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[Note: This is a slightly edited version of my original post. Kathy]
In a thought-provoking essay on BC and Daily Kos, teacherken asks, "When will they ever learn (about torture, the economy, the environment and a host of other things)? Indeed. However, I believe the problem is so much more complicated than human biases (not seeing ourselves as we are) and failures of logic and reason. The problems run so much deeper than failures to see our own limitations, our own wrongdoing. Rather there is something systemic in the manner in which an increasingly abusive political party commits historic wrongs, then intimidates its adversaries until it's adversaries capitulate. In the process we have something dramatically less than compromise. It is something on another plane all together. I will summarize the key points of an important essay by noted journalist Robert Parry, who broke much of the coverage on the Ira-Contra war here. And I will reflect and build upon it.
It wasn't always that way, though the Republican Party in the era of Franklyn D. Roosevelt mightily tried. In some glaringly similar tactics it wanted a hands-off approach to the Great Depression. Let the economy dive as deep as it would, and to the victor goes the spoils. Sound familiar? You might also ask, what kind of Americans want our country to fail? Fast forward to the late 1960s.
Robert Parry calls what began in the late 1960s "Battered Wife Syndrome." As an organizational psychologist, I don't agree that it's legitimate to overlay or generalize various individual psychological syndromes, disorders etc of individuals onto groups. So I won't use that syndrome to describe what is happening. And yet, there is something going on in both the set-up, occurring back in the 1960s, and the continuation on to this day, that bears further reflection. |
| Ultra-Conservative Republicans personified by Barry Goldwater were resoundingly defeated in 1964. From that trouncing they learned much, though. Among those lessons was that extremism is supposedly "no vice." Later, the famed Justice Powell memo identified a preliminary strategy from which the Phyllis Schlaffleys, Pat Buchanan's and Dick Cheney's learned and planned. Similarly, the corporations which wanted to pay to play (especially, but not limited to, Big Oil and the Coors family) deeply funded this growing movement and its proliferation of so-called think tanks, which were really propaganda arms of the ultra-conservative movement. Works with titles mimicked today (e.g., "None Dare Call It Treason") foreshadowed works of similar names today by Jonah Goldberg and Ann Coulter. And all were designed to re-frame and re-align American thought and create backlash against Democrats.
Parry chronicles the sordid history. Watergate was far from the worst that Richard Nixon did. Even before elected, Richard Nixon did something even more treacherous. With the US on the cusp of a negotiated peace settlement of the Viet Nam War, with one half a million of our troops in harm's way, Richard Nixon sent forth operatives to take down the Paris Peace talks. If the talks were successful, the Democrats might have won in 1968. As Parry recounts, Nixon sent the leaders of South Vietnam a series of messages offering them a better deal. President Lyndon Johnson learned this from wiretaps of the South Vietnamese embassy. Johnson confronted Nixon by phone. But when a Christian Science Monitor reporter "sniffed out the story and sought confirmation," Johnson Defense Sec. Clark Clifford and Sec. of State Dean Rusk were mum, says Parry. So a party which itself had been the brunt of false claims of treason, finds real evidence of treason, but takes a pass. Here's the kicker, as reported by Parry:
"In what would become a Democratic refrain in the years ahead, Clifford said in a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call that 'Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I am wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests."
He stayed silent, "for the good of the country." How many times will we hear that excuse over-layed onto catastrophic deceit and treachery in the years since?
Watergate was the one exception to complete Democratic acquiescence. But even so, Democratic National Chair Robert Strauss tried to shut down the Watergate hearings. But Watergate was a major failing, not just a "second rate burglary" as Republicans still like to say. It was a systemic introduction of an enemies (perceived enemies of Nixon, not of the country) list and the use of the government against those "enemies." The Watergate tapes reveal the extent of the run-amok government, where even discussions of destroying the Brookings Institution by violent means was discussed in the White House with the president present. And yet the MSM permits the use of language "second rate burglary," without fully informing those too young to remember (or too re-educated) that there was so much more.
Confronted by Watergate, Parry says, Republicans didn't chose the better option, "to play by the rules," to operate for the good of the country. Instead they launched an anything goes, ends-justifies-the-means, endless, forty-year-long search-and-destroy mission against Democrats. As for the Democrats, their re-education in what is "good for the country" paved the way for what came next.
Parry continues. During the 1980 elections what the Republicans learned kept them in treacherous one-upsmanship mode once again. The American public was growing impatient with Iran's holding US hostages. Just before the elections CIA operatives loyal to VP Candidate George H. W. Bush, meddled in the hostage crisis. Parry says the "evidence is now overwhelming" that Republican operatives, including campaign chief Bill Casey used back-channels to undercut the hostage negotiations. This was nicknamed the "October Surprise." They argued that Regan-Bush would give Iran a better deal. The Carter administration was aware of all this, but it remained silent. In part because Carter hadn't freed the hostages, Reagan swept into the White House because of his October Surprise.
During the Iran-Contra Crisis, Democrats did hold hearings. But in the presence of overwhelming evidence, they refused to hold Reagan responsible. Instead, some lesser characters were paraded across our TV screens. Oliver North launched a career based in part on his performance during those hearings. And key Senators were reluctant to take on the-then-young man in uniform. And so, an administration had sold arms to our enemy (Iran) off the books to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, which Congress had expressly forbidden. But for the "good of the country," the main players were never tried. Selling arms to our enemies, is that not treason? Both Poindexter and North's convictions were overturned because of previously promised immunity.
By then, whenever new wrongdoing by Republicans emerged (e.g., arming Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the late 1980s and early 1990s), Democrats shrugged and let it go "for the good of the country. Eventually those same weapons would be used to partially justify the First Gulf War, which many Dems also supported "for the good of the country," though it truly had nothing to do with our country. Bill Clinton could have further explored Iran Contra. But he didn't for the "good of the country." And yet he still received the full-throttle incendiary politics of the ultra-conservative House Republicans, who tried to bring Clinton down by any means. The ultra-conservatives own the GOP now, are isomorphic with it.
And then again, in 2003, a Republican administration, waged war against a country for no reason, apparently used torture to extract false confessions in an effort to justify the war as "necessary." It used the trumped-up war to roll back our Constitution, our rule of law, our Constitutional three-branch government. It inserted paid fake journalists into the so-called mainstream media to deceive Americans. It paid contractors to appear on TV in support of its war powers and war making, despite the fact that its illegal to do so. It installed a unitary executive, which the same Republicans are busy dismantling now that their boy is no longer in office, but will erect again once they regain the office they believe is theirs. And they do more, obstructing at every turn, today (during the Obama administration) making the Republican obstruction in Bill Clinton's term look like child's play. With each iteration, the Republican movement against the American people's interests get bolder, brasher, and more lethal to democracy.
With each iteration, the Democrats take a pass "for the good of the country." At what point do we, the American people, override them-demand that enough is enough and that we are not going to take it any more. The phony GOP "tea parties" are a pathetic hoax and cruel joke upon Americans. The usurpation by the Republicans of the "I'm not going to take it any more" is laughable.
Ironically, the ones who should not "take it any more" are Democratic and democratic citizens. We have been subjected to the degradation of the country by ultra-conservatives for far too long. Once again, we must take our country back-from the pretend tea partiers; the destructive Republican talking heads; and, even our side of the aisle, which weakly offers up (one more time) the empty rhetoric of the good of the country. If they really cared about the good of the country, after all, they would put an end to torture and punish those who perpetrate it. They would take a firm stance against fraud to advance war. They would end the tyranny of the Republican frame, the Republican dirty tricks, the Republican treason of unConstitutional excess. Until they do these things, they are not acting for the good of the country. Until they do these things, the long, sorry history of democratic acquiescence to Republican excesses can never be laid to rest. |
