THIS MODERN WORLD

Tom Coburn, 1997

A Republican member of Congress Tuesday criticized NBC television’s showing of the Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List,” saying its airing during Sunday family time should outrage parents.

Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was quoted in a release put out by his office as saying the airing of the highly acclaimed film took network television “to an all-time low, with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes.”

His criticism brought a response from Sen Alfonse D’Aamto, a New York Republican, who told the Senate Coburn’s statement was “shocking.”

“To equate the nudity of the Holocaust victims in the concentration camp with any sexual connotations is outrageous and offensive,” D’Amato said.

“I just wonder if Congressman Coburn is aware that there was a Holocaust, that millions of people died and it’s not something anybody should ever forget,” NBC West Coast president Don Olhmeyer was quoted as saying in Variety, an entertainment industry trade paper.

“NBC is extremely proud of its presentation of this unique award-winning film,” he said. “We think that Congressman Coburn’s statement should send a chill through every intelligent and fair-minded person in America.”

John McCain, yesterday

John McCain’s presidential campaign released a new television ad Tuesday that says Barack Obama is bad for families because he supports sex education for kindergartners. Obama’s campaign called the ad a “shameful” distortion.

The ad says Obama has a weak record on education and that his only accomplishment was legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners.

“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the ad says. “Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.”

But the legislation was not Obama’s, it never became law and it would have required age-appropriate information in schools. Obama has said that means warning young children about sexual predators and explaining concepts like “good touch and bad touch.”

“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.

Earlier today I wrote a post with a suggestion for an Obama ad, but what I’d really like to see is a Palin-ized shot-by-shot remake of the first half of this ad :

Same narrator, same structure, same footage of Britney Spears, etc. And then for the kicker, cut to Barack Obama speaking directly to the camera saying :

…but that’s not why you should vote against John McCain. Beneath all the hype is the same economic policies, foreign policies, energy policy, and dirty politics we’ve seen for the past eight years. I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message because you can’t promise change when your record is just more of the same.

Who’s the celebrity now?

In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama describes the three years he lived in Indonesia during the late sixties after his mother married his stepfather Lolo. This was immediately after the Indonesian military staged a quasi-coup and carried out one of the biggest bloodbaths of the 20th century.

No one knows precisely how the US was involved in the coup itself and the subsequent massacres. However, several things are clear. The US despised Sukarno, the president whom the coup pushed out, because he kept Indonesia in the Non-Aligned Movement and was one of the NAM’s main leaders. Likewise, the US loved Suharto—the Indonesian general who seized power from Sukarno and subsequently ruled the country for 30 years—because he did exactly what we told him to. And there’s testimony and documentation that the US provided lists of people for the military to kill, as well as various kinds of assistance while they were doing the killing. As James Reston of the New York Times wrote (approvingly) in 1966:

Washington is being careful not to claim any credit for this change…but this does not mean that Washington had nothing to do with it. There was a great deal more contact between the anti-Communist forces in that country and at least one very high official in Washington before and during the Indonesian massacre than is generally realized. General Suharto’s forces, at times severely short of food and munitions, have been getting aid from here through various third countries, and it is doubtful if the [Suharto] coup would ever have been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.

Beyond that, it’s still murky forty years later. And even this basic history is essentially unknown in America, since it reflects on us so badly. (For instance, see this story about a New York Times reporter; interestingly, he started his career as an assistant to James Reston.)

So all in all, this is the kind of thing would-be presidents of the United States don’t talk about. Thus, it’s truly surprising that in his book Obama both (1) provides the history honestly, and (2) discusses how societies forget this kind of thing on purpose, and describes how this is a basic, terrifying aspect of power. According to Obama, “history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood.”

Was Obama right about this? Well, according to Google, there is literally just one specific reference anywhere online to his writing about the coup.

In any case, I’ve now stuck the most relevant parts from Obama’s chapter on Indonesia over on my site. And if you want to hear Obama actually say “Even the smart guys at the Agency had lost count,” I’ve also posted an mp3 of the highlights.

In tonight’s speech, John McCain used a line I’ve heard him use more than once on the stump :

I’ve fought the big spenders in both parties, who waste your money on things you neither need nor want, and the first big-spending pork-barrel earmark bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it. I will make them famous, and you will know their names. You will know their names.

He’s already lived up to half of his promise :

I’m not sure if introducing the country to Porky Palin and her federal money-addicted town is exactly what he had in mind though.

As “jumped the shark” applies to television and “nuked the fridge” applies to movies, lemme just say that, in the realm of politics, the Republican National Convention really “earned the desk” last night :

Why is it that the GOP seems to think that American elections should all just be a giant veteran-fluffing competition? You know how I like to honor the military? By trying to keep our soldiers (which includes my step-brother who’s currently in Iraq) from being murdered by Iraqi extremists and by reuniting them with their families.