Water Man Spouts

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Buzzards and Snakes

"Reporters had begun circling Muskie like buzzards, just as they had done to Romney in 1967; everyone wanted to be the first guy to claim the scalp of a front-runner. ….. Richard Nixon showed more than a casual interest in the news. It was evidence his campaign plan to get the Democrats to scratching each other’s eyeballs out was bearing fruit.

"A White House staffer, not ‘Paul Morrison,’ had written the ‘Canuck’ letter. A man on the White House payroll had hired and supervised the black picketers who greeted Muskie at his Florida hotel. His name was David Segretti, and he had also secured a spy to get hired as Muskie’s campaign driver – which is how Evans and Novak got the secret memo on Muskie’s California property-tax hearings. The director of the Youth for Nixon unit of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Kenneth Rietz, received stolen Muskie documents on Washington street corners from a contact known as ‘Fat Jack.’ Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, ran another, entirely separate dirty tricks team. Thus all the fake leaflets, stink bombs, stickers, and press releases claiming unlawful use of government typewriters that were driving the Democratic campaigns insane. ….

"Segretti turned to more willing recruits: fellow veterans of conservative campus politics. Political dirty tricks were the bread and meat of the young conservative movement that organized in the early sixties around the National Review and the Goldwater for President crusade. Young Americans for Freedom, Tom Charles Huston’s old outfit, for example, set up camp in a hotel for the 1961 conference of the National Student Association with a mimeograph machine, walkie-talkies, and a bevy of secret operatives who pretended to be strangers but identified themselves to one another by wearing suspenders – all funded with the help of Bill Rusher, National Review’s publisher and another former army intelligence officer – and took over the resolutions committee via a phoney ‘middle-of-the-road caucus.’ The Young Republican National Federation was shot through with so much chicanery that its 1963 convention turned into a chair-throwing brawl. College Republicans put on elections more rank than banana republics: here was where young operatives learned the black art of setting up ‘rotten boroughs’ – fake chapters – in order to control the national conventions.

"Then they brought their skills to the grown-up’ game. One especially nasty operator was loaned by the College Republicans to the campaign to defeat the Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970, Al Dixon. Dixon was having a formal reception to open his Chicago headquarters. This kid assumed an alias, volunteered for the campaign, stole the candidate’s stationary, and distributed a thousand fake invitations – they promised ‘free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing’ – at communes, rock concerts, and street corners where Chicago’s drunken hoboes congregated. The kid’s name was Karl Rove. The RNC soon hired him at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques."
--Rick Perlstein; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America; pages 628-630.

As the presidential primary season ends, and the general election contest begins to take shape, the spirit of Richard Nixon'’ "dirty tricks" will manifest itself in new and different ways. During the democratic primaries, the goal of these republican operatives is to damage unity among democrats. It is worth taking a few moments to examine both how and why they will be coming out in full force during the general election contest.

First, the strength of the democratic party lies in its ability to unite a wide range of groups and individuals, with a variety of interests in the presidential and congressional elections. These groups include progressive, liberal, moderate, and conservative democrats; those with specific interests, including fighting racism, sexism, ageism, and numerous other "-isms"; environmentalists; labor unions; anti-war groups; the young, middle-aged, and old; the poor, the middle class, and even a segment of the wealthy; and democrats from the grass roots, and local, state, and federal positions.

Among the interests that we share as democrats is a common enemy. That common enemy is the republican machine. Alone, each of us is like an individual finger that the republican machine can crush and break. Together, we form a powerful fist that is fully capable of protecting all of our interests.

The republican operatives seek to weaken democratic unity. They do so for the most obvious of reasons: to keep us as individual fingers that they can break. To do so, they try to identify the areas where they can exploit differences among us. In 2008, those areas include issues including race, sex, and the ability for the democratic party to coordinate efforts from the grass roots to the presidential campaign – and everywhere in between.

Obviously, some things have changed since 1972. The media is far more entrenched in the republican camp. And the internet has offered democrats a powerful means of organizing and coordinating our efforts.

Thus, we can expect to see the republican operatives focusing their efforts to manipulate both the media and the internet. More, these efforts will be coordinated to the fullest extent possible. The most obvious example is what is know as "PUMA," a republican effort to plant seeds of dissent, distrust, and animosity among some of the larger and most important groups within the democratic party. The media can be expected to support their efforts to make PUMA-like groups appear to be organic democratic splinter groups. But, of course, they are being run by republican operatives.

There will also be an increase in the number of individuals who claim to represent democratic values, who will continue to try to plant those seeds on the internet sites that offer the promise of being able to unite grass roots democratic activists, especially among the progressive and liberal ranks.

This is not to suggest that there are not tensions within our party. There are. And there should be. There are people who have become frustrated and angry during the primary season, and who voice serious concerns. There are elected officials in Washington, DC, who have behaved in dishonorable ways in the Bush-Cheney years. We must be patient with the first group, and let the second group know that we have no more patience with them.

Monday, August 18, 2008

The Presidency & the Federal Courts

" The day after that press conference where {President Nixon} tried to frame the thirty-fifth president of the United States for murder, as Americans absorbed the Attica massacre, he received the resignation of eighty-five-year-old Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. Almost simultaneously, Justice John Marshall Harlan announced that he, too, would retire.

"John Mitchell proposed Richard Poff of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, who had offered amendments to strip from the 1966 civil rights bill the power to sue for civil rights violations. Poff decided he didn’t welcome the confirmation fight, so Nixon cast his eye over Democrat Robert Byrd: another thing for the Dems to scratch each other’s eyeballs out over. ‘He’s a real reactionary. The Democrats just made him their whip. And he was in the Ku Klux Klan when he was young. Send them a message.’ (That was George Wallace’s slogan.) A list of six candidates leaked to the American Bar Association revealed the political opportunism: Byrd, who’d never been admitted to the bar or practiced law; three undistinguished women, a nod to the ERA ferment (one was a segregationist leader); an appeals court judge who’d built his reputation defending Mississippi governor Ross Barnett against contempt charges when he’d refused to let James Meredith attend Ole Miss. Chief Justice Burger said he’d resign if any of them were appointed. ‘Fuck him,’ Nixon responded. ‘Fuck the ABA.’ Which somehow made it into the New Republic. Which received a prompt letter from John Ehrlickman: ‘The simple fact is that in the many hours I have spent with the President I have never heard him use the word attributed to him in Mr. Osborne’s piece.’

"Nixon was deferential enough to the ABA to change course: one of the eventual nominees was a former ABA president, the Virginian Lewis Powell. The other was the Justice Department’s William Rehnquist. Both were received well by the experts. The White House heaved a sigh of relief: two conservatives passed the smell test. Powell was the author of a memo to the Chamber of Commerce arguing that ‘the American economic system is under broad attack ….from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectuals and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.’ He proposed a multipoint plan(‘a long road and not one for the faint-hearted’) to ideologically monitor universities and the media, push for more aggressive pro-business intervention in the courts, and politically organize corporations. Rehnquist had reportedly called for law and order in times of domestic insurrection ‘at whatever cost in individual liberties and rights.’

" ‘Rehnquist is pretty far right, isn’t he?’ Kissinger asked Haldeman.

" ‘Oh, Christ,’ Haldeman replied. ‘He’s way to the right of Buchanan.’ "
--Rick Perlstein; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America; pages 604-605.

The next President of the United States will probably appoint two justices to the United States Supreme Court. More, he will decide numerous other federal court appointments. The public will decide if John McCain or Barack Obama will determine the nature of those federal court justices. And those individuals will define Constitutional Law for the next generation.

"But it has to be noted that the US Constitution is only what those who warm the bench say it is. At present, we have two right-wing zealots on the bench; two right-wingers (we’ll know later if they are zealots); one normal, moderate Republican; and four ordinary, sensible people. So we have four justices who are frightening or potentially frightening, and five who are not.

"America should realize that if one of the five retires or dies, and Bush (or any conservative successor of his) appoints only one more right-winger to take his or her place, America, incrementally, will become a different nation, for the worse, to live in. We are that close, just one justice, from waking up in the morning to a new America. Hypothetically – and I’m not saying that five right-wing justices would necessarily make such a ruling – if a search and seizure case came before the court in which the police, though having time to get a search warrant, broke into an American home without one, and the court held that this was not an ‘unreasonable search and seizure’ under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, America would change overnight."
--Vincent Bugliosi; The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder; page 248.

We simply cannot afford to have John McCain in the Oval Office. Let’s dedicate ourselves to the effort to elect Barack Obama this fall. There is far too much at stake here to do otherwise.