This is not "The America I Knew"

James Taranto has spotted this reactionary meme at the first Presidential Debate, in Barak Obama's closing statement:

You know, my father came from Kenya. That's where I get my name.

And in the '60s, he wrote letter after letter to come to college here in the United States because the notion was that there was no other country on Earth where you could make it if you tried. The ideals and the values of the United States inspired the entire world.

I don't think any of us can say that our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States, is the same.

And part of what we need to do, what the next president has to do--and this is part of our judgment, this is part of how we're going to keep America safe--is to--to send a message to the world that we are going to invest in issues like education, we are going to invest in issues that--that relate to how ordinary people are able to live out their dreams.

And that is something that I'm going to be committed to as president of the United States.

Taranto points out:

Barack Obama may be the world's leading expert on Barack Obama, but he managed to misstate a crucial fact in his father's life story. Obama père came to the U.S. in September 1959, the Washington Post reported in March--which would mean that the letter-writing campaign Obama fils describes would have taken place in the 1950s, not the 1960s.

Why is this important? Because it is weird to hear a left-liberal politician wax nostalgic for the "moral authority" the U.S. supposedly enjoyed in the 1950s--before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the War on Poverty, America's defeat in the Vietnam War, women's liberation, gay liberation, Roe v. Wade, Nixon's resignation--all the liberal triumphs of the 1960s and '70s. It is conservatives who usually argue, rightly or not, that the era since the 1950s has been one of moral decay.

Presumably it was to divert attention from this contradiction that Obama misstated the decade in which his father attempted to come to America. Liberals, at least those who weren't there, remember the 1960s fondly. But however one evaluates the legacy of the 1960s and early '70s, is there really any substance to Obama's claim that "our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States," has deteriorated? (Obama's father, by the way, was a "child" of 22 or 23 when he arrived in the U.S.)

Our sense is that there is not, that Obama is painting a rosy picture of the past in order to disparage contemporary America. It's nothing more than feel-bad rhetoric.

In fact, we'd say the most salient contrast between America in 2008 and America in 1959 is this: In 2008, Obama fils has an excellent chance of becoming the next president. In 1959, there were large portions of the country where Obama père would have been treated as a second-class citizen. Obama père seems to have seen past America's imperfections and focused on its greatness. If Obama fils is to be the next president, one hopes he will learn to do the same thing.

William Ayres

This is all very inside baseball. If you haven't been following the presidential campaign since 2006, it may seem as though it is an argument in progress. It is. Feel free to skip.

Just a few posts ago I was wondering about Barack Obama, "Who Does He Owe?"

It seems as though one of the people he owes is William Ayres. As pointed out by Hillary Clinton, Obama used the position that he had in Ayres operation as a bullet point on his resume.

This is the absolute sticking point for me. My family calls me McCarthyite and say that I'm attempting to smear Obama with guilt by association.

And yet.

"I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."

"We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."

Oh, God. Do we think that the Red Brigade were random? Bader-Meinhof Group? Were all the pain and horror and death in the end for nothing?

Calling me McCarthyite isn't the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Foriegn Policy Experience

I'm just wonderin'...

One of the big memes of the Clinton campaign has been "experience." Mrs. Clinton touts her experience in the White House, said experience consisting of being a family member of the President. She is going after Mr. Obama about his inexperience.

“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”

Two points:

What foreign policy experience did the President with whom she shared the White House have before his election?

If being a family member counts as experience, doesn't George W. Bush come with a much fuller nepotistic resume? His father was a member of the house of Representatives, Chief Liaison to Communist China, director of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, Vice President for 8 years and President for four years, during which time the US saw the fall of its cold-war adversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and conducted a UN-sanctioned campaign in Iraq.

Again, I'm just sayin'...

Why We Can Never Have Another Clinton Presidency

These are dry times for conservatives like me. I see that the current tack of the Republican party (which began with the election of George W. Bush) is taking to a more mainstream course. I know that the world has changed almost immeasurably since 1980, and that those that long for the second coming of Ronald Reagan both do not know what they want and would not accept it if it came.

I have my strong doubts about Obama. He lacks executive experience and will rely on teams of advisers. Who are these advisers? Perhaps they should be making policy speeches.

But in all this there is to me one constant: There can never be another Clinton in the White House.

Many Clinton haters will to this day gas on and on about the Rose Law firm and Whitewater billing records. These issues display in the Clintons a small-minded meanness.

Others will cite the White House Travel Office scandal. In this Hillary showed that she saw the office of the president as a a spoils machine, there to dole out plum jobs to cronies.

Others point out the trifecta of Clinton supporting the independent-counsel law; supporting and signing a law that enhanced and extended the ability of victims of sexual harassment to compel testimony; and Bill's feeling that he, as usual, was above the law.

All that pales next to the Clinton's actions in the closing days of Bill's presidency, when he released from prison 16 terrorists.

Debra Burlingame runs down some history that I am sure Hillary doen't want springing up on any of her carefully managed "listening tours" or "town halls."

On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he "will not rest until justice is done." Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN.

The FBI cracked the cases with the discovery of an FALN safe house and bomb factory... FBI agents obtained a warrant and entered the premises, surreptitiously disarming the bombs whose components bore the unmistakable FALN signature. They found 24 pounds of dynamite, 24 blasting caps, weapons, disguises, false IDs and thousands of rounds of ammunition....

Federal law enforcement agencies considered these individuals so dangerous, extraordinary security precautions were taken at their numerous trials. Courthouse elevators were restricted and no one, including the court officers, was permitted to carry a firearm in the courtroom.

Given all this, why would Bill Clinton, who had ignored the 3,226 clemency petitions that had piled up on his desk over the years, suddenly reach into the stack and pluck out these 16 meritless cases? (The New York Times ran a column with the headline, "Bill's Little Gift.")

Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the midst of her state-wide "listening tour" in anticipation of her run for the U.S. Senate in New York, a state which included 1.3 million Hispanics. Three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- Luis V. Gutierrez (D., Ill.), Jose E. Serrano, (D., N.Y.) and Nydia M. Velazquez, (D., N.Y.) -- along with local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights advocates, had been agitating for years on behalf of the FALN cases directly to the White House and first lady.

Initial reports stated that Mrs. Clinton supported the clemencies, but when public reaction went negative she changed course, issuing a short statement three weeks after the clemencies were announced. The prisoners' delay in refusing to renounce violence "speaks volumes," she said.

The Clintons were caught in an awkward predicament of their own making. The president had ignored federal guidelines for commutation of sentences, including the most fundamental: The prisoners hadn't actually asked for clemency.

To push the deal through, signed statements renouncing violence and expressing remorse were required by the Justice Department. The FALN prisoners, surely relishing the embarrassment and discomfiture they were causing the president and his wife, had previously declined to accept these conditions. Committed and unrepentant militants who did not accept the authority of the United States, they refused to apologize for activities they were proud of in order to obtain a clemency they never requested.

So desperate was the White House to get the deal finalized and out of the news, an unprecedented 16-way conference call was set up for the "petitioners" who were locked up in 11 different federal facilities so that they could strategize a response to the president's offer. Two eventually refused to renounce their cause, preferring to serve out their lengthy sentences rather than follow the White House script.

Mr. Clinton's fecklessness in the handling of these cases was demonstrated by the fact that none of the prisoners were required, as a standard condition of release, to cooperate in ongoing investigations of countless unsolved FALN bombing cases and other crimes. Mrs. Clinton's so-called disagreement with her husband on the matter made no mention of that fact. The risk of demanding such a requirement, of course, was that the prisoners might have proudly implicated themselves, causing the entire enterprise to implode, with maximum damage to the president and potentially sinking Hillary Clinton's Senate chances.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican politicians in New York who'd been crowing to their constituents about the impending release of these "freedom fighters" were enraged and insulted at Hillary Clinton's withdrawal of support. "It was a horrible blunder," said State Sen. Olga A. Mendez. "She needs to learn the rules."

I don't think that we need to doubt that Hillary has learned the rules.

I Don't Do Comedy

Other than an occasional wry remark, I don't even try. This is why:

This is like watching Steve Hawking goof on about singularities. I'll stick to commenting about my sad life.

The Heav’n-Rescued Land

I wonder these days how many people know the first verse of the national anthem? I wonder how many people know that The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses?

I know, friends and neighbors, because I once sang all four verses to get out of a tight spot.

I was a young fellow, and a trainee at the U.S. Army Signal School's Ceremonial Unit. The unit was run like a kind of fraternity with several weeks of initiation where the pledge's lives were made miserable by the older team members. A common punishment was to order the trainees to drop for endless pushups. (I left the unit a year later with arms like Popeye.)

One particular fellow, PFC Peake, had made it his mission to make me spend as much time as possible doing pushups. After three weeks I knew that the situation couldn't go on. I knew that we were headed for a showdown. And so I began to memorize the entire national anthem.

Sure enough, a few days later I walked into the unit's dayroom and into a circle of older team members. On seeing me, PFC Peake yelled "Drop trainee!" So I assumed the pushup position. But, before he could assign me a specific number of pushups to do, I began singing The Star Spangled Banner. Of course everyone in the room saw the joke and played along, coming to attention (including me).

As I reached the first refrain, "O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave," Peake's eyes lit up. I had played my joke on him, but now whatever number of pushups had been ready to assign, it had now doubled.

As I sang, "O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave," I coud see the group start to relax. Before they could drop from attention, I began the second verse:

"On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes"

Again, as I reached the refrain, the group prepared to see Peake's aweful vengance. But then came the third verse and refrain--then the fourth.

By the time I sang (with a cracking voice) the final refrain, "And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave," the atmosphere in the room had changed. They knew that they had been topped. As I finished PFC Peake gave me the command, "Carry on," and I went about my business. Two week later I passed my tests and inspections and became a unit team member.

I think that it's good for us to see the full text of Key's poem that so swept a nation that it became it's national anthem. And if we find some of the words hard reading, we need to measure ourselves against the text, not measure the text against what we think it should be.

So here it is, in it's non-politically correct form, The Star Spangled Banner:

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream

’Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation,
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our Trust"

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Dead Conservatives

Peggy Noonan writes on the "Weeping Reagan" Time magazine cover:

Could I be correct that they only front-page weeping Republicans, and only laud conservatives when they're dead?

Peg o' My heart, you are completely correct.

Old, dead Republicans are kind of wonderful:

Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.

Oops...

Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

Hey! Time passes. The 1980s are the 21st century's 1950s.

The America I Knew

There has been a meme going around for a few years that has annoyed me more and more as time goes by. I call it: "The America I Knew."

Ed Asner is the worst offender:

I feel that George Bush's actions are desecrating the America that I grew up in and believed in. He is making us an imperialist government. He is choosing to replace heads of state and government he doesn't like.”

Anne Levinson chimed in this last holiday season:

If it is not too much to ask, this holiday season I'd like my country back. It's really what I want most. I think about it every day, without fail. I understand it would be easier to get me an iPod, but that joy would be short-lived compared with helping me be proud of my country again...

The America I grew up loving used to stand as a symbol of hope, of equality, of liberty and justice, not only for the rest of the world, but for its own citizens. I love this country, but the America I live in today makes me long for unwavering and principled leaders who will stand up for their citizens the way Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin stood up earlier this year in the House of Commons to support civil-marriage equality for his country's citizens...

What I am annoyed about is that both of these people are being intellectually and historically dishonest about where America is and where it used to be. They are attempting to appropriate a conservative, even reactionary, meme and use it to advance a point of view that is radically unconservative.

Both of these quotes speak of an America of living memory. Let's ask ourselves what was the America like these people are nostaglic for?

By a quick Google of published documents and biographies, Anne Levinson is approximately 47 years old, Mr. Asner is 76 years old. What America was like in Mr. Asner's memory?

• Between 1919 and 1922, a further 239 blacks were lynched by white mobs and many more were killed by individual acts of violence and unrecorded lynchings.
• In 1948, the Democratic party was split when the "Dixiecrats" walked out of the Democratic National Convention to protest the party's segregationist plank. None of these Representatives and Senators who bucked the Democratic party ever suffered punishment from their caucuses by expulsion or demotion of seniority or removal from prized committee chairmanships.

Is this the America that Mr. Asner longs for?

What about Ms Levinson's childhood?

• It wasn't until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 that the Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson to outlaw Jim Crow.
• In 1962, George Wallace was elected governor on a pro-segregation, pro-states' rights platform in a landslide victory. In his inaugural speech he declared "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever."

Surely this is not what Ms Levinson means by "unwavering and principled leaders."

A few years ago John Stossel ran one of his libertarian pieces on ABC about the culture of blame. In it, he played a couple of television commercials from the late 1950s and early 1960s for various products, laundry soap and canned coffee. I was aghast at their sexist bias and insensitivity. What was worse, I remember seeing the commercials when they first aired, and they were completely unremarkable in the cultural context of their day. Younger people who don't remember this time could fall into the "America I Knew" meme because they have no direct memory of those times. I do. Shame on those, conservative and liberal, who trot that old warhorse out.

America is a wonderful country. My favorite! And I have wonderful nostalgic memories of my boyhood. But I cannot generalize from the specific of my own experiences to say that America was better back then.

Look, if you are a progressive at least espouse a doctrine of progress. It is conservative to look back. It is silly, politically, for progressives to engage in nostalgia.

The Sad Dishonesty of Garrison Keillor

I have over the years enjoyed the radio work and writings of Garrison Keillor. I began listening to "A Prarie Home Companion" back in the 1980's. I bought cassette copies of my favorite shows. (My all-time favorites are "The Royal Family," and "Tomato Butt.") I bought Lake Wobegone Days, Leaving Home, and WBLT. I truly identified with his journey from small-town boy to a grown-up bemused by the changes in the world around him.

So it really hurts to read what Mr. Keillor thinks of me. I seem to be some sort of monster in his eyes:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Apparently, long ago we were lovable:

Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

Oh my.

I guess that Mr. Keillor is abandoning the characterization of Republicans as "Babbits" and McCarthyites who chained thier wives in domestic slavery. I guess those genial Rotarians weren't the scourge of American arts and letters after all. Calling Allen Ginsberg! Telegram for Henry Miller!

So the 1950's Beat movement, the Feminism movement, the 1960's Student Radical movement and the rest were all just faux pas?

I look at the description of Keillor's book, Homegrown Democrat, and marvel at its unconcious irony:

In a book that is at once deeply personal and intellectually savvy, Homegrown Democrat is a celebration of liberalism as the "politics of kindness." In his inimitable style, Keillor draws on a lifetime of experience amongst the hardworking, God-fearing people of the Midwest and pays homage to the common code of civic necessities that arose from that tradition. He skillfully asserts the values and politics of his boyhood--the values of Lake Wobegon^™--and reserves the right to toss a barb at those who disagree. A thoughtful, wonderfully written book, Homegrown Democrat is Keillor's love letter to liberalism, the older generation, JFK, and the yellow-dog Democrat city of St. Paul that is sure to amuse and inspire Americans.

The "politics of kindness" ???!!???

I am amazed that Mr. Keillor's nostalgia for that past seems to have blinded him to it's conflicts and consequences. If he cannot see the differences between the 1955 and 2005, many of the rest of us can.

The changes through which the Republican party went were in response to the political and social calamities that the country endured in the 1960s and 1970s and the defeat that it experienced in 1964. The Republican party became in the 1990s the majority party in the United States. It won elections again and again. There is no cabal, there were no "stolen" elections.

People voted Republican because they didn't like or didn't trust the Democrats. If that hurts your feelings, I am sorry. Now dry your eyes and blow your nose.