Tuesday, June 15, 2004
ANALYSIS SHMANALYSIS:
Sebastian, who, you know, actually lives in Germany, shows that the European elections were actually less of a story than Sullivan thinks.
posted by Sully Watch 6/15/2004 12:06:38 AM
AWARD DRIFT:
Perhaps he should create the Godwin Award for Greeley’s remark; it certainly doesn’t strike us as implying a moral equivalence between the terrorists and the West or implying that we had it coming.
But then, he’d be exposed as just another lame Internet follower.
posted by Sully Watch 6/15/2004 12:00:11 AM
Monday, June 14, 2004
ABSOLUTELY THE LAST REAGAN POST:
Fred Kaplan at Slate, who earlier last week defended Ronnie’s role in ending the Cold War, turns around and cites him for an action that, in the dying embers of that conflict, made the legend of Osama bin Laden by not matching a Soviet backdown in Afghanistan and thus creating the situation where a ferocious battle between bin Laden’s mujahids and the Red Army could take place.
Ten years earlier, had Reagan taken Gorbachev’s deal, Afghanistan probably still wouldn’t have emerged as the “friendly, neutral country” of Gorby's dreams. Yet it might have been a neutral enough country to preclude a Taliban takeover. And if the Russian-Afghan war had ended earlier — if Reagan had embraced Gorbachev on the withdrawal, as he did that same autumn on the massive cutback of nuclear weapons — Osama Bin Laden today might not even be a footnote in history.
We suspect that, in the century to come, that Jaji was allowed to happen will be seen as one of those great pivotal what-if moments that had implications for years to come, up (or down) there with Lee’s lost orders and Hitler’s decision to wait a month before invading Russia. Or Halen not giving his troops a water-break at Adrianople.
posted by Sully Watch 6/14/2004 11:49:22 PM
BLOOD LIBEL, OR HOW THE MEDIA LYNCHED O.J. SIMPSON:
(Bear with us, please, for a lengthy, passionate, and off-topic in-your-face contrarian post; the writing of which has preoccupied us the last two days)
In this season of anniversaries (D-Day 60, a personal one for us, and this week Bloomsday 100) the sudden intrusion of Reagan’s death has helped shove Goldman-Simpson murders 10 further into the obscurity so many wished for it at the time. OJ has been interviewed; Kato has been brought back to life briefly, and there's been some general reminiscences from the tabloid press which had a field day at the time the likes of which will not come again for some time. If ever. And a few bloggers, naturally.
But, on the whole, this is noted and will pass as many in and out of the media doubtless wish it to. After all, what relevance does this have to our lives today compared to, say, the Reagan presidency? June 12, 2004, is noted, with a scratch of the head and an “oh yeah” and then passed on. All in the past. All bad water under the bridge. A time when we were all a little crazy.
This is where we beg to differ. For many of the things that have been gripes of the liberal blogosphere about the establishment media over the last couple of years — the collusion with less-than-reputable sources, the symbiotic relationship with the Mighty Wurlitzer and the general prostitution — got their start during the OJ trial. Everything they would later do or try to do to Clinton, they did to OJ. Put it this way: if the impeachment was World War II, OJ was the Spanish Civil War.
Up to that point, we had known but never really believed this. We thought ourselves alienated, but we didn’t know what that was until we saw how grotesquely the media distorted the trial and tabloidized itself in the process. Afterwards, we could never take them at their word again.
We are still angry about this today. Not all the time, of course, but it comes back when we read things like the unsurprisingly triumphalist National Enquirer coverage.
We are so angry as we type this, that we cannot help but listen to the greatest song of long-smoldering rage and an injustice to be corrected that we know of, and quote from it occasionally:
I can feel it coming in the air tonight,
Oh Lord,
oh Lord.
Feel free to put it on and listen to it as you read. We did while typing. It will make you feel like we do. Just about every word in this post, we feel like screaming. There has as yet been no one to do to this case what John Bryson finally did in the Lindy Chamberlain case (the basis for the more appropriately-named A Cry in the Dark, which is actually still a very accurate term for what we’re doing in this post).
And what compounds this is that many on the left still don’t realize just how badly they were taken by this. They were angrily and appropriately shocked at how the media worked with Starr and the most obnoxious and noisome Republican crew around to try to subvert the results of a presidential election. And, to their credit, most of them saw the scales fall from their eyes at last.
Yet, incredibly, when it comes to O.J. Simpson, many are still content to parrot the media line from that time and assume Simpson was transparently guilty. They may see how the prosecution blew it, and how putting a lying racist cop on the stand as a key witness was an indicator of the terrible underlying racial problems. But, as far as we can tell, they were so intimidated by the wildly-overplayed domestic-violence angle as to be afraid of offending feminists, or ersatz feminists (we weren’t all that surprised by Tammy Bruce’s slow rightward drift in the intervening years, to the point that she defends a confirmed sexual-harasser when he runs for governor) to really delve seriously into the facts of the case.
Or, in good wimp-ass liberal fashion, they avoided the issue altogether, using the trial as a whole to thoughtfully opine about race relations in the U.S., the impact of media coverage on the judicial system, and the system of jury trials. Anything but the actual facts of the case, of which there were plenty to sift through.
This abdication of responsibility was more than just shameful. It created a vacuum that the right-wing media and their useful idiots in the establishment used to further their grand narrative of everything “wrong” with America — lawyers are the problem with everything, black people are dumb — that served them so well during the impeachment. Liberals missed a golden opportunity to defend a system that worked for once. Just because one black person has the financial resources to fight off a state attempt to frame them without Legal Aid and candlelight vigils does not mean you should be so paralyzed by guilt over all the black kids in California’s penal system who didn’t that you don’t do anything. Just because the jury acquitted him does not mean you should stand by and let the corporate media do far more damage to a man than any prison term would.
The media’s utter surprise at the way the jury which had sat through the entire trial and patiently paid attention to most of the evidence both sides put on utterly rejected the show-trial conclusion it had already prepared is its biggest failing in the case. Any seasoned prosecutor expected it; an acquittal that quickly is the jury saying, as Bozanich notes, get us out of here! No sale! It can only be compared to the way the Rhodesian media deliberately conspired to underreport the depth of Robert Mugabe’s support in the early 1970s, fearing that being truthful would drive whites to leave the country. When suddenly this fringe figure won as much support as he did, there was civil war (read this account. The American media must similarly be held accountable for the negative social fallout from the Simpson verdict)
The way Marcia Clark handled (we would say mishandled, but as she admitted to Peter Bozanich early on, the case was a loser anyway, so to take it to trial anyway to begin with was to mishandle it) the prosecution also eerily foreshadows the Iraq war: Talk over and over about what a large quantity of evidence you have, hoping that people confuse quantity with quality, lurch around from strategy to strategy without sitting down together and having a real plan until it’s too late (the prosecution didn’t have a team meeting, as it were, until right before it had to present its rebuttal case); use the whole enterprise to promote the personal interests of one deeply flawed and incompetent individual (if you read her book, you’ll find that she is so catty, bitchy petty, vindictive and averse to personal responsibility as to make even George W. Bush look like a model of emotional maturity by comparison (It says something that even Nicole’s sister is still bitter over what she said in it). The readers at Amazon aren’t lying. Then, just like the Iraq war, she got caught up in her own deceptions (when the jury asked that the testimony of limo driver Allen Park be reread to them during deliberations, it has not escaped some notice that Marcia, in her closing arguments, claimed Park had testified to things that he had, in fact, not).
It’s uncanny, this parallel to the Iraq war. Listen to another assistant LA D.A., Peter Bozanich, talking about Gil Carcetti during the trial. Who else does this sound like?
By then it was almost a bunker mentality ... It was a very closed circle. They would take no advice from anybody. No input. The case is going south in front of everybody’s eyes. And they would listen to nobody ... Because of this bunker mentality they just got sidetracked and there was nobody there to bring them back. But then, Garcetti doesn’t listen anyway. He wants things said that he wants to hear. He doesn’t want to hear what he doesn’t want to hear. And anybody who tells him things he doesn’t want to hear is excised.
Sounds like they were about to change the indictment to two counts of murder-related program activities.
For, and it should be obvious by now the heresy we’ve been leading up to saying, once you get the media filter out of the way and treat yourself to those things it did not rule significant but the jury saw and heard all right, O.J. Simpson was properly acquitted and wrongly held liable. O.J. Simpson did not commit the murders.
There is more than enough evidence exculpating him. YOu may think you know everything, but you don’t. Because the newspapers, magazines and A Current Affair weren’t and aren’t going to tell you.
Yes, we said heresy. In the wake of the murders and Simpson’s acquittal, it seemed to us that, if you had asked a surprising amount of people (mostly white, to be sure) to choose between believing in O.J.’s guilt or God’s existence, God would have lost. It was that firm a piece of public credo at the time. And still is
Among the left media, in fact, we should exempt Michael Moore, who devotes a chapter of his book Downsize This! to explaining why he believes Simpson is innocent. Even after the civil trial, with a new chapter on it in the paperback, he didn’t change his mind. Perhaps, if Fahrenheit 9/11 is the huge success we all hope it gets to be, he can devote another film to exploring this further.
Also, there are two of the many books written about the trial, other than those by the participants, that are worth reading for what they tell. Joe Bosco, one of the four book authors given a permanent seat at the trial, wrote a terrific yet underpublicized account, A Problem of Evidence, that includes many horridly underreported facts (often sort of unsourced or vaguely sourced, but he talks to enough people on the record as to suggest that his sources for some of the juicier bits and issues he raises are pretty well-placed. Besides, you don't need to have sources to ask the questions about facts in the trial record that no one else has the temerity to (like, when Collin Yamauchi testified that the presence of O.J.’s blood on the glove was due to him spilling some of O.J.’s reference blood when he opened the vial, just what was that reference vial doing in the same room with the socks and gloves to begin with?). He is also about the only “pro-J” writer to accurately perceive the media’s role in all this, and be “outraged at the outrage.”
Lawrence Schiller’s American Tragedy is also a must-read, too: practically every page reveals yet another gaping hole or misstep in the prosecution case. Whatever the people at Amazon say (what they admit they wanted to believe), it's not hard to read that book cover to cover objectively
And this is not dead history. The media did not just damage themselves. No, what they took down with them was even worse. They did a great deal of damage to American race relations, something that can barely afford that and has not quite recovered from; and then they cast the criminal-justice system and its stringent protection of the defendant against the depredations of the state, a system which many nameless Americans and others have fought and died quite horribly to protect, as the anniversary of D-Day reminded us, as the villain (You'd never know that Los Angeles County spent more money to prosecute Simpson ($11 million) than he did defending himself ($7 million, a good deal of which he will probably never be able to pay back) and put on more lawyers, so much so that when it came time to prosecute Fuhrman Garcetti’s office had to contract it out because every prosecutor in the office had too much involvement in the case to be beyond conflict of interest).
Well I was there and I saw what you did,
saw it with my own two eyes.
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you been;
It’s all been a pack of lies!
Since we mentioned Michael Moore above, we name also the names that are worthy of especial contempt. It matters not that later on some of these people took more honorable positions on Bill Clinton’s behalf. What they did in that dark period of the mid-1990s cannot be forgotten anytime they speak on anything today or tomorrow. No matter how much we and they want it to be.
Well if you told me you were drowning,
I would not lend a hand.
I’ve seen your face before, my friend,
And I know you don’t know who I am ...
(Sorry, Phil, for slightly amending the words)
First up, Dominick Dunne. There is no one alive who better personifies what so unbecame the media during the Simpson trial. No one. What he did is so bad, so horrid, that you will forgive us if we say that for it he deserves everything bad that has ever happened to him. Yes, we’re fully aware of the implications of that remark. And we still mean it.
Dunne was the ringleader in a celebrity culture and the ravens that feed off it that, correctly sensing that some of the public outrage directed Simpson’s way was at celebrity as a whole, particularly in the wake of the recent acquittal of the Menendez brothers at their first trial, closed ranks and turned its back on Simpson to protect itself, not in the least because, as an African-American, he could be more easily sacrificed.
Don’t believe this? Read Dunne’s “book” about the trial, Another City, Not My Own, in which his “Gus” character admits on his behalf that, despite covering so many celebrity trials, he’s really not that good at,and not really interested in, covering the facts and sorting them out (which can, properly understood, make for good journalism, but should not be counted on as the truth as many people did at the time). In fact, consider Dunne’s record predicting verdicts: Simpson guilty, Michael Skakel and Martha Stewart not. Zero for three. Plus his being taken in by Ted Maher. Why does anyone hire this man?
That would be merely comical, but on the ugly side the book exhibits an unhealthy fascination with the white wives of rich and successful black football players. Dunne’s dark side further came out in one of his later Vanity Fair columns, when he couldn’t resist chortling about how Don Ohlmeyer, one of the few media people with any real power to still defend Simpson, went back to rehab after one of his tirades on the subject. As an ostensibly recovered alcoholic himself, Dunne should know better (Perhaps, however, his obsessive and brutish focus on Simpson and other subjects suggest that, he, like George W. Bush, is a bit of a “dry drunk” himself).
It says, to us, a lot about O.J. Simpson that, even after all this, one day late in the civil trial he offered to shake Dunne’s hand. And it says everything about Dunne that he refused the gesture.
Next up for this eternal damnation is Vince Bugliosi. All one can say after reading Outrage is that the man has somehow been inhabited by the spirit of Charles Manson (His book should more appropriately be titled Outage, or subtitled Outrage: How Lawyers Whom I Consider to be My Professional Inferiors, Even by the Standards With Which I Consider Every Lawyer Save My Good Close Friend F. Lee Bailey to Be My Inferior, Got The Sort of Press I Once Did But Can’t Anymore). Bosco savages Bugliosi particularly in his introduction, noting that he got a bestseller out of watching the entire trial on TV and didn’t spend one day in the courtroom, one day where he could have seen things like Marcia Clark flirting with Johnny Cochran while the jurors were absolutely petrified looking at the greatly-enlarged crime scene photos (which, granted, has no bearing on O.J.’s guilt or innocence but all the bearing in the world on how the jury perceived the prosecutor, and why she might have lost the case, among the many things that Bugliosi fails to consider). The long passages about God and why he’s an atheist are the only place we’ve ever read such sentiments that tend to make one understand why 41 percent of the American population says they’d never vote for one. When people do not believe in God, Chesteron said, they will believe in anything.
Since then he has tried to reinvent himself as some sort of constitutional lawyer, not an area he was renowned for as a practicing lawyer, writing a short book aruging against the Supreme Court decision to let the Jones case go forward and also loudly questioning the Florida decision. If others had done this, we might have given them credit. But Vince’s role in stoking right-wing outrage and hogging the media to flog his book after O.J. set that whole thing in motion to begin with. Nothing he does can make up for it.
Let’s also save a spot for Jeffrey Toobin. Few of the reviewers who praised The Run of His Life realized what the trial junkies all did, regardless of their position on the guilt/innocence issue: that his book is extremely poorly sourced, relying on low-level prosecution sources to paint O.J. as dim-witted and barely cognizant of what was going on, some Stepin Fetchit on trial. This racial pandering eliminates any other good he may have hoped to accomplish by later writing A Vast Conspiracy (which also had some problems).
Of course, this could all be because, having made his big scoop for The New Yorker uncovering Fuhrman’s past racism, he either felt compelled to henceforth blow makeup calls. Or because, as Bosco notes, he was rarely at the actual trial, having to spend time with his family in New York.
Lastly, Jay Leno should go down. We know, a court-jesterish late-night TV host hardly fits this company, but Leno earned it not only by trivializing the whole trial (when he introduced the Dancing Itos, their namesake found it so funny and flattering that he called both sides together in chambers the next morning for an unannounced sidebar ... where they watched the video of the DIs over and over. Apparently Johnny Cochran and Marcia Clark, who were beyond speaking to each other by this point, looked at each other with that do-you-believe-this-shit face. And it happened more than once), but by swinishly pandering to racial bias not only with his frequent jokes at the expense of any presumption of innocence O.J. may have managed to retain but by ridiculing anyone who, after a certain point, still believed that O.J. might be innocent ... in other words, blacks (You think there’s a reason Branford Marsalis quit as his bandleader around that time?) It’s no surprise that he turned up at Tom Lange’s retirement party with a cake decorated with the words “guilty.”
So now, the question you’re asking is “Why not? What’s all this evidence you’re talking about?”
It’s difficult, we realize, to answer this question without getting into the very ample evidence of evidence tampering, which even many people who think O.J. was guilty agree happened.
But by focusing on this, you avoid some of the exculpatory evidence.
For starters, the blood on Goldman’s keys. They were found on the ground at 875 South Bundy next to his outstretched hand, soaked.
It isn’t hard to conclude that he might well have used them to defend himself by gouging away at the attacker’s face. It’s a common self-defense tactic you really don’t need to practice after learning.
If so, you’d think the prosecution would have introduced it. But they didn’t. Officially, believe it or not, in a case where blood evidence was held up as the gold standard of proof, the blood on those keys was never tested.
According to Bosco, more than one source told him it was and the police didn’t like the results, so they buried it where the prosecution wouldn’t know and wouldn’t have to turn it over to the defense and returned the keys to Goldman’s girlfriend (does she still have them? It would be interesting to know). But, as he notes, even without it that blood is mighty suspicious. The prosecution, when asked, claimed it was probably Nicole’s or Ron’s. But how? How would so much of Nicole’s blood conveniently have gotten on Ron’s keys on the ground, when she was flailing around under assault and scattering blood everywhere? And Ron doesn’t have any wounds that close by that would have accounted for that much blood getting on his keys.
Ron also has a huge bruise on one of his knuckles, consistent with landing a good hard punch on someone. Again the prosecution basically said, well he hit a wall. But the courtyard at Nicole’s condominium (now torn down by its new owner, as O.J.’s house also was) was very small and made even smaller by the bushes planted inside the fence. Ron and Nicole and their killers (it should be pretty obvious there were more than one) could not, we think, have missed so wildly and struck a wall so full on with an assailant who was easily in reach? Given that the blood trail down his jeans from the wound in his leg suggests (according to Michael Baden and never really rebutted by the prosecution) that he had to be standing up for at least five minutes, putting to rest any theory that the murders happened very quickly as favored by the prosecution (which sent five timeline witnesses over to the defense because it didn’t like what they had to say), we think it’s far more likely that GOldman at least not only struggled with his attackers but inflicted susbtantial injuries on at least one of them ... injuries which are nowhere present on O.J.
You might answer, the cut on his hand (strangely unmatched on the glove). But its a light laceration that couldn’t possibly have dripped enough blood to account for all the places it supposedly did. The primary piece of evidence tying O.J. to the place and time of the crime, the blood-drop trail at Bundy, aside from showing too many forensic irregularities (missing bindles, DNA far too degraded to have been so fresh) is anomalous in and of itself. Only five drops accompany the foot trail, and the prosecution never really disputed Henry Lee’s observation that their spill pattern indicates that they were deposited by someone standing still at the time while the corresponding footprints were made by someone moving a fairly brisk pace. Blood can’t lie about these things.
And there are only those five blood drops. Yes, it’s possible that O.J., if it were him, could have realized that he was bleeding and held the arm in. But then why, when the tracks suddenly pivot back toward the bushes, possibly because someone was heard approaching the scene, were no corresponding blood drops ever found? Try doing that sort of pivot and not properly balancing yourself, especially when you have the kind of arthritis that O.J. did (It wouldn’t have physically prevented him from committing the murders, as his doctor testified, but at the same time he would have shown the effects of such extraordinary exertion even when putting his bags in the limo, especially if Goldman had struggled as much as he did).
The question of the 17 unidentified fingerprints at Bundy remains, too, plus the unidentifiable ones on the envelope holding Juditha Brown’s glasses and the glasses themselves. Who wanted to look at them? If it was O.J., why didn’t he notice the dropped glove that was inches away?
Consider also this exchange from O.J.’s police statement. Det. Vanatter is asking him about the entry to Nicole’s:
Vanatter: Did she keep that house locked up?
O.J.: Very.
Vanatter: The intercom didn’t work apparently?
O.J.:I thought it did
Vanatter: OK, OK. Does the electronic buzzer work?
O.J.: The electronic buzzer works to let people in.
What you need to know here is that the buzzer hadn’t worked that year since being damaged in the earthquake (but the intercom did). Nicole had to actually go down and let people in herself — the reason she died when and where she did. The detectives were laying a clever rhetorical trap like you’ve seen on a million cop shows; here it worked (remember Simpson was emotionally and physically stressed out, plus sleep-deprived, the main reason the prosecution didn’t play the tape as evidence since it’s so obvious. If he was aware enough to realize what was going on, there were a million other things he should have been able to attend to) to show that O.J. clearly wasn’t familiar with how things worked at Nicole’s, as he should have been if he had been stalking her so recently.
We also should adress the shoe photos, which may well have been what did O.J. in at the civil trial. For now, we’ll stipulate that they’re Bruno Maglis size 13 all right, but remember that the prosecution was able to meticulously track down almost all those sold in the U.S. due to their limited production and high cost; they could find no evidence that O.J. or anyone who knew him had ever bought the shoes or given him some as a gift. As it is, those shoe photos are like seeing the summit of a mountain perched in mid-air with nothing underneath holding it up.
There’s more, lots more, but it would fill a book and those books have already been mostly written (start with Bosco’s).
So what do we intend to accomplish by posting this? Well, we just have a blog that people read. Hopefully some of you will have an open mind — if you’re here regularly you’re probably already able to understand that the media packages certain truths as a product regardless of the underlying reality or lack thereof. Perhaps if there had been blogs in 1995 more of this would have been known and understood, and the verdict would not have been the occasion for the Neanderthal racism and lawyer-bashing that it was.
We think, over the years, that there were plenty more people (yes, white people) with this, ahem, minority opinion, but that they kept silence in the face of the media roar. No, we know this because when we’ve asserted some of the things we said above, those people (more women than men, interestingly enough) felt they could speak up and agree. Perhaps, if you are one of those people, this post will give you the courage to speak up on this more.
But it would be nice if some enterprising journalist picked it up. For starters, someone could file open-records requests for things like any results of tests on the blood on the keys; the logs and notes of Fuhrman’s partner Brad Roberts for June 13, 1994; results of police canvassing of the Rockingham neighborhood (supposedly extensive and never released to the defense); and investigations of the Brett Cantor (nightclub owner and friend of Ron’s and Nicole’s who was stabbed to death in a manner similar to Goldman’s) and Michael Nigg (fellow waiter at Mezzaluna who lived beyond his apparent means and was shot to death days before the verdicts) murders. Yes, it’s our belief that the solution to this is not Ron Shipp or Jason or Kato, as intriguing as some of those theories are; it’s in that coke-dealing underworld that Faye Resnick inhabited and the celebrity culture and LAPD had a shared interest in not going into.
We know, no one feels the need to do what a jury already did, but given what the media have done it’s far more imperative.
Now back to Sullivan ... we just had to get this off our chests.
posted by Sully Watch 6/14/2004 01:25:39 AM
Saturday, June 12, 2004
MAN IN THE GAP, OR RATHER MAKING THE GAP:
Returning even as Reagan Grief Week winds down to the subject of just “who” won the Cold War, American Prospect executive editor Michael Tomasky finds the one man who really did change history with a single decree — former Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn.
To make a long story short, Horn was the one who decided, on Sept. 10, 1989, to permit East Germans ostensibly vacationing in that nominally-allied but slowly-less-communist country, that international treaties on caring for refugees trumped Hungary’s agreement with the GDR to not permit that country’s citizens to emigrate westward to Austria and, eventually, West Germany, where they were automatically qualified for citizenship.
As anyone alive at the time remembers, that was the straw that broke the Warsaw Pact’s back. Hungary and Poland had slowly been liberalizing, but suddenly the East German state, deprived of its power to prevent its citizens from fleeing, fell into civil disorder that only ended when Egon Krenz, the suddenly-appointed party leader, decided to open the borders and thus turn the Berlin Wall, the symbol of Cold War divisions between nations, into just an ugly piece of architecture one had to crawl over to get to the Kurfürstendamm or wherever. East Germany from thereon in was living on borrowed time and merged with West Germany a year or so later.
Then came Czechoslovakia, later to divorce into the Czech Republic and Slovakia somewhat amicably; then Bulgarian upstarts began the process of ending communism there by taking ten minutes to arrest the aging Todor Zhivkov; finally the year ended with Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu going down in a hail of bullets. Not a single Soviet ally in Eastern Europe remained in communist hands.
As Tomasky sums up:
That was the end of the East. It took until 1991 for the Soviet Union to close up shop officially, but it was clear by the fall of 1989 that the Communist era was over. And the end began not on Pennsylvania Avenue, but at the Austria-Hungary border.
Were those border guards thinking of Ronald Reagan as they cut that barbed wire? Was Horn infused with the great man’s spirit as he made his world-changing decision? Alas, there exists little evidence that the answer to either of these questions is yes. Instead, as Horn said: “There was no other way. We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise. It was quite obvious to me that this would be the first step in a landslide-like series of events.” The “humanist solution.” As Reagan and his admirers devoted considerable energy to denunciations of humanism throughout the 1980s, Horn’s explanation of his brave action does not sound, to my ear, very Reagan-like at all.
This version of the collapse of the East is, I’d wager, not one you’ve read in the last few days. Or, for that matter, the last few years. The American right has gone to Herculean lengths to cement the Reagan mythology and the story line that puts Reagan at the center of communism’s collapse has taken firm hold. Arguing against it is tough work. The eminent historian John Patrick Diggins did precisely that in TAP’s December 2003 issue; far from expressing the values of Western conservatism, Diggins wrote, “the Eastern European forces of freedom that courageously took to the streets to overthrow communism... represented the three great antagonists of conservatism: the youth culture, the intellectuals of the ‘60s generation, and the laboring classes that still favored Solidarity over individualism.”
He is exactly right. It is not an argument, admittedly, that will have its day this week or next, or even anytime in the near future. But it is one well worth remembering, this week especially.
We’d also like to add one more observation. Well, two.
First is that we’ve heard a lot this week about how, before Reagan came in, a sort of equanimity was taking hold regarding perceptions of the Soviet Union in the West and it took his “evil empire” speech to set everyone straight.
Well, on the surface, OK. There was a distinct sense in some quarters that maybe the Soviets and us could share the world after all, and we could all help out by being less critical of how they chose to run their country. We don’t deny that.
But what conservatives conveniently leave out of this is the causality. This didn’t just happen because everyone in the West went and dropped acid. This happened because of things like My Lai, Chile, Suharto and apartheid. Things that made it difficult to argue that we were on the side inherently more moral. Things that were supported in the name of opposing Communism that differed from it only in that the rigid hand of the state crushed dissent in the name of preserving free enterprise rather than proletarian revolution. Things that bring to mind Tolstoy’s famous and unforgettable (and quintessentially Russian) saying relating to cats and dogs, with conservatives emphasizing the modifiers and liberals looking at the noun.
If conservatives had taken the time and effort to try to come up with a way to explain, or help us explain, how despite those things the free world was still freer than the People’s World, rather than just waving the flag, they might sound more honest proclaiming that part of Reagan’s legacy today.
Second, we were genuinely moved by the services today. The Simi Valley services, with the eulogies by Reagan¹s surviving children, were actually better than the National Cathedral one. We sang along with some of the patriotic songs despite having heard them several million times already this week. And who cannot be moved by the site of Nancy Reagan succumbing to grief one final time on her husband’s coffin, even if mainly by reference to similar scenes one may have witnessed? Pain and grief are universal. You could see that woman finally having to give way to her widowhood.
We remember also the guy shown saluting in Times Square throughout the entire evening service. There was adulation that was still evident on many faces of members of the public shown on TV this week. Even if we didn’t share it, and critique it, we still would like to remind most on our side that it is a very real political fact, however much we may resent that and its practical effects, and that the way to deal with it is not to try to tear it down (you’ll fail and hurt yourself in the process) but to ask ourselves, where among ourselves might American liberals find a leader who inspires something similar in the public? (Besides this guy, of course).
posted by Sully Watch 6/12/2004 12:56:49 AM
YOU WERE SAYING ...:
Jo collects some of Sullivan’s more hysterical pronouncements over the past three years or so, and revises the words of a John Prine classic here.
posted by Sully Watch 6/12/2004 12:50:26 AM
WITH A FATHER LIKE THAT ...:
We liked Bush Sr.’s speech too — it was better delivered than anything he ever gave as president — but we thought one line in it was more revealing about the speaker than his subject.
“From Ronald Reagan, I learned courage ...”
George H.W. Bush, barely out of his teens, piloted a bombing mission in the South Pacific which he continued despite taking heavy damage from Japanese anti-aircraft fire. So bad that, after completing the mission nonetheless, he had to bail on the plane not knowing for sure if he’d left two other guys to die (later on in life, he would say he was sure they had). He got decorated for this. And it takes a guy who never even served in combat to teach him courage?
Granted, there are different types of courage. And we don’t necessarily buy into the growing right-wing standard that war is the only place where one can learn or demonstrate courage. Still ...
posted by Sully Watch 6/12/2004 12:42:04 AM
Thursday, June 10, 2004
REAGAN REDUX:
Just where did Sully get the idea that “almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn’t what was said at the time”? Of course now that he’s dead and 15 years from the White House everyone is going to look at him in a historical perspective.
Indeed, of the nine quotes offered in something that looks suspiciously like an RNC-fomented talking-points memo, only the very first, from Schlesinger, addresses the question of how history would see Reagan. The others are all very hot, immediate criticism of things Reagan was doing at the time.
And did you notice something else? Besides Schlesinger, only one other quote comes from the second term, when people have to concede that a presidency is not some fleeting four-year loss of mind but an institution.
And — surprise — that quote comes from John Kerry. A quote in which Kerry doesn’t even use Reagan’s name. You knew there had to be an agenda here somewhere (besides the obvious, of course).
Then Sullivan follows this up with the debatable assumption that Star Wars is what brought down the USSR. Even granting this, it’s not even true on the propaganda. It was the possibility of Star Wars in this folklore that brought the Soviets to the table, not the actual program (which was a microcosm of the whole Reagan Cold War strategy: an elegant bluff, as we said earlier, that would have been seen very differently and resulted in very different history had it been called.
UPDATE: Sidney Blumenthal lends support for this over at Salon:
At the October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan had agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, to the consternation of his advisors, until Gorbachev insisted that testing for the Star Wars missile defense shield in outer space be suspended. Two of Reagan’s utopian dreams collided. But after the exposure of the Iran-Contra scandal, Gorbachev furiously rewrote the script, dropping the objection to Star Wars. (Nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov told him it was a fantasy.)
As well as truly stating what Reagan did as far as ending the Cold War:
Reagan did not bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union, which was crumbling from terminal internal decay. But to the degree that he gave Gorbachev political time and space, he lent support to the liberalizing reform that hastened the end.
Via Approximately Perfect we get this reality check on Reagan-as-conquering-hero from a former U.S. correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail.
It was his arms buildup, Republican admirers say, and his menacing rhetoric that brought the Soviets to their knees and changed the world forever. He was a pleasant man, the 40th president, which makes this fairy tale easier to swallow than some of history's other canards. Truth be known, however, the Iron Curtain’s collapse was hardly Ronald Reagan's doing.
It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with a sweeping democratic revolution at home and one peace initiative after another abroad, backed the Gipper into a corner, leaving him little choice — actors don't like to be upstaged — but to concede there was a whole new world opening up over there.
[...]
Glasnost and perestroika became the new vernacular. For those in the White House like Richard Perle, the prince of darkness who still thought it was all a sham, Gorby now began a withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. He released the dissident icon Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of other political prisoners. He made big strides on freedom of the press, immigration and religion. He told East European leaders that the massive Soviet military machine would no longer prop up their creaking dictatorships. He began the process of something unheard of in Soviet history — democratic elections.
By now, the U.S. administration was reeling. Polls were beginning to show that, of all things unimaginable, a Soviet leader was the greatest force for world peace. An embarrassed Mr. Reagan finally responded in kind. Nearing the end of his presidency, he came to Moscow and he signed a major arms-control agreement and warmly embraced Mr. Gorbachev. A journalist asked the president if he still thought it was the evil empire. “No,” he replied, “I was talking about another time, another era.”
The recasting of the story now suggests that President Reagan’s defence-spending hikes — as if there hadn’t been American military buildups before — somehow intimidated the Kremlin into its vast reform campaign. Or that America’s economic strength — as if the Soviets hadn’t always been witheringly weak by comparison — made the Soviet leader do it.
In fact, Mr. Gorbachev could have well perpetuated the old totalitarian system. He still had the giant Soviet armies, the daunting nuclear might and the chilling KGB apparatus at his disposal.
[...]
As for the Gipper, he was bold and wise enough, to shed his long-held preconceptions and become the Russian’s admirable companion in the process.
In the collapse of communism he deserves credit not as an instigator, but an abettor. Best Supporting Actor.
Mr. Martin (no relation to the Canadian PM, we imagine) gets it right, reminding the readers as we did that Gorbachev, not Reagan, was the man with the hand that could sign the right papers to really end things, and also touching on the fact that Reagan’s only-Nixon-could-go-to-China moment was not universally adored by Reagan’s base at that time. We do, in fact, distinctly remember Howard Phillips (a big-time conservative back then but a nobody now, whose most lasting achievement was suggesting to Jerry Falwell that he set up some sort of activist group) calling Reagan a “useful idiot”* and:
The hawks were also mistaken about what steps were needed in the final stage to bring about the dismantling of the Soviet empire. During Reagan’s second term, when he supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform efforts and pursued arms reduction agreements with him, many conservatives denounced his apparent change of heart. William F. Buckley urged Reagan to reconsider his positive assessment of the Gorbachev regime: “To greet it as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler.” George Will mourned that “Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.”
Let’s see you say that at the funeral, guys.
ADDENDUM: We remember that even at the end of the Reagan administration some conservatives were still pillorying Reagan for this. John Lofton, famously eccentric conservative Christian columnist then at the Washington Times (and now nowhere that we can tell, thank God, although it wouldn’t surprise us if NewsMax, CNS, WorldNutDaily or some similar organization had given him a home), wrote a whole column around the time Reagan left downgrading every one of the achievements of his presidency as touted by some other rightie (Bob Tyrrell, perhaps). Among other things, he stated clearly the hard-liner objection to the INF treaty and others: the Soviets violate every treaty they sign, so why sign a treaty with them? Someone should track Lofton down now and see what he has to say.
Slate’s David Greenberg also takes up the subject of Reaganite and anti-Reaganite mythmaking in a piece that’s worth your attention. He’s actually harsher than we were on the subject of Reagan’s temperament, but also hammers on Reagan not being the primarily responsible party for the Cold War. His conclusion — that Reagan’s shrewd pragmatism was his most underappreciated virtue — is an interesting contrast with Amenorrheic Annie’s take that he wasn’t (as supplied by Steve Mussina).
And on the subject of AIDS, which by and large the major media have avoided or downplayed when discussing Reagan’s legacy, Bruce Garrett has some interesting information (in addition to the press conference transcripts you’ve already read) about how Reagan responded to Ryan White, the young Indiana boy who got the disease from a blood transfusion and became the first face of AIDS in America. And the information about White himself was taken directly from the website White’s family set up that still exists, not some gay propaganda rumor.
*(added later). Dennis Miller, back when he was still creative, relevant and funny, came up with a comeback line for this that was so great and sounded so much like something Reagan might actually have said: “Well, at least I’m still useful”).
posted by Sully Watch 6/10/2004 11:39:03 PM
THEY THAT SEE YET ARE STILL BLIND:
Attaturk at Rising Hegemon looks at the way Bush’s clothes keep disappearing and reappearing for Sullivan and concludes:
... Dubya is not the beflightsuited manly man of virtue that Sully occasionally opines about, but rather, by American standards are dangerous and callow fanatic who is a big fan of making alleged “evildoers” suffer. There was more to his mockery of Carla Faye Tucker begging for her life than just bizarre behavior, there was sadism.
Today, Sullivan sees the sadism. For this alone Bush should have his ass shipped back to Crawford (though there are numerous others).
Yet, Sully will undoubtedly snap back into some sort of insane immaturity and find Bush’s STRENGTH compelling in the future. That and the pushing conservativism keeps me financially better off considerations that adds up to hypocrisy.
Sully has yet to take the final path and see the truth for what it really is, that this outward strength, is really the cover for what is in actuality the shallow “pick the wings off a fly” vileness that actually makes up Bush’s personality.
(Emphasis in original).
posted by Sully Watch 6/10/2004 11:28:10 PM
THE MACROS:
George Cerny takes note of Sullivan’s boast that he’s written over a quarter of a million words (written, one wonders, or quoted as well?) and wonders just how difficult that really was.
He does this by way of quoting, in its entirety, a classic old joke about ... jokes, the one about the old guys who tell the same jokes so often they just number them instead (actually, George, best punchline we ever heard: one of the old guys says "247" or something like that and no one laughs. Later someone in the know about this asks why they didn’t laugh and is told, “Oh, that fool Lefkowitz can never do a Swedish accent right.” Actually, it’s more of a sequel joke).
He then suggests something similar for The Blog Queen:
I offer, in the hope of easing his burden, some preliminary notes toward a comprehensive list.
1: "The United States is morally superior to murderous terrorists."
2: "The left does not grasp this."
3: "Europe does not grasp this."
3-a "The French."
4: "They want us to lose."
5: "Bush is a great leader."
6: "More excellent news."
6-a "Another reason to be optimistic, if only somewhat."
7: "This is not a failure. It is, instead an opportunity.
8: "I don't know what to think, but not all hope is lost."
9: "Bush's adviser/cabinet member _________ deserves the blame for this failure."
9-a: Karl Rove
9-b: John Ashcroft
9-c: George Tenet (obsolete)
10: "I'm starting to lose confidence in President Bush."
11: "Thank God, Bush has finally started taking control of the situation by clearly stating a coherent policy."
12: "Off to Provincetown..."
13: "Lecture/Book Tour"
14: "Pledge Week!"
15: "Site Traffic reports"
16: "Why oh why do the Republicans hate gays so much?" (see 9-a)
17: "When will the Democrats show some leadership?"
18: Flypaper (# retired)
19: "The mainstream media cannot be trusted."
19-a: NY Times
19-b: BBC
20: "_______ on the (left/right) said something outrageous."
20-a "Why doesn't everyone on the (left/right) condemn ________? Are they not outraged? Do they agree?"
21: "I've been wrong. Events have proven this beyond any doubt, forcing me to rethink much of what I believed, and to examine what I wrote in the past. I owe some apologies." (Just kidding)
Suggestions welcome.
posted by Sully Watch 6/10/2004 05:15:20 PM
WHAT HE MISSES OUT ON NOT READING THE BLOGS WE READ:
The very liberal Steve Mussina had that Spc. Baker story almost three weeks ago.
As usual, Sullivan is like The New York Times in not admitting the roles of its lesser brethren in breaking important stories.
posted by Sully Watch 6/10/2004 05:08:21 PM
AT WHAT POINT IN TEH CYCLE IS HE NOW?:
Jo Fish does the honors:
Today’s columns have to be among the best of Andrew-does-Sybil bits. It might just make it to the Hall o’ Fame. Start with the “take-down” of the French (what else is new). Entirely missing the point that democracy is a product of some weird combination of culture and necessity, Andrew still believes we can “export” democracy like we export agricultural products. He sticks to the republican party line, just couched in slightly nicer terms that the cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys are all hosed up and blew their chance at empire because they were not tuff-enuff. Who now has designs on Tyranny and Colonialism in the [region] middle-east? Not France, they’ve got the T-Shirt.
[...]
But then the Duchess rolls over to and shows his soft white belly, hoping for a few pats for being “tough” on the 1600 Crew and his fellow Republicans. Taking righteous exception to some old Gipper-era press transcripts about AIDS that have surfaced, he's appropriately indignant. Fucking Duh. Those transcripts are the pornography of indifference; and remember Andrew waxes rhapsodic over the guy who directed the porn ... so appropriately indignant and transparently pandering to other conservatives who want to sit on the fence with him and express outrage with at no cost. Gee.
posted by Sully Watch 6/10/2004 05:03:21 PM
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
STEVE! STEVE! STEVE! (OFF-TOPIC):
Steve Gilliard is not only, we think, the best African-American commentator out there, bar none, he’s one of the best altogether. So perhaps it’s only telling that he does this on his own blog rather than on the Times op-ed page.
Why do we say this? Posts that include pithy, quotable aphorims like this:
Americans like to pretend history is what happens to other people
Ouch! As good as anything Fitzgerald or Henry Ford might have said on the subject.
He also put up this great one about black unlove for Reagan.
posted by Sully Watch 6/9/2004 10:26:38 PM
SWEET AND TENDER HOOLIGANS:
WareMouse with an acid comment on Sullivan’s teenage Reagan button:
Wow, tough guy. Bet that really showed those ruffians on the debate team who was running things.
No, you mean the rugby team, as in the guys who found Sulliteen’s dairy confessing to his crushes on various members, then read all over the school PA.
(Also a nice one in this vein here)
posted by Sully Watch 6/9/2004 10:08:20 PM
CAPTAIN BAREBACK RIDES AGAIN:
For the record: Reagan didn’t give me HIV. Another gay man did, with my unwitting consent. I did practise safer sex, but it obviously failed.
“Unwitting consent”? How in the name of logic is that possible? Aren’t the two terms mutually contradictory, as in, one can only consent to that which one is aware of? What would he say if Bill Clinton said he’d given his “unwitting consent” to that blow job? We’d laugh.
Note also that Sully here says he practiced “safer” sex? As we seem to recall, it was like the timeworn adage about pregnancy ... either sex is/was safe, or it wasn’t. No shades of gray there.
If Sullivan cares enough about Reagan’s “clarity” and “honesty,” he ought to at least respect those qualities and save the self-pitying weasel phrases for himself.
And you wonder how he lets Bush get away with it for so long? Or why we keep linking to those ads?
posted by Sully Watch 6/9/2004 05:49:46 PM
OH, THOSE HYSTERICAL MUSLIMS!:
Would Sully be so dismissive if, say, a Jewish group objected to a movie ad or something that depicted swastikas on a huge billboard near the synagogue?
posted by Sully Watch 6/9/2004 02:31:20 PM
HISTORY LESSON:
Jo Fish, as usual, reporting for duty with yet more proof that, as Mickey Kaus once said, Sullivan really doesn’t understand America as much as he likes to think he does.
Logan Circle, TX, Guy is even more vicious:
Basically, Andrew could be really really cool and different by liking Reagan as a British teen; and there’s no need to worry about little things like funding brutal dictatorships that murder their citizens in Latin America, because Reagan was all about “convictions.”
posted by Sully Watch 6/9/2004 02:27:50 PM
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
TODAY THE SOVIETS, TOMORROW THE SWEDES:
George Cerny wonders whether Sullivan should be eligible for a Sontag Award or something like that.
Also, he gives a good critique and perspective on the famous or infamous “evil empire” speech, noting what’s really scary about it.
This is, in fact, an excellent example of yet another point we wanted to make in Reagan’s wake: just why so many on the left were opposed to the kind of anti-communism Reagan espoused.
Basically, we couldn’t help but see that, to its exponents, especially after McCarthy, anti-communism was pretty much anti-liberalism as well. What they were gunning for was not limited to gulags and central planning. They were going after the entire idea that government has a role to play in mitigating the effects of a capitalistic economy on its population and society. Taking down communism, as the recent history of the American Republican Party unquestionably demonstrates, was the beginning and not the end.
No, this hardly meant that communism as it was (and is) should be defended by anyone. But conservative pundits who still go to lunch on this whipsawing cannot pretend this wasn’t obvious even to them, and why liberals should have gone as whole-hog enthusiastic as they did over a movement that so clearly had them marked as next in line.
posted by Sully Watch 6/8/2004 05:11:42 PM
THE GIPPER AND THE VIRUS:
Reminded by too many people of the fact that he is, you know, not only gay but HIV-positive, and that there is no really good way to play Reagan’s legacy in this respect, Sullivan at last chooses to respond in the dark hours (again, it is really annoying that he claims it’s 3 a.m. when it’s not).
Expanding on his earlier passing remark, Captain Bareback has no choice but to admit that “Reagan should indeed be faulted for not doing more to warn people of the dangers of infection early enough.” So far so good. But then he goes, as anyone working this subject does, to Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On ... and then seriously misrepresents it.
Yes, Shilts is unsparing, as he should be, regarding the resistance and denial to AIDS prevention and awareness within the gay community and its institutions at that time. But there’s a fair share of blame to go around, and neither the public-health establishment (Robert Gallo and his massive ego, which held up an effective HIV test for a crucial year after it had been developed by ... the French, deserves as much individual blame as anyone in that narrative) nor the administration comes off easy.
What Shilts faults Reagan for doing, or rather not doing, was publicly acknowledging the AIDS crisis until 1987, after the last election in which he could have been an issue had passed, at which point his administration was already weaker politically than Clinton’s at the comparable time (please, don’t argue this point, we remember it all too well).
Yes, there were considerable scientific obstacles and yes, direct exhortations to use condoms from Reagan himself probably would not have been heeded. But that was not what people on the front lines like Fauci and Kramer were asking most for.
One sentence, just one sentence, from Reagan in 1982 or 1983 to the effect that this disease was public health crisis might have given nervous moderate Republicans in Congress the cover they needed to vote for more money for education and prevention ... and more importantly, for things like research efforts to try and identify those possibly infected who were still out there cruising bathhouses and telling people (and themselves) that purplish mark on their back was just a bruise they got while working out ... just a bruise. Things like that, targeted appropriately, might have made a difference to hundreds of lives. Yet Reagan didn’t speak up until more American lives had been lost than on 9/11, Antietam and D-Day put together, basically calling for the locking of the barn door after most of the horses had been stolen.
Here’s the damage:
What did this mean in practical terms? Most importantly, AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.
When health and support groups in the gay community were beginning to initiate education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding.
[...]
When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagans, was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out as president. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times opinion article, called for mandatory testing for HIV and said that HIV-positive gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV-drug users on their arms) Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence), when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little-too-late initiative. Reagan, again, said and did nothing. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.
[...]
But the irony is that portraying Reagan as being anti-gay because of his religious convictions, while wrong, is, in fact, the kind interpretation. Looking at history it is clear that Reagan’s inaction during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic was due to indifference, emotional callousness and greed for political power.
It’s that that Sullivan’s second-greatest hero has to be called to account for.
UPDATE: Sebastian seconds much of this and adds:
Some (yes, we’re looking at you Andrew Sullivan!) would give Reagan credit for spending $5.7 billion on AIDS during his presidency. What Andrew won't say (or acknowledge) is that barely half (56 percent) of this was discretionary spending, the bulk of the remainder the result of entitlements (primarily Medicare & Medicaid.) In 1984, Robinson’s “large sum of money specifically earmarked for AIDS” was a whopping $60 million. Discretionary spending on AIDS did not exceed $1 billion until FY1989 (at $1.3 billion.)
LATER UPDATE: From Atrios we get to read this post about just how (un)seriously the Reagan administration took AIDS.
We also read here, on the same blog, that Larry Kramer, whom Sullivan cited, is about to nail Reagan to the wall in his usual style in the next issue of The Advocate.
posted by Sully Watch 6/8/2004 01:26:18 AM
Monday, June 07, 2004
SCRAPING:
Sebastian on Sullivan’s preference for using Democratic Underground as wholly representative of the left.
Watching Andrew Sullivan regularly link to DU — when he could quote Atrios, DailyKos, MaxSpeak or Pandagon (to name a few,) is like watching a one-trick pony that’s forgotten its only trick.
Good one!
posted by Sully Watch 6/7/2004 03:05:48 PM
REPUBLICANS ONLY NEED APPLY FOR THIS LEVEL OF INDULGENCE:
I even got to go to a rally where he promised to raise our taxes. It was a gaffe. We didn’t care. We loved him.
Let no one ever take him seriously again when he raps on Bill CLinton for character reasons.
posted by Sully Watch 6/7/2004 02:35:42 PM
THERE YOU GO AGAIN ...:
Virginia Postrel’s post is not (surprise) as Sullivan represents it, as you might have guessed. In fact, the quoted bit is actually a quote in and of itself of an old book review her magazine chose to repost on the occasion of Reagan’s ride into the sunset, merely arguing that, back in the early 1980s, some of Reagan’s critics chose to differ with the argument, now obvious in retrospect, that the Soviet economy was slowly rusting out.
What’s unusual in this, as opposed to the innumerable other instances when Sullivan misrepresents something he’s linked to, is that in this case one needn’t even click to see the misrepresentation take place. Schlesinger is quoted as saying that, based on his anecdotal experience in Moscow (a standard no economist of any political leaning, especially those familiar with how the Soviet economy worked and didn’t work), the Soviet economy was not on the verge of collapse. That does not equal a viewpoint that the Soviet Union was not evil.
It took a long Google search, but here’s something written by Schlesinger seven years ago that suggests he did not have a favorable view of the Soviet Union or its governing philosophy:
The twentieth century has no doubt been, as Isaiah Berlin has said, “the most terrible century in Western history." But this terrible century has — or appears to be having — a happy ending. As in melodramas of old, the maiden democracy, bound by villains to the railroad track, is rescued in the nick of time from the onrushing train. As the century draws to a close, both major villains have perished, fascism with a bang, communism with a whimper.
[...]
Democracy, striding confidently into the 1900s, found itself almost at once on the defensive. The Great War, exposing the pretension that democracy would guarantee peace, shattered old structures of security and order and unleashed angry energies of revolution — revolution not for democracy but against it. Bolshevism in Russia, Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, militarism in Japan all despised, denounced, and, wherever they could, destroyed individual rights and the processes of self-government.
[...]
Democracy requires capitalism, but capitalism does not require democracy, at least in the short run.
Capitalism has proved itself the supreme engine of innovation, production, and distribution.
Postrel is at least honest enough to note that the perception of the Soviet economy as vital and alive was shared by some on the right as well, which brings us to the real issue that neocons desperately wish to duck today: how can they reconcile their own beliefs that the Soviet Union was a lightbulb slowly burning out with the establishment of things with titles like the Committee on the Present Danger to argue that the United States needed to arm, arm and arm right now to confront the Soviet menace? The criticism some of us have made in retrospect was, maybe your need for a military buildup was not as directly correlated to the Soviet threat as you think? Remember how badly Team B, the neocon hucksters (one of whom was a yet-unknown junior wonk named Paul Wolfowitz) got it wrong in the late 1970s by arguing that the CIA had consistently underestimated future Soviet military capabilities and that their approach, wildly overestimating them, was morally superior because at least their fears were in the right place? (No one involved in Team B should be allowed to take credit for realizing the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse because they sure as hell didn’t think so at the time. Matt Yglesias has a prime example of how one of themost distinguished B-boys, Richard Pipes, is trying to have it both ways even now). Money quote from Zakaria:
Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber “probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984.” In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.
With enemies like these, the Soviet Union didn’t need friends.
Actually, one has to wonder, really, if the acceptance on both sides of a USSR that was here to stay has more to do with simply preferring a world largely governed by known quantities, a world where assumptions could be safely made and acted upon, a world where both sides knew the devil as opposed to the uncertainties we are now seeing were behind Iron Curtain #1. To our collection there was almost no serious thinking on either side about what would happen when the Cold War ended until just before it did.
QUICK UPDATE: Atrios, who probably would have saved us the time had we waited to read him this morning, agrees.
posted by Sully Watch 6/7/2004 01:33:59 PM
SO GO, ALREADY!:
Roger Ailes on how Sullivan’s inability to ignore the Republican Party’s increasing enshrinement of homophobia as a fundamental value is getting tired.
UPDATE: Atrios, in the same post linked to above, juxtaposes this with the Kushner-bashing.
posted by Sully Watch 6/7/2004 01:25:03 PM
OUR RESEARCH DEPARTMENT AT WORK:
Jo Fish shows Sullivan that the powers of the new Iraqi government are indeed limited.
posted by Sully Watch 6/7/2004 12:39:58 AM
