Below is an excerpt of Smith’s 2003 Harpers article, retelling the early stages of the Iraq war, composed entirely of public statements from the Bush administration — All of them, FALSE!

[...]

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn’t want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We’ve tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush…

Read More–> A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies by: Sam Smith, Harpers, October 2003

When I  posted Funny or Die’s “Presidential Reunion” the other day I noticed they had a new Drunk History clip up.  If you’re unfamiliar with the series, be warned:  anyone sensitive about obscene language, binge drinking, or having their story teller pause periodically to wretch, may wish to skip the below clip.

Incidently, the clip that caught my eye was actually a teaser for FoD’s HBO series featuring Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas, portrayed by Will Ferrell and Don Cheadle, and looks to be worthwhile.

But there was another one I hadn’t yet seen.  View the below clip and you’ll hear the story of the 9th President of the United States, William Henry Harrison, whose tenure lasted a mere 30 days.  Harrison is played by Paul Schneider with Derek Waters on both sides of the camera.  Your story teller:  a highly shitfaced J.D. Ryznar.

Enjoy!

Related on PiP ~ Tales of the Founding Fathers from the Highly Intoxicated, 14 July 2008

Cold War Ethos, alive and well during 2008 presidential election.

Crossposted from Care2.com’s Political Causes Blog ~ Originally published 16 February 2010

Former Congressman Charles Wilson, the title character of the 2003 book/2007 movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, passed away Feb. 10 of a heart attack.  He was 76 years old.

The Democratic representative from East Texas was one of Washington’s most colorful characters during his tenure.  Wilson was known best for two things:  First was his reputation as a playboy.  “Good Time Charlie” was seldom seen without a young lady on his arm possessive of most of the attributes prized by the superficial male.

Second, and infinitely more significant, was Wilson’s role in the covert effort to support rebel factions in Afghanistan fight against the Soviet army in the 1980s.

Charlie Wilson’s Role & Regrets

From Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1973-1990 , introductory essay by Steve Galster:

In 1984, Wilson used his powerful position on the House Intelligence Committee to tack on an additional $50 million for Afghan covert aid and convinced the CIA to purchase high-quality, Swiss-designed Oerlikon anti-aircraft missiles, which could pierce the heavy armor of the USSR’s most formidable counterinsurgency machine, the Hind Mi-24 helicopter. The CIA went even further in 1985, purchasing the sophisticated British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles. And in 1986, due to pressure from several congressmen and a number of bureaucrats at the State and Defense departments, the CIA provided the mujahidin with U.S.-made Stinger missiles, the most effective shoulder-held anti-aircraft weapon in the world. It was the first time the CIA had provided U.S.-made weaponry as part of a covert insurgency support operation, and the legislative branch was largely responsible…

Wilson was the toast of Washington following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.  His efforts in support of the Afghan mujahidin, however, would have tragic unforeseen consequences.  Wilson, himself, admitted as much in 2003 National Public Radio interview.

“I take my full share of the blame, but – and at the time I didn’t realize how serious it was, but the United States, once the Communist government had fallen, once the Russians had left, we sort of lost interest, the United States and other Western countries,”  Wilson lamented to NPR’s Terry Gross.  “And because of that, we created a vacuum.”

Supporting Pakistani interests in fight against Communism

That a power vacuum existed in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent American neglect is true but only partially so.  What Wilson failed to mention was that in pursuit of America’s Cold War “triumph,” by allowing Pakistani intelligence (ISI) officials to distribute the American resources, that outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Melissa Roddy noted the consequences of allowing the ISI to select the beneficiaries of “American largesse” in a Dec. 2007 Alternet.org post.  Within it, Roddy scolds the filmmakers behind Charlie Wilson’s War for misrepresenting this historical aspect, particularly their failure to mention the substantial support– up to 40 percent of billions of dollars worth of American aid — given to “…a blood-thirsty, fundamentalist, loudly anti-American bastard named Gulbaddin Hekmatyar.”

Not only is Hekmatyar anti-American, but he and another anti-American fundamentalist, Abdul Rasul Sayaf, received lots of support during the 1980s from the Saudis. That support included cash and thousands of Arab volunteers, including a wealthy young engineer named Osama bin Laden. It was Hekmatyar and Sayaf who, with bin Laden, established terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is why after 9/11, Wilson went on Fox News and said, “This was as much my fault as anybody’s.” He understood the link between U.S. support for these thugs and the events of that terrible day. But Wilson’s mea culpa is not included in Charlie Wilson’s War, nor is there any mention of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayaf or Arab volunteers.

Upon the news of Wilson’s death, Roddy – a documentary filmmaker with a focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, past and present – published a post at ThePublicRecord.org entitled, “I Come Not to Praise Charlie Wilson, But to Bury Him.”  Her more recent condemnation pertains to the less romantic aspects of Wilson’s tireless efforts; namely, the Congressman’s ties to oil companies with regional interests and his lucrative, post-legislative career as a lobbyist for Pakistan.

Be sure to view the clip from Roddy’s documentary on the subject at the bottom of this post.  However, I’m less interested in the condemnation of Wilson than I am the Cold War mindset that facilitated him.

The destructive persistence of America’s Cold War Ethos

Historian H.W. Brands described the evolution of the American Cold War ethos in his 1993 book, “The Devil We Knew:  Americans and the Cold War.”

Within the book (and it should be noted that this pertains to a minuscule segment of Brand’s sweeping Cold War treatment) the author describes how the good vs. evil dichotomy became entrenched in American politics, foreign and domestic.  It was a black and white caricature of a gray-scale conflict, easily digestible for the American electorate.  Perhaps necessary at the time, it allowed Americans to collectively pat themselves on the back for “winning” the Cold War while ignoring the consequences, here described in the above linked National Security Archive essay from Galster:

Six thousand miles away from the celebrations, however, the war in Afghanistan raged on. Washington and Moscow’s clients, using U.S. and Soviet-supplied weapons, continued their internecine struggle for power, adding more civilian casualties to the 1 million who had already died. Although peace had broken out between the superpowers, the legacy of their long and bitter rivalry lived on in the rocket-prone city of Kabul, Pakistan’s crowded refugee camps and the war-ravaged villages in the Hindu Kush mountains.

Similarly, American ignorance of these conditions allowed for simplistic notions of the Cold War to persist in domestic politics.  “Few American voters cared to take the time to educate themselves to the nuances of the possible positions candidates might adopt on issues relating to national security,” Brands wrote.  “For the majority who didn’t, the question of whether an individual was reassuringly hard or suspiciously soft on communism simplified the sorting process.”

Also on the domestic front, this paradigm was exploited by “persons and organizations that had hidden behind the Cold War to oppose social reform…”  Brands notes that these constituencies would have no problem finding another mechanism following the Soviet Union’s collapse, however, “… red-baiting would be hard to match for its capacity to change the subject, and to throw advocates of reform on the defensive.”

There can be no doubt that these Cold War tendencies continue to poison America’s political climate.  The success of Charlie Wilson’s War at the box office is evidence that Americans were, and continue to be, willing to cling to their romantic notions well after the supposed Cold War’s end.

Replace communism with terrorism, the Soviet Union with Al Qaeda, in many of the above paragraphs and the extension of American Cold War sensibilities into the present becomes plain.  To be sure, the death of Charlie Wilson will do nothing to change this state of affairs.  Absent an American awakening to nuance in understanding U.S. foreign and domestic policy, it’s a shame that that we can’t bury the Cold War ethos with him.

See Also:

• Bob Mondello, “’Charlie Wilson’s War’ a Satirical Spin on History.” National Public Radio.  21 December 2007.
• Robert G. Anderson & George Crile, “Charlie Did It.”  60 Minutes Video, CBS News.  Aired 13 March 2001.
• Watch Part One of Melissa Roddy’s Conflict of Interest:  Patterns in Chaos.  (Part 2, Part 3)

Say what you want about Glenn Beck, but do not dispute this: The man is enormously influential in the American political debate. Spend some time with any one of the new conserva-libertarians who’ve been getting so much face time since last spring — the Tea Party, the 9/12 Project, or more extreme groups that are out there like the Oath Keepers — and you’ll often find that their activism traces back to Beck, whether it’s something he said on his Fox News program or his radio show or the books that he’s touted into best-sellers like the “The 5000 Year Leap,” an obscure Christian-oriented take on the Constitution and the Founding Fathers by a deceased John Birch-era right-winger that has sold by the truckload since it was Beck-endorsed.

[snip]

The real reason that history “is no longer taught” is because…it’s bogus. Let’s look at Barton — who Texas Monthly called in a massive profile “The King of the Christocrats” – and his track record”

[snip]

Barton is the founder of a Texas-based group called the WallBuilders, a foundation devoted to proving that the roots of the United States and its Constitution are not based on the separation of church of state — as is widely believed and widely taught — but as country built upon a bedrock of Christianity. That is also the premise of a widely circulated book that Barton published in the 1990s called “The Myth of Separation” — a book that was eventually re-written and issued under a different name because it was larded with bad information, some of which nevertheless became gospel on conservative talk radio. As noted in the 2006 Texas Monthly article (via Nexis):

In 1995 the historian Robert Alley attempted to trace the provenance of a quote that Rush Limbaugh had mistakenly attributed to James Madison, in which Madison purportedly called the Ten Commandments the foundation of American civilization. All roads led to David Barton,whose The Myth of Separation attributed the following quote to Madison: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Barton cited two sources for the quote: a 1939 book by Harold K. Lane called Liberty! Cry Liberty! and Frederick Nyneyer’s 1958 book First Principles in Morality and Economics: Neighborly Love and Ricardo’s Law of Association. Alley couldn’t find the quote anywhere in Nyneyer’s book, however, and eventually concluded that Barton had pulled it from an article in a journal with the unlikely title Progressive Calvinism, which, in turn, had attributed it to something called the “1958 calendar of Spiritual Mobilization.” In any case, Alley reported, the editors of Madison’s papers were unable to find anything in his writings that was even remotely similar. “In addition,” they added, “the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison’s views on religion and government, which he expressed time and time again in public and in private.”

Read More–> Glenn Beck’s plan to save America…with Christian-right pseudohistory | Philly | 02/09/2010.

BigThink.com compiled their Zinn collection on the sad occasion of the famed historian’s death.

This clip is but the first.  Follow the link below the clip to see parts, two & three.

From the BigThink.com post:

The legendary activist, author, and historian wanted to be remembered for “introducing a different way of thinking about the world,” and as “somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.”

Read More–> Remembering Howard Zinn – BigThink.com

Rest in peace, Professor.

From CommonDreams.org ~ by Mark Feeny:

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack [Jan. 27] in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

Portrait of Howard Zinn by Robert Shetterly from his series, Americans Who Tell the Truth. http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Howard_Zinn.php

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s…

[snip]

Read More–> Howard Zinn, Historian who Challenged Status Quo, Dies at 87 | CommonDreams.org.

How Right Wing Extremists Try to Paralyze Government Through Ideological Smears and Baseless Attacks

PFAW has assembled a nice, but alarming post, comparing the then & now of McCarthyism.  Perhaps what’s most frightening about its present manifestation is that there aren’t any Republicans with the stones to stand up to the baseless fear mongering.

From People for the American Way, published December, 2009:

McCarthy’s campaign against supposedly widespread communist infiltration of the U.S. government brought down sitting Senators and intimidated even President Eisenhower (who loathed McCarthy) and his advisors.  McCarthy’s campaign was boosted by conservative think tanks, media figures, and clergy, and abetted for years by the unwillingness of most of his colleagues to stand up against his false charges and clear abuses of power.

[snip]

Today’s McCarthyism has many faces and voices, including the household names of right-wing cable television, a plethora of radio hosts, Religious Right leaders, right-wing organizations and the bogus “grassroots” campaigns they generate – and Members of Congress and other Republican Party officials.  Together they engage in character assassination and challenge the loyalty and patriotism of their targets…

Read More / Digg it

Today, she’d know them as RINOs

“They love to engage in revisionist history,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Nov. 19.  She was referring to Democrats as she had risen to speak in opposition to an environmental protection measure intended to safeguard a 21-mile segment of Molalla River in Oregon.  As she spoke, Foxx set about some blatant revisionism of her own.

Foxx’s began her objection with the bizarre suggestion that the GOP had been the champion of “good” environmental protection laws.  Had she stopped there, her floor speech would have justifiably been dismissed as a bit of irony.  Instead, Foxx went on to perpetuate the misconception that Republicans were also the champions of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, amid fervent obstruction from Democrats.

Upon the completion of Foxx’s remarks, she was passionately rebuked by Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA).  “I can’t believe my ears,” Cardoza said, and went on to assign credit for the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) to the efforts to the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Here is video of the exchange on the House floor from the ThinkProgress.org Nov. 19 post on the subject. (continued below the clip)

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.4150138&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

While Cardoza’s assessment was factually correct and his tone appropriate, his rebuke of Foxx would have been strengthened by informing her that the Republican Party of which she spoke no longer exists.  Indeed, the Republicans whose votes were vital to passing civil rights legislation in the 1960s would be derided as RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – by Foxx and like minded, right-wing ideologues of today’s GOP.

That conservatives have sought to maintain this myth is nothing new.  Paul von Hipple addressed it in a 2005 Alternet.org post responding to a taxpayer funded “Republican Freedom Calendar” which presented a one-sided representation of their Party’s historic role as advocates of civil rights.  The evidence employed to prop up this argument relies upon the higher proportion of GOP votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

It’s a far too narrow interpretation of history, as von Hipple indicated in his 2005 post:

In fact, Congressional votes on the Civil Rights Act did not break along party lines – they split along regional lines. In the North, both parties supported the Civil Rights Act; in the South, both parties opposed it. The difference was that the Republican Party had very little presence in the South, which had been dominated since the 1870s by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party.

This period marks a historical turning point for both political parties.  President Johnson and liberal Northern Democrats were ill prepared for the Southern white backlash that followed the passage of civil rights legislation.  Of course, the legislation wasn’t the only factor, but it was during this time that the Democratic Party set on a path to shedding its racist elements.  In doing so, Democrats lost the political grip on the South it had held since the Great Depression.

The path chosen by the Republicans was altogether different.  Interestingly, the GOP underwent a schism, not unlike the one presently in progress.

Republican conservatives, sympathetic to the racist backlash among Southern whites, made their first political inroads in the South around this time.  The most significant evidence for this trend was the GOP’s 1964 presidential nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.

Before Goldwater’s nomination, the GOP’s regional strength was based in the American North-East.  Their party leaders were inclined to support government investment in infrastructure.  Having been decimated during their initial struggle against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (which they decried as “socialist,” sound familiar?) a moderate GOP persisted as a minority party, seeking to improve FDR’s legislation rather than rail against it.

Goldwater lost to LBJ in 1964, but having won his home state and four other Southern states in the contest, the GOP’s course was set.  They abandoned their moderate positions — the mantle of which Foxx is presently attempting to claim — in pursuit of the racially divisive “Southern Strategy.”

This political strategy was neatly summarized by Sidney Blumenthal in a 2003 Salon.com post:

With the coming of the civil rights revolution, Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson deployed the federal government to support social equality. In reaction, Republicans — from Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan — developed a Southern strategy to win over white voters in the region who felt betrayed. That strategy involved using widely understood code words going back to the Civil War like “states’ rights,” an updating of the well-worn strategy of Southern reactionaries to demagogue on race in order to keep poor and working-class whites divided from blacks on issues of common interest. Thus the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan.

Indeed, Reagan’s ascendency is instructive.  His rise was facilitated by the GOP’s rejection of its moderate voices.  Just as Foxx mistakenly claimed the civil rights mantle on Nov. 19, Reagan did also.   Yet his true feelings were betrayed by his policies and rhetoric.

From the above mentioned von Hibble Alternet post:

…Ronald Reagan, in his 1966 campaign to become governor of California, endorsed repeal of California’s Fair Housing Act, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”

Similarly, Foxx’s own statements over the past year illustrate her departure from the moderate positions of the kinder, gentler GOP of yore.  She has more than made herself clear regarding the present-day civil rights issues, most notably in debates over the rights of homosexuals and health care reform.

My Care2 colleague Tracy Viselli understandably called for Foxx’s apology or resignation following her slanderous comments about Matthew Sheppard on the House floor while debating the hate crime legislation that bares his name.  More recently, Viselli , rightly, took issue with Foxx’s declaration that the present health care reform proposals pose a bigger threat to America than “any terrorist from any country.”  Add to this Foxx’s 2006 vote, along with 33 other Republicans, opposing the extension of the Voters Rights Act, and it becomes clear that any claim of civil rights advocacy exists only in her mind.

Further, these outrageous examples of Foxx’s true beliefs plainly illustrate that the North Carolina congresswoman has absolutely nothing in common with the Republicans who helped advance  the cause of civil rights in the 1960s.  Rather, Foxx is just another product of the cynical GOP which prospered by exploiting the societal divisions left after their passing.