative action or the bussing riots in South Boston and Canarsie in the 1970s. It not only looks normal, but no one really ever gets around to cleaning up the mess until he has something to gain by it. Nobody of any consequence in New York City politics said very much about squeegee men until Disney wanted to move into Times Square in 1994.

No one in the corporate media addressed the constant stream of white nationalist rhetoric coming out of the Imus in the Morning Show until it was both unavoidable and, more importantly, until it could be spun in a way that minimized the amount of damage it would do to the corporate media elite.

While left liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich may feel socially and politically secure enough to go on the Imus in the morning show to listen to anti-semitic slurs directed at him personally, a kind of fraternity hazing ritual where he would demonstrate that he was man enough to take it all with a smile and in exchange get the opportunity to publicize books for himself and his friends, anybody who’s spent any time on white nationalist web forums like Stormfront or Jew Watch would immediately recognize the language and the level of vitriol used by Don Imus and his producer Bernard McGuirk. If you don’t have the stomach to read Stormfront, the liberal watchdog site Media Matters has done a good job of collecting some of the more outrageous things Don Imus, his producers and his guests have said over the past few years.

http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/people/donimus?sort=default&offset=0

Why wasn’t the Imus in the Morning Show taken off the air on November 19th, 2004 when frequent guest Sid Rosenberg referred to Palestinians as “stinking animals” and said that they “ought to drop the bomb right there, kill ’em all right now”? Well, we all know the corporate media’s bias against Palestinians and Arabs, especially after 9/11, so maybe that was it. But how about December 8th, 2006 when Imus himself referred to the “Jewish management” at CBS as “money-grubbing bastards”? Why wasn’t he taken off the air then? Or how about when he compared Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont to John Mark Karr, the man who confessed to killing Jon Benet Ramsey? Didn’t that cross the line?

In each of these cases, even when Imus made anti-semitic remarks about his own employers, no, it didn’t. To understand why, let’s go to the remarks Bernard McGuirk made on March 30th, 2006 about Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, who was abducted and held hostage by a group of Islamic militants in early 2006 and released in March. “She’s probably carrying Habib’s baby at this point,” remarked producer Bernard McGuirk. “She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone.” As ridiculous as this may seem to you or me, to a white nationalist this is deadly serious business. Any contact between a white woman and a non-white man can only be about one thing, sex, and any white woman who has extended contact with non-white men is damaged goods. The only real difference at this point between the Imus in the Morning show and the Stormfront message boards is that most of the Stormfront crowd are probably wittier and more literate and that Stormfront occasionally posts some useful information about how to keep the feds from snooping into your hard drive. CBS probably should have pulled the plug right there, if only because Imus and McGuirk were spewing vitriol about a fellow journalist who had just survived 3 months of unimaginable terror at the hands of her captors.

But doing so would have meant explaining why. It would have meant an extended, and possibly intelligent debate on the American occupation of Iraq. It would have meant talking about the various resistence groups, which range from foreign terrorists fighting for Allah all the way to Iraqi patriots fighting for their homes, and it would have required making a distinction between the two. Firing Imus over Sid Rosenberg’s remarks that Palestinians are subhuman animals would have meant a frank discussion about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Firing him over Ned Lamont would have given more attention to Lamont’s grassroots anti-war candidacy only two weeks after he beat Joe Lieberman in the primary. It would have given Lamont free publicity at the very moment the corporate media elites and the Democratic Party elite were desperately trying to get Lieberman back into the race. And firing him over the anti-semitic slurs about the management of CBS would have meant explaining that no, the way the media is run has nothing to do with Judaism but rather, with corporate profits, social and political control, something nobody at CBS really wants to get into.

Inevitably Don Imus finally ran into the perfect media storm, something not even he could survive. There’s been a lot of talk about how Imus attacks the powerless, which he certainly does, as in the case of the Palestinian refugees or the terrorized freelance journalist Jill Carroll (who was obviously in no position to defend herself in writing so soon after her release), but in April of 2007 his mistake was not in attacking the powerless, but, rather, in attacking a group that could hit him back, the African American middle class. Like any racist, Imus tends to think that whatever minority group he currently has in his crosshairs is a monolith, a faceless crowd with no distinctions among themselves. In spite of his obvious misogyny, Snoop Dog understands the African American community in a way Don Imus doesn’t. “It’s a completely different scenario,” he said. “Rappers are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports.” Surely with all that time he supposedly hangs around Harold Ford (a member of the African American elite if ever there was a member of the African American elite) Imus should have know that while a remark about a purely fictional member of the African American underclass could be ignored, women who play basketball for a well-known university at the most elite level would be off limits.

What’s more, the issue had more crossover appeal that Outkast or Jimi Hendrix. Not only did Imus have to deal with the African American elite and the usual media hogs like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, he would also have to deal with everybody else, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, lower level employees at MSNBC, white people in general, anyway who was sick of the kind of clown who would dress up in cowboy gear and make racial slurs on national TV, or put on a flight suit and swagger onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and give a speech under a banner saying “Mission Accomplished”.  Indeed, while the American people were willing to give anybody who put on the airs of the great white hunter and all American gunslinger the benefit of the doubt right after 9/11, by this time, after seeing them bungle the war in Iraq, lose an entire American city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and get stuck in a seemingly endless parade of minor scandals, there would be no second chances. Nancy Pelosi and the Republicans have probably cut a deal protecting George Bush from impeachment but nobody was going intervene for poor Don Imus.  

But as every Leninist, most members of the American ruling class, and very few liberal Democrats know, with every disaster comes an opportunity. And we would all have to pay the price. Don Imus makes a series of truly vile racial slurs against 10 innocent young women who had probably never even heard his name. Don Imus is fired. Case closed. Easy, right?

But nothing is ever this easy. Every one of those elite talking heads who had ever spent any time yucking it up with Imus and McGuirk about them Jews and them niggers now had to have his say (and note I say “his” because one of the few women who had appeared on his show, Anna Marie Cox, actually apologized for it). Politicians would join in. Professional African American contrarians and critics of African Americans would leap into the fray (Can a statement from Bill Cosby be far behind?). The specter of “political correctness” would rear its ugly head like Godzilla rising out of Tokyo Bay. The Gates of Neverland would be opened and all hell would be unleashed on the American people. Oh yes. We would now be subject to that most horrifying of all disasters, a “national dialog on race” hosted by the corporate media.

In other words, the rappers made him do it.

An elderly white racist compares African American women to animals, he, like Jill Carroll giving statements under duress from her terrorist abductors, must have no other choice right? Poor Don Imus was not only a racist but he was a racist because of hip hop, an art form that came out of the South Bronx in the 1970s, when he was already well into his 30s, and which didn’t develop the obsession with glocks, hos and bling until the 1990s, when he was already well into his 50s. Poor Bernard McGuirk. Not only was he a knuckle dragging Klansman, he was a knuckle dragging Klansman under compulsion. Oh you think poor Bernard was making crude sexual innuendos about Jill Carroll because he’s a sexist pig and a racist clod. Nope. He’s doing it under compulsion. Somewhere offstage, Fiddy Cent is holding a gun to his head.

Klan it up white boy or I’ll blow your brains out.

Fortunately for us, these media storms have a way of burning themselves out. And yes, the American people are going to be no less pissed at the corporate and political elites 6 months from now. But excuse me if, in the meantime, I reach for my Jesus juice.

It’s time to recognize an unpleasant truth. Your government isn’t spying on you. It doesn’t want to influence you. It isn’t lying to you. It’s declared war on you.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/25/80/
After I read Jim Dwyer’s article in the New York Times about the massive campaign of spying on and harassment against United for Peace and Justice and the anti-war movement in the months leading up to the Republican National Convention, a part of me wanted to believe that it was all one big mistake. Some government bureaucrat had taken the dossier labeled “Plans To Isolate and Dismantle Munitions Dumps in Post Saddam Iraq” and the dossier labeled “Plans to Spy on People Who Carry Giant Puppets at Anti-War Rallies “and simply put them in the wrong envelopes.

From August 28th to September 3rd of 2004, the New York City Police Department, along with the Secret Service, the FBI, and various private security contractors waged one of the most elaborate and well-executed military operations in American history. 900,000 protesters, a city twice the size of Seattle or Boston, were effectively managed without firing a shot. Close to 2000 people were corralled and locked up in a mass detention center with a minimum of violence. Neither the Bloomberg administration nor New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly wound up paying any significant political price. Not only was Bloomberg reelected by a huge majority the following year, Kelly was being groomed by the New York City media and corporate elites to become their next mayor, even scoring a fawning profile in the left liberal magazine The New Yorker.

Major combat operations on the home front were over, and it had been a cakewalk.

Two years later, thousands of miles away in Southern Lebanon, they learned a different lesson. Riding high off of the expulsion of Syria during the “Cedar Revolution” and the successful redeployment of its radical settlers in 2005 from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, the United States ruling class and its proxies in the Israeli government decided to stage a dry run for an invasion of Iran. Taking advantage of the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah in July of 2006, a routine occurrence that usually led to prisoner exchanges, the Israeli military took out its pliers and its blowtorch and went medieval on the Lebanese people, destroying power plants and lighthouses, sending bridges crashing down into the water, turning huge sections of Tyre and even Christian North Beirut into rubble, and transforming most of southern Lebanon into a landscape reminiscent of Chechnya or the face of Mars. We know the ending. The IDF left southern Lebanon with its tail between its legs, its reputation for invincibility shattered beyond repair, and the image of Israeli brutality scattered over the world along with photos of blasted Merkevas and IDF gunboats transformed into floating lumps of melted steel.

Hezbollah is the first Arab military organization after 1948 built from the ground up inside the Muslim world without Soviet aid. They’re also the first Arab military organization to beat the IDF. From 1948 to 1991, no Soviet built conscript army under a secular Arab dictator had ever defeated an Israeli, British or American army. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no British, Israeli or American army has ever beaten an Arab military organization in a protracted guerilla struggle. Let that sink in for a while. From 1948 to 1991, no Soviet built conscript army under a secular Arab dictator had ever defeated an Israeli, British or American army. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no British, Israeli or American army has ever beaten an Arab military organization in a protracted guerilla struggle. Far from being the racial and cultural inferiors most Israeli right wingers and American neoconservatives think they are, Arabs and Muslims learned how to beat western armies only after they no longer had the help of the great white Russian empire to the North.

Osama Bin Laden and  Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah might not be the kind of guys you’d want to have a beer with, but you can’t deny that they’re both brilliant an innovative military commanders. Unlike Saddam, they both realized from very early on that Soviet military culture had never really worked for anybody except the Soviets, or, to be more specific, the Soviets in 1943. As good as they looked rumbling through Prague in 1968 or slaughtering Shiite rebels in Southern Iraq after the first Gulf War, when they face the vastly superior military technology of the Americans or of the American built IDF, T62s and T64s or even T72s (when you’re lucky enough to get them) become nothing but rolling toaster ovens. Any tinhorn dictator like Saddam, Nasser or Sadat can raise a big army (the ability to torture your own citizens and throw them in jail without charges tends to limit resistance to the draft) but the question of actually making them fight once they came into contact with the enemy was a little more problematic, especially in the pre Abu Ghraib days when surrendering to Americans (or even Israelis) seemed a lot more appealing than being turned into a halal pot roast inside some Russian made hunk of pig iron.

The fundamental insight born of necessity that fourth generation Arab commanders have learned is that 3000 smart, hardcore volunteers who can think creatively and, more importantly, who are willing to die for their cause can be a lot more effective than a conventional army made up of draftees. Well planned out asymmetric attacks on key civilian targets or a lighting fast maneuverable division of light infantry broken down into small units of 3 or 4 men can knock a clumsy superpower off its feet like a smart lightweight wrestler taking down a clumsy musclehead.

As horrific as they were, the terrorist attacks on September 11 were actually a precision strike, and they accomplished everything Bin Laden wanted and more. At the cost of less than 3000 American civilians and 18 volunteers, he was able to bluff the American ruling class into dismantling its bases in Saudi Arabia, starting a suicidal war in Iraq, and completely gutting not only the US Constitution but the entire Anglo Saxon tradition of civil liberties that went back to 1215. By maneuvering the American ruling class into gutting its own Constitution, Bin Laden effectively removed the threat that American democracy posed to his Islamist vision for the Middle East by the elegant and breathtakingly simple solution of eliminating American democracy.

And what have 3200 American military personnel and anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000 Iraqis bought for George Bush? That’s right, another Iranian hostage crisis.  

Ever since 9/11, on the other hand, the American anti-war movement has gone in the opposite direction, right into the arms of retrograde authoritarian Marxist Leninism.

With the final capitulation of American liberalism to the authoritarianism and militarism of Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush — a process that was begun in 1987 with the refusal of the Democratic Party to impeach Reagan for Iran Contra and which was hilariously personified in the famous photo of Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis sticking his head out of the turret of an M1 Abrams tank but which reached its culmination only in the Fall of 2002 with the Democratic Party’s surrender of the power of Congress to declare war to the White House — Communists inside the anti-war movement and the broader left finally decided to make themselves useful. Those irritating people who used to do little but sell newspapers, Ramsey Clark and the Trotskyite Workers World Party, Bob Avakian and the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, and Leslie Cagan and the traditional Stalinist Communist Party USA, were now the ones organizing the large anti-war demonstrations, not just using them to build up their membership lists.

Of course it makes perfect sense. The Bush administration’s propaganda offensive in the Fall of 2002 and the Winter of 2003 was so relentless and so overpowering that only people who had a very solid, dogmatic core of belief were able to stand up to it. Where the typical liberal found himself struck with self-doubt (maybe Saddam had those weapons of mass destruction after all), Marxist Leninists saw everything moving according to plan, a neocolonialist President using the horrors of 9/11 to justify an imperial agenda it had been planning all along.

And good for them. Any liberal who attacked the huge, largely communist organized anti-war demonstrations in the Fall of 2002 and Winter of 2003 was being a crude sectarian, and probably even has some of the blood of those 600,000 Iraqi civilians on his hands.

But, and this is a very big but, the same solid, dogmatic core of beliefs that allowed the leaders of International Answer, Not in Our Name, and United for Peace and Justice to resist the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign around Iraq also made it inevitable that they would organize anti-war protests that would be as vulnerable to a sophisticated domestic counterinsurgency campaign in 2003 and 2004 as Saddam’s poor draftees were to the might of the US military in 1991. Large, fixed permitted anti-war demonstrations planned in cooperation with the local police are worse than useless. They become security-theater. They demonstrate to the world the ability of big city police departments to control mass numbers of people. They don’t weaken the resolve of the ruling class to go to war. They strengthen it.

What’s more, their cumbersome, top-down, authoritarian organization also prevents them from reacting quickly to changing conditions during the course of the demonstrations they organize. Bob Herbert of the New York Times calls the mass arrests of over 2000 protesters during the RNC one of the great, untold stories of our time. When the NYPD locked 2000 non-violent American citizens up inside a filthy pier on the west side of Manhattan that should have immediately become the focus of the protest movement’s leadership. Instead of depending solely on legal observers and pro-bono lawyers from the Center for Constitution Rights, Leslie Cagan should have called up the media and announced that United for Peace and Justice was marching on the detention center and intended to keep marching on the detention center until all 2000 people were either let out of jail or charged with a crime. But she did nothing of the sort. In fact, if anybody had tried, the leadership of United for Peace and Justice would have probably told them not to.

There have been some signs of progress. Some of the more radical and innovative anti-war groups like World Can’t Wait or the Occupation Project (which has conducted a very successful series of sit ins at the offices of Democratic Party congress people) are calling for smaller, more focused and creative demonstrations (as well as the need to move from “protest to resistance”), but they don’t go far enough. It’s not enough to call for more innovative anti-war actions or even to call for moving from protest to resistance. It’s time to recognize an unpleasant truth. Your government isn’t spying on you. It doesn’t want to influence you. It isn’t lying to you.

It’s declared war on you.

Let that sink in for a while. If you’re poor, black and live in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, you’ll probably respond with something like “well no shit”. But for most of us, it’s a difficult concept to grasp. We may not believe that the government’s always on our side and many of us may even think that they’re irredeemably corrupt scum who should be washed out of office with a firehouse and a 20-gallon drum of Lysol. But the idea that our government is conducting a highly sophisticated counterinsurgency plan against its own people seems remote, even when there’s proof of it on the front page of the New York Times. That’s what happens in those other countries we invade.

Most of us, even the most radical, even the neo Stalinists who run International Answer and United for Peace and Justice believe that if we put enough pressure on Congress or bring enough people into the streets or write enough letters to the editor, someone in Washington will get the message. We think in terms of protest and petition, political organizing and getting out the vote, not in terms of war, but, guess what, that’s how they think of you. You’re the enemy. You’re the obstacle in their way. And more than that, they’ve not only declared war against you, they hate you. They would have won that war in Iraq a long time ago if it hadn’t been for you. You’re the ones making them go through this silly farce of having elections. You’re the ones who keep whining about health care and the economy. And what exactly will they do with you when they’ve replaced you with Chinese and Mexican slave labor anyway?

Go to the Internet (well you’re already here) and open up any right wing website, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit, any one will do. They’re all the same. Do you think these people came up with all that stuff all by themselves? No, they’re just lowbrow noisemakers for the ruling class. When they label you traitors for not being totally onboard with George Bush’s program, that’s what people a lot more powerful and a lot wealthier than they are really think about you. When they say that anti-war protesters should be put up against the wall and shot, that means that there are people at the very top of the economic and political food chain who at some point, maybe not often, maybe not publicly, maybe not seriously, but who at some time have at least thought about it.

And it’s time to start fighting back, not violently. That would just be playing into their hands. That’s what they want you to do. But it’s time to start thinking of the campaign to end the war in Iraq not as a protest movement or a political organization but in the same way they do, as a military operation. How do you learn more about the NYPD than the NYPD knows about you? How do you find enough people willing to get arrested and get slapped with the kinds of serious charges that are used to intimidate people out of doing civil disobedience? How do you find enough people willing to lose their jobs, their credit, their families and their futures in order to clog up the system to the point where the war machine screeches to a halt? It’s time to start learning from Hezbollah. It’s time to start thinking about the non-violent equivalent of fourth generation warfare.

While I’ve never seen a single episode of 24, Survivor or American Idol and I don’t normally watch Fox News, whenever I get an e-mail telling me that someone whom I’ve actually met is going to be interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, I usually feel obligated to tune in, if only to see what they look like on TV.
While I’ve never seen a single episode of 24, Survivor or American Idol and I don’t normally watch Fox News, whenever I get an e-mail telling me that someone whom I’ve actually met is going to be interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, I usually feel obligated to tune in, if only to see what they look like on TV.

The only problem is that Fox News is a lot like a very easy video game that you can figure out after a few tries. After that it just gets boring, even when it involves people I know. Sunsara Taylor, the national spokesperson for World Can’t Wait, seems to have been given the same gig on the O’Reilly Factor that Maryscott O’Connor has with John Gibson, the token leftist used to embarrass liberals. We all know the dance. Fox will put fringy leftist groups on air hoping that they’ll make perfectly reasonable arguments (like the idea that Bush should be impeached or that the Democratic Congress should vote to end the occupation of Iraq) look fringy and unpatriotic. This drives elite liberal Democrats — who want ordinary people out of the streets, off the air, and at home watching TV — nuts. Being the sacrificial victim on Fox News also provides an excellent opportunity for anti-war organizers and progressive activists to get airtime they wouldn’t ordinarily get on CBS or MSNBC. It’s not necessarily about converting Fox’s viewers. It’s about getting the segment on YouTube and up on your website, using the credibility that even national media exposure on Fox can give you to raise funds and continue organizing.

One of  Bill O’Reilly’s jobs is to make sure this doesn’t happen, to minimize the ability of anti-war and progressive groups to leverage credibility and exposure out of Fox’s desire to embarrass elite liberals and the Democratic Party. In other words, he can’t just debate them. He has to destroy them, make them look so stupid and so crazy that nobody in their right minds would want to have anything to do with them, or else he gets a lot of nasty letters from his mullet headed, meth addicted viewership about why he’s putting on them damned commie Islamofascists. Normally it’s not very difficult. All of Fox’s shows are taped so they can edit out any kind of material they don’t want on the air. They control the lighting, the timing of the segments, the cameras, the microphones. And it’s not only Fox. When the Washington Post did their hit piece on leftist blogger Maryscott O’Connor, all they really had to do was take enough photographs to be sure they’d have a usable one from the worst possible angle.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401648.html

This isn’t brain surgery. Give me a digital camera, a raw converter, a 1 Gig flash card and a few minutes, let me control the lighting, and I could make James Madison look like a kook on the political fringe or Brad Pitt look like someone who can’t get a date. Call it character assassination by drivers license photo. But occasionally things get out of control. Sunsara Taylor, who looks a bit like Tina Fey’s younger sister, is a little too attractive and a little too conservative looking to fit the typical Fox News viewer’s stereotype of an anti-war activist. But during the first one on one interview with Bill O’Reilly, he and his crew went for the full, head on, frontal assault. While they may not have gone as far as the Washington Post did with Maryscott O’Connor, Fox’s crew, who tape hundreds of people a week and know exactly how someone would come across on camera, certainly did forget to tell her to remove her jacket (Are they cutting back on heat at Fox?) and certainly did forget to tell her to brush back her hair and take off her glasses, all the better to set her up for O’Reilly, who wanted to portray her as the out of touch, elitist leader of the moonbat horde who routed Rahm Emanuel from his Capital Hill press conference.

Nevertheless, this kind of full, head on bullying, which works so well against liberals, who, like Charlie Brown fooling himself again and again that Lucy will actually hold the football in place and let him kick it, really do think people at Fox are interested in a fair and honest debate, is much less effective against hard core radicals, who realize they aren’t. In his first one to one interview with Sunsara Taylor, he actually gets flustered by her ability to stay on message, and he comes off looking more like my Uncle Charlie at a family reunion than a professional TV journalist. You can almost imagine him leaving the Fox studios to go back out to his ten year old Ford Taurus with the “Jane Fonda Traitor Bitch” sticker on the rear windshield. Damned commies. We should send em all to Gitmo and hang em up on a meathook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UarLnP690i8

Score one for Sunsara Taylor and World Can’t Wait.

But don’t count out Fox News and Bill O’Reilly that easily. They weren’t going to make that mistake twice. After the March on the Pentagon to commemorate the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the O’Reilly Factor invited Sunsara Taylor for a second try. This time they went for a more subtle approach, invited her to the studio itself and shot her from a more flattering camera angle and in a more flattering light. But in the meantime they had figured out how to use her own strengths, the ability to stay on message and to challenge Bill O’Reilly head on in a way most liberals (like the awful Kirsten Powers) won’t against her. O’Reilly does, you have to concede, have some skill as a broadcast journalist. After all, if being an ignorant, bullying right wing lunatic were all it took to make it on TV, my Uncle Charlie would have had his own show on Fox News a long time ago, and, quite obviously, when it comes to a TV segment, O’Reilly’s going to have a better sense of timing that Sunsara Taylor. So he not only let her go on without actually disputing anything she had to say, he encouraged her, repeatedly changed the subject and made her answer so many questions in so little time, it wound up look as though she were just throwing out random bits of anti-American propaganda she had picked up at the March on the Pentagon.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5fsJrRt0gcU

Score one for Bill O’Reilly.

And there it would have stood, but Bill couldn’t quite stop there and the show wound up coming off the rails anyway. Taylor, in the segment, in addition to looking a bit like that TA at the University of Michigan you spent your freshmen year working up the courage to hit on, also has a creepy, superficial resemblance to Andrea Mackris, the ex Fox News TV producer who won a multimillion dollar settlement against O’Reilly for sexual harassment. So you’d have to wonder about O’Reilly’s motivations for structuring an entire show around a relatively obscure anti-war activist. Indeed, immediately after the segment was over, O’Reilly brought on three other guests, Gary Sinese, the far right wing actor who was last seen as Tom Hank’s sidekick in Forrest Gump, the ever more repellent Michelle Malkin, and a “Democratic Strategist” named “Kirsten Powers,” who looks a lot more like the typical blond, bleached Fox News bimbet than any liberal I’ve ever met. And he tipped his hand. He had brought Sunsara Taylor on Fox News, not because he was interested in anything she had to say or even in defeating her in a one on one debate. No, he had brought her on his show simply to make her look stupid, simply to make fun of her.

In other words, at long last we see where Fox News, its staff and crew, and most of its viewership is coming from, high school. Like the popular girl who acts nice to the class geek, invites her to a party, and pretends to be friends with her, only to drop the metaphorical bucket of pig’s blood on top of her head when the setup is complete. O’Reilly spent the rest of the show wrinkling his pretty little nose and hissing. “Don’t think I actually want you on this show because I think you’re cool or anything Sunsara. I only had you on to prove what a dork you are”.

But the segment is disturbing on a deeper level than the fact that the people running a major news outlet are emotionally stuck somewhere in the 10th grade. While her timing was bad and while O’Reilly was able to make her look a bit like a lightweight, everything Sunsara Taylor argued during her segment was not only true, but uncontroversially true.

We can argue about the validity of the Lancet Study. Have 50,000 or 600,000 Iraqis died? University of Michigan Middle East specialist Juan Cole thinks its perfectly reasonable but, in the end, nobody’s going to have any idea about the real numbers for decades, since Iraq is simply too dangerous for civilian academics and NGOs to spend too much time counting the bodies. Marla Ruzicka of CIVIC, the last person who actually tried, was burned alive in her car after it had been bombed by the Iraqi Resistence. O’Reilly comes off like the classic Holocaust denier, my Uncle Charlie in David Irving drag, and he trots out the arguments all Holocaust deniers use. Oh it wasn’t six million. It was more like a million. And besides, they all died of disease and Stalin killed way more people than Hitler anyway.

But there is no debate about Maher Arar. Maher Arar was kidnapped at Kennedy Airport by the American government. Maher Arar was taken to Syria and held in a coffin like cell. And Maher Arar was tortured. There’s no argument about this. It happened. 2 + 2 is four. The earth is not 6000 years old. And Maher Arar was tortured. Get used to it. It’s reality. The Canadian government has already conducted an extensive investigation into the matter, the Garvie report. They have already awarded Maher Arar a 9 million dollar settlement. They have already asked for an official apology from the United States government and they have already asked that Maher Arar be taken off the no fly list by the American government, which, up to now, they’re still refusing to do. Once again, there’s no argument about this, even for mainstream American politicians. Even Patrick Leahy, in his questioning of soon to be ex attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, makes substantially the same points Sunsara Taylor does.

There’s something decidedly terrifying, and I really don’t scare that easily, about the fact that O’Reilly wouldn’t concede the basic facts in the Maher Arar case, that he, like any mean girl in high school, simply wrinkled his nose and mimicked what Taylor had to say instead of either conceding the facts and moving on or disputing them. “Oh you’re such a dork worrying about a completely innocent man locked up in a cell for close to a year. I say it didn’t happen and since I have all the power and you don’t it didn’t. What’s more, like duh. Up is down. War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. And, by the way, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.”

Worse yet was Kirsten Powers, who, to be fair, might not have seen the previous episode. Powers, who is apparently some sort of liberal Democratic, wouldn’t dispute O’Reilly on the issue of the US government’s extraordinary rendition and on legalization of torture. Why risk that cushy gig on Fox and that condo on the Upper West Side over a few Arabs? Instead, she talked about Sunsara Taylor’s motivations, as if Sunsara Taylor were the issue and not the conduct of the US government, the Democratic Party’s acquiescence in the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, and the extensively documented abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Powers, by backing down, gave a bipartisan effect to O’Reilly’s agenda against Sunsara Taylor and the anti-war movement. She made it look as if both the legitimate right and left, conservatives and sensible liberals, accepted the idea that the US government doesn’t torture innocent people in their “war on terror”, that wanting to acknowledge and come to terms with these abuses makes you, if not an America hating traitor, then at least a far out, beyond the pale, probably emotionally unbalanced radical.

And that, my friends, is why we’re still in Iraq.

There will never be a memorial in Washington DC to the over 900,000 innocent civilians killed by the American government over the course of the tens years of its involvement in Southeast Asia. Nor will there ever be a memorial made of stone or metal to the Vietnamese soldiers who stood up to the largest, most powerful, most destructive military the world had ever seen — and won.
Operation Rolling Thunder was the longest extended bombing campaign in American history.

According to Wikipedia, “between 1965 and 1968 aircraft of the U.S. Air Force had flown 153,784 attack sorties against North Vietnam, while the Navy and Marine Corps had added another 152,399. On 31 December 1967, the Department of Defense announced that 864,000 tons of American bombs had been dropped on the DRV during Rolling Thunder, compared with 653,000 tons dropped during the entire Korean Conflict and 503,000 tons in the Pacific theater during the Second World War.”

“Rolling Thunder” is also the name of the motorcycle club that holds an annual “Ride for POWs and MIAs” in early May, a sort of “Hells Angels” for right-wing Vietnam vets and their supporters.

This year, egged on by right wing talk radio, bloggers like Michelle Malkin, and Fox News with the idea that International Answer’s March on the Pentagon was going to desecrate the Vietnam Memorial, “Rolling Thunder” came to Washington DC early, and they came in force. Where the typical anti-war protest in Washington usually draws a small counter protest, this year, on March 17th, the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the numbers were more evenly divided. Anybody who walked up Constitution Avenue towards the Vietnam Memorial had to run a gauntlet of scowling, flag waiving bikers. They walked through the crowd trying to pick fights and they lined the road along the bridge going over the Potomac. It was a menacing, ugly scene.  The war in Iraq is going badly. These people feel abandoned and betrayed by not only the Democrats but also by the Bush administration, and, in their minds, it’s all going to happen again, the last helicopter taking off from the roof in Saigon, Jimmy Carter pardoning the draft dodgers, the rolling crisis of the 1970s when American power seemed to be on the decline. Once again they’ve been “stabbed in the back”.

On the other side was a coalition of about 10,000 people organized by groups like World Can’t Wait, the After Downing Street website, the Campus Anti-War Network, Code Pink and various pro-Palestinian, Marxist and anarchist organizations, all under the umbrella of International Answer’s Troops Out Now coalition. This is the more ideologically radical side of the anti-war movement. While its organizational methods, large, heavily controlled permitted marches organized in cooperation with local police, are almost exactly the same as more mainstream anti-war groups like United for Peace and Justice, International Answer’s uncompromising support of the Palestinians has earned the hostility of most liberal Democrats and the presence of ex US Attorney General Ramsey Clark regularly leads to charges that they’re closet supporters of Slobodan Milosovic and Kim Il Jung. Considering the hysterical misrepresentations of International Answer that you often see even in well known liberal publications like Salon.com or Slate, it’s easy to see why the largely rural, largely unsophisticated members of “Rolling Thunder” could have been so easily manipulated into believing that the Vietnam Memorial was in imminent danger of being destroyed.

There will never be a memorial in Washington DC to the over 900,000 innocent civilians killed by the American government over the course of the tens years of its involvement in Southeast Asia. Nor will there ever be a memorial made of stone or metal to the Vietnamese soldiers who stood up to the largest, most powerful, most destructive military the world had ever seen — and won.

While the design of the Vietnam Memorial itself, that somber black gash in front of the Lincoln Memorial listing the names of the 58,159 American soldiers killed in Vietnam was originally so controversial that Maya Lin, the young Asian American woman who designed the monument, wasn’t even mentioned during the dedication in 1982, lest her race offend Vietnam veterans or their supporters, the memorial was quickly embraced and eventually co-opted by the extreme right. As early as the late 1980s, when I first visited the memorial, you could already see the tents of the vendors hawking Vietnam MIA paraphernalia, and, simultaneously, pushing the usual right-wing revisionist view of the American defeat. The United States was never defeated in Vietnam, the line went. It fought the war with “one hand tied behind its back” and was eventually stabbed in that very back by the liberals, anti-war protesters and the media.

In the mid 1990s, a controversy erupted over the MIA booths. Ted Sampley, one of the key players in the Vietnam MIA industry and the founder of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, attacked Jan Scruggs, the head of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fund, and the man who came up with the original idea for a Vietnam Memorial in the first place, for his criticisms of the MIA tents. Scruggs phrased his criticisms in religious terms — moneychangers didn’t belong in a holy place — but part of him could undoubtedly see the way the Memorial was being transformed from a place dedicated to healing the wounds that the Vietnam War inflicted on the American psyche to a rallying place for right-wing revisionist history. Sampley, in a 1997 letter, also attacked Scruggs for accepting the conclusions of Senators Kerry and McCain that there were no more MIAs left in Vietnam.

“Added to the controversy,” Sampley wrote, is Scruggs’ friendship with Hanoi advocates Sens. John Kerry and John McCain and their hatred for POW/MIA activists. Scruggs and his Memorial Fund board of directors have not hesitated to publish their opinions supporting efforts of U.S. corporate giants to do business with communist Vietnam.”

Over the course of the life of the Vietnam Memorial, from its inception in 1978 to the Presidential election of 2004, the right-wing revisionist view of the Vietnam War became mainstream America’s view of the Vietnam War.

Jan Scruggs himself first came up with the idea for a Vietnam Memorial after he had gone to see the rabidly racist, reactionary movie the Deer Hunter.  While in 1978 most Americans believed that the Vietnam War, if not downright evil and immoral, was at least a tragic mistake, The Deer Hunter started the ball rolling in the opposite direction. Where in reality, Vietnamese prisoners were kept in tiger cages, in The Deer Hunter, it was American prisoners who were kept in tiger cages. Where in reality, Vietnam was destroyed by the American military, the Deer Hunter concentrated on the war’s destruction of the community a small, east European immigrant town in Central Pennsylvania. And, of course, in a brilliantly Orwellian twist, Michael Cimino reversed Eddie Adams’ famous image of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner by showing over and over again white American soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors.

By 2004, after years of false stories about Vietnam vets being spit on in airports by anti-war protesters, lesser revisionist movies like Stallone’s Rambo series, and the out of context images of the atrocities in Cambodia – in reality it was the Vietnamese Communist military who stopped Pol Pot’s mass murder-the stage was set for the stab in the back myth to go mainstream. Its enabler was none other than Vietnam vet and former anti-war activist John Kerry. Kerry attempted to avoid debating the war in Iraq by talking up his military service in Vietnam. But by running away from his own anti-war activism in the early 1970s, he subconsciously sent the message to the American people that anti-war protesters were unpatriotic, or at least immature and unrealistic. It wound up costing him the election when right-wing veterans groups successfully portrayed him as the arch anti-war protester, Jane Fonda Kerry, too unpatriotic, out of touch, and elitist to be elected president.

But it has longer ranging consequences than Kerry’s defeat in 2004.

In 2004, when Kerry visited the Memorial, right wing media outlets like Newsmax started a rumor, later discredited, that Kerry gave the middle finger to none other than Ted Sampley. According to Sampley’s own account he attempted to remove Kerry from the memorial. “Senator, I am Ted Sampley, the head of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry,” he reports himself as having said, “and I am here to escort you away from the Wall because you do not belong here.”  As ludicrous as Sampley’s self-serving account is, the message behind it is clear. The Vietnam Memorial does not belong to all the American people, not even to a man like John Kerry, who actually served in Vietnam. It belongs to pro-war, right wing Americans and pro-war right wing Americans only.  

On March 17th, according to the Washington Post, the government made it official, allowing the right wing counter protesters, Rolling Thunder and a Gathering of Eagles, to hire private security contractors to keep International Answer’s supporters from visiting the site.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031701280.html

Gathering of Eagles, the group that organized the protest, was so worried about threats to the monuments that it hired private security to guard the Wall, said Harry Riley, 69, a retired Army colonel from Florida. Other vets patrolled the area through the night and early morning, he said.

By early morning, the National Park Service had installed two metal detectors and carefully controlled entry along the path leading to the Wall. Blue-helmeted riot police were stationed along the length of the Wall. For a time, a handful of vets paraded back and forth with American flags waving in the stiff, cold breeze.

In other words, I was no longer welcome at the Vietnam Memorial. In 1989, when I first visited the memorial, very young and very left wing, I chatted amiably with one of the MIA hawkers about our political differences. In 2007, now approaching middle age but with the same politics, I would not have been allowed to visit the site. Oh, being white, male, relatively conservative looking, and in his 30s, I probably could have got closer to the wall then a lot of people. But if I had honestly expressed my opinions about the war in Vietnam or the War in Iraq, I would have either gotten beaten up by members of Rolling Thunder or escorted off the property by the DC Park Police. And nobody at the Washington Post seemed to consider that a problem.

Whatever difficulties they are currently having, the Republicans understand this all too well, that if they control the way the debate is framed on this most basic level, the Democrats in Congress will never be able to mount a consistently principled opposition to any use of the military for whatever reason, however foolish and ultimately destructive. The Democrats in Congress won’t call for an immediate end to the occupation because, deep inside, they accept the right’s basic premise that withdrawing from Vietnam in 1975 led to the genocide in Cambodia. They won’t cut off the funds because, once again, deep down inside, they accept the basic premise of the right that cutting off the funds for the war in Iraq would be the equivalent of stabbing the troops in the back. And liberals won’t defend the basic rights of free speech and assembly because, deep down inside, they accept the premise of the right that groups like International Answer and World Can’t Wait are traitors who deserve to be silenced.

On the other hand, the radical anti-war protesters who marched on the Pentagon last Saturday, whatever their faults, realize that in order to end the occupation of Iraq, you have to undermine the very foundation of the Bush regime’s justifications for the endless “war on terror”. International Answer’s much maligned speakers lists may in fact be dull and may in fact turn off would be supporters but they do have a logic. Let the various ethnic groups and nationalities who have been beaten down by the American government have a say, even if it’s about their little pet projects most of us don’t understand. Let people who aren’t Americans, who aren’t supporters of the American military, who may in fact hold politics offensive to most Americans, let them speak. Another group, World Can’t Wait argues, in their “call”, that you simply can’t have any common ground with the kind of people, for example, who would name a motorcycle club after an obscene program of industrialized mass murder. “This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.” And Cindy Sheehan, in her speech at the Pentagon, pointed in the direction of the counter protesters and said that  “those people think America’s the whole universe. America’s not the whole universe”.

Indeed, this strikes at the very heart of the matter. It’s not enough to argue against the occupation of Iraq on the grounds that not enough privileged young Republicans are enlisting or that the war is being executed badly or that it’s too expensive. All these arguments are legitimate and have their place but unless you lay the basic foundation for an anti-war political agenda, that Vietnamese, Iraqi, and everybody else’s life is as valuable as the life of an American, you will be no more effective than John Kerry was in 2004.

So how exactly did Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and Maxine Waters get so much more conservative than the typical American?
When it comes to impeachment and the war in Iraq, the polls are clear.  As early as the fall of 2005, a Zogby poll showed that close to 50% of the American people supported impeaching President Bush if it could be proven that he lied about the war in Iraq. The number went up to 53% in the Northeast and 72% among registered Democrats. What’s more, the latest Gallup poll shows that 58% of Americans want the United States to withdraw from Iraq within 12 months, 46% believe that the United States “can’t win”, and another 20% think that the United States “can win but probably won’t”.

If the polls are clear on what the American people think of impeachment and the war in Iraq, it’s also clear that even the most liberal Democratic members of congress don’t agree.  John Conyers, for example, declared on the February 16th edition of Democracy Now that he wasn’t even in favor of debating impeachment.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/1548232

We don’t have the luxury to impeach this president and this vice president. We have the responsibility to stop the war in Iraq, and I think it’s proceeding along sound lines.

Even though Senator Russ Feingold has clearly laid out the argument that the only way to stop the war in Iraq is to defund the war in Congress, progressive luminaries like Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters have both rejected the idea

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/house-democrats-say-consensus-is-forming-on-u.s.-troop-withdrawa

l-2007-03-06.html

Speaking for the liberal wing, Lee said that the “Out of Iraq” caucus is not seeking to cut funding to the troops. But the meeting failed to reach the consensus that leaders are seeking.

So how exactly did Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and Maxine Waters get so much more conservative than the typical American?

Watching the guerilla video of anti-war protester Tina Richards confronting Representative David Obey in Congress makes it painfully clear how most American politicians view their constituents.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/obey-dialogue

Obey, a liberal Democrat who voted against the Iraq War Resolution may just be having a bad day, but he’s also exasperated with Richards, a woman in his district whose son has done several tours as a Marine in Iraq, and what he perceives as her failure to understand the restraints that he’s operating under. Even though the financial relationship is reversed (The people pay Congress. Congress doesn’t give the people an allowance.), he considers himself the adult and Richards the child.  Do you see a magic wand here, he snarls as he opens his coat. We don’t have the votes to defund the war. But if only you idiot liberals would get out of the way we would have the votes to end the war.

Obey later apologized, although it was unclear whether he was sorry he insulted Richards or that he got caught.

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/obey-berates-woman-over-war-funding-later-apologizes-2007-03-09.

html

While the tactic of filming Obey without his consent was slimy (George Allen knew he was being filmed before he made his self-destructive race baiting crack welcoming macaca to the real world of Virginia.) he might have been more on guard had he actually seen the camera and not revealed the fundamental truth we all know but so rarely see acknowledged by a member of the political elite.

The United States is not a representative democracy.

American politicians operate under a set of restraints set by the military industrial complex, powerful lobbying groups, the corporate owned media, and the rules of the free market. Their job is not to take the people’s views to the elites, but the elites’ views to the people, to generate a set of options acceptable to the ruling class that the people are then free to chose among.

But there’s an added twist. The elites are not by any means united on how they want to govern. There are deep divisions within the ruling class. There’s the authoritarian faction best represented by George Bush. Scare the people. Make them read the Bible. Prepare them for a total “war on terror” that will never end.  Then there’s a more moderate faction best represented by Al Gore. If capitalism is to function at all, it needs to have restraints. If it doesn’t, it will simply destroy the environment and, eventually, itself.

Not surprisingly, the authoritarian and moderate factions within the political and cultural elites tend to be clustered around whatever sectors of capitalism they represent. So, for example, Colorado Springs, the Vatican of Christian fascist America is home not only to Focus on the Family, but also to the Air Force Academy and the defense industry. On the other hand, the film industry in Hollywood, the giant pharmaceutical plants in New Jersey between New Brunswick and Princeton and the cluster of colleges and universities around Boston simply can’t operate if people believe that the world is 6000 years old and was created by God. They require a well-educated, relatively secular pool of skilled workers.

In other words, if the elites were united, there would be little need for politics and the whole fiction of democracy would end with little fanfare. But since they are so deeply divided, they need pitchmen to sell their ideas to the people, or, rather, role models to demonstrate acceptable behavior and opinions. The result is that instead of being a representative democracy, the United States is a representative democracy turned upside down.  The American people wind up internalizing and “representing” the political views of those very elites who should be representing them.

It’s the politics of the children’s table.

My mother, for example, was a liberal Democrat who supported Humphrey in 1968 and wound up voting for McGovern in 1972. She refused to watch war movies, thought that “blacks and whites would eventually have to live together whatever they thought”, and wouldn’t have been capable of voting Republican, however bad the Democratic candidate might have been.

My father on the other hand was more conservative. While he usually supported organized labor (He voted for Mondale in 1984 because Reagan “broke the air controllers”.), he was also a Marine Corps veteran who strongly identified with the military. Politicians of either party like John Kennedy who he perceived as being pro military got his vote. Politicians like Jimmy Carter who came across as weak and indecisive did not. While war may not always be the answer, it was always worth trying. We always had a flag hanging from the front of the house, and it was always handled, carried, and folded properly.

As I grew up, I usually found myself acting out both political roles, trying on different costumes in order to see which one I liked best.

The first memory I have of expressing a political opinion was in Kindergarten, just before the last helicopter took off from that roof in Saigon. I had been fascinated with model tanks and airplanes at a very young age so one day for “show and tell” I brought in a model of a Huey that I had built (with my father’s help). At recess, I decided to “strafe” a couple of girls in my class, holding the toy helicopter in my hand over the girls while making machine gun sounds with my mouth. The girls were very upset, went to the teacher to accuse me of spitting on them, and I was made to sit under a table in the corner of the classroom as punishment. When I emerged from my pre-pubescent tiger cage, I stood up, pointed at the teacher, and said “Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda”.

Websites like the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are the children’s table of the Democratic Party. Its readers are well read, passionate, and engaged in the study of politics but they are kept far away from the center of power and are not allowed to frame the terms of the debate.  Segregated off onto a separate table, like children at a family reunion, they rarely question the arrangement itself. Why are we sitting at this table far off in the corner of the room while the adults have serious discussions among themselves? Instead, they compensate by taking on the personality and opinions of the adults they hope to join some day. Some are “fans” and supporters of Barack Obama, others of Hillary Clinton, still others of John Edwards. There are the difficult children who believe that if only the children whine loudly enough for impeachment and for the end of the war, the adults will pay attention, impeach Bush and end the damned war. Then there are the good sons and daughters who make a point of understanding just what a difficult time mommy and daddy have at work, how they’re not as powerful as we all think they are. The Democrats don’t have the votes to impeach. If they defund the war, it will cost “us” the White House in 2008. Just be patient. This all takes time. Still others just sit quietly and wait patiently for “Fitzmass”.

This would all be fine if all of the various adult roles the children on the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground model were equally possible. The problem, however, as David Obey not so eloquently expressed, is that the options all of the adults in the Democratic Party have are extremely limited. They cannot impeach. They cannot end the war. They cannot restore habeas corpus. While the Republican family lives in a big house in Greenwich and its children have a realistic shot at growing up to be anything they want, the Democratic family lives in a walkup in the North Bronx. Men like David Obey, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and women like Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee are hard working, blue collar citizens who can only raise a fraction of the money that politicians on the right can. They do the best they can but, in the end, their kids aren’t going to Harvard.

In other words, the “good kids” on the Daily Kos are more in touch with reality than the bad kids. Shut up. Mommy and Daddy work hard. Leave them alone.

Instead of depending on the Democratic Party and on harried liberal Democratic politicians to end the war in Iraq, Americans should leave the children’s table and get out on their own. Groups like David Swanson’s After Downing Street Coalition, International Answer, World Can’t Wait, and United for Peace and Justice are, for all their many faults, a force outside of the two party mainstream. A mass, bipartisan anti-war and pro-impeachment movement doesn’t depend on liberal Democrats, but it’s goal doesn’t necessarily have to be about attacking them.

On the contrary, supporters of the Democratic party, far from ignoring or red baiting the anti-war movement, should embrace it. While the Democratic Party is limited in both resources and in options and while the progressive wing of the Democratic Party more limited still, the American people still have the ability to call on a force outside of the two party system, the threat of non-cooperation of a broad section of Americans with the war machine, a force that would effectively get the Democratic Party off the hook and take the responsibility of ending the war out of their hands. A “surge” of popular resistance would, in effect, tie the hands of both parties. If the threat of disorder were great enough, what you’d see would be a bipartisan group in Congress who would find a way to end the war and take the issue off the table for the election of 2008, which could then be about issues the Democrats want to talk about, social security, health care, the minimum wage, social justice. In other words, the Hagel/Feingold commission could do the hard work of ending the war and restoring the Constitution, and Barack Obama could smile his way all the way to the White House.

dem come for de rasta and you say nothing
dem come from the Muslims you say nothing
dem come for the anti-globalist you say nothing
dem even come for the liberals and you say nothing
dem come for you and will speak for you? who will speak for you, who ?

Asian Dub Foundation “Round Up”

Amanda Marcotte is a widely read liberal Democratic blogger who was handpicked by the presidential campaign of John Edwards to run their web operations. In spite of the fact that the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress three months before, it took only 16 days for the radical right and their allies in the corporate media to pressure her into resigning and to bully Edwards into issuing an apology for hiring her in the first place.

All of this is disturbing, but none of it is very surprising. While the circle of liberal bloggers and grassroots party activists clustered around online communities like the Daily Kos, the campaign of Ned Lamont in Connecticut, and Marcotte’s own weblog Pandagon have received a good deal of attention in the corporate media and even some credit for the Democratic party’s takeover of Congress last November, elite Democratic Party powerbrokers like Chuck Schumer, Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton and even Howard Dean have traditionally kept them at arm’s length.  On the other hand, Catholic League President William Donohue, right-wing journalist Michelle Malkin, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the other conservatives who mounted the campaign against Marcotte and fellow John Edwards hire Melissa McEwan have powerful financial backers on the Christian right and genuine access to the inner circles of the Republican Party.

In addition to being on the wrong side of a mismatch with their adversaries on the neoconservative and Christian right, the Democratic Party’s digital grassroots has further stacked the deck against itself. Over the past 4 years, they have consistently tried to distance themselves from and marginalize the anti-war and social justice movements. The result has been a de facto surrender of the terms of the debate to corporate media appointed right wing gatekeepers like Bill Donohue. Indeed, when Bill Clinton famously distanced himself from the Black Nationalist rapper “Sister Souljah” in the 1990s, it would have been hard to imagine the fervor with which both conservatives and liberals would have latched onto what at the time seemed a forgettable exercise in campaign rhetoric. But over the past decade, and especially since the beginning of the war in Iraq, conservatives have rarely let a month pass without demanding some kind of Sister Souljah moment from liberals.

They are rarely disappointed.

On October 10th of 2002, after the Republican controlled House of Representatives and the Democratically controlled Senate passed H.J.Res.114 authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq, the millions of people in the United States who opposed the war from the very beginning, suddenly realized that they had no representative in either major political parties, and took to the streets. From the rally in Central Park on October 6th, 2002 organized by Notinourname and International Answer to the mass demonstrations on February 15th, 2003 that put over 100 million people in the streets simultaneously all over the world and which were labeled “the other superpower” by the New York Times, the United States saw the largest sustained burst of anti-war activism since the protests over Kent State in the early 1970s.

While the “netroots” was still in its infancy (The Daily Kos was founded in May of 2002), Atrios in April of 2002, MyDD in April of 2002, and Firedoglake in December of 2004), liberals and the intellectual elite on the margins of the Democratic Party were far from pleased. Haunted by Nixon’s victory in 1968, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and McGovern’s crushing defeat in 1972, the specter of another anti-war movement and another backlash from the “silent majority” proved stronger than their anger at the way their representatives in Congress gave in and wrote Bush out a blank check to invade Iraq.

The most egregious example came on October 16th, the day Bush signed H.J.Res. 114 into law, Michelle Goldberg, a writer for the “liberal” online magazine Salon.com, and a proxy for Columbia professor Todd Gitlin, penned a scathing hit piece called “Peace Kooks”, an attack on Not In Our Name and International Answer, two of the more radical groups leading the protests. While maintaining that she was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, Goldberg made no secret about how she felt about the anti-war movement. She hated it. The protests weren’t organized by grassroots Americans at all but rather by “outsider agitators” who were trying to hijack the war for their own agenda.

http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2002/10/16/protest/index.html

Goldberg’s piece, which was later reprinted and widely circulated by Front Page Magazine editor and fellow Salon writer David Horowitz, dripped with class elitism and passive aggressive venom. If the organizers of the protests were dangerous radicals, then the “ordinary Americans” who attended them were just plain stupid. “The new antiwar movement is in danger of being hijacked by bizarre extremist groups — and most protesters don’t even know it”, Goldberg wrote, never bothering to explain how people at the rally she was panning could be unaware of the radicals involved in organizing it when she had already called our attention to their very obvious and in your face presence. “There were the usual suspects, like the girl from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade who donned a kaffiyeh and hurled red-faced imprecations against capitalist tyranny”.

David Corn, the “liberal” columnist for the Nation, who would later go on to work for the right-wing media collective “Pajamas Media” was even more alarmist. In an article for the LA Weekly dated October 30th, 2002 he ducked into a phone booth, donned his superman cape, then activated his X Ray vision to rescue would be anti-war protesters from those stealthy reds who, like terrorists, lurked among them.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/behind-the-placards/3458/?page=3

“If the goal is to bring the silent majority into the anti-war movement, it’s not going to be achieved by people carrying pictures of Kim Jong-Il even if they keep them hidden in their wallets.”

While he was at it, maybe Corn should have tried to find the weapons of mass destruction behind Ramsey Clark’s pack of Trojans.  

The destructive pattern would not change as liberal Democrats moved from working for magazines like Salon and mainstream Democrats like Dean to working for themselves. Indeed, in spite of the way the cluster of liberal Democratic websites that grew up around the campaign of Howard Dean exploded in 2003, there was almost no mention of the anti-war and social justice movements and no consistent line opposing the war in Iraq. They would ricochet between mocking Bush’s incompetence, taunting right wingers to sign up for the military, and predicting the imminent takeover of all of Iraq by the Shiite militias, but they would never come out and call the war a crime, something that, even if the United States could win, would still be wrong. And they maintained a strict separation wall between themselves and people to their left, whom they saw as a possible excuse for the right to attack.

On March 16th, a few days before the invasion of Iraq, Rachel Corrie, the American political activist was killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army. While getting some attention at the beginning in the mainstream media it was met with deafening silence by the Democratic left, who all but ignored the relentless campaign of demonization that took place within the online right and in mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the Rachel Corrie incident was the first canary to die inside the coal mine, and the toxic brew of red-baiting and misogyny directed against the dead anti-war activist whipped up inside the online right by the pro-Israeli lobby and by grassroots neoconservatives was an early template for the campaign of manufactured outrage directed against Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McKewen by William Donohue and the Catholic League for Civil Rights.  

In 2005, when University of Colorado professor of Native American studies Ward Churchill was targeted by the right and their allies in the corporate media in a way that prefigured the attacks on Amanda Marcotte in almost all of its details, most liberals in the now well developed netroots not only ignored the almost unprecedented removal of tenure via a campaign of outrage manufactured by the far right, they went out of their way to distance themselves from Churchill.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, normally one of the “netroots” most ferocious opponents of the far right, seemed far more interested in distancing himself and his fellow Democrats from Churchill than he was in defending Churchill’s right to speak and to publish.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-ann-coulter-matters.html

“Put simply, Coulter’s importance is infinitely greater than Ward Churchill’s (or Harry Belafonte’s or Barbra Streisand’s or any other left-wing bogeyman), and Reynolds’ connection to Coulter is far more substantial than all of those Democrats who never even heard of Churchill before and yet, according to the sermonizing Reynolds, nonetheless somehow had a compelling obligation to denounce him.”

You denounce your extremists, he wrote, daring neoconservative blogger Glenn Reynolds to come out and attack Ann Coulter, and we’ll denounce ours.

I wrote my post urging that Reynolds be asked about his conspicuous silence concerning Coulter only once: (a) several days elapsed after Coulter’s speech and Reynolds said nothing to condemn it, and (b) I began receiving e-mails pointing to posts written by Reynolds where he piously demanded that Democrats not remain “silent” in the face of intemperate remarks by far less important figures than Coulter.

But the real test for liberal bloggers would come a year later.

Neither Ward Churchill nor Rachel Corrie had ever been associated with the Democratic Party. Cynthia McKinney, on the other hand, was a different story, and the controversial Georgia Congresswoman would prove to be a difficult test case for liberal bloggers and grassroots Democratic Party activists.

Indeed, while McKinney is occasionally grouped with Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Maxine Waters and other left leaning Democratic members of Congress, she is in fact considerably more radical. While in congress, she consistently worked outside of the framework that even Kucinich and Conyers are careful not to violate. Dennis Kucinich, for example, serves largely as a liaison between the Democratic Party and  the anti-war movement. His role is to draw anti-war radicals into the party without being a real threat. Note, for example, that he has not introduced articles of impeachment. McKinney, on the other hand, consistently crossed the line, introducing articles of impeachment, calling for a more thorough investigation of 9/11, advocating a more “even handed” American posture towards the Arab Israeli conflict.

Whatever precisely happened on March 29th, 2006, when McKinney got into some kind of altercation with a Capitol Policeman, and it’s important to note that all of the widely publicized charges were thrown out of court due to lack of evidence, it drove a deep wedge into the left wing of the Democratic Party. Not only did John Conyers and the Congressional Black Caucus decline to intervene on McKinney’s behalf, liberal Democratic bloggers in the “netroots” were split bitterly. More radical members of the “netroots” like Amanda Marcotte herself sided with McKinney, noting the misogyny and the racially charged nature of the attacks in the media. http://pandagon.net/2006/04/08/even-if-cynthia-mckinney-did-what-they-say-it-wouldnt-matter/ But more conservative Democratic webloggers like John Avarosis of Americablog bitterly attacked McKinney and defended the behavior of the Capital police.

It was surprising, therefore, that when the long awaited job opportunity with a mainstream Democratic Party candidate finally came, it was Amanda Marcotte, a loyal Democrat but also stridently feminist, gleefully profane, and militantly secular, who got tapped, and not one of her more low key, Ivy League white male colleagues. Indeed, many of the better-known, white male liberals in the “netroots” have always appeared to be censoring their writings with an eye towards later employment in the Democratic Party. Take the case of Jimmy Carter. While he was frequently written about, and defended on the pages of weblogs like Atrios and the Daily Kos in 2005 and the beginning of 2006, a simple search through the biggest Democratic web loggers will reveal that he basically drops off the face of the earth after he published “Peace not Apartheid”. Why, after all, risk writing about the Middle East, an issue you probably don’t know much about anyway, if it’s only going to cause you trouble later on after you get hired by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?

Amanda Marcotte, on the other hand, while, once again a very loyal Democrat willing to work for John Edwards even after Edwards declared that “all options were on the table” for Iran, has never been a Democratic Party activist like Jane Hamsher or Jerome Armstrong. On the contrary, she’s practically made her reputation as a bomb thrower and a provocateur, couching opinions that, while perfectly true, would be still be incendiary, even without the additional verbal hot sauce she’s always piled on top. “The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.”

The sequence of events that followed Amanda Marcotte’s hiring played out in an almost perfectly textbook manner and are described too well by Amanda Marcotte herself in her Salon.com article to be worth going into any detail here. Shortly after she was hired on January 30th, the predictable grumbling started to bubble up on far right wing websites like Michellemalkin.com and Littlegreenfootballs.com, all of whom demanded Amanda Marcotte’s head.

Come, come, they said, barking the familiar orders at liberals in the netroots, give us a Sister Souljah moment now.

Amanda Marcotte is a very popular figure in the liberal “netroots” and of course, as she remarked herself in her post on Cynthia McKinney, white. So a manufactured campaign of outrage on the extreme right side of the blogosphere wasn’t going to be enough in and of itself of to make Amanda Marcotte lose her job. On the contrary, there are liberal Democratic webloggers like the above-mentioned Glenn Greenwald, who practically live for fights with the hard right online.

But while everybody in the “netroots” likes to complain about how the mainstream media favors the right, and while some of them could have anticipated how easily they could have escalated the “controversy” over Amanda Marcotte onto MSNBC, CNN, and Fox,  and while a few might have even guessed the role that misogyny and appeals to the cultural backlash in middle America over issues like abortion and gay rights might have come into play, none could have fully imagined how far the right would take it and just what it meant.

There would be no more demands for Sister Souljah moments from the left. The double standard would now be open and unapologetic.

Last Fall, when the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress with a clear mandate from the American people to scale down the war and reign in the Christian right, George Bush, the White House, the corporate media and the Republican Party did not respond by moving to the center. On the contrary, Bush’s response could best be summed up by “fuck you. Congress is now closed.” The war would now be escalated, not scaled back. Bush was letting Congress know where the real power inside the United States government stood, and it was not with them, and Congress knew it.

No sooner did George Allen concede to Jim Webb in Virginia than “liberal” Congressman and member of the Congressional Black Caucus Charles Rangel start calling for a reintroduction of the draft. Rangel’s proposal of course was hypocritical. Rangel is opposed to escalating the war. But what it demonstrated was that Rangel accepted the terms of debate laid out by the right. Criticize the conduct of the war, but not its morality. Call the war a mistake. Don’t call it a crime. Boxed in by his limited options, Rangel settled for a draft bill he knew would never succeed. He even voted against it himself.

Certain that the Democrats would offer no real opposition to the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration quickly offered them a way to save face. Bush proposed a troop “surge” in Iraq, a very public increase of troops levels by 20,000, something that the Democrats could appease their liberal grassroots by loudly and publicly opposing, and something which let them put off talking about the occupation of Iraq itself. And the Democrats went even further, reassuring George Bush that he wouldn’t be impeached or held accountable for an obvious pattern of lawbreaking since the war in Iraq began by flooding the media with an early primary horserace for 2008. Suddenly all the talk of impeachment and of ending the war was gone and it was all about media superstars Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ana Nicole Smith.

Similarly, in the realm of culture, the right and the corporate media was letting the liberal “netroots” know where the real power stood. There would now be an open, naked double standard. Amanda Marcotte would be a test case.

The first sign that it was now all about raw power was who the right and the corporate media chose to be their standard bearer, William Donohue, an unapologetic anti-Semite and head of the “Catholic League for Civil Rights,” a far right wing organization bankrolled by, among others, Dominos Pizza Chairman Tom Monagham. While liberal Democrats like Glenn Greenwald, as noted above, often taunt the right to be consistent. If you support the war, then enlist. Denounce your extremists and we’ll denounce ours,  the right doesn’t play this game. They are perfectly comfortable with double standards.

In an article by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, for example note how Donohue continues to pretend that the Democrats could “even the score” by putting on a suit and tie, purging themselves of their more marginal supporters, and accepting his terms. John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots. Just give us a Sister Souljah moment, he seems to hint, and everything will be OK.

But once Chris Mathews, Bill O’Reilly, and CNN decided to appoint Donohue as a gatekeeper, the game was up. The ruling class had taken its ball and gone home for while Edwards would apologize for Amanda Marcotte’s criticisms of the Catholic Church, almost as if on cue, Donohue would be allowed to get away with statements that were far more extreme than anything that had ever been written on Pandagon or Shakespeare’s sister.

We’ve already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost. [MSNBC, Scarborough Country, 12/8/04]

Where was the anti-Defamation League? Were was Joe Lieberman? Where were the major Jewish political activists? How about Little Green Footballs or the pro-Israeli right online, people who are sensitive to any manifestation of anti-Semitism from the left? Did they approve of it from the right? All of them were conspicuously silent. Indeed, while there is indeed a virulent strain of anti-semitism on the left, it’s almost always hidden behind political agenda that are not necessarily anti-Semitic, support for the Palestinians or behind the 9/11 Truth Movement. Not so with Donohue. His anti-semitism is open, unapologetic, taunting. We’ve already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks?

But Donohue’s anti-Semitism, of course, was never really the point. The target wasn’t Jews and the reason for using an anti-Semite as a spokesman wasn’t anti-Semitism. It was to say this. We can get away with whatever we want, whenever we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You will play by our rules and you will enjoy it.

Interestingly enough, there is no prohibition on criticizing religion from the right and I’m not talking about the right’s constant attacks on Islam. There is a residual pro-immigrant, anti-war, and humanist streak inside the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant denominations that might eventually get in the way of the ruling class’s agenda. But criticizing it is to be a privilege reserved for people whose pro-war, pro ruling class credentials are beyond reproach, people like Christopher Hitchens, for example or, surprisingly, Bill O’Reilly, who’s the subject of a press release from, astonishingly, The Catholic League for Civil Rights.

“O’Reilly ended this segment by saying, ‘The Vatican wants all the illegals to come here but it does want them to be Catholic.’ Looks like the time has come for O’Reilly to take some of his own medicine and wise up or shut up.”

What’s even more astonishing about this is that O’Reilly is saying exactly the same thing Amanda Marcotte was accused of saying, that the Catholic Church is cynically playing politics in order to increase their own membership.

“The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.”

Nevertheless, Bill O’Reilly still has a job at Fox News and Amanda Marcotte has been sent back to Pandagon, and the message for “liberal bloggers” is quite clear. Over the next few years, there is going to be a winnowing process. We have already driven a wedge between the Democratic Party and radicals in the anti-war movement. We have made it unacceptable for any mainstream Democratic candidate to be overly critical of religion or overly supportive of gay rights or abortion rights.

Now we have come for the liberals.

Those of you with the right gender, skin color and background are going to find employment in the campaigns of mainstream Democratic candidates like Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Quite obviously, the Internet is going to continue to play an expanding role in politics and your skills are going to be needed. For those of you who have gone to the right schools, there might even be guess professorships at major universities and checks from liberal thinks tanks. But if you rock the boat in any way, if you talk about the anti-war movement, if you lend any support for the movement to impeach George Bush or defend people who we have designated outside of what’s acceptable, then you too will be labeled unacceptable just like that loud mouth feminist Amanda Marcotte and, while living on ad revenues and freelance writing assignments might work when you’re 25, don’t imagine you’re going to like it at 35 and 45. Pay no attention to what that moonbat from old Europe Martin Niemoller once said about how, after they picked off the communists, social democrats and Jews there was no one left to stand up for him. We will never come for you. Trust us.