Author: Jonathan Schwarz

I don’t know if Dennis Kucinich’s presidential runs were the best use of his energy. (I worked on the one in 2004.) But he’s unquestionably one of the strongest progressive voices in Congress. Just for instance, he’s the only person there who was willing to introduce articles of impeachment for Cheney.

And with the Ohio primaries coming up one month from today on March 4th, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the right wing of the Democratic party are trying to beat him. In a highly unusual situation for an incumbent, he’s being outspent 5-1 by opponents.

So if you agree we need him in Congress, and have some extra money lying around, I encourage you to send it to his campaign. Now I’ll turn the microphone over to him:

Rick Perlstein explains for the Washington Post why we’re not about to “get past” the sixties:

It’s easy to find hundreds of pictures of the national student strike that followed Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. Plenty of pictures of the riots at Kent State that ended with four students shot dead by National Guardsmen. None I could find, however, of the counter-demonstrations by Kent, Ohio, townies — and even Kent State parents. Flashing four fingers and chanting “The score is four/And next time more,” they argued that the kids had it coming.

The ’60s were a trauma — two sets of contending Americans, each believing they were fighting for the future of civilization, but whose left- and right-wing visions of redemption were opposite and irreconcilable. They were a trauma the way the war of brother against brother between 1861 and 1865 was a trauma and the way the Great Depression was a trauma. Tens of millions of Americans hated tens of millions of other Americans, sometimes murderously so. The effects of such traumas linger in a society for generations.

The rest.

Perlstein’s new book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America is available for pre-order at Amazon.

Several weeks ago this statement of Hillary Clinton got lots of attention:

I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, “We are going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished.

What’s gotten less attention is what Martin Luther King himself thought on this subject. Chris Rabb has the bad taste to point out that King wrote this in an article published in January, 1969 after his death:

The past record of the federal government, however, has not been encouraging. No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn’t voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

It would be fun to live in the kind of world where people remembered enough history to ask Hillary Clinton about this.

link

“Reality Is Totally Different”
Iraqis on “Success” and “Progress” in Their Country
By: Dahr Jamail

This March 19 will be the fifth anniversary of the shock-and-awe air assault on Baghdad that signaled the opening of the invasion of Iraq, and when it comes to the American occupation of that country, no end is yet in sight. If Republican presidential candidate John McCain has anything to say about it, the occupation may never end. On January 7th, he assured reporters that he was more than fine with the idea of the U.S. military remaining in Iraq for 100 years. “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so… As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.”

He said nothing, of course, about Iraqis “injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” In fact, amid the flurries of words, accusations, and “debates” which have filled the airways and add up to the primary-season presidential campaign, there has been a near thunderous silence on Iraq lately — and especially on Iraqis…

Once again, with rare exceptions, that media has had a hand in erasing the catastrophe of Iraq from the American landscape, if not the collective consciousness of the public. What, it occurred to me recently, do my friends and acquaintances back in Iraq (where I covered the occupation for eight months during the years 2003-2005) think not just about their lives and the fate of their country, but about our attitudes toward them? What do they think about the “success” — and the silence — in America?

The rest.

If you’re the New York Times and you need a new columnist who’ll cover foreign policy, you obviously want William Kristol. After all, he’s the guy who said just before the war began, “we’ll be vindicated when we find the weapons of mass destruction and liberate the people of Iraq.”

Likewise, if you’re the Washington Post and need a long piece for last Sunday’s paper about the onrushing economic crunch, you obviously want Kevin Hassett. After all, he wrote Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.

I find the NY Times and Washington Post much more comprehensible if I just think of them as the church newsletters for a particularly unpleasant religion. OF COURSE the church elders choose writers who believe in transubstantiation.