When Preznit Bush gave his speech
yesterday to the Air Force Academy graduates in Colorado Springs, it
became a chance of sorts for him to trot out his codpiece and pretend
once again that he was a great War President:
After World War II we helped Germany and
Japan build free societies and strong economies … These efforts took
time and patience, and as a result Germany and Japan grew in freedom and
prosperity and are now allies of the United States. . . . Today we must
do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Right. Because, you know, Al Qaeda — like the Nazis and the Soviets
— has this massive army capable of overpowering ours and destroying
America existentially. Uh huh.
As the Denver Post observed:
World War II was a necessary war, for
America, England, France and the rest of the free world. With Hitler’s
dictatorship and accompanying inhumanities, the U.S. had no choice but
to join forces with its allies. The freedom of the world was at stake.
But Iraq, as we now know, was an optional war. We had a choice.
That’s certainly become crystal clear in recent days, thanks to Scott McClellan. But really, this event — like the original "Mission Accomplished" photo op, and the toppling of Saddam’s statue, and the constant trotting out of those propaganda generals on TV — was part and parcel of the continuous stream of bullshit coming from this White House as part of another military operation: a "psychological operation", or "psyops" as they call it in the military, with the American public as the target.
It worked back in 2003. Now, well, maybe not so much. But as Bush reportedly said
early on in his tenure: "Who cares what you think?" Especially when he
can substitute thought with his own special brand of bullshit.
You’ve got to love how easily conservatives jerk their knees and
point their fingers at liberals, labeling them appeasers and traitors,
when the reality of historical fact paints quite the opposite picture.
From the defenders of slavery who formed the Confederacy to Henry Ford, the America First Committee,
and ever onward, the record of cultural conservatives who have readily
dispensed with America’s interests — especially the preservation of its
democratic institutions — in favor of their own (usually moneyed)
interests is as long as it is disgraceful.
When Preznit Bush the other week attacked Barack Obama
(and by extension, liberals generally) as being like the appeasers of
the Nazis before World War II, there was of course no small irony,
considering that Bush’s own grandfather had built a chunk of the family
fortune out of business dealings with the Nazis,
helping ship large sums of American capital to Germany as the Nazis
built their war machine in the 1930s. But the larger irony, perhaps,
lay in the fact that a number of notable Republicans, movement
conservative icons, continue to argue that it was a mistake not to
appease Nazi Germany — and that America’s participation in World War II
was a mistake.
The most prominent of these, of course, is Pat Buchanan.
Buchanan has for some years promoted the theory that the U.S. and
Britain should have just let Hitler have his way — essentially letting
the far right wipe out leftist movements regardless of the criminal
methods employed and with little concern about collateral civilian
deaths — because he would have let white English speakers go unmolested.
Apparently Buchanan has a new book in the works along these lines titled Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, and he was on CNN last night promoting it. It was something to behold:
BLITZER: You make the case there would
have been no Hitler, there would have been no World War II, there would
have been no holocaust albeit in effect for Winston Churchill. What’s
the point?
BUCHANAN: Well the point of this is obviously Hitler came out of
World War I and the tearing apart of Germany but what I am saying is,
had Britain not given an insane war guarantee to Poland and then go on
the war on behalf of a Poland it could not save, I don’t think there
would have been any war in Europe. I don’t think there would have been a
war against the western democracy. At the very least, all the Jews of Western Europe would have survived. That’s basically one of the cases we make.
What’s that again? The Jews would have survived had not Britain taken up Poland’s side? Even though Kristallnacht
— a systematic, state-approved series of violent pogroms in which — had
already taken place, in 1938, well before the British announced their
pact with Poland (which was signed in September 1939)?It’s useful, perhaps, to review some of the facts of that event:
The pogrom proved especially destructive
in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the
German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in
their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public
humiliation. Although murder did not figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht
claimed the lives of at least 91 Jews between 9 and 10 November. Police
records of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides
in the aftermath of the violence.
As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State
Police), following Heydrich’s instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish
males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks
the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a
massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity.
Hundreds died in
the camps as a result of the brutal treatment they endured; most
obtained release over the next three months on the condition that they
begin the process of emigration from Germany. Indeed, the effects of Kristallnacht would serve as a spur to the emigration of Jews from Germany in the months to come.
… The events of Kristallnacht represented one of the most
important turning points in National Socialist antisemitic policy.
Historians have noted that after the pogrom, anti-Jewish policy was
concentrated more and more concretely into the hands of the SS.
Moreover, the passivity with which most German civilians responded to
the violence signaled to the Nazi regime that the German public was
prepared for more radical measures. The Nazi regime expanded and
radicalized measures aimed at removing Jews entirely from German
economic and social life in the forthcoming years, moving eventually
towards policies of forced emigration, and finally towards the
realization of a Germany “free of Jews” (judenrein) by deportation of the Jewish population “to the East.”
Thus, Kristallnacht figures as an essential turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, which culminated in the attempt to annihilate the European Jews.
So how does Buchanan justify his bizarre theory? Blitzer tried to pin him down on this:
BLITZER: Let me get back to the book now
because we’re almost out of time. I want you to explain the notion that
you have that Hitler would have never come to power, there would have
been anti-Semitism, to be sure, but there wouldn’t have been the
extermination of 6 million Jews. Because that’s going to cause a lot of
controversy, this notion you have that, in effect, Churchill was
responsible for the chain of events that led to the Holocaust.
BUCHANAN: Churchill was not — Chamberlain made the decision to give the war guarantee to Poland.
Here’s my view, Wolf. I’ve read and studied Hitler. One thing he did
not want was war with the British Empire. He admired it. He respected
it. He never wanted war with it. He wanted to make an ally of it. Had
Chamberlain at the goading of Churchill not given a war guarantee to
Poland, Britain would not have had to go to war on behalf of Poland.
It’s because Britain declared on Germany that Germany came west. That’s
the reason Germany had basically hostages of everybody in Western Europe
from the —
BLITZER: Hitler had plans of exterminating the Jews in the ’30s, a lot earlier.
BUCHANAN: Wolf, I have not seen any plans of extermination. Hitler
went genocidal after the invasion of Russia was broken down in Russia,
after he declared war on the United States, and he was looking to defeat
in the face. It was at that point that the conference was held, Wolf.
As you know, that was in January of 1942.
BLITZER: What about all the anti-Semitic laws, all those Jews who were rounded up starting in the 30s in Germany?
BUCHANAN: Look, there’s no doubt Hitler was anti-Semitic from the
time even before he wrote camp. What we’re talking about, when you
mention the Holocaust, for heaven sakes, is genocide. You’re not talking
about anti-Semitism. It was anti-Semitism in Poland in those years.
There’s no doubt that Nuremburg laws were in 1935. They were dreadful.
As a consequence, half the Jews had left Germany before November 1938.
Another half fled after that. They were outside Germany with the curtain
fell.
What Hitler did was a monstrous crime, Wolf. It was a war crime. Had
there been no war, there would have been no holocaust in my judgment.
So, according to Buchanan, Hitler’s treatment of the Jews did not turn murderous until the Wannsee Conference
of 1942. The years of the Brownshirts’ murderous thuggery and
Kristallnacht which well preceded this event, evidently, were just
harmless meanie stuff.
Of course, Buchanan has been making essentially this case for some years. In a 1977 column, he wrote:
Though Hitler was indeed racist and
anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit
murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a
soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first
rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed
oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him…Hitler’s
success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was
an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who
stood in his path.
Writing of "group fantasies of
martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of
Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel
engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New
Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan’s columns have run in the Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other
publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.
[More on Buchanan's indulgence in Holocaust denial here.]
He made the biggest splash in this regard back in 1999, when he was
gearing up to run for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket. His
book A Republic, Not an Empire made essentially the same case. And at the time, historian Robert Dallek delivered what should have been the definitive spanking:
It’s a seductive but wholly unpersuasive
fantasy. Among Buchanan’s many misjudgments on the events of World War
II, none is as serious as his failure to understand the dynamic of the
Hitler-Nazi regime. Had Hitler defeated Soviet Russia, it would have
been an inducement to further expansion. Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich
was built on fierce nationalism and militarism. His regime needed
enemies and constant military challenges to survive and flourish.
After Russia, he would have turned his military machine back against
the West. And it would have been a West even less able to meet the
threat than in 1939-1940. The decision to guarantee Polish security had
as much to do with stiffening British resolve to meet Hitler’s threat as
with saving Poland from German conquest. A Britain assuming Hitler
would confine himself to Eastern conquests would have been a nation as
enthralled in 1939-1940 by the appeasement psychology as that which
immobilized it in 1938.
As for the United States, Buchanan thinks that after Britain
successfully resisted Hitler’s air assault in the fall of 1940, "Germany
posed no strategic threat to the United States." Buchanan means by this
that Hitler would not have been able to invade the United States:
hardly a revelation to historians or to Franklin Roosevelt and his
political and military chiefs in 1940.
The issue was not whether Hitler had the wherewithal to land forces
in the United States, but the many other ways in which he directly
threatened our national security. Roosevelt justifiably worried about
the penetration of Nazi influence in Latin America and potential dangers
to the Panama Canal. And what about Nazi challenges to dominance of the
Atlantic sea lanes? Buchanan all too casually passes over the U-boat
menace, which could not be contained until 1943.
Buchanan has forgotten FDR’s compelling June 1940 speech at
Charlottesville, where he warned against the isolationist "delusion" of
America as "a lone island in a world dominated by force." Roosevelt
predicted that a Nazi-dominated Europe would create for America a
"nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed
through the bars from day to day by contemptuous unpitying masters of
other continents."
Buchanan entirely overlooks how difficult it would have been to
maintain our democratic institutions in a world of hostile totalitarian
regimes.
And what about Hitler’s potential to build an atomic bomb? By 1940
Roosevelt had taken heed of Albert Einstein’s warning about Germany’s
capacity to develop such a weapon and America’s need to launch a crash
program to beat the Germans to the punch. Can anyone with the slightest
familiarity with Hitler’s ruthless indifference to civilized standards
of behavior doubt that a Nazi Germany armed with atomic weapons would
have been ready — indeed, even eager — to use them against Britain and
the United States? And would a president who strictly adhered to
isolationism in response to the European conflict even have considered
building a bomb?
Buchanan has nothing to say about what a Hitler victory over Soviet
Russia might have meant to Britain and the United States in the Pacific,
where Japan, Hitler’s ally, would hardly have given a passive response
to German victories in Europe. And what about the Jews of Eastern Europe
and Russia?
Ah, but in Buchanan’s view, that would have been a price worth paying
just so Hitler and Stalin could have gone head-to-head and rubbed each
other out. Collateral damage, you know, is a small price to pay for big
ideological victories.
Buchanan did not slow down after 1999. He has continually spouted this nonsense, including in a 2005 column and more recently in a TownHall piece attacking Bush for misunderstanding poor Hitler.
The funny thing is that, in spite of all this — as well as his continuing demonstration of overt racism, both in talking about black people as well as in his discussions of immigration
and what he calls the "invasion" of America by Latinos, complete with
texts that use white supremacists as though they were credible sources,
and his fretting about the "passing of the white race" — Buchanan continues to enjoy an honored spot on cable-news broadcasts around the dial: on CNN, on MSNBC, on Fox.
No one in the broadcasting business, or within the ranks of
journalism generally, seems the least bit bothered by Pitchfork Pat’s
increasingly overt racism, anti-Semitism, and downright kookery. They
keep looking up to him as some kind of conservative sage, and they keep
inviting him onto their shows (lately he’s been talking about Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama almost exclusively within the context of the
"white vote") as though he were worthy of not just their airtime but
their abiding respect.
That’s another kind of appeasement. But you won’t find anyone within
the media, let alone in the ranks of movement conservatism, much
bothered by it.
"If we are to have a national debate and
a national dialogue and a decision about national policy and we make a
judgment that we are going to raise immigration levels – let’s say that
we double them, lets say that we triple them – sign me up," Dobbs is
reported as saying in February 2007. "There is nothing in me that is a
restrictionist whatsoever, and I realize that separates me from others
who are against illegal immigration on the basis that there is too much
immigration. I don’t believe that. I do believe that we are not in
control of our immigration policies or what is happening in this
country. And that leaves me in despair."
Well, as Stein notes, Dobbs "has rarely, if ever, expressed such a
viewpoint on his show." Recently, he tried a similar angle in his teeth-baring encounter with Paul Waldman,
arguing that "I am also for raising legal immigration." He did it
before in an interview with Janet Murguia, in the video above.
However, none of this explains why Dobbs:
Makes up phony statistics connecting immigration generically with a supposed increase in diseases like leprosy.
Why he broadcasts white-supremacist mythology about a Hispanic “Aztlan” conspiracy to return the Southwest to Mexico.
Why he continually claims that Latino immigration is responsible for an increase in crime.
Why he once said that this wave of immigration is turning America
into “a third world cesspool” (a remark that has since been removed from
the CNN website).
Why he constantly promotes the notion of making English the official U.S. language.
Why he regularly refers to this wave of immigration as an “invasion.”
Why he regularly hosts anti-immigrant voices from white-supremacist
groups and vigilante scam artists like the Minutemen and yet neglects to
explain his guests’ troubling backgrounds.
I could go on all day, but you get the point: None of this has
anything to do with the legality, or lack thereof, of these immigrants.
Dobbs regularly bashes and demonizes Latino immigrants generically,
irrespective of whether they are legal or not.
Dobbs regularly whines, as he does in Sirota’s book, that "there’s
never been an issue of race introduced into this discussion by me" —
which is true enough insofar as his making explicit references to race.
But the reference is implicit anytime you begin picking up and
broadcasting appeals, ideas, and phony "facts" that originate with white
supremacists, and when you have them on your show to spout their bile
without explaining their background to your audience.
What Dobbs is doing, in fact, is what right-wing pundits of various
stripes have been doing for the past decade and more: repackaging the
ideas and talking points of far-right hate groups, stripping them of
their more obviously racist and noxious language, and presenting them to
the public as nominally "normal" ideas. The right has been doing this
ever since Pat Buchanan recommended the strategy of "expropriating"
David Duke’s racist appeals — on immigration, affirmative action, and on
welfare particularly — back in 1989.
But it’s only a facade. And when you strip it away, people like Lou Dobbs stand revealed as the hatemongers they really are.
It’s kinda funny how the right-wing mouth-foamers have made a habit of using immigration as a way of distancing themselves from the most despised president
in history — because Bush has, in their eyes, simply not done enough to
target those eeeevil illegal immigrants. The reality, as we saw in Iowa last week,
is that Bush and his team — including his newly and dubiously installed
U.S. attorneys — these days are doing everything they can to scapegoat
immigrants.
The people who track federal prosecutions have noted a sharp spike in convictions related to illegal immigration:
Federal convictions in February 2008
resulting from immigration matters jumped to the highest point in recent
history, according to timely data from the Justice Department. The
total of 6,583 such convictions is nearly double what it was in the
previous month, up an unprecedented 96 percent.
The highly unusual spurt in the convictions of individuals charged
with various immigration crimes appears to be the result of "Operation
Streamline." Under this recently intensified administration policy,
according to news reports and interviews with federal public defenders,
the government has charged a rapidly growing number of undocumented
aliens with various federal criminal charges in selected districts along
the Mexican border. "Operation Streamline" began as a pilot project in
December 2005 in Del Rio, Texas.
"Operation Streamline" is a product of the nativists who have been
jumping up and down demanding we "enforce the laws on the books" — even
if, as we’ve seen in the past week, doing so produces human travesties involving the treatment of immigrants. It’s essentially a "zero tolerance" policy applied to immigration:
The "normal" routine on the U.S.-Mexico
border (if anything can be called normal there) is for visa-less border
crossers to be fingerprinted, photographed, and immediately shipped back
across the line by the Border Patrol.
But based on pilot projects in the Del Rio sector of South Texas and
elsewhere, "Operation Streamline" just launched in Laredo – one of the
busiest ports of entry in the world. Under this "zero tolerance"
program, all crossers, without exception, are charged with the
misdemeanor crime of illegal entry in federal district court. Most
plead guilty, serve some time in a federal penitentiary, and then get
deported. Repeat offenders get hit with felony charges and even more
time.
The Bush folks insist that "Operation Streamline" has been a success
— though its greatest success could be in further degrading the
standards of due process for American citizens and illegal immigrants
alike:
Since Operation Streamline went into effect just over a year ago, arrests in the Del Rio sector have dropped 37 percent.
"By sending the message to the folks that are crossing that you are
going to be arrested, you’re not just going to get let loose," says
agent Kathlyn Lawrence, "it kind of discouraged them from crossing with
the frequency that they were crossing. That has freed us up to be able
to look more for the possible terrorism elements."
But critics claim the undocumented immigrants are being coerced to plead guilty to a law they don’t understand.
"They are then convicted in these sham proceedings in which they are
given one, maybe two minutes in front of the judge, and to call that due
process is shameful," says Jennifer Chang, with the American Civil
Liberties Union Immigrant’s Rights Project.
The civil-rights bulldozer "streamline" approach has been wielded to great effect in the Iowa immigration raids, as the New York Times reported Sunday:
In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds
here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in
prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.
The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in
the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors
bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants
arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have
generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations
and rapidly deported.
The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the
Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal
officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried
out by immigration authorities at a workplace.
Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who
oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing
success.”
Well, yeah, if you call obliterating basic standards of due process
and civil rights a success. And considering this administration’s record
in that regard, I expect that’s exactly what they meant.
The unusually swift proceedings, in
which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days,
were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of
due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American
Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been
denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under
immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea
agreements.
… The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because
immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now,
relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal
crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely
unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at
Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a
senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department.
“It’s the reliance
on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action
that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the
criminalization of immigration law.”
Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the
immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard
bargain driven by the prosecutors.
If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would
try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory
two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the
immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or
immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.
All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.
And it’s worth remembering that Dummermuth, as Lynda Waddington notes,
was one of BushCo’s new team of U.S. attorneys hired after the 2004
election — though his hiring was not as suspect as others, since his
predecessor appears not to have been forced out:
There are, however, direct links between
Dummermuth and the Bush administration. In addition to small campaign
contributions, Dummermuth was one of three field staff for the
Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in Iowa during 2000. He directed
campaign activities in the eastern portion of the state while Scott
Shuman worked central and Grant Young worked western Iowa. The three
answered directly to political director Craig Schoenfeld.
In addition, Dummermuth’s wife, Rebecca, previously served in the
Bush administration’s Department of Labor as special assistant to the
solicitor (then Eugene Scalia). She also worked in the White House,
serving as associate director for legal affairs in the Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In that capacity, she often
served as a spokeswoman and advocate for faith-based initiatives. In a
2004 article in the Hawaii-Reporter,
Rebecca was reported as explaining the constitutional guidelines of
such funding and same-faith hiring practices. The topic was not new to
Rebecca, who had previously served as a legal counsel at The Becket Fund
for Religious Liberty, a public-interest law firm that protects the
free expression of religion. Also, as lead articles editor of the
Washington and Lee Law Review, she published a column entitled "If We
Recant, Could We Qualify?" that examined the exclusion of religious
providers from state social-service voucher programs.
Bush may not be popular with the anti-immigrant crowd, but it’s clear
he was just a step or two behind them; these days, he should be their
poster boy. And as Frank Sharry explores at AlterNet, the results have proven to be yet another Republican disaster in the making.
At a fundraiser in Florida Thursday
night, Barack Obama accused anti-immigrant crusaders Lou Dobbs and Rush
Limbaugh of "ginning things up" to such an extent that there was a rise
in hate crimes against Hispanics last year.
"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia.
There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last
year," Obama said. "If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh
ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen."
Politico’s Jonathan Martin writes that Limbaugh addressed Obama’s
remarks on his radio show today and said that the remarks hurt his
feelings.
"I actually don’t believe this. Barack Obama, in my own state,
raising money for his presidential campaign called me xenophobic at a
fundraiser," Limbaugh said. "I thought this guy was the unity candidate?
Calling me a Xenophobe? Responsible for hate crimes? My feelings are
hurt here."
I’m sure we’re all just very worried about poor Rush’s hurt feelings
here, since he’s such a sensitive fellow himself who would never dream
of hurting anyone else’s feelings, let alone demonizing them so deeply
and consistently that right-wing nutjobs in his audience set off bombs
at federal buildings or commit hate crimes.
Now I wonder if Lou Dobbs will invite Obama onto his show to attempt to "refute" this charge. Or will he just bare his teeth again?
I’ve got to wonder why the network
allows Lou Dobbs to continue spewing false, inflammatory nonsense under
the guise of objective journalism.
Here is his latest confrontation
with Paul Waldman of Media Matters about the fictional NAFTA
superhighway. Indeed, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave the NAFTA
Superhighway myth four Pinocchios.
Now, I know that Dobbs brings in some serious ratings. And he is
certainly entitled to his own opinion. But he is not entitled to his own
facts–especially not on a network that makes a real effort to separate
truth from falsehood and represent all sides of the political debate.
Shouldn’t someone be editing this swill? Doesn’t CNN have a
responsibility to tell its viewers that, in this case, one of their
presenters is engaged in flat-out anti-immigrant fearmongering? Perhaps
the network could employ a simple superimposed title–THIS IS NOT TRUE…or
LOU HAS JUMPED THE SHARK ON THIS ONE–whenever Dobbs pretends that there
is such a thing as the NAFTA Superhighway. This sort of thing
diminishes the credibility and hard work of the other journalists on the
network. (And no, I do not count the execrable Glenn Beck as a
journalist.)
It’s good to see that other journalists are finally recognizing that Dobbs’ lack of accountability is a problem for all of us.
At a fundraiser in Florida Thursday night, Barack Obama accused anti-immigrant crusaders Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh of "ginning things up" to such an extent that there was a rise in hate crimes against Hispanics last year.
"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year," Obama said. "If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen."
Politico's Jonathan Martin writes that Limbaugh addressed Obama's remarks on his radio show today and said that the remarks hurt his feelings.
"I actually don't believe this. Barack Obama, in my own state, raising money for his presidential campaign called me xenophobic at a fundraiser," Limbaugh said. "I thought this guy was the unity candidate? Calling me a Xenophobe? Responsible for hate crimes? My feelings are hurt here."
I'm sure we're all just very worried about poor Rush's hurt feelings here, since he's such a sensitive fellow himself who would never dream of hurting anyone else's feelings, let alone demonizing them so deeply and consistently that right-wing nutjobs in his audience set off bombs at federal buildings or commit hate crimes.
Now I wonder if Lou Dobbs will invite Obama onto his show to attempt to "refute" this charge. Or will he just bare his teeth again?
Last week I made a trip up to Bellingham to provide a counter-event for local folks in Whatcom County, since Jonah Goldberg was gracing them with his presence to promote Liberal Fascism. It was a fun (if lightly attended) event that gave me a chance to explain what's wrong with Jonah to ordinary folks.
Jonah Goldberg helps add to public confusion when he applies the term “fascism” to liberals and their policies, freelance writer David Neiwert says.
As Neiwert sees it, the real fascists are white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups whose pedigree can be traced back to the Ku Klux Klan in the South after the Civil War.
Some on the left have long been guilty of misusing “fascism” as a political insult, Neiwert said in a telephone interview, and that appears to be part of the reason for Goldberg’s book.
“What he’s trying to do is refute or repudiate the old left-wing canard that conservatives are fascists,” Neiwert said. “I sympathize with that, actually. Calling (conservatives) that muddies the waters.”
But by replying in kind, Goldberg just makes matters worse, Neiwert said.
“He’s muddying the public’s understanding of something that it’s important for the public to understand,” Neiwert said.
George Bush is no fascist, but neither is Hillary Clinton, Neiwert said.
True fascists are people like Oklahoma City terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Writing in The American Prospect, Neiwert admits that scholars don’t agree on a precise definition of fascism, but he suggests that most would identify it by “its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and … its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age.”
Fascism is also noted for something else, Neiwert wrote: “It has historically always been vigorously — no, viciously — anti-liberal.”
While true American fascists may be few in number, McVeigh proved that the threat they pose is real, Neiwert said.
“It doesn’t take many of them to be a problem,” Neiwert said. “Wild, crazy rhetoric does have consequences.”
Only one minor inaccuracy here: I was a Web producer at MSNBC. I've never done TV production.
It's telling that last week's mass immigration raid in Iowa, during which immigrant workers were rounded up and treated like cattle, was heralded by the whupping of federal helicopters hovering over the town and its meat-processing plant.
One of its warning signs was that the feds showed up a week before and blackened out the windows of the Cattle Congress facility to prepare it for holding large numbers of detainees.
"What's that all about? You know, what does that sound like? That's just creepy, just things that seem really unAmerican, that seem on the down low," Howard says. "No one should be treated this way. These aren't drug runners. They're not terrorists." Howard calls the raid "political maneuvering" to show people the Bush Administration is doing something on illegal immigration.
As Joshua Holland at AlterNet suggests, the feds' behavior throughout, while "professional" enough, has raised the specter of law enforcement that is all about keeping workers in a state of fear, and leaving the employers who are manipulating them completely unscathed.
According to the Associated Press, an attorney who interviewed some of those swept up in the raid said that the company itself "obtained false identification for immigrant workers." But in the overwhelming majority of these raids -- 98 percent, according to the Washington Post -- the only people to pay any penalty are poor people trying to earn a substandard wage working in America's growing unregulated economy. Meanwhile, ICE charged many of the detained with "identity theft" for those faked papers, effectively giving immigration hard-liners what Congress hasn't granted them through the legislative process: serious criminal charges for what have always been misdemeanor immigration violations at most.
Most of all, it's clear that the plant's owners were in the business of seriously exploiting the illegal status of their workers -- abusing them, underpaying them, exposing them to hazardous working conditions -- and the raids actually had the effect of covering that up:
