NO QUARTER » New McCarthyism

Totalitarian Tactics and an Illegitimate Nominee

Bud White — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:39:57 +0000

Neither the main stream media nor the Democratic Party nor even the Obama campaign itself has come to terms with the damage Obama’s tactics have done to our Party. The damage was facilitated by the media and the big blogs.

Obama’s first task was controlling the media. Politicalcenter writes:

Taking their cue from totalitarian regimes, Obama developed his own propaganda arm which spewed facts and figures to the media and made false claims designed to keep controversial issues dealing with the candidate off of the main stream media. At the same time, Obama attacked in merciless ways those who voiced opposition on various Internet systems and sources, including the media who dared to question him, and has now stopped debates in favor of tuning his message against McCain again with the help of completely compliant media.

Consider that there’s a growing movement of determined progressives who are committed to Obama’s defeat. Our swelling numbers and strength of purpose are actually pretty shocking when you stop and think about it. The PUMA movement isn’t bitter or small; it’s radical and revolutionary: This is how parties are born and die. You are living history. SusanUnPC writes:

Hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters will NEVER vote for Barack Obama. And a great many will vote for John McCain simply because they believe he is qualified to be president, and that Barack Obama is NOT qualified or experienced enough — and we’re worried sick about such a teleprompter-dependent neophyte being handed the toughest job in the world.

In addition to Obama’s race-baiting and thuggish tactics, Anglachel suggests that Obama’s problem is the illegitimacy of his nomination:

The increasing rejection of Obama by voters is a measure of his declining legitimacy. People who once thought they would gladly vote for him, like me, are now implacably opposed to him. He is no longer legitimate in our eyes…Participating in and profiting from the media hatred of the Clintons, throwing out accusations of racism to try to forestall criticism and inflate AA vote counts, encouraging people to be “Obamacans” not Democrats, the “Democrat for a Day” strategy, engaging in intimidation and threats to extract caucus votes, aggressively trying to monopolize money specifically to silence alternative voices, and treating voters who do not choose him first with contempt.

As Anglachel writes, there are several million of us who feel that Obama’s nomination is illegitimate, that his tactics are counter to our values as progressives, and that he is not the unity figure he claims to be. Indeed, Obama wears two masks: at one moment he gives high-minded speeches, at the next he is accusing Bill Clinton, a beloved former president, of racism.

As progressives, we are repulsed by the totalitarian nature of Obama’s candidacy — creating a cult of personality, the venom espoused by his adherents, the delegate stealing — tactics that are repugnant to the many who have spent a lifetime working for democracy and social justice.

Almost four years ago at DailyKos, DemFromCT wrote about Bush in ways which seem even more fitting for Obama today:

I was intrigued to hear some of the theories on the talking heads shows; it’s culture issues, not class economic issues. Kerry’s reality-based, Bush is not. Bush has run for four years to select and indoctrinate those who believe him and everyone else is against him.

During this primary season, Obama’s campaign used the big blogs as instruments to indoctrinate progressives and silence the opposition. Take the strike of DailyKos, for example. Imagine that this had happened at a progressive company: a group of women and men complain to management about rampant sexism and abuse. The manager, Kos in this case, regardless of his own agenda, would investigate and set limits on abusive language and behavior. Instead Kos, the proprietor of the biggest liberal blog, in a moment of unbelievable arrogance, calls their strike “laughable.” Feminism, justice, and respect are thrown out in favor of one candidate.

Politicalcenter continues:

The propaganda process was carefully managed turning everything damaging to Obama into racist or irrelevant issues. These included blatant refusals to print or to discuss clearly relevant issues to claims that any discussion was racism. Obama did not care about the truth. Only the message.

From this vantage point, Obama’s continual attacks on Hillary Clinton supporters were continually repeated through numerous MSM channels with little or no questioning and constant support for the Obama view of the truth. Obama thereby created the most one-sided message system ever developed in US politics.

The PUMA movement is the classic liberal fight against injustice. The ancestors to Just Say No Deal PUMAs are the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement. We’re not bound to a particular party or a candidate. We’re joined together by our values. John Kennedy famously defined liberalism as:

not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

Based on our progressive values, we reject Obama’s use of race-baiting and sexism as political tools — although ignored by the press and perpetuated by bloggers — we have documented it and are emboldened by these injustices:

Indeed, to this day, the Democrats have continued to use racism wherever they turn. From the Wright controversy, where Dean called the coverage racist, to the war against Geraldine Ferraro claiming that she is a racist, Obama has turned the tables dramatically against free speech and toward some other place that we dare not go or discuss.

Our movement faces ridicule and obstacles but is born out of our principles, and we will not be silenced. We believe that Obama’s defeat will strengthen the progressive cause long-term, we vote our conscience and we will not be bullied into supporting a candidate and movement who consistently violates the progressive tenets that include free thought and expression.

Riverdaughter perfectly expresses the progressive’s rational to reject to Obama. She writes:

Time is not going to heal this wound. Oh, I take that back. If I wake up on Nov. 5 to find that Barack Obama, the inexperienced, untested, unvetted, lightweight candidate who we counted on you to stop, if I find that he is NOT my president, I will finally be over it. If the man who called me a racist because I thought he was unready does not take the oath in January, I will be satisfied. If all the people he threw under the bus, the old, poor, working class, Appalachians, woman, latinos, asians, gay and Muslims find that the Democratic Party is now genuinely shocked and chastened for screwing us over as well as any Republican would have done, then we will have exercised our power.

Au so Corrente: the new left McCarthyism

Steve Diamond — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:45:02 +0000

If they start to foam at the mouth about you I guess what you are saying is having some kind of impact, so the lumping of my work along with others under the title of a recent blog called “Lies, Damnable Lies, and Political Commentary,” should perhaps be viewed as a kind of praise.

But the fact that the site (something called Corrente - apparently run by Leah Appet, an affiliate at some recent date of an outfit known as MoveOn.org) refuses to register me in order to respond - after several attempts over a number of hours - is the sign of dirty pool. And this is combined with personal remarks about me on their blog by someone hiding behind a fictitious name. (Do the site’s web masters realize, or care, that I teach at a law school?)

So instead of continuing my frustrating attempts to respond on their site, let me point out a few things about the comments today of “Bringiton” on Corrente. What we will discover is, in fact, a new form of McCarthyism entering today’s political discourse, only this time from the authoritarian left.

First, an irony: it takes this person more than 5,000 words to tell his no doubt hungry readers that, well, of all the things we have to worry about in this world, that one of my posts was 4,500 words long! And, guess what? If you accept his view of it, I didn’t say anything! You would be wasting your life to spend a minute considering what I have written because it is nothing more than a lie or a damned lie and I am nothing more than a tool of what he charmingly calls the “VWRC” (the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy).

(Oh, by the way, Bringiton, conspiracies typically are crafted, well, conspiratorially, but everything I have said has been on the record. We are left to guess at who or what Corrente is much less whom or what Bringiton is. Is a conspiracy afoot, right wing or otherwise on Corrente? Inquiring minds would like to know.)

But let’s get to the heart of the matter:

Is there a political relationship between Obama and Ayers?

If so, should we care?

The answer to both question is Yes. Ayers and Obama have known each other for at least 14 years. They have worked very closely together on a number of projects, projects which have had political goals, primarily in education policy. Ayers is surely not just some guy Obama met at a kids’ soccer match.

Ayers advocates a narrow-minded and potentially divisive concept called “repayment of 400 years of the education debt to people of color” that is now also the number one priority of Obama’s senior education advisor, an individual who has long standing close professional ties to Bill Ayers.

Obama has also indicated a willingness to consider aspects of this idea.

These are facts, ladies and gentlemen. There is a clear public record of it.

In fact, although you would never know it, these facts are not denied by Mr. Bringiton.

Actually, far from it: although you would never know it unless you, too, had the professional and political obligation to wade through his 5,000 word screed, Bringiton SUPPORTS reparations through “repayment of the education debt to people of color.”

In fact, he brags, “Obama has suggested, as have many others including myself, that the issue of slavery “reparations” can be addressed through collective investment….”

I am sure the Senator welcomes Bringiton’s endorsement of his views.

If Obama, however, were to endorse this proposal, I think he would have to withdraw his nomination. Whether or not one thinks reparations for slavery is a good idea (I happen to think, like perhaps the Palestinian right of return, there are credible arguments for it and huge political and cultural obstacles in its way), it is politically untenable for a U.S. presidential candidate to campaign on that idea or on any approach, like “repayment of 400 years of education debt to people of color,” that is an attempt to sneak the same idea through another door.

There is, fortunately, now a progressive alternative available at least on the education front: the Bold Approach announced this week by the Economic Policy Institute. I presume, and hope, that debate about the candidate’s approach to education is underway inside the Party right now.

What clearly bothers Bringiton and no doubt many of his friends in the authoritarian left, then, is not that I have written about Ayers and Obama, it is that I disagree with his politics. But instead of a straightforward debate about the merits of the issue of reparations, he instead tries to dispense with my argument by lumping me in with what he thinks is a conspiracy.

And he tries to deny the actual politics that he and the others on the authoritarian left really defend. Fidelista Carl Davidson, webmaster for Progressives for Obama, only opposes the embargo against Cuba?

In response to an absurdly friendly interview of Cuban leader Ricardo Alarcon by fellow Obama backer Tom Hayden (who has the nerve to describe how “freely” Alarcon speaks about the “many forms of socialism” [sic!] without ever asking about dissidents languishing in Cuban prisons) Davidson reminisced as follows:

Very good, Tom.

It brought back memories of the night in 1968 when you, I and Dave Dellinger were hustled through the streets of Havana for our late-night, long, rambling talk with Fidel.

Alarcon is asking all the right questions, and I agree with him about [Brazilian President] LuLa, too. There is a ‘High Road,’ market-inclusive, solidarity economy alternative to neoliberalism and hegemonism. It needs imagination, audacity, organizing and all the friends to[we?] can find.

Cuba, by the way, is what transformed me, in my twenties, from an anarcho-syndicalist into someone who could read Che from Gr[a]msci’s eyes, or vice versa?

In any case, we need fresh thinking.

Keep On Keepin’ On…

So the same year the Russian tanks roll into Prague to crush the Czech uprising, these two Obama backers are kicking it with Fidel in Havana. Forgive me for thinking Davidson is, indeed, something more than a simple advocate of free trade with Cuba.

Today, of course, the hot spot for the left Obama supporters is Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, where Bill Ayers visits often and cheered the “revolutionary” nature of education in front of Chavez in November, 2006.

Here’s a shot of the “revolutionary” education conference that Ayers attended. The banner in the background reads “Bolivarian Education and the Defeat of Capitalist School.”

And here are some fellow Obama supporters: maoist labor activist Bill Fletcher on the left and Danny Glover, on the right, on a recent revolutionary tour of the “new socialist man’s” paradise. They were on a visit to “see the results of the peaceful revolutionary process led by President Hugo Chavez.” (Picture thanks to the Progressives for Obama website.)

Of course, the press is full recently of the accounts of Chavez’s attempts to turn neighbor against neighbor in an overhaul of his intelligence services. Fortunately, what vestige of democracy still exists there was used recently to defeat his attempt to solidify power through a rewriting of the Constitution.

Instead of a head on discussion of the actual politics at stake in this debate, Bringiton deals with our political disagreement by engaging in guilt by (vague and unsubstantiated) association, a tactic worthy of the McCarthy period. The fact that some on the right may agree with me on some aspects of the Ayers-Obama link (and, believe me, they disagree with far more) it is enough for this person to dispense with concrete discussion and, instead, simply toss everything in the trashbin.

Oh, but not until he has written his 5,000 words about, well, something.

I guess we can happily look forward to more of this as the facts about the Ayers-Obama relationship, those stubborn little things, upset the apple cart of so many on the authoritarian left.

Lies, Damnable Lies, and Political Commentary | Corrente

_____________________

From my blog, Global Labor and the Global Economy.

About me: I am a law professor and political scientist on the faculty of Santa Clara University School of Law in Santa Clara, California, which is in the heart of Silicon Valley. I teach courses on the global capital markets, the international economy, corporate governance and international labor and human rights. Prior to joining the faculty I was in private legal practice in New York and in Palo Alto. I also have an extensive background in the labor movement and advise a wide range of unions, workers and institutional investors on financial and legal issues. This website is an independent project and hence is my responsibility and it is not affiliated in any other way with the law school or Santa Clara University.