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Rush Limbaugh botches history at CPAC

Since I was busy all weekend installing a new (tankless) water heater --the old one rusted out-- I paid no attention to the conclusion of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and its last speaker, Rush Limbaugh. 

But thanks to my brother, who did pay attention, I'm now aware of how Limbaugh managed to not only confuse the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, he also misquoted the former to suit his conservative ideology. 

Here's what he said:

"We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom -- and the pursuit of happiness."

Note the addition of the word "freedom", which appears nowhere in the Declaration, let alone in the "quoted" passage. 

As my brother concludes, "Democrats can rest easy" when conservatives trust their fate to a man who can't "get his historic references right."

Speaking of Limbaugh and other dittohead global warming deniers, my new tankless water heater not only runs on natural gas, which is far less damaging to the environment than other fossil fuels like petroleum and coal, it also runs efficiently, meaning that it uses much less gas than the old one.  It therefore qualifies me for a $300 federal tax credit.

WooHoo!

The change we need

From Bill Moyers Journal last night:

"As Washington obsessed all week over the fate of one nominee to the cabinet, and as we watched hearings about the failure of watchdog agencies going to sleep on the job, we heard almost nothing of the people across the country suffocating in the wreckage of their lives. Some of us born in the Depression still remember the song made famous by the Carter Family singers, called the 'Worried Man Blues'.

" 'I went across that river and I lay down to sleep. When I woke up there were shackles on my feet.'

"The day my father was fired from his job at Manly's Appliance Store, he came walking home as if he had shackles on his feet. I still remember the look on his face. He wasn't yet 50, but had suddenly turned old, the way a lot of people look today who are losing their jobs. Their stomachs are knotted with fear as the life they had come to expect is fading fast. Not because of their own failures but because our political and financial elites rigged the economy for their own advantage.

"John F. Kennedy famously said, 'Life is unfair,' and so it is. But it wouldn't feel as unfair if the shackles wound up instead on the well-heeled feet of Wall Street and Washington's elect. That's the change we need, the change we can really believe in."

Moyers' comments may sound better than they read.  Here's the video.

Let's honor Martin Luther King for who he REALLY was

Yesterday I sent this e-mail to the Neigborhood Schools Alliance and assorted other people of importance:

"Here's my concern about moving the MLK event from a school --Jefferson-- to a church.  I watched the festivities on TV and what I mostly heard was a quite narrowly defined religious message --to wit,  you can be 'free at last' or 'reach the promised land' by accepting Jesus as your savior.

"I know that Martin Luther King was an ordained Baptist minister, but  that's not why he won the Nobel Peace Prize nor why he's honored with a national holiday.  His mission was one demanding the end to the injustices of slavery,  Jim Crow segregation, and racism, a mission which was later expanded to include opposition to the Vietnam War and the advocacy of economic justice for poor people regardless of race.  He may have personally believed in the saving grace of Jesus, but that wasn't his message to the nation, at least not one that I heard.  His was a call for peace, nonviolence, and social justice, not a call for 'personal' salvation.

"I speak as one who likes gospel music, but the events at the Highland Christian Center were more like a Christian revival meeting than an occasion to honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.   Had the event been held at Jefferson, I'm convinced that the tone of the festivities would have been far more inclusive."

Last night I came across a couple of pieces that reaffirm my concern with the tendency to oversimplify and distort King's message.  The first was appropriately published on Dissident Voice, appropriately because Martin Luther King was nothing if not a dissident:

"The guy they show us isn't MLK. They show us a saint, even a martyr to the cause of racial justice, a goal that most Americans think we achieved a long time ago.           

"The icon serves an important role. It preserves the power structure, a strange claim when considering MLK was a subversive through and through." ...

"To his racial justice agenda, he added anti-militarism and           economic justice. It took him some time, but he came out against the Vietnam War.  Indeed, he came out against all wars."

And this piece from the American Prospect reminding us why King was in Memphis where he was assassinated.  It concludes:

"The best way to honor his memory is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers' rights, living wages, and social justice."

Lastly here's King's speech --"A Time to Break the Silence"-- in 1967 when he announced his opposition to the Vietnam War.

It's my fervent hope that a truly progressive Democratic candidate for President will emerge to once again take up Martin Luther King's "struggle".

Thanksgiving? Or a day of atonement?

I know that today bloggers and columnists feel obligated to wish everyone a perfunctory "Happy Thanksgiving!"   But...

What are we thankful for?

"That the world's great powers achieved 'greatness' through criminal brutality on a grand scale... ."?

Read the rest of Robert Jensen's "No Thanks to Thanksgiving" here.

*******************************

You gotta like Steve Duin's angle, though.  He thanks specific people for their contributions to society.  Like--

• Tom Civiletti, for continually bringing the rare combination of reason and civility to the peevish scrums on the blogosphere.
• Keith Olbermann, for the most impassioned rants of the election year.
• Dan Meek, ... for giving a damn.

It makes you think that Duin voted Democratic.  And for campaign finance reform.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Zinn on war--the "good" war

Since Howard Zinn is the historian du jour, in this blog, anyway, and since World War II has been greatly romanticized, and sanitized, in book and film in recent years, I thought this piece by Zinn might be appropriate and timely reading.

My father was a WWII vet, and like most others who have actually been on the battlefield, he was largely silent about his experiences in Europe. My guess is that he witnessed the same atrocities that Zinn refers to in this passage:

"World War II is not simply and purely a 'good war.' It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side--too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.

"Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it--the defeat of fascism. But I deeply resent the way the so-called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don't want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq."

I too, having never experienced the reality, tend to romanticize the heroics of our soldiers in the so-called "just wars". All I can say is, I'm relieved that I made the effort to demonstrate against the war in Iraq.

Classism and the media

In my last few posts I've referred to media elitism and class consciousness, especially with regard to Iraq and the uproar over Fahrenheit 9/11. I've also mentioned the response of the establishment media to historian Howard Zinn, who admits to growing up class conscious, acknowledging that the circumstances of his upbringing have affected his approach to writing "bottom-up" history.

This article in the Columbia Journalism Review supports the contention that most journalists don't relate well to poor and working class Americans. They're too well-off and culturally distant:

"The class divide between journalists and the poor and working-class Americans many of us claim to write for and about is real, though it has little to do with political ideology and is more complicated than the faux populists of the Right would have us believe. Russell Baker, the former New York Times columnist, got closer to the mark in the December 18 issue of The New York Review of Books. 'Today’s top-drawer Washington news- people . . . belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well,' he wrote. 'The capacity for outrage had been bred out of them.'

"So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. As Baker points out, we are the comfortable. The demographics confirm it. We are part of the professional class, reasonably affluent and well educated. By 1996, for example, the last time the American Society of Newspaper Editors conducted a broad survey of the U.S. newsroom, 89 percent of journalists had finished college. Meanwhile, only 27 percent of all Americans have four or more years of college, according to the latest census."

Columbia University is, ironically, the perfect symbol of the class divide in this country. The Ivy League school is perched high on a bluff in Manhattan overlooking Morningside Park in Harlem. It is also the alma
mater of the people's historian, Howard Zinn, who in this interview with David Barsamian explains why the Marxist proletarian revolution and the collapse of capitalism never occurred as Marx predicted in the mid nineteenth century:

"There’s a big difference between having a working class that is 80 percent of the population and seething with anger at the system and a working class of which half has been given enough goodies to be content, leaving a minority in desperate poverty. The minority may be an important one, in the U.S. it may be 40 million people who are in desperate circumstances without health care, with a high incidence of child mortality, but still not enough to make the kind of workers’ revolution that Marx and Engels were hoping for."

Back to the media. George Monbiot explains media bias as a byproduct of "greasing up to power", which is the British equivalent, I guess, of "sucking up to", or brownnosing:

"Another is that, as in all professions, you are rewarded for greasing up to power. The people who are favoured with special information are those who have ingratiated themselves with the government. This leads to the paradoxical result that some of our most famous and successful journalists are also the profession’s most credulous sycophants."

He continues:

"While you are rewarded for flattery, you are punished for courage. The US, British and Israeli governments can make life very difficult for media organisations which upset them, as the BBC found during the Gilligan affair. The Palestinians and the people of Iraq have much less lobbying power. All the media are terrified of upsetting the Israeli government, for fear of being branded anti-semitic. Powerful governments can call on the rightwing press for support. Rupert Murdoch, who has a commercial interest in the destruction of the BBC, is always happy to oblige."

As usual, any discussion of class and media bias leads back to Michael Moore and his movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. Monbiot is no exception. Although he criticizes the movie as "crude and sometimes patronising" and at times "clumsy and incoherent", he ended up applauding it for "asking the questions which should have been asked the past four years. The success of his film testifies to the rest of the media's failure."

He concludes:

"When most of our journalists fail us, it’s hardly surprising that the few who are brave enough to expose the lies of the powerful become heroes, even if their work is pretty coarse. When a scruffy comedian from Michigan can bring us closer to the truth than the BBC, it’s time for a serious examination of why news has become the propaganda of the victor."