Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Bush, Nixon and the Karl Rove attack strategy

It's not at all surprising that the Bush campaign is trying to slander Kerry's military record.  That's the way the Bush dynasty works.  You want to smear an opponent, you make up slander about him.  You want to invade a country, you make up some fake claims about its horrible stockpile of "weapons of mass destruction."

But Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove has his distinctive twist on the strategy:  Observers see eerie parallels in attacks on Kerry, McCain San Francisco Chronicle 08/24/04.

Four years ago, as George Bush struggled in the polls, supporters of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination unleashed a ferocious attack on rival John McCain, questioning his commitment to veterans and his fitness to serve.

After the charges took root, Bush distanced himself from the veterans group that made the attacks, called the Arizona senator's service "noble'' and cruised to a nomination-saving victory in the South Carolina primary.

Monday, in a series of events that some observers say are eerily familiar, Bush distanced himself from a veterans group running fierce attacks on John Kerry's military record and called his rival's service in Vietnam "admirable. '' Rather than focus on the Democratic nominee's Vietnam record, a matter that has engulfed the presidential contest for the past week, Bush said "we ought to be debating who (is) best to be leading this country in the war against terror.''  ...

"It's amazing how similar this type of attack is to the pattern of attacks I have seen over two decades -- in some cases involving Bush's campaigns, in other cases they involved campaigns in which Karl Rove was a participant,'' said Wayne Slater, senior political writer at the Dallas Morning News, who has covered Bush since his early days in Texas politics and is author of the book "Bush's Brain,'' about Rove.

"In every case, the approach is the same: You have a surrogate group of allies, independent of the Bush campaign, raising questions not about the opponent's weakness but directly about the opponent's strength,'' Slater said.

It's the way the national Republican Party works, too, as the documentary film The Hunting of the President, based on the 10-year Republican smear campaign against Bill Clinton, vividly shows.  But the Bush variant has always been particularly nasty.  When Jeb Bush steps up to take his place in the dynastic succession in Washington, we'll see exactly the same kind of thing.

Bush set the tone for his defenders in his statement Monday.  The Chronicle story was generous in the part quoted above in saying that Bush had "distanced" himself from the Swift Boat Liars for Bush group's charges.  But, unlike some news organizations that falsely reported or left the impression that Bush had specifically denounced the ads, the Chronicle reports accurately, "Bush passed up an opportunity to denounce the content of the group's television commercial, in which veterans accuse Kerry of lying in order to win combat medals." (my emphasis)

The Pundits try to grapple with it

The Bush campaign is equating the Swift Boat Liars campaign with the pro-Kerry ads run by the "527 groups," who under the current campaign financing laws can run independent political ads for a candidate as long as they are independent of the campaign.  Conservative columnist Debra Saunders took up the party line: A taste of their own medicine San Francisco Chronicle 08/24/04.

Now Team Kerry claims that the Bushies are behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads attacking Kerry's military record, even though there is no proof that Bush League is behind the attacks.

News flash (to the New York Times, which ran its story on the funding behind the anti-Kerry ad on page one): People who support Bush have paid for the anti-Kerry ads.

Not a news flash: People who support Kerry have bankrolled anti-Bush ads.

The point of this is not that any sentient being actually believes there's an equivalence between political ads that focus on real issues, and ads like those of the Swift Boat Liars that promote demonstrable falsehoods about factual occurrences.  The point is try to validate the Swift Boat Liars, and other Republican front groups that will no doubt be floating other frivolous attacks between now and the election, as being somehow legitimate voices that deserve to be heard as part of "fair and balanced" reporting.

And to answer the obvious question, of course groups like MoveOn.org are acting in effect as Democratic Party front groups in this campaign.  And I'm sure maintaining the technical independence the campaign laws require will take some real diligence.  But the scandal of the Swift Boat Liars ads attacking Kerry's combat medals is not that it's legally constituted as an independent group.  It's that the group is just plain lying about John Kerry's record.

Kerry's counterattack has at least stirred the Big Pundits to life as they try to catch up.

Tests of a Smear Campaign by E.J. Dionne, Jr. Washington Post 08/24/04.. Dionne manages to identify the important elements of what's going on:

This episode is a great test of how politics work in our country. It is, first, a test of George W. Bush.

Bush claims that his highest priority is uniting the country in the war against terrorism. A president who would be a uniter and not a divider knows that cheap-shot politics can only further rend our nation and weaken his own ability to lead.

Yesterday Bush offered what you might call a nuanced response to the controversy over the anti-Kerry ads. While praising Kerry's service, Bush issued only a blanket condemnation of all ads by outside groups. What Bush really needs to do is tell the inappropriately named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to stop smearing Kerry's service record and urge his big money contributors to stop bankrolling the distortions.

This is also a test for the media. We see here a fascinating and ugly development in the politics of annihilation. A supposedly outside group raises money from close Bush supporters, staffs itself with political operatives close to Bush and the Republicans, and then puts up several hundred thousand dollars worth of television ads. This is, as one operative with years of experience in Republican campaigns put it, "a professional hit." Suddenly, questions about Kerry's service that were asked and answered months ago become big news again.

That's a pretty good summary.  Bush is a phony who prances around in a flight suit.  He practices bitterlydivisive and sleazy politics.  And the mainstream media irresponsibly plays along.  That's really what we're seeing with the Swift Boat Liars affair.  Dionne even goes off the reservation and says the nearly unthinkable for a Big Pundit:

The media have to do more than "he said/he said" reporting. If the charges don't hold up, they don't hold up. And, yes, now that John Kerry's life during his twenties has been put at the heart of this campaign just over two months from Election Day, the media owe the country a comparable review of what Bush was doing at the same time and the same age.

Will our Potemkin press corps (as the Daily Howler has been known to call them) step up the challenge?

Among the Big Pundits, Paul Krugman has been so far off the reservation that he's actually quoted the Daily Howler approvingly on the matter of how the mainstream media builds lazy "scripts" about politicians and events that then shape - and frequently distort - their coverage.

Rambo in Mesopotamia

The Rambo Coalition by Paul Krugman New York Times 08/24/04

One of the wonders of recent American politics has been the ability of Mr. Bush and his supporters to wrap their partisanship in the flag. Through innuendo and direct attacks by surrogates, men who assiduously avoided service in Vietnam, like Dick Cheney (five deferments), John Ashcroft (seven deferments) and George Bush (a comfy spot in the National Guard, and a mysterious gap in his records), have questioned the patriotism of men who risked their lives and suffered for their country: John McCain, Max Cleland and now John Kerry.

How have they been able to get away with it? The answer is that we have been living in what Roger Ebert calls "an age of Rambo patriotism." As the carnage and moral ambiguities of Vietnam faded from memory, many started to believe in the comforting clichés of action movies, in which the tough-talking hero is always virtuous and the hand-wringing types who see complexities and urge the hero to think before acting are always wrong, if not villains.

Which gets back to something I believe I've quoted here before, from Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002):

The prospect of war is exciting.  Many young men, schooled in the notion that war is the ultimate definition of manhood, that only in war will they be tested and proven, that they can discover their worth as human beings in battle, willingly join the great enterprise.  The admiration of the crowd, the high-blown rhetoric, the chance to achieve the gloary of the previous generation, the ideal of nobility beckon us forward.  And people, ironically, enjoy righteous indignation and an object upon which to uleash their anger.  War usually starts with collective euphoria.

But forgetting the past, specifically the real experience of real wars, is also critical to this process.  Hedges also makes reference to the Vietnam War in the American experience:

We were humbled in Vietnam, purged, for a while, of a dangerous hubris, offered in our understanding and reflection about the war, a moment of grace.  We became a better country.  But once again the message is slipping away from us, even as we confront the possibility of devastating biological or nuclear terrorist attacks in Washington or New York.  If the humility we gained from our defeat in Vietnam is not the engine that drives our response to future terrorist strikes, even those that are cataclysmic, we are lost.

We often think of hubris as pride, or defiance of fate.  The ancient Greek concept of  ́ύβρις (hubris) was very much related to the notion of μοίρα (moira).  The idea of moira was that a person had a particular task or mission or destiny in life that they were expected to fulfill.  Hubris was failing to fulfill that moira.  That could happen in the sense of trying to do more than one's moira calls for, which we would think of as arrogant pride.  Hubris could also be backing away from one's moira and not stepping to fulfill one's task in life.  In either case, getting outside the moira would bring dislocations, one way or the other.

I don't know if nations can have moira.  But it sure seems like the United States has gotten way outside somebody's moira by trying to reshape Iraq in an image agreeable to us by the means chosen. And the dislocations it has produced show up everywhere: in the sleaze-slinging by the Swift Boat Liars for Bush, in the exposure of Valerie Plame, in the leaking of critical intelligence to Iran through Ahmed Chalabi's group, in the lies about WMDs, in the administration's violation of international law and the congressional war resolution in the Iraq War, in torture in the gulag.  Unfortunately, the destructiveness unleased by the hubris of the Bush dynasty won't necessarily fall back directly on them.  So far, the destructive effects have been more on others.

David the Dean Broder offers up yet another in his endless series of safe and mostly inane commentaries: Swift Boats and Old Wounds Washington Post 08/24/04.  As he often does, he manages to dip his toe into a real insight, then buries it under a pile of platitudes.  In this case, he talks about how the "baby boomer" generation is still rehashing to 1960s and both sides still haven't reconciled and blah, blah.

The Nixon Generation

What he glances in passing is that today's Republican Party is shaped in a particular way by the politics of the 1960s.  More specifically, by the conservative backlash against the "counterculture" (hippies, for short), against the civil rights movement, against the antiwar movement, that Richard Nixon incorporated into his so-called Southern Strategy, in which the national Republican Party began in earnest to court the support of unreconstructed Southern segregationists.

Part of that self-identification was to pose as the superpatriotic party in the Rambo style that Krugman defined.  And the particular style of demonization of war critics goes back in very direct ways to Nixon, who personally met and recruited John O'Neill to head up a Republican front group called Vietnam Veterans for Nixon and to debate JohnKerry.  The same John O'Neill is today a leading player in the Swift BoatLiars for Bush group.

Let's watch Tricky Dick himself set the tone, albeit retrospectively, in his 1985 book No More Vietnams:

Violence was becoming the rule, not the exception, in campus protests.  Following the announcement of the incursion into Cambodia [1970], a new wave of violent protest swept the country.  At the University of Maryland, fifty people were injured when students ransacked the ROTC building and skirmished with police.  In Kent, Ohio, a crowd of hundreds of demonstrators watched as two young men thre lighted flares into the army ROTC building on the campus of Kent State University and burned it to the ground.  Ohio's governor called in the National Guard.  A few days later, a large crowd of students began throwing rocks and chunks of concrete at the guardsmen, forcing them up a small hill.  At the top, the soldiers turned, and someone started shooting.  Four people - two protesters and two bystanders - were killed.  In August a van packed with explosives was blown up next to a building at the Univeristy of Wisconsin, killing one graduate student, injuring four others, and doing $6 million in damage.  Underground newspapers [the "blogs" of 1970] across the country reported ecstatically that another blow had been struck against the "pig nation."  No one could justify the decision of the guardsmen at Kent State to fire on the crowd, but neither should anyone have defended the actions of a confrontational mob or of murderous bombers.

I had mixed emotions about the antiwar protesters.  I appreciated their concerns for peace.  I was angered by their excesses.  Bu most of all I was frustrated at their moral righteousness and total unwillingness to credit me or my predecessors with a genuine desire for peace.  Whateve my view of their motives - and whatever their estimate of mine - the practical effect of their actions was to give encouragement to the enemy to fight on or refuse to negotiate a peace. That the brightest and the best in our great educational institutions could not recognize that their peace protests prolonged the war is one of the tragic ironies of the Vietnam era. (my emphasis)

[Note to those too young to have experienced Nixon as president:  this is Richard Nixon speaking; don't assume that anything he mentions as fact is so until confirmed from a reliable source.] It's vintage Nixon that the violence in protests is exaggerated by emphasis and blamed exclusively on the protesters.  Anyone who's read more than superficially about the Kent State and Jackson State killings (which occurred just after, but Nixon doesn't mention them - because all the victims there were black?) knows that the violence was almost exclusively the responsibility of the authorities on the scene.  Nixon did, too, of course.

His tactic of "even-handedness" in saying the killings at Kent State couldn't be justified BUT..., is also vintage Nixon.  Sounds a little like Bush's "evenhanded" pseudo-condemnation of independent ads, doesn't it?  Or like the people who say, "Of course, torture at Abu Ghuraib was bad, BUT..."

I love that "someone started shooting."  The soldiers at Kent State, who were not under any kind of attack at the moment, wheeled in unison and began firing at random into a crowd of students.  People were walking to class, because there was no particular reason to be afraid of violence at the moment.  There was no riot going on.  The Guardsmen were obviously ordered to turn and begin firing.  All four fatalities, and one permanent crippling, were from Guard weapons.  No one fired at the Guardsmen.

But seeing George W. Bush and his crew in action almost makes me nostalgic for Nixon.  Nixon at least lied with imagination.  Bush's crew makes stuff up and depends on the Republican echo chamber and a lazy, irresponsible press corps to magnify the falsehoods and drown out the critics.

But this demonization of people like John Kerry has become an integral part of the political identity of the political children of the Nixon administration.  While good Republicans kids like George W. Bush reviled antiwar protesters, Bush personally supported the war verbally but made sure he ran no risk in fighting in it.  Recounting his perspective in those days, Bush told a reporter in 1990, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment.  Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

But, in the minds of the Nixon Generation, Bush was a good Republican patriot, because he supported the Vietnam War verbally and personally resisted it by getting a Air Guard slot that (in those days) virtually guaranteed he wouldn't be sent to Vietnam.  But a soldier and Vietnam War hero like John Kerry is an evil figure to them, because he actually criticized the war out loud.  He articulated the opposition that Bush acted upon.

Bill Clinton, who had to contend with similar questions about his actions to avoid military service, managed to run against Old Man Bush in 1992 without questioning that Bush's service record in the Second World War.  In fact, during the campaign, the New York Times published a story suggesting that Bush senior may have been implicated in a war crime involving illegal shooting of Japanese survivors of a sunken boat.  The Clinton campaign never tried to exploit that opening.

But Bush the Younger can't seem to avoid the effort to rewrite history, so that he becomes the swaggering war hero in his flight suit, while Kerry the genuine war hero is smeared as a liar and then blamed for bringing the smear on himself!

So now we have this bizarre Vietnam War debate, in which the political and ideological pathologies of the Nixon Republicans have merged with the sleazy style of the Bush dynasty.  It ain't a pretty picture.

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