seem to have vaporized. As there are a number of list serves on this
section I'm pretty sure you didn't get this. Let me know if this is a dupe,
and thanks in general for being interested enough. -Ed
Today's Democracy Now program is on the leaks around the Af/Pak
wars. It's a remarkable panel with critical analyses. Tune in. -Ed
Quote of the Day
July 24, 2010
'Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole
debate about the war is old if painful news - but not
for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image.
Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was
letting Democrats get away with the "shameful" claim
that the Bush administration hyped the case for
invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!
'Again, Republicans aren't trying to rescue George W.
Bush's reputation for sentimental reasons; they're
trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies.
And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the
next time Republicans are in power, they'll behave
differently. If you believe that they've learned
something - say, about fiscal prudence or the
importance of effective regulation - you're kidding
yourself. You might as well face it: they're addicted
to Bush.'
Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times
July 23, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/2blof72
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html?th&emc=th
There's a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'
"none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know
what history will bring."
By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: July 25, 2010
THE glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a
swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She
is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don
Draper. So you don't really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad
news. "The world is so dark right now," she says. "One of the boys killed in
Mississippi, Andrew Goodman - he's from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him
from summer camp." Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she
fills in the dead air. "Is that what it takes to change things?" she asks.
He ventures no answer.
This is just one arresting moment - no others will be mentioned here - in
the first episode of the new "Mad Men" season premiering tonight. Like much
in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of
what people don't say and can't say. "Mad Men" is about placid postwar
America before it went smash. We know from the young woman's reference to
Goodman - one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia,
Miss., in June 1964 - that the crackup is on its way. But the characters
can't
imagine the full brunt of what's to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to
contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know
what history will bring.
This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American
president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we
reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where
it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited
video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national
institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P.
and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority
of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the
poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who
served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.
Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod's
43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious
for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its
validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with
N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from
immediately condemning Sherrod for "shameful" actions. As the world knows
now, her talk (flogged by Fox as "what racism looks like") was an uplifting
parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South
to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural
development.
The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by
Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn't look like a Norman
Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife's testimony to her good deeds on
CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture
who fired Sherrod without questioning the video's patently spurious
provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for
him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an
executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a
government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let
oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the
White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful
commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn't a failure of due
diligence - there was no diligence.
Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the
Sherrod smear - including some in the news business who reported on the
video without vetting it - have watched her entire speech. What's important
is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What
matters is Sherrod's own story.
She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th
anniversary of her father's funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17,
leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth.
Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious
racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed "Gator" for a reason.
Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to
justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father's
murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.
Sherrod had long thought she'd flee the South, but had an epiphany on the
night of her father's death. "I couldn't just let his death go without doing
something in answer to what happened," she said. So she made the commitment
to stay and devote her life to "working for change." She later married
Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation,
including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the
civil rights movement.
None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or
ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all
unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary
of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the
racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story
began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea
Party to expel "racist elements" in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party
adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to
anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and
past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a "parody" on
the Web - a letter from "colored people" to Abraham Lincoln berating him as
"the greatest racist ever" and complaining about "that whole emancipation
thing" because "freedom means having to work for real."
Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P.
had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party's racist elements, he was belatedly
excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth,
it's
not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any
other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that
the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of
the G.O.P. instead.
The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican
subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in
California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle,
Harry Reid's Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding
over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly
mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under
their tent. "I am not interested in getting into that debate," said Mitch
McConnell last week.
Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus
Sherrod video as revenge under the headline "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards
Racism." To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon
of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously
subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with
the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like
Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with "a deep-seated
hatred for white people," and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on
Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a "Latina woman racist."
Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes.
Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and
whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod's father was murdered
200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted
with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds
during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis
with lying - never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses - and
tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn't push
it. But he wasn't deterred then, and he and others like him won't be
deterred by the Sherrod saga's "happy ending" as long as the McConnells of
the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage
into the media bloodstream 24/7.
"You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this
country, but we keep going backwards," Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media
Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America's
progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod's father could be
murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.
We don't know what history will bring next. But we might at least address
the chilling question prompted in "Mad Men" by the horrific events of 46
summers ago - "Is that what it takes to change things?" - before our own
summer comes to a boil again.
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