"...before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran..." --Mustachioed Chickenhawk John Bolton to M.E.K. terrorists on July 1, 2017

As we get closer and closer to the 2020 election, we should never forget that Donald Trump has selected the number-one cheerleader for war against Iran as his National Security Advisor, especially since Bolton's publicly-proclaimed deadline for meeting his terrorist allies in Tehran has already passed. This New York Times video from last year, "John Bolton Wants Regime Change In Iran. What's His Alternative?" should be seen by all Americans before the Trump Administration's gunboat diplomacy turns the Persian Gulf into another Tonkin Gulf with trumped-up reasons for yet another disastrous American war. There have already been many too many misguided military adventures carried out under our flag in my lifetime.

"I have said for over ten years, since coming to these events, that the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs' regime in Tehran." -- Chickenhawk N.S.A. John Bolton speaking to the M.E.K., July 1, 2017

I haven't posted much on this True Blue Liberal blog in the past year, but with the current administration currently rattling sabers in Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, and elsewhere, we should all be prepared to speak out loudly and immediately and publicly (especially since we have a Congress that has handed all of its constitutional war powers to an authoritarian executive branch elected by a minority of Americans) whenever military action seems imminent. It doesn't seem like it's enough to type #ImAlreadyAgainstOurNextWar on Twitter every day. I need to start stating my anti-war opinions more clearly than can be done in 280 characters.

TBL Tweet of the Day for 12/6/2016

The trueblueliberal.org tweet of the day is from @DaveWeigel. It's another quick reminder of how different the cost of health care can be in places where it's not completely driven by the profit needs of private insurers, hospitals, and others in the U.S. medical and pharmaceutical industries.

Just had an eye injury diagnosed, treated, and prescribed for in Vietnam and I think I'm a socialist now pic.twitter.com/vdAkdbfeRn

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 6, 2016

Morley Safer (November 8, 1931 – May 19, 2016)

Morley Safer retired from 60 Minutes last week and today he passed away. More than his many years on CBS's popular Sunday-night magazine show, he will be remembered for this, one of the most honest and important reports from Vietnam in 1965 when the US war there was still relatively young. LBJ wanted CBS to fire Safer for this unvarnished look at American troops calmly burning the village of Cam Ne. You wonder how many young antiwar activists were created watching this episode of CBS News with their parents in living rooms around America that evening.

They moved into the village and they systematically began torching every house — every house as far as I could see, getting people out in some cases, using flame throwers in others. No Vietnamese speakers, by the way, were among the group with the flame thrower. The trooper with the flame thrower was ordered to zap a particular house, and our cameraman, who's Vietnamese — Ha Thuc Can, this wonderful man — put his camera down and said, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" And he walked to the house and then I went with him, and a sergeant came on up. We heard people crying.

--Morley Safer from Reporting America at War: An Oral History (compiled by Michelle Ferrari)

Reporters were freer to travel and report in 1965, long before the concept of "embedding" in our 21st-century desert wars made television news readers into more predictable flag wavers.

Rest in Peace Morley.

More than a "Protest Vote"

Ben Shahn's classic McCarthy poster.

The following quotation appeared yesterday in a New York Times piece from Patrick Healy, "Bernie Sanders Can Take Heart From a Broadway Champ."

“Like Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Sanders will offer a way to cast a protest vote in a primary against Hillary Clinton, but I don’t expect him to register much support beyond that.” 

-- Douglas E. Schoen, Democratic Strategist 

A look at the Schoen Consulting website shows that Douglas Schoen has worked for US politicians, including both Clintons, Mike Bloomberg, Jon Corzine, and Evan Bayh; US corporations, including Walmart, P&G, and AT&T; and international politicians Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, and three Israeli Prime Ministers. In other words, he's as Establishment as they come and his thoughts are representative of the "common knowledge" and "conventional wisdom" of the power elites. He's also wrong.

If you look at the support Eugene McCarthy got in 1968, he was far from being a fringe figure or a mere "protest vote." Peace-candidate McCarthy was not expected to do well against Lyndon Johnson in the first primary in New Hampshire, but his strong 42% second-place showing against the sitting President was at least one of the factors that led to LBJ's withdrawal (and RFK's entry into the race). McCarthy won the most popular votes in the 1968 primaries, but it was a time when party machines were able to give the nomination to the candidate who had received the fewest votes, LBJ's VP Hubert Humphrey, who had concentrated on the wheelers and dealers in non-primary states rather than attracting primary voters. There was a reason there was chaos in the streets outside the Democratic convention.

"...you learn really how strong the Establishment is, not just the political Establishment, but the business Establishment...the business community and the political institutions are all geared to the Establishment, and when they're really tested they're all militarist..." 

--Eugene McCarthy (at the 2-minute mark in the video) 

I felt I needed to capitalize "Establishment" when transcribing the quote pulled from the video, because that's the way we thought of that word at the time. It's a word that would serve the Bernie 2016 campaign well (I'm sure it's a word Bernie Sanders used very freely in his political past).

A Day to Remember Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse

On this fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that pulled us deeper into Vietnam on false pretenses, I wasn't happy to turn on my computer at lunchtime to see this updated headline about Iraq on The New York Times' homepage:

"U.S. Weighs Iraq Airstrikes, Citing Crisis" The New York Times, 8/7/2014 at 1pm EDT

On August 7, 1964, the House voted unanimously and the Senate voted with only two exceptions to give President Johnson the authority to "take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" in Vietnam after an incident between American warships and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin that turned out to be not at all what it was presented to be when Johnson and McNamara explained it to the press, the Congress, and the American people.

Members of Congress and the American people should always remember when they read a bellicose headline or watch a speech from a Secretary of Defense or State with professional-looking maps, that only two members of Congress took a correct action 50 years ago today.

All Vietnam is not worth the life of an American boy...
— Alaska Senator Ernest Gruening, August 1964

I believe that history will record this resolution as a historic mistake. I am not going to go along with this kind of program, in South Vietnam … that in my judgment is going to kill needlessly untold numbers of American boys, and for nothing.
— Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, August 1964

If you want more details of the event itself, click here for the the Gulf of Tonkin excerpt from Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

Flip Flopping on Gitmo is the Mavericky® Thing to Do

Watch John McCain from 2008 give all the reasons why Guantanamo Bay's prison camp should close:

"So, I'm for closing Guantanamo Bay. It may be one of the nicest places in the world to live in, but it has become a symbol and we need to close Guantanamo." 

So why has this ex-Prisoner of War decided now, six years later, that Gitmo is A-OK with him?

I'm sure that this new John McCain would be perfectly OK with it if North Vietnam had decided in 1967 that the enemy combatants bombing their country could be held indefinitely without trial in an offshore extra-legal prison camp and grilled for information, wouldn't he? 

All the Way with BHO? (redux)

[I originally posted this on October 1, 2011, but I felt it might be time to trot it out again and place it at the top of the blog. I don't feel like I need to add any specific references to today's debate about unleashing American weaponry against Syria.]

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.

"Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming..."

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the shooting of four antiwar protesters by the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Kent State University.

There are a lot of candidates for the official marker between The Sixties and The Seventies, and May 4, 1970 may be mine. In recent years, I've placed the Altamont Speedway Free Festival of December 6, 1969 high on that list, but personally, I don't think the events there were on my radar until Gimme Shelter hit the theaters at the end of 1970.  Kent State's effect was immediate for all of us then in high school. I remember being immediately shocked by the shooting of unarmed 19 and 20-year-old men and women, engrossed by the photos in Life, and buying the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young single of "Ohio" backed with "Find the Cost of Freedom" on the day it hit the local record store a month after the shootings. I then dedicated the years 1971 and 1972 to going to as many anti-war protests as I could in DC, Philadelphia, and New York.

Mitt Romney's Coming of Age Travails, per CNN. Quelle Horreur

CNN may have forsaken its quest to become Fox News. The original cable news network is now attempting to become The Onion, or Comedy Central, with their recent Mitt Romney infotainment, "Romney Revealed":


 Forget the horrors of the Vietnam War in 1968, that war that Mitt Romney demonstrated in favor of, and whose draft the young Mormon missionary avoided:

CNN Narrator: “In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.
Fellow Missionary Mike Bush: “There were protests and there were blockades and there were marches all over the country."
CNN: "The streets of France were in chaos."
Bush: "There was no train service, there were no buses, no newspapers. The electricity would go off from time-to-time. There were no letters from home. The money at the time came via check. That was our lifeline was getting letters from home.”
CNN: "So you were totally isolated."
Bush: "Totally isolated."

No Checks from Dad?!

Chickenhawk Newt

I don't want to be accused of not being evenhanded in my coverage of the GOP Presidential candidates.  I know I've been spending too many entries on Mitt Romney lately, but he's made himself such an easy target. Releasing his tax returns on the day that President Obama is delivering a State of the Union speech concentrating on our inequitable tax system written by and for the rich? What was he thinking? Why wasn't he thinking?  But this isn't about Mitt.  This is about Chickenhawk Newt.
You need to read this Vanity Fair article by Peter Boyer from 1989, "Good Newt, Bad Newt," about how Newt was horrible long before his Freddie Mac lobbying and his recent race baiting, but the story that needs to be as well known as Romney's Dog on the Roof is the story of hawkish Newt's Vietnam War experience.  He was old enough to serve, but he didn't.

Sure enough, he found himself listed among a sizable group of noted conservative hawks (including George Will and Richard Perle) who had managed to avoid the war-the "war wimps," as they came to be called. In 1985, he told Jane Mayer of The Wall Street Journal that he still believed that "Vietnam was the right battlefield at the right time." Why didn't he go? "Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over," he allowed. But, recovering, he added, "Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made."

What if every young draftee and volunteer asked what difference they would make in the course of any war.  You're young. You're patriotic. You're cannon fodder. You don't ask questions. Newt's sense of grandiosity is not a new thing. It's hard to imagine him volunteering for any military service as less than commander in chief (maybe, in a pinch, head of the joint chiefs of staff).

"... and it's 1,2,3, what are we fighting for? ..."

While some neocon chickenhawks like Bush and Rove and Cheney and Gingrich and Qualye will be happy to tell you exactly what great causes the US Government was fighting for in Indochina forty years ago, the only answer to the bipartisan American war that made any sense to anyone I knew was simple: FUCK IT.
Few people expressed that profound meditation on war and peace better than Country Joe McDonald with his "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" (preceded with the Fish Cheer) as performed here at Woodstock in 1969. I didn't have the pleasure of singing along there, but I vividly remember chanting and singing along with Joe and another very large crowd on the National Mall on 4/24/1971.
Enjoy.
 "Gimme an F!"
"Gimme a U!"
 
And, of course, like all the best sixties protest music, there's a great tie-in here to the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Well, come on Wall Street, don't move slow
Why man, this is war a-go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Cong.

Have fun following the bouncing ball. And singing along.

If you don't know this song by heart already, the American educational system is to blame. This is as important a part of our common cultural legacy as knowing the words to The Star Spangled Banner or Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

All the Way With BHO?

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.

With Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam" playing on the stereo, I run across the headline: "Bush says he'll visit Vietnam next year". Isn't it a little late?

Click here for details: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/21/bush.vietnam/ . To run across this article about our Commandant in Chief's future travel plans while Jimmy Cliff's 1969 "Vietnam" was playing in the background seemed especially appropriate.

I guess this chickenshit chickenhawk finally thinks it's safe enough, a little over thirty years after he first dressed up in a soldier suit and professed his deeply held belief in (other, poorer, Americans) killing Communists. Maybe if he wears his flightsuit he can stir up a little of the old animosity when he's over there in Hanoi & Ho Chi Minh City.

--True Blue Liberal