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(Turned upside down read: No Immediate Miracles)

I'm often reminded that, when a crisis erupts and the Republicans are in charge, the solutions often fall into the category of Bonehead Misfires.

True to form, in 1974 when the country was in the midst of inflation, recession, mass unemployment and a crisis of faith (owing to the recent resignation of Richard Nixon and the quickly ending Vietnam War), Gerald Ford announced a new package, complete with slogan and buttons - Whip Inflation Now. Rather than use the dreaded Tax-Word, Ford proposed a "surcharge" on individuals making over $7500 a year and families making over $15,000 a year (remember, this is 1974 when money was a little different and less funny then). The immediate effect was to squeeze the middle class and create more loopholes for those who could most afford it.

Ford envisioned a kind of World War 2 gung-ho attitude on the part of the American people, willing to sacrifice at the drop of a hat. The resulting effect was dramatically less so.

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(h/ Heather)

Tom Tancredo stormed off the set of the Ed Show when he was debating health care with Markos Moulitsas. Poor baby.

It all started when Tancredo started trash-talking the Veterans Administration, at which point Markos brought up his chickenhawk past. He got angry and tried the standard conservative whine, realized he was better quitting while he was behind, and then stormed off. The truth hurts, right Tom?

As a Republican student activist, Tancredo spoke out in favor of the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Northern Colorado in June 1969, he became eligible to serve in Vietnam. Tancredo said he went for his physical, telling doctors he'd been treated for depression, and eventually got a "1-Y" deferment.

Too many of these cowards discuss our troops when they themselves refused to serve when they had the chance. Here's Jed Lewison:

A few minutes ago on The Ed Show, Tom Tancredo tried to make the case against government health care by claiming that the Veterans Administration is unpopular with U.S. military veterans. The only problem for him was that he was up against Markos...who is one of those veterans, unlike Tancredo, a pro-Vietnam War chickenhawk who got a 1-Y deferment.

When Markos pointed out that Tancredo was (a) wrong about the Veterans Administration and (b) not qualified to speak for veterans, Tancredo exploded in anger, demanding an apology. Markos did not oblige, and Tancredo stormed off the set.

Funny, too, how the most thin-skinned of the wingnuts are the same people most prone to making vicious, uncivil, frequently racist and xenophobic remarks. Tancredo, after all, is a guy who claimed the National Council of La Raza was just like the Ku Klux Klan, and called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, and told the people of Brownsville, Texas, that they should build the border fence on the northern side of their city.

And then goes whimpering and whining off the stage when he gets a clean shot to the gut with hard facts. There's a street name for that, but this is a family blog.

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Bill Moyers ended his show this week with an editorial comment on what he thinks we should do if President Obama chooses to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending more troops--bring back the draft.

I would agree with him if the end result wouldn't be what always happens when this country has had a draft. The poor go fight and the rich find a way out of it. If we could make sure every neocon war monger had to go first, I'd say hell yes, but that's not going to happen.

BILL MOYERS: Watching the CBS Evening News on Afghanistan this week I thought for a moment that I might be watching my grandson playing one of those video war games that are so popular these days.

REPORTER: An American military convoy traveling northwest--

BILL MOYERS: Reporting on the attacks that killed eight Americans, CBS turned to animation to depict what no journalists were around to witness. This is about as close to real war as most of us ever get, safely removed from the blood, the mangled bodies, the screams and shouts.

October, as you know, was the bloodiest month for our troops in all eight years of the war. And beyond the human loss, the United States has spent more than 223 billion dollars there. In 2010 we will be spending roughly 65 billion dollars every year. 65 billion dollars a year.

The President is just about ready to send more troops. Maybe 44 thousand, that's the number General McChrystal wants, bringing the total to over 100 thousand. When I read speculation last weekend that the actual number needed might be 600 thousand, I winced.

I can still see President Lyndon Johnson's face when he asked his generals how many years and how many troops it would take to win in Vietnam. One of them answered, "Ten years and one million." He was right on the time and wrong on the number-- two and a half million American soldiers would serve in Vietnam, and we still lost.

Whatever the total for Afghanistan, every additional thousand troops will cost us about a billion dollars a year. At a time when foreclosures are rising, benefits for the unemployed are running out, cities are firing teachers, closing libraries and cutting essential maintenance and services. That sound you hear is the ripping of our social fabric.

Which makes even more perplexing an editorial in THE WASHINGTON POST last week. You'll remember the "Post" was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, often sounding like a megaphone for the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Now it's calling for escalating the war in Afghanistan. In a time of historic budget deficits, the paper said, Afghanistan has to take priority over universal health care for Americans. Fixing Afghanistan, it seems, is "a 'necessity'"; fixing America's social contract is not.

But listen to what an Afghan villager recently told a correspondent for the "Economist:" "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."

Listen, too, to Andrew Bacevich, the long-time professional soldier, graduate of West Point, veteran of Vietnam, and now a respected scholar of military and foreign affairs, who was on this program a year ago. He recently told "The Christian Science Monitor," "The notion that fixing Afghanistan will somehow drive a stake through the heart of jihadism is wrong. …If we give General McChrystal everything he wants, the jihadist threat will still exist."

This from a warrior who lost his own soldier son in Iraq, and who doesn't need animated graphics to know what the rest of us never see.

So here's a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let's not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let's not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don't have jobs here at home, or can't afford college or health care for their families.

Let's share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let's bring back the draft.

Yes, bring back the draft -- for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.

Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.

Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show yesterday, via Media Matters:

You -- In 2008, in our presidential election, we had a, a, a war veteran, Vietnam War veteran, John McCain, against an elitist, five-minute career senator of a hundred and fifty days. That senator was running as a Democrat, and had actively sought the defeat of the U.S. military in Iraq -- had actively sought to undermine General Petraeus, who was the author of the surge that led to a turnaround in Iraq and a victory. And now that same man is dithering in Afghanistan while American soldiers -- not Bush soldiers, not Obama soldiers, American soldiers -- are dying. At record numbers.

The threat that people in this country who want to be free face is now within our own borders. That's the stark reality. We'll be back.

Obama and the liberals are, in the land of the Limbaughst, the True Enemies of America.

If only Limbaugh really were "just an entertainer." Then we could dismiss him as a clown. But "entertainers" don't have audiences of "dittohead" acolytes who absorb their every word as gospel truth. "Entertainers" don't make condemnations of half the country as being the "enemy within" and actually stand -- and actually stand a chance of the other half nodding its head in agreement.

This, of course, is how you whip up violence: You scapegoat, you demonize, you dehumanize, and most of all, you paint a target on people's backs and say they're they Enemy. And you can't help but suspect Limbaugh is perfectly aware of this.

I devote a fair amount of space in The Eliminationists to Limbaugh. For a lot of reasons. Obviously, he's been doing this for awhile. But he's also stepping it up quite bit.

PROMOTIONAL NOTE: I'll be speaking tonight in Mount Vernon, Wash., at the Lincoln Theater at 7 pm. I'll be discussing my book as well as the recent visit to the city by Glenn Beck.

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October 27, 2009 C-SPAN

Congressman Walter Jones lays out an impassioned plea for his colleagues to "please move very carefully with a fully defined plan on what the military is supposed to accomplish in Afghanistan"--a great speech.

So many of the saner people were driven out of the military during the Bush administration, it doesn't surprise me that the people left include a lot of the right-wing, racist fringe elements. Still, it's shocking to hear this:

DURHAM — The U.S. military is not just fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most renowned investigative journalist says.

The army is also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”

In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military leaders want Obama to fail.

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”

The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.
“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

Hersh called the “Af-Pak” situation — the spreading conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Obama’s main challenge.

The only way for the U.S. to extricate itself from the conflict, Hersh said, is to negotiate with the Taliban.

“It’s the only way out,” he said. “I know that there’s a lot of discussion in the White House about this now.

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(French Army commanders - Dien Bien Phu - 1954 - Reality came as a shock)

Sometimes you wonder how we get into seemingly impossible situations that appear to have no ending in sight.

While running through my archive looking for tapes associated with our involvement in the Vietnam war, I ran across an earlier broadcast, from May 1954 - the occasion was the recent fall of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, which effectively ended the French involvement in that former colony. Edward R. Murrow, as part of his See It Now program put together a panel consisting of Senate Majority Leader William F. Knowland (R-California), Sir Robert Boothby, a conservative member of Parliament in Britain and a member of the De Gaulle cabinet in France. Togther they discussed, as a sort of postmortem examination of what went wrong and what was next.

Sir Robert Boothby: “When the French the other day implied and our French colleague implied just now that we’d rather left them out on a limb, left them to do this thing alone, they are I think to some extent to blame themselves. We’re speaking quite frankly, but they have made it plain for five years that they regarded this Indo-China as a domestic concern, this Indo-China business. They didn’t want intervention by anybody else, that they didn’t want to make it an international issue. They didn’t want our help or the help of the United States. And it was only three or four weeks that they made the request for help which was really too late.”

French Representative: “Maybe it was too late, but if I may interrupt here, as you have really put my country in question here. Yes, for five years we have asked for nothing. In five years we have lost 400,000 men. If China had not come into the picture we might not be where we are today. And after all, I think that . . well if I may say so, it wasn’t very kind of you to say what you just said. We have done our best as I told you. And . . well, if we had found all the help that we could have expected, perhaps we would not be here today, at least saying alas what we have to say”.

Maybe it's hindsight, but judging from Knowland's reaction to the situation, it almost feels prophetic that the U.S. was destined to get involved sooner rather than later - as was the case.

As I am hearing now about the potential domino effect of an U.S. pullout in the region, with the potential repercussions being an overthrow of the Pakistani government, a return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan and, as Chris Matthews pointed out "all hell breaking loose" with nuclear weapons hanging in the balance - it's almost identical language to that being said some 55 years ago.

The stakes are different this time - but not by much.

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(Secretary of State Dean Rusk, 1968 - Up to his eyeballs in it)

With the current situation in Afghanistan getting to the confrontation point, I was reminded of another situation the U.S. got into with Vietnam. Some four years after the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, questions were started to be raised over what was our plan there and how long was it going to take before we got out of there.

When an Aid request came along with a rumored increase of troop strength by 100,000-200,000, the Senate was starting to wane in their support, with J. William Fulbright being the most vocal during his questioning of Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

J. William Fulbright: “I do not mean to suggest of course, that I now agree with the course of action we are following in Vietnam. On the contrary, my doubts about the wisdom of this course of action have grown, and I am more than ever convinced that it is wrong, and that our present policies in Vietnam have had, and will have effects both abroad and at home that are nothing short of disastrous. Some members of this committee share my opinion. Others do not. But as I have said Mister Secretary, that while those of us who do not agree with our present policies in Vietnam, believe that it is our duty as United States Senators to give voice to the objections we feel in our minds and in our hearts.”

Unfortunately, it would grind on for another seven years before it came to an end.

Do the words deja-vu come to mind?

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Howard Kurtz is still playing water carrier for the Bush administration and their WMD lies used to justify invading Iraq and when called out for it by Daniel Ellsberg who says he'll name names as to who in the Bush administration knew better what does he do? Why try to change the subject of course!

Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which debuts this week in New York, Los Angeles and at the Toronto Film Festival.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Obama administration is getting as much pressure from the press as it should, particularly compared to previous administrations, say the Bush administration?

ELLSBERG: None. No administration has gotten the pressure that it should from the press on this point. We got into Iraq with as much deceptions as occurred in Vietnam, a generation earlier. A performance by the press no better than we saw of pressing behind the lies of the administration than we got during the Johnson administration when I was in; nor did we get a single person within the administration, the Bush administration now, who saw that the adventure into Iraq was going to hurt our counter-terrorism efforts, hurt our security, and was violating the Constitution in terms of treaties. Another example would be treaties on torture and our domestic laws on torture. People who saw that clearly, not one of them leaked to Congress, or to the press.

(CROSS TALK)

KURTZ: Obviously, there were conflicting opinions and conflicting evidence, for example on WMDs. But let me come back to this.

ELLSBERG: No, pardon me.

KURTZ: Go ahead.

ELLSBERG: When it came to lying -- when it came to lying about the nature of the evidence that the evidence was unequivocal, that was as much of a lie as saying that evidence of the attack on August 4th, on our destroyers, was unequivocal. Yes, there was --

KURTZ: You're comparing the Bush's building of the case to go to war in Iraq, with Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf war incident, just to be clear.

ELLSBERG: I am, indeed. It's exactly the same in the performance not only by the president, but by all of the people who knew that it was a disaster. And I could name names there, if you want.

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(Sen. Everett Dirksen - master juggler, sometimes referred to as "The Wizard of Ooze")

With the current state of "bi-partisanship" having something of a hollow ring to it, I thought I would drag out an episode of Meet The Press from January 24, 1965 to hear how adults used to do it. As a result of the sweep by the Democrats in the 1964 election, the Republicans were the minority party. Everett Dirksen became Senate minority leader - he embodied The Loyal Opposition while maintaining some form of unity within a fractured Republican party.

Lawrence Spivak: “Senator Dirksen, there’s been a good deal debate over a long period of time over what the role of the minority party in Congress should be. How do you see the role of the Republican Party in Congress today?”

Sen. Dirksen: “Well, the role of the Republican party or any minority party for that matter, would be one of constructive opposition, not blind opposition. And by constructive opposition, I mean you accept the things that are good for the country. You try to amend or modify proposals that, in your judgment and judgment of the party, are not good. And if they contain more of evil, shall I say, than of good, then you reject them. But always you try to follow a constructive line”.

Dirksen was masterful at the art of negotiation, as was evidenced by his popularity on both sides of the aisle as well as his gift for abundant oratory. He was a fervent supporter of the Civil Rights Act and subsequent Civil Rights legislation. He was also a vocal supporter of the Vietnam War which put him in a precarious place as our involvement increased with no end in sight.

I suspect Dirksen would be seriously dismayed by the current state of his party - as I think many Republicans of the past would.

Voices of reason appear to be in short supply of late.

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(John McCormack - rumored to have thrown up and fainted when told he might be President in 1963)

The opening of the 2nd session of the 87th Congress - January 10, 1962. A pretty busy year. Former speaker of the House Sam Rayburn had suddennly died, leaving the seat open. John McCormack was voted to succeed him. McCormack had the dubious distinction of informing the House on November 22, 1963 that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. When told there was a rumor Vice-president Lyndon Johnson may also have been assassinated - the thought he may be next in line as President was a bit too much.

In this broadcast, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Leverett Saltonstall are interviewed to discuss upcoming Legislation. Eugene McCarthy was to become a Presidential candidate in 1968 and 1972 and was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. Here he talks about the proposed Medicare Bill - one which didn't pass during this congress, but did eventually pass in 1965.

Eugene McCarthy: “ I do expect that we will have a good fight on the Medical Aid question. This would be drawn I suppose, quite clearly on party lines. In my judgment we can pass a bill which is somehow tied to Social Security, which is the kind of bill I think we ought to pass in the Senate. I’m not sure as to what the response will be in the house, but I do think this is a proposition which the Democratic party and certainly the President are both firmly committed and that we should make a total kind of political fight on this one.”

I am always amazed, listening to these old broadcasts, how civilized two people from opposite sides of the aisle could be towards each other.

Or is it just me?

What a strange feeling it is for those of our era to hear that Robert McNamara is dead. Widely reviled for the Vietnam War, he later expressed great ambivalence in the documentary "The Fog of War." He was a liberal, but of that time - for instance, as Secretary of Defense, he signed a directive that forbade military men and women from patronizing segregated establishments in the communities surrounding a military base - but continued the war long after he knew it was a lost cause.

Mr. McNamara is best remembered — and in some quarters still reviled — for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he played in waging the Vietnam War. The controversy that erupted in 1995 when he published his memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” demonstrated the extent to which the scars he bore remained unhealed.

No one person can be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk: Each played his part. To many, though, it was “McNamara’s war,” as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it.

“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” Mr. McNamara said during a 1964 press conference. “I think it is a very important war, and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

Those words would come to haunt him.

[...] Kennedy reportedly wanted Mr. McNamara to replace Rusk as secretary of state in his second administration. And Robert Kennedy said he and his brother speculated about supporting Mr. McNamara for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.

The Kennedys were not alone in falling under the spell of the McNamara mystique. Johnson offered him the vice-presidential nomination in 1964. “He’s the best man available,” LBJ told a friend. When Mr. McNamara declined, Johnson pronounced him “No. 1 executive vice president in charge of the Cabinet.” He later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

US Senator Barry Goldwater, who would become a harsh critic, initially hailed Mr. McNamara as “one of the best secretaries ever, an IBM machine with legs.” David Halberstam, who would later assail Mr. McNamara in his book “The Best and the Brightest,” wrote in 1963 that “McNamara may well be this country’s most distinguished civil servant of the last decade.”

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(Robert McNamara - Every time he opened his mouth, doom flew out)

To anyone of a certain generation, the name Robert S. McNamara will probably evoke the same (or very similar) reactions as this generations Donald Rumsfeld does.

Anger, bitterness, rage, betrayal - simmering arrogance, wrongheadedness and simple belligerence. All over a war that, like Iraq, should not have existed in the first place. And yet it was McNamara's insistence we wage it, even to the point of deceit.

I remember his "Mea Culpa tour" of the 1990's, begging forgiveness for his wrongdoings and his errors - saying in fact, The Gulf of Tonkin incident may not have happened. And some 60,000 casualties and untold wounded later . . . .

But as Joseph N.Welch once told Joseph McCarthy: "Your forgiveness sir, will have to come from a power other than myself".

And so here is a Press Conference, typical of the McNamara era during the Vietnam War, from February 7, 1965 - as the escalation and casualties mount. As we sighed and waited for our draft notices to appear.

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(At the end of 9,000 days it looked like this . . .)

It was the war that nobody thought would ever end. But eventually it did, and suddenly. Even though the Vietnam war from the U.S. standpoint was over, at least on paper in January of 1973, the conflict between North and South kept going even as American troops were being withdrawn and our presence scaled back down to adviser (more or less ending where we began in 1950). On March 10 1975, North Vietnam launched an offensive and quickly moved south with very little resistance advancing towards Saigon. President Thieu resigned and newly installed President Duong van Minh declared a cease fire and an end to hostilities.

And just like that - it was over.

America woke up to the news on the morning of the 29th, as bulletin after bulletin jammed the airwaves saying that South Vietnam had surrendered and the last U.S. Embassy was finally closed and evacuated and dependents were being airlifted to waiting offshore warships. Panic broke out as North Vietnamese tanks rolled in with thousands of people trying to leave.

And back in the U.S. the post-mortem began that continues even today, with attempts at using the Vietnam experience in the same breath as Iraq and Afghanistan, as illogical as that may seem. Different wars, different peoples, different ideologies entirely

Here is a one-hour glimpse into that day as it happened - this particular day 34 years ago.