The Other Side

We've Been Warned

            Forty-two years ago this Sunday, an assassin’s bullet struck down a drum major for peace, Martin Luther King Jr. That horrific act not only silenced the strongest voice speaking truth to power in America, but it also kicked off unrest throughout the nation.

As Wikipedia tells it, in Washington D.C., windows of businesses were shattered and stores were quickly looted of their wares. Over 1,200 buildings were burned in the rioting. Crowds of over 20,000 protestors overwhelmed the 3,000 man police force and nearly 14,000 federal troops had to be called in. Troops from the Army’s 3^rd Infantry guarded the White House as rioters came within two blocks of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the largest occupation of an American city since the Civil War. 

            The rioting raged for four days leaving a dozen dead, over a thousand injured and 6,000 arrested. Some parts of D.C. didn’t recover economically until the ‘90’s. 

Dozens of other cities suffered similar fates in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and other riots broke out throughout that bloody year.

I shudder to think of the conflagration this nation would see if harm befell this President.

The threat is real. Nine members of the Hutari militia in Michigan, self-described “Christian warriors,” were arrested recently with plans to kill police, and attack the officers’ funeral in the hopes of setting off a battle that would topple the government. Other militias had trained with them.

            In 2008, an assassination plot against candidate Obama was broken up in Denver, Colorado. Last year an elderly anti-Semitic man killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.     A year ago, a 23 year old man who feared President Obama was going to take his guns killed three Pittsburgh police officers. Just days ago, a Tennessee man plead guilty for plotting with another man to kill President Obama and dozens of other black leaders.

            This comes during a time of overheated rhetoric. After health care reform passed, Mike Vanderboegh, of Pinson, Ala., former head of the Alabama Constitutional Militia put out a call on his blog: "We can break their windows. Break them NOW. And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary."

            And the windows of Democratic headquarters were broken across several states.

            It’s a time when the President is routinely referred to as a socialist, communist, terrorist and depicted as Hitler. Talk radio hosts have compared Obama’s policies to Nazi eugenics. It’s a time where members of Congress have referred to his health care plan as “Armageddon.” After a fellow Ohio Congressman voted for reform, Rep. John Boehner said he was a “dead man.” Rep. Michelle Bachmann has implied that the administration would use Census information to set up concentration camps.

            Republican leaders like Bill Posey, Chuck Grassley, John Campbell, Jim Inhofe, Richard Shelby, Marsha Blackburn and others have played footsies with the Birthers, the Deathers, and other assorted wingnuts. It’s not surprising then that in a Harris Poll last month, 67% of Republicans think President Obama is a socialist, 38% think he’s doing “things that Hitler did” and one in four believe he “may be the Anti-Christ." One in five Republicans believe the President of the United States “wants the terrorists to win.”

            It’s incumbent upon Republican leaders to set the record straight and not foment this kind of nonsense. Why did Republican leaders refuse to issue a joint statement with Democrats to tamp down the rhetoric and condemn violence?

            Politics ain’t beanbag, the saying goes. Rhetoric gets heated. But we’ve arrived at a place where people carry guns to rallies and a large segment believes the President isn’t legitimate. That’s not to mention the ones who think he’s Satan incarnate. It’s a dangerous time. We’ve got to pull back from this madness and realize that we’re all on the same team.

No one can say that we haven’t been warned.

           

             

Knockout!

The battle for health care was really something until the Democrats found their spines, opened an industrial strength can of Whup-Ass and knocked that GOP elephant out.

What's happened to the Republican Party? I know their spin doctors and loyal talking point readers are trying to push the meme that the Republicans had all of these wonderful ideas for health care in the beginning and Obama shut them out.

The reality is that the Republican plan for health care starts at tort reform and ends at insurance companies being able to congregate in states with loose regulations and then sell insurance across state lines. They want the health insurance companies to be like the banking system. And we see how well that worked out.

But the Republicans never planned on being a part of reform. They chose the strategy of opposition. And it worked for a while. It kept them in the fight, like a boxer clinching his opponent.

The Republicans chose to seize upon the Tea Party movement. Their rhetoric became reckless and patently false. They knew there were no death panels in the bill. The Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks filled the airwaves with comparisons to Nazi eugenics. Republicans compared Obamacare to the Soviet gulag system. Many of their angry supporters responded by showing up to rallies armed or toting signs depicting Obama as the Joker and Hitler. Everywhere was the talk of socialism and communism.

Now that the vote is over and health care reform is a reality, we've seen death threats to the President on Twitter, threats against Congressmen and women, bricks thrown through windows, suspicious powders delivered, home addresses of Representatives' published on the internet and dangerous violent rhetoric. The Republican base is angry. Furious. A national temper tantrum has begun and it's ugly.

The sad thing is bipartisanship was actually within reach early on. Perhaps the GOP leadership should've read Obama's books to get a sense of the man. (It would've helped if the liberals had read his books as well to understand they weren't getting Dennis Kucinich.) What the Obama-haters never understood was Barack Obama isn't the radical leftist ideologue caricature he's made out to be. He's a pragmatist, willing to buck his own party to get things done. This is the man who stunned his liberal base by backing warrantless wiretaps. By some estimates, eighty percent of Bush era terror policies are still in place. In fact, Obama has stepped up their implementation, especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. It was Barack Obama that disappointed his base by not fighting for a public option in the health care bill, in order to attract Republican votes. If anything, the base wishes Obama was more liberal. When Republicans point at Obama and scream, "Socialist!", many in the base are thinking, "If only..."

But what's done is done. The pachyderm is resting on the canvas, sucking wind. The donkey is nimbly leaping up in the air, braying loudly, it's front hooves extended heavenward, having delivered the shot that buckled the beast.

It stings to lose political fights. It didn't have to be this way. Republicans could've signed onto the bill and gotten more of what they wanted into it, if anything. Obama was willing to deal for GOP support. But it was more important to the leadership to try to hand the new President a massive legislative defeat. They gambled and lost.

The elephant raises its dazed head. The donkey leaps from the ring with the championship belt slung over its shoulder.

And the crowd goes wild.

The Politics of Yes We Can

By Kelvin Wade

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum on the health care bill and the GOP:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

He's right. For all of the GOP and Tea Party scare tactics and misinformation, the Republicans come away from this vote empty handed.

When the public starts seeing and experiencing the benefits of this bill, a large part of the opposition to it will melt away. The same thing happened when George Bush and the Republican Congress passed the prescription drug benefit. Bush suppressed a report that the bill would cost $400 billion. The GOP twisted arms and held the vote open three hours to ensure it's passage. It was controversial. It wasn't popular.

But now it is.

So when the public experiences this bill...when they're not denied coverage, when they're not dropped from coverage when they get sick, when they can cover their kids to age 26 they will like this bill.

This isn't a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. It does raise taxes on those making over $200,000 a year and does tax so-called Cadillac health plans. There will be unforeseen consequences and some foreseen consequences to this law. There always is. And the GOP will try to make hay with every negative consequence.

But when the public sees the benefits of the package and sees that government hasn't taken over health care, sees that illegal immigrants are barred from this bill, sees that they still have the same doctor and looks far and wide and never finds the DEATH PANELS they were told would result, they'll see that they were lied to by Republican politicians.

And the 32 million additional Americans who will have health insurance will keep in mind that NOT ONE Republican voted for this bill.

Some Republicans think that health care reform is their ticket to a congressional takeover in November. Maybe. Maybe co-opting teabaggers and accusing the President of leading us to socialism and fascism and filling the streets with angry signs is their key to victory.

But perhaps they should learn the lesson Democrats learned in 2004. It's not enough to be angry and opposed. Democrats were angry at George W. Bush and opposed to his policies, but that would only get them so far.

You have to stand for something. And the Democrats, as pathetic and ineffective as they've been, have finally found their spines and shown that they stand for something.

Moving History to the Right

  The Texas School Board has voted to tentatively amend the  state’s textbooks to allow for a more conservative, Christian slant on a 10-5 party line vote. California and Texas are the largest buyers of textbooks in the country and the rest of the nation follows our lead. Since California isn’t buying new textbooks until 2014, the majority of the nation will follow Texas’ lead.

     Members say they were merely “balancing” the textbooks, which they think are too liberal. But when the religious right moved to take over school boards years ago, the goal has always been to infuse their brand of conservative Christianity with the government. Last month, one of the Christian activists on the board, Cynthia Dunbar, told the New York Times: “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

       Thomas Jefferson was dropped from the history books as one that inspired revolution through his writings in favor of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. What? The man who wrote a pamphlet in 1774 critical of King George that Americans rallied around? The primary author of the Declaration of Independence? That’s not revolutionary enough?

     Jefferson’s sin, according to the board, is that he supported the separation of church and state. That’s anathema to the Texas School Board’s revisionist desire to promote the idea of America’s founding as a Christian nation.

     Anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly gets a mention in the new history textbooks while the late Sen. Edward Kennedy does not. Really? The 4^th longest serving senator who helped mold and pass Head Start, Bilingual Education, WIC, Title IX, anti-apartheid sanctions, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, SCHIP and No Child Left Behind has to stand aside for the woman whose greatest claim to fame is helping kill the Equal Rights Amendment?

Is that balance?

      Confederate leader Jefferson Davis has reportedly been put on equal footing with Abraham Lincoln. Joseph McCarthy’s image gets a scrubbing in the new texts. More Republicans and conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation are emphasized while liberal ones are not.

Minorities didn’t fare well. Some minority members of the board sought to add more Hispanics to the history books but were voted down. The board voted to not mention any Hispanics who died alongside Davy Crockett at the Alamo fighting for Texas’ independence. Some on the board even wanted to remove the first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall from the history books but, fortunately, that effort failed.

     Many conservatives complain that California’s textbooks are too liberal. So, in a world where partisans have their own news channels, newspapers, magazines and websites, why shouldn’t they have their own textbooks? But is that really where we want to go? 

     The late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Revising history to fit your agenda doesn’t make it so.