Author: shaun

Fourteen years after the 9/11 catastrophe, the Bush administration cover-up of why the terrorist attacks were carried out despite the White House, CIA and FBI being repeatedly warned of them still holds. Not only has the final word not come out about this malfeasance of enormous and arguably criminal proportions, hardly any word about it has.

The mainstream media has been complicitous in ignoring this cover-up and ancillary efforts to hide the truth, which is not to be confused with the rantings of so-called 9/11 Truthers but rather an effort to hide the serial negligence and incompetence that characterized the government response before, during and after the attacks. The Obama administration has shown no interest in trying to penetrate this veil of silence.

Fourteen years after 19 suicidal hijackers “pulled off a geopolitical magic trick of the first order,” as one pundit astutely put it, America is less vulnerable, but only if you take a narrow view.

Osama bin Laden had been denied his caliphate long before his assassination in May 2011, but Al Qaeda remains a dangerous if diminished force, and then there is ISIS. In the years since the attacks, the American national security state has grown immense and out of all proportion to what is realistically needed. Hundreds of thousands of innocents have died and nations have been destroyed. Then there was the Bush Torture Regime.

Pundits declared that Bin Laden’s death finally brought closure to the families of the 3,000 9/11 victims and the U.S. as a whole, but because of the continuing government cover-up and the news media’s complicity in it, that is a convenient if tragic fiction.

Go to Kiko’s House (kikoshouse.blogspot.com) for an analysis of the 9/11 cover-up and its implications.

     Playing beach volleyball on summer vacations as a teenager with a guy who ended up a heartbeat away from the presidency does not qualify me to comment on Joe Biden, while being a native Delawarean who has closely watched and cheered on his four-decade ascendancy from county councilman to Vice President of the United States, with an occasional handshake and exchange of pleasantries at a football game or other event at our alma mater, gives what I have to say only a little gravitas.  But as someone who happens to have covered presidential politics since not too long after Joe and I had to get serious about the business of growing up, I have three little words for him: Please don’t do it.

    Okay, that’s four words, and what I don’t want him to do is, of course, run for president.

    When Barack Hussein Obama gives his last State of the Union speech next January, at his side will be Joseph Robinette Biden, without question the most influential vice president for good in American history.  This by way of differentiating him, as if one needs to, from Richard Bruce Cheney, without question the most influential vice president for evil in American history.

    One reason Joe’s star has risen so high is because he succeeded Cheney, who acted as a de facto president when it suited his imperial self, usurped the roles of national security adviser and secretary of state, was a tireless cheerleader for the use of torture and fear mongering, a scold in accusing anyone who didn’t agree with him as being unpatriotic, and was a key player in going to war against Iraq, which has inexorably led to the rise of ISIS.  

    By contrast, Joe’s chops as a conciliator, honed through 36 years in the Senate, has thrust him into the spotlight at key junctures in the seven years since Obama was first elected.  Additionally, and perhaps most importantly as history will show, Joe has played a vital role as Obama’s devil’s advocate with the encouragement of a president nearly two decades his junior.  

    There are those who will tell you that Joe was destined for greatness, but I would not be one of them.

    I met Joe when I was 12 and on my way to junior high school, and he was 17 and entering his senior year at a Roman Catholic boy’s school outside of Wilmington. He was a gangly kid with no apparent social skills and had a stutter. We played beach volleyball together at the Delaware shore over several summers, and his folks and my folks became friends. Delaware, you see, is even smaller than it looks on a map.  

    Joe went on to the University of Delaware, where he excelled at political science in a department later chaired by the late Jim Soles, who was to attract the future managers of both the 2008 Obama and McCain campaigns to Delaware as undergrads. I followed him to Delaware, where I excelled at nothing except repeatedly getting in trouble with the university administration as editor of the student newspaper.  

    Although I sort of kept up with Joe through our parents’ friendship, our paths didn’t cross again until 1972, my second election as a voter, when I pulled the lever for a man who had long left behind the traits of awkward adolescence.  

    Joe upset a longtime Republican U.S. senator, but within days of the election suffered the tragic deaths of his wife and baby daughter in a traffic accident.  His sons Beau and Hunter survived, and Joe — determined to quit before even being sworn in — stayed at their hospital bedsides day and night for weeks until Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who made repeated trips to Wilmington, convinced Joe otherwise.  Joe began the first of six terms in Washington — at 29 the youngest senator in modern history — and a tenure in the upper chamber that was to be characterized by hard work, growing foreign relations expertise, a willingness to compromise, and a successful hair weave, as well as a dismaying tendency to shoot from the lip.  

    Like vice presidents in general, Joe has been subjected to ridicule.

    Beyond his verbal blunders, there was a hilarious series of articles and images in The Onion to which Joe reacted to with good humor and then some.  A consequence is that these send-ups have burnished his image as a Joe Sixpack and further endeared him to reporters, who truth be known care less about a politician’s world view than whether he’s fun to cover.

        ​* * * * *

    On May 30, Joe’s beloved elder son, Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III, died.

    Beau had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2010, although that was not made public at the time. The cancer had been in remission during his two terms as Delaware attorney general.  In early 2014, he announced his intention to run for governor in 2016, but the cancer returned with a vengeance.

    Joe’s grief over the loss of Beau some 42 years after he had sat at the three-year-old’s hospital bedside was absolute and extraordinarily public.  In an era of deep rancor between Democrats and Republicans, there was a bipartisan consensus that the vice president is a fine man, father and friend, and the grief emanating from the corridors of power was genuine.

    Then, about a month later, in a carefully orchestrated series of leaks said to emanate from Joe’s inner circle, it was reported — first by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and then by a widening circle of news media heavyweights — that when Beau Biden realized that he would not survive his cancer, he sat down with his father and urged him to wage one more campaign for the White House, asserting that America would be better served by Joe’s values.

    Joe has done nothing to halt the leaks or knock down speculation, and it is said that some of his advisers are now counseling him on pursuing a four-state initial strategy — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — that would be a gauge as to whether he could knock Hillary Clinton from her front-runner status.  He would be 77 at the end of a first term, and there is some chatter that he would promise to serve only one term, which would still make him the oldest of any president in history.

    There is no delicate way to put this, so I’ll come right out and say it: Joe’s prolonged grief has been heart rending, but it may be that some of those advisers are using his grief to advance their own agendas.  I haven’t a clue as to where Beau’s stepmother, Joe’s second wife Jill (whom I knew pretty well in the years before she and Joe remarried) stands on the matter.  But she may be key to what the final decision will be, as presumably would be his friend in the Oval Office.

    As I have agonized over whether Joe should run and what I would tell him if I had an oportunity to do so, I was reminded of a 2010 essay on him by my friend Mark Bowden in The Atlantic, and one thing Joe said in particular:

        “Look, I ran for president [in 2008] because I honest-to-God believed that for the moment, given the cast of characters and the problems of the country, I thought I was clearly the best-equipped to lead the country . . . But here’s what I underestimated: I had two elements that I focused on, which made me decide to run. One was American foreign policy, and the other was the middle class and what’s happening to them economically. If Hillary were elected or I were elected, and assume I did as good a job as I could possibly get done, it would have taken me four years to do what [Obama] did in four weeks, in terms of changing the perception of the world about the United States of America. Literally. It was overnight. It wasn’t about him. It was about the American people . . . It said, these guys really do mean what they say. All that stuff about the Constitution, and all about equality, I guess it’s right.”

    There are many reasons, some consequential and others less so, why I don’t believe my beach volleyball buddy of yore should run for president.

    Among them are that Clinton would be a far stronger Democratic nominee and be able to summon a coalition of supporters, including the party’s deep-pocketed liberal elite, far larger than Joe would.  She would be something approximating a shoo-in to win the election, while Joe would not, and will be a worthy successor to Obama.  And their values, which was of such concern to Beau, are not dissimilar.  It really would be no contest, while Joe seemed to keep tripping over his own message when he ran in 1988 and 2008.  Would a third run be appreciably different?  Possibly, but perhaps only because the press corps digs him so much, and that affection eventually would fade.

    But the most important reason is this: Joe always has made his own political fortunes secondary and those of country he serves first and foremost.  There is no reason to stop that now.

    When the New York Times commissioned a cover for the January 24, 2014 issue of its Sunday Magazine, the result was an eye popping departure from the norm.  Readers accustomed to covers of political powerhouses like those of Barack Obama looking presidential, a thoughtful Newt Gingrich with his chin resting on intertwined fingers or Sarah Palin flashing her toothy smile, were assaulted with an  unflattering rendering of the head of a hairless Hillary Clinton embedded in a planet orbiting amidst an interstellar array of objects variously identified as the Chelsea Quasar, Friends of Bill Black Hole, Katzenberg’s Comet, and so on and so forth.

    The cover by artist Jesse Lenz for an article by Amy Chozick titled “Planet Hillary” on Clinton’s influence on the people within her political universe, generated so much comment that Arem Duplessis, then the magazine’s design editor, wrote a story about its genesis, including an acknowledgement that earlier versions that presented Clinton in a more humorous and less grotesque light were rejected.  Many readers were merely bemused, but some defaulted to an oft-peddled line: The Times had it in for Hillary Clinton and yet again had gone out of its way to portray her in a negative light.  Indeed, when Clinton’s husband had last appeared on the magazine’s cover, he was flatteringly photographed in a dark suit with a hot pink necktie and relaxed demeanor.  Indeed, the title of the article was “The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton.”

    “This is a good study into how a merely bad idea turns into fullblown idiocy,” wrote one indignant reader. “What woman ever wants to be portrayed as a huge, round, bald blob of head, capable of gobbling up whole galaxies?” asked another.

    The Times pleaded that no harm was meant by the cover, but Clinton’s defenders were back on the attack against The Gray Lady late last month after an extraordinary series of gaffes that began with an exclusive story published online and then in some print editions stating that the inspectors general for the State Department and intelligence agencies had sent a referral to the Justice Department requesting a “criminal investigation” into whether Clinton “mishandled sensitive government information” on a private email account when she was secretary of state.  The account had become a controversy in its own right, the subject of Republican-led congressional investigations, relentlessly biased coverage on Fox News, and attacks by some of the Republicans who hope to face the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election.

    There followed a series of clarifications, changes and corrections that raised more questions — about The Times coverage and motivation — than they answered.  Then came a tough column by Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan in which she took issue with the paper’s seemingly laissez faire use of the “multiple high-level” confidential government sources who “confirmed” the investigation and faulted it for a lack of transparency, and finally an unsigned Editors’ Note, certainly written by or at the behest of Dean Baquet, who as executive editor holds the highest ranking position in The Times‘ newsroom, that obliquely apologized for missteps “that may have left readers with a confused picture.”

    It turns out that the “criminal investigation” was merely a procedural step in a bureaucratic dance to determine whether sensitive government information was mishandled, rather than  whether Clinton herself mishandled information, but the damage had been done and the impression further cemented that the most influential media outlet on the planet — that is Planet Earth, not Planet Hillary — had again gone out of its way to portray her in an unflattering light.

    I reach a somewhat different conclusion about the email story and The Times‘ coverage of Clinton overall, although one not particularly more favorable to the paper.  As a career journalist who sat through hundreds of story meetings, vetted dozens of potentially controversial political stories, and directed the campaign coverage of a major metropolitan newspaper for no fewer than four presidential elections while being involved in 12 presidential elections in all, I believe that The Times made two fundamental errors of judgment that resulted in what Public Editor Sullivan termed “was, to put it mildly, a mess”:

        * Reporting a less sensational version of the story would have been smart.  Waiting another day to publish the story would have been smarter, but that’s not how the news business works in a hyper-competitive 24/7 world when fairness, accuracy and transparency take a back seat to being first.

        * Lurking behind those shadowy confidential sources are people who want to embarrass Clinton, almost certainly including Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House’s so-called Benghazi Committee and previously the source of intentionally misleading leaks concerning Clinton.

    My review of The Times‘ last 50 Hillary Clinton stories betrays no particular bias, only a pretty damned good paper with a richness of resources that is devoting a fair number of them to covering a person who in great likelihood will be the next president.  But as the most influential media outlet, The Times is going to be second guessed as well as be gamed by people with less than pure motives like Gowdy.  The former comes with the territory; succumbing to the latter in unacceptable.

     It is disingenuous to blame Republicans for the xenophobic and racist white male as a force in American presidential politics.  Democrats also must share the blame, and a societal malaise larger than politics is the cauldron for this toxic brew.  But the Republican Party alone is responsible for calculatedly harnessing bigotry and hate as political weapons, and consequentially for the emergence of Donald Trump as someone to be reckoned with despite his celebrity clownhood, a man whose very unfitness for the presidency is a significant factor in his popularity, as well as made the GOP’s quest to retake the White House into a mockery.

    Mockery is actually a pretty good word to describe the state of the Grand Old Party, which has ignored the best advice of its best minds to plot a course in the last 10 or so years that in the service of short-term gains — and to hell with the future — built on Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, an unabashed appeal to racism that fed off of the alienation of whites in the South and elsewhere following LBJ’s landmark civil rights initiatives.  And then there was the party’s great conservative god, Ronald Reagan, who embraced the Southern Strategy under the moniker of “state’s rights,” at least when he was campaigning in the South.

    And so we have headlines like this one in the New York Times:

    Trump’s Appeal? G.O.P. Is Puzzled, But His Fans Aren’t

    Puzzled?  Not really, it’s just those short-term gain chickens coming home to roost.  Of course not all of the 15 (and counting) other Republican presidential candidates think like Trump, or even agree with him, but the pushback against the celebrity gadzillionaire has been painfully slow in coming and tepid, at best, because of fears that those xenophobic and racist white males who pretty much are the party’s base will have their feelings hurt.  (That began to change on Saturday when Trump dissed Senator John McCain’s war record, but more about that in a moment.)

    Make no mistake about it: As Democrats showed racists the door, the GOP welcomed them and their fellow travelers with open arms, which is why it also is the party of creationists, gun nuts, anti-abortion wackos, immigrant haters, homophobes and has become known for what opposes, not what it proposes.

    Trump is not the first Republican candidate of stature in recent years to dog whistle their appeal to that base; he’s merely the loudest and most obnoxious.  There was Sarah Palin, who was described by her zealous supporters in the same glowing terms as Trump before she burned out, and Senator Ted Cruz, a presidential wannabe who skirts the edges of racial demagoguery when it suits his purposes and has praised Trump for his “truthfulness.”  (I could only come up with a single Democrat of even vaguely similar inclination, the long-retired Zell Miller, in looking for Democratic comparables in the last quarter century, and then even further back to Lester Maddox and George Wallace some 40 and 50 years ago.)

    But Trump takes the cake as he barnstorms the country to shouts of “USA! USA!”.

    It is one thing to declare that the American Dream is dead, its leaders are stupid, and that “his country” is being stolen from him, which is exactly how Charleston church terrorist and white supremacist Dylann Roof feels.  Or that George Bush should have invaded Mexico and not Iraq.  Trump’s appeal to xenophobic and racist whites is visceral as he surrounds himself at his rallies with “true Americans” whose relatives were killed by illegal immigrants and invites people like the man whose son was crushed under the car of an undocumented immigrant to share their stories with his audiences.

    “The illegals come in, and the illegals killed their children,” he said recently.  “They never tell you what nationality they are. . . . Most of them are Mexican.”

    Never mind that Trump is ahead in some national polls.  As a fringe candidate, and he still is despite his vocal following and standing in the polls, what goes up must come down in the cruel physics of politics.

    Trump’s beyond-the-pale attack on McCain in declaring “he’s not a war hero” for being captured during the Vietnam War, never mind that he was held prisoner for five and a half years in Hanoi and refused early release despite being repeatedly beaten, quickly became the excuse the other candidates were praying for (the execrable Cruz excepted) to lock, load and lash back, and the news media needed to stop acting like it was intimidated by Trump and begin piling on.  Or at least do some serious vetting.

    Predictably, one of the first post-McCain slander reports concerned Trump being evasive and seemingly embarrassed about why he never served in the military at the height of the war McCain volunteered for despite having a medical deferment he has described as being only “short term.”  Next up were stories that he is a closet liberal who has donated more of his fortune to Democrats than Republicans, including Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.  He also has supported universal health care and was pro-choice until recently.  And then came stories about his seat-of-the-pants operation: That he’s a less than serious candidate who brags he only spends about half his time campaigning, hasn’t bothered to assemble much of a staff, one of whom is a former The Apprentice contestant, and doesn’t take advice from anyone who isn’t The Donald.  

    Meanwhile, the Huffington Post is making a big deal about moving its Trump coverage to its Entertainment section.  As value judgments go, that seems pretty stupid, no? And Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, whose record of getting things wrong is unrivaled in the conservative media and was Sarah Palin’s most ardent supporter, told ABC‘s This Week that Trump would make a better president than Hillary Clinton but criticized him for swiftboating McCain.  Charles Krauthammer, of all people, actually was making sense: “This is the strongest field of Republican candidates in 35 years,” he told Fox News. “You could pick a dozen of them at random and have the strongest Cabinet America’s had in our lifetime, and instead all of our time is spent discussing this rodeo clown.”

    According to a corollary law of political physics, Trump’s poll numbers should begin dropping now that it’s open season on him.  We shall see.

    Lost in the firestorm over Trump’s attack on McCain (for which he has not really apologized) is that fellow Republican candidates have been comfortable, for the most part, with Trump’s politics of fear.  His declarations that Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers is okay, but impugning a white guy’s war record is out of bounds if the vet is a Republican and not John Kerry or Max Cleland.  And while Trump may begin to founder sooner than later and eventually will fall, it will take a very long time to wash away the stain of the Republican Party’s shame.

     Every political news story has a narrative arc: Initial reports followed by subsequent reports followed by what-it-all-means analyses followed, sooner or later, by diminished interest and then inevitable flame out, often only a few days after the story broke.  That was the likely course following Donald Trump’s announcement on June 16 that he was running for president.  Sniggering, bad hair jokes and practiced yawns.  But nearly a month on, the Trump story not only has legs — as butt ugly as they are — but he has sucked pretty much all of the air out of the Republican presidential campaign, leaving the many other candidates gasping for breath, scrambling to get noticed and hopping mad at the xenophobic gadzillionaire who not only has stolen their thunder but come to represent all that is wrong with the Grand Old Party.

    The Trump narrative arc is well into the what-it-all-means phase, but it has taken a while for the more forthright political pundits to hint at what I’ve been saying for some time: Trump has legs because he speaks for what he has begun calling “the silent majority” in his stump speeches, white men (and women, as well) whose greatest fears have nothing to do with access to health care or jihadist threats, but their ongoing demographic marginalization.

    This explains why Trump’s smash-mouth views on immigration — you know, the hordes of brown ones who are taking away the jobs we don’t want in the first place when not selling crack cocaine to our sons or raping our daughters — have resonated so deeply with the Republican Party’s nativist base.

    While not disagreeing with that view, a very few pundits are spinning Trump’s ascendency as the best thing to happen to the GOP since a former B-movie actor and pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax conned the party into nominating him for president because Trump’s very long 15 minutes of fame could help more mainstream candidates in the long run.

    Like Ronald Reagan, Trump is jobbing the Republican establishment big time.  (After all, he is the author of The Art of the Deal.)  Like Reagan, he is all smoke and mirrors — and despite all their tone-down-the-rhetoric whinging, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his fellow nail biters know that.

    My blogging friend Will Bunch over at Attytood suggests that what Priebus and Company are really doing is an update of the classic children’s fable: Please don’t throw us in the briar patch, Mister Trump!  Bunch adds that the Republicans hitting the panic button probably aren’t smart enough to realize Trump could be their savior beginning with the forthcoming presidential debates in a scenario with Emmy-winning appeal:

        The script is already written. The salivating cable moderator will ask Trump in the first 10 minutes about Mexico and rapists or what not, and The Donald will launch into his routine. The reply will certainly fall upon Jeb! — serious and well-spoken, fluent in Spanish, husband and father of Latino-Americans, and he will utter a well-crafted response that will, in essence, be the 21st Century version of, “Have you, at long last, no sense of decency.” And the pundits will go wild, declaring the scripted reply to be historic — the where’s-the-beef-no-Jack-Kennedy-Army-McCarthy moment that made John Ellis Bush “a leader.”

    Bunch further observes, as have I, that Jeb Bush may be the least popular figure with the best chance of becoming president since forever and at the moment is getting creamed by Trump in a goodly number of polls.  This has to do with the fact that although Bush has the kind of name recognition candidates would kill for, it’s the wrong name.  And that his lackluster campaign has had to compete with 13 others . . . oh, make that 14 others with Scott Walker formally announcing yesterday.

    It is a lead-pipe cinch certainty that Trump will flame out, but at the moment he is dominating the airwaves and lapping the field in appearances on Fox News, the official party Wurlitzer, according to Media Matters.  And nativist Americans finally have the racist demagogue running for president they’d long been hoping for.

     If you weren’t coming home in a pine box or wheelchair from Vietnam, the year 1968 was tremendously exciting, and among the waves of change roiling American society none was quite as dramatic as Eugene McCarthy’s campaign to wrest the heart and soul of the Democratic Party from the hawks and take the White House in what would be a bloodless and historic coup d’état.

    I was a junior in college, editor of the campus newspaper and, while avowedly objective in all things political as a young journalist, I secretly and fervently supported McCarthy.  My roommates took leave of classes, if not their senses, to slog through deep snow in New Hampshire to volunteer for the maverick U.S. senator from Minnesota in the first-in-the-nation primary.  They even cut their long hair and shaved off their beards to “get clean for Gene.”

    McCarthy stunned President Johnson and won 20 of New Hampshire’s 24 convention delegates, while Richard Nixon won the Republican primary.  Robert Kennedy quickly reversed field and joined the race, hastening LBJ’s dramatic announcement that he would not seek reelection.  And suddenly anything seemed possible to my friends and I, as well as millions of young people and others opposed to a war that already had taken more than 20,000 American lives and deeply disillusioned with the Democratic establishment, a ruthless president and his lapdog Congress.

    The sensational early successes of McCarthy invite comparisons with Bernie Sanders, who like McCarthy nearly five decades earlier, has tapped into a reservoir of disenchantment with the Democratic establishment in the person of Hillary Clinton.

    There are indeed similarities, but they will not hearten the supporters of Sanders, a Democrat-turned-Independent and self-described socialist from Vermont: While McCarthy and Sanders were and are men of principle and there is a not dissimilar reservoir of disenchantment, it also does not run deep.  And like McCarthy, Sanders will get very little rank-and-file support, while his quixotic quest will end as McCarthy’s did, a mere footnote in the annals of presidential campaign history.

    The lack of rank-and-file support is the key.

    Sanders’ liberal support, like McCarthy’s, is a given.  No surprises there as liberals embody what opposition there is to Clinton, although she is considered “liberal” by contemporary standards.  But despite some seemingly promising poll numbers for Sanders, Clinton holds a huge and insurmountable lead among moderate and conservative Democrats, both white and nonwhite.

    Sanders’ lack of black and Latino support is especially striking.  Unlike most of the riders in the Republican clown car, that has nothing to do with how he views minorities and everything to do with how working-class, less liberal Democrats view him.  Which is to say, traditionally Democratic voters.

    So while Sanders may pick up a few delegates in the early primaries, he has no chance of succeeding if he can’t attract voters outside of his fairly small constituency.  And he won’t.

     Asked to name my all-time favorite Grateful Dead show, I typically respond, “Which year?”

    “No, which show?”

    “Okay, how about May 8, 1977 in Hamilton, New York?”

    “Howcum?”

    “Because it was just about perfect.  The Dead had just finished recording the seminal Terrapin Station album and were unbelievably loose.  They had been on a roll all spring with nary a bad note or an off-key lyric in the half dozen or so shows I’d already seen.  The setting this particular night was Barton Hall, the Gothic Revival performance space at Cornell University.  It was acoustically sublime.   And incidentally, the show was voted the Dead’s best ever in a 2013 poll in, of all places, The New York Times.

    “Anyhow . . .

    “In typical Dead style, they took us to amazing places during a four-hour extravaganza, elevating us to great and then greater heights, and then bringing us down ever so gently at the end as they were wont to do when everything was clicking. And although it was May, snow was falling when we walked out of the hall. The perfect touch to end a perfect evening.”

THAT WAS THEN AND NOW IS NOW

    Deadheads who believe it will be old times all over again, whether it be 1968, 1978 or whatever 8, when the Grateful Dead take the stage for five shows next Saturday and Sunday and early July in celebration of the band’s 50th anniversary, are likely to be disappointed.  

    That is not to take anything away from what are being billed as the Fare Thee Well shows, which the Dead say will be their last ever.  The concerts at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on June 27-28 and at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 3-5 are bound to be great, but it’s 2015 and that’s where the heads of the “Core Four” — original band members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart — are.

    Expect them and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio (whose band owes an enormous debt to the Dead), pianist Bruce Hornsby and keyboardist Jeff Chimentito to play many of the old favorites over those five evenings.  The shows are to be webstreamed, simulcast on SiriusXM and shown in selected theaters for the many of us — hell, the millions of us — who don’t have tickets.  But Anastasio is not Jerry Garcia, nor will he pretend to be.  He certainly is likely to evoke the late, great Garcia’s magic and the entire aggregation certainly will evoke an extraordinary era in music, but that was then and now is now.

    The concerts are to be enjoyed for what they are and not what the Dead used to be.

    Please click here to read lots more:

http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-fifty-years-of-grateful.html

    There were 15 or so of us gathered around the large conference room table.  It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon in the fall of 1996 and the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board was conducting yet another interview in the laborious election-year process of endorsing candidates.  I happened to be sitting in because I was directing the paper’s presidential campaign coverage and this particular day the candidate was William Jefferson Clinton, whose wife Hillary was at its side.  Although Election Day was a month or so off, it was assumed Clinton would roll to an easy re-election victory, which he did, and that the Daily News, a liberal bastion with a blue-collar readership, would endorse him over the hapless Bob Dole, which it did.

    I have three powerful memories from that encounter: That the Secret Service had overlooked a large ceremonial African tribal dagger in a leather sheath in the middle of the table when it had scanned the room, which elicited titters from the editorial board and concerned looks from two Secret Service agents when the president pulled the dagger from the sheath and turned it in the sunlight while answering a question about education, I believe.  That Mrs. Clinton, who sat immediately to my right and said nothing but dutifully nodded and smiled when her husband spoke, was wearing a perfume reminiscent of a scent an old girlfriend used, and that together and separately Bill and Hillary Clinton exuded a power for which words like charisma and magnetism are inadequate.

    Thousands of news stories, analyses and commentaries have been written about the Clintons in the nearly two decades since my close encounter, many of then negative, many of them positive, and many of them attempts to try to figure out what the heck makes them tick.  

    Why, in my view, Bill Clinton is the best politician of my lifetime despite reliably being his own worst enemy yet remains hugely popular with large swaths of the electorate.  Why Hillary Clinton is the most popular woman in America in poll after poll yet remains deeply unpopular with many voters and an enigma because of the long shadow cast by her husband in the 40 years since she agreed to move to Arkansas in the service of his nascent political career.  And why the Clintons, who at ages 68 and 67 could be quietly minding their business as proud grandparents back home in Chappaqua, seem to be running harder than ever — Bill to feed his high-octane ego as a global post-presidential celebrity who still relishes the roar of the crowd, and Hillary to become not just the first woman president, but to prove her detractors wrong and finally escape that long shadow.

    I wrote elsewhere the other day that there are only two ways that Hillary Clinton will not be elected: By Republicans suppressing the Democratic vote in enough states to eek out victory, or for the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to throw the election to the GOP as it did in 2000.  I should have added a third way, or rather the potentially toxic combination of two things: Running too timid a campaign, which she did in 2008 by conducting a traditional man’s campaign and not running as herself, whoever that may be.  And not being able to keep at arm’s length her husband, who meddled to excess in 2008, as well as the troubling baggage of a family foundation that has raised a cool $2 billion or so for good works from foreign donors, too many with dodgy reputations, who expect that a President Hillary Clinton would side with them when the international going got tough.  

    The long and the short of the situation is this: Republicans have been fiendishly clever in keeping voters (and that supposedly liberal media) focused on her.  If she cannot put the focus on us — as in the dividends voters should expect to reap from her presidency, a sure-thing win may slip from her grasp.

    A fatal case of Clinton fatigue next November would not merely hand the White House to a Republican who, judging from the overcrowded GOP field to a man (sorry, Carly), would not merely undo the accomplishments of Barack Obama, but even more importantly pack a Supreme Court that would do untold damage for many years to come.

    Official Washington ramped up its pushback against investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s recent exposé​ with the release this week of nearly 80 previously classified documents and books and other materials seized from Osama bin Laden’s compound during the raid by Navy Seals in May 2011, but the alleged treasure trove did nothing to debunk Hersh’s assertion that virtually nothing the Obama administration has said about the assassination of the 9/11 mastermind is true.  And the ever dutiful news media distorted or plain got wrong what Hersh has written about the documents.

    Predictably, a list of the books seized from bin Laden’s library — ranging from Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward to The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy to The 9/11 Commission Report — got most of the attention, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence cleverly promoted the list on a web page titled “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf.”

    The Obama administration claimed that the document dump had nothing to do with the publication of Hersh’s exposé in the London Review of Books, but coming as it did out of the blue a mere 10 days after Hersh dropped his 10,300-word bombshell begs credulity and reinforces my view that Hersh touched a nerve in the hypersensitive White House and got a lot more right than wrong — notably that the Pakistani intelligence service assisted the U.S. in carrying out the raid on the compound in Abbottabad and that the documents seized were of marginal value.

    “The material offers the deepest look yet into bin Laden’s final years, much of which he appears to have spent sending missives to his subordinates, seeking to direct a terror network that appeared to have grown far beyond his control, and working his way through a pile of books that ranged from sober works of history and current affairs to wild conspiracy theories spun by anti-Semites,” reported The New York Times.

    True enough, but that falls far short of the administration’s claim following the raid that it produced a “treasure trove . . . the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever,” which would provide vital insights into Al Qaeda’s plans.  An unnamed official told reporters five days after the raid the material showed that bin Laden “remained an active leader in Al Qaeda, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group . . . He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control center in Abbottabad.”

    Many of the documents seized remain classified, but if the documents that were released are the best the White House could muster to make the case bin Laden remained a — if not the — mastermind, then Hersh’s assertion in his exposé that “These claims were fabrications [because] there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over” has withstood the Obama administration’s counteroffensive.

    Hersh’s main source — indeed virtually his only source, something that I and others have criticized — is a retired senior U.S. intelligence official.

    In asserting that the documents were not a treasure trove, Hersh writes that the CIA’s internal reporting showed that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006, only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of Al Qaeda.  “We were told at first,” the retired official is quoted as saying, “that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff.  And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it.  But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.”

    The retired official told Hersh that most of the materials from Abbottabad were not seized in the raid but later turned over to the U.S. by the Pakistanis, who then razed the building. The Pakistani intelligence service, which Hersh states helped the U.S. set up the raid after corroborating bin Laden’s whereabouts, took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the U.S. for questioning.

    The blowback from the pundit class over the bin Laden story has been especially ferocious, which reinforces my view that, as I wrote, at the very least Hersh has again exposed the soft underbelly of a news media content to chew its self-important cud without the bother of questioning, let alone being ever so slightly skeptical, of what our presidents and corporatocratic leaders tell us.

    National Public Radio dutifully led the disinformation charge after the document release.

    NPR first claimed that Hersh had written there were no documents, then NPR reporter David Welna got it mostly wrong in stating ” . . . there’s also the fact that these documents are coming out the week after investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a story alleging that the U.S. fabricated the documents it claims to have seized during the raid.”

    What Hersh said, of course is that the claims that the documents were dynamite were fabrications, not the documents themselves.

    Writes Shamus Cooke at globalresearch.org:

    “Asking probing questions is of course a key part of journalism. If only the media had been so eager to ask similar questions of the Obama administration’s version of bin Laden’s death. . . .

    “The gaping holes of logic in the official story were there from the beginning. Hersh actually asked questions and explored them while the rest of the media were content with regurgitating White House press releases.  And when the White House’s narrative became an Oscar winning movie [Dark Zero Thirty] — made with help from the CIA —  the myth was cemented in popular culture. Until Hersh shattered it.”

This correspondent abhors violence in any form, let alone what is happening on the streets of Baltimore.  But he concludes that civil unrest may be the only way to provoke meaningful and lasting police reform, including an end to the rampant brutality that has been part and parcel of policing in Baltimore and too many other big American cities.  (It is highly likely that in the very dead Freddie Gray’s case, police took him for what they derisively call a “nickel ride.”)  

Face it, folks, do-gooder reports aren’t getting the job done.  

Will Philadelphia be next?  As I wrote at my home blog in January:

“I saw enough bad police behavior to last several lifetimes during the 21 years I worked for one of Philadelphia’s two major daily newspapers.  This did not make the unjustified and widely publicized killings of black men by police officers in a St. Louis suburb and on Staten Island in the year past any less vile.  It merely reconfirmed for me that until the police in this country are brought under control, there can be no racial rapprochement. . . .

“During my two-plus decades in Philadelphia, officers routinely brutalized criminal suspects and innocents alike with little likelihood of their being sanctioned by their department, let alone charged with criminal offenses.  Efforts to reform the department through blue-ribbon panels, task forces and legislative fiats came and went with the seasons and today, 13 years after I left the City of Brotherly Love, its police department remains deeply corrupt and rogue officers — taking advantage of a powerful police union, weak laws and compliant district attorneys — continue to terrorize the communities they are sworn to protect.”

How else other than civil unrest to bring attention to and provoke action on this hitherto intractable issue — which has been so much background noise for far too long?