By The River

President George W. Bush is desperate to keep the U.S. in the Iraq civil war, so desperate that today he despicably sought to reignite the angry national debate of the 1960s and 1970s over the Vietnam War. Many Americans thought that debate was long over, but Bush, speaking at the convention of the Vietnam War-loving and hippie-hating Veterans of Foreign Wars, reached out to the minority of rightwing Rambo bitter-enders and all but proclaimed they were stabbed in the back. Many of the veterans, but not all, roared their approval.

Bush said the U.S. should not have withdrawn from Vietnam, a war in which he, like many other young American males, managed to avoid joining. He in effect said the U.S. should have continued to expend the lives of young American draftees--they were dying in Vietnam at a rate of about 10,000 per year--in the name of a failed foreign policy. He blamed the Khmer Rouge holocaust in Cambodia in the mid-1970s on the U.S. withdrawal, conveniently ignoring how President Nixon destabilized the Cambodian government in the early 1970s. The Nixon-ordered bombing and invasion of Cambodia in 1970 sealed the deal, driving the Cambodian peasantry into the arms of the Khmer Rouge (see the Wikipedia entry after the jump). All this tragedy will happen again if we leave Iraq, Bush said, to widespread excoriation outside the convention hall.

Historians will eventually begin to explore the impact of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam on America. Most Americans, including this one, were tired of a war that had dragged on for nearly 15 years and was seemingly without end. We wanted only for it to end and were willing to let the chips fall where they may. But a minority of Americans, including some former soldiers, did not accept the defeat and gradually convinced themselves, like some German soldiers after World War I, that they had been stabbed in the back.

You saw some of this in the controversy over the Maya Lin design of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. Some of the bitter-end veterans called it the "black gash of shame" and finally prevailed on the Reagan Administration to add a semi-heroic traditional statue of three weary soldiers. Even more insidious was the myth that took hold in the late 80s and early 90s that Americans had "spit on" returning soldiers from Vietnam. There is absolutely no proof that this happened anywhere, says historian Jerry Lembcke, author of "The Spitting Image," who tried hard to find it. The Swift Boat Veterans whose lies destroyed the John Kerry campaign in 2004 are yet another example.

I've believed for sometime there is a group of American officers who believe that the press and leftist Democrats stabbed the Army in the back in the Vietnam War. It is evident in the extreme hostility toward the press shown during the current Iraq War. Defeat in war can be a terrible thing. It shatters the most deeply held myths and illusions. And it can spawn political movements and embolden politicians like Bush who see gain in ripping open long-healed American wounds.

From Wikipedia entry on the Khmer Rouge:

"Historians have cited the U.S. intervention and bombing campaign (spanning 1965-1973) as a significant factor leading to increased support of the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry. Historian Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen have used a combination of sophisticated satellite mapping, recently unclassified data about the extent of bombing activities, and peasant testimony, to argue that there was a strong correlation between villages targeted by U.S. bombing and recruitment of peasants by the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan and Owen argue that "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began,[3]. In his study of Pol Pot's rise to power, Kiernan argues that "Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia" and that the U.S. carpet bombing "was probably the most significant factor in Pol Pot's rise." [4]

When the U.S. Congress suspended aid to Cambodia in 1973, the Khmer Rouge made sweeping gains in the country. By 1975, with the Lon Nol government running out of ammunition, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the government would collapse. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh."

Posted by David at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Conservative Republicans largely got the votes they did in the last 25 years of the 20th century from people who believed the myth--spread by Republicans--that most welfare went to black people who didn't really deserve it. Ronald Reagan's fictitious "welfare queen," who supposedly drove a Cadillac and supposedly lived the high life while collecting federal welfare checks, was no more real than Superman's nemesis Lex Luthor, but it felt good to believe it.

I doubt that most of these so-called Reagan Democrats wanted the federal government to cut off health coverage to children, white, black, or Hispanic. But the rabid ideologues of the Bush Administration can't sleep unless they've hurt somebody that day, so the administration has pulled out all the stops to kill a Democratic effort to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program.

CHIP was created by Sen. Allen Kukovich, a Democratic state senator from Pennsylvania, back in the late 1980s. Democrats would like to expand eligibility for the program as a means of getting more low and middle-income people into a health insurance program. President George W. Bush has proclaimed that anyone without health insurance can simply go to a hospital emergency room. The administration is desperately trying to kill the CHIP expansion because it fears it would be a foot in the door to creating a national health insurance program.

Did you vote for hurting children? I didn't think so. Let your local Congressman know you want him or her to vote against the Republican leadership on this important issue.

Posted by David at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I watched the 1990 film "Lord of the Flies" on the Chiller Channel tonight with my daughter Elizabeth, who is 14. I had never seen the film (and didn't know there was a Chiller Channel), but of course had read the William Golding novel of the same name back in 9th grade. As I recall--here comes a guilty admisson--I bought the Cliff Notes at Reader's World in downtown Holland, Michigan, to help me with my book report. Elizabeth was assigned the book as summer reading going into 9th grade at Harrisburg Academy. She has been plugging away at the book and didn't buy the Cliff Notes.

I hasten to add that I did read "Lord of the Flies" and it did stick with me. How could it not? Fourteen is the perfect age for a boy or girl to read Golding's 1954 masterwork, which helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The idea of being stranded on an apparently deserted tropical island starts out very attractive. No more parental rules, no more teachers, just fun in the sun. Of course, the boys rapidly shed what turns out to be a thin veneer of civilization and revert to jungle savagery, complete with spears and loincloths and bloody violence.

The movie is a relatively faithful rendition of the book, although the English boys become Americans and the time is the Cold War rather than World War II. They don't find a dead flyer hanging by a parachute from a tree, but they do kill Piggy with a boulder to shut him up. That scene always gave me a chill, symbolic as it is of the triumph of a brutal mob over civilized life.

In 9th grade in 1968 we were confronted with the Vietnam War. Classmates' brother were dying in the Tet Offensive, and we wondered if the war would still be on when we were old enough to be drafted. Fourteen year-olds do wonder about that. What do they think about today when they read "Lord of the Flies?" The bloody hell of Iraq, where the civil war in what, long ago, was the cradle of civilization has become slaughter for slaughter's sake? Where 250 innocent people in a small village die at the hand of faceless bombers?

Yes, do read "Lord of the Flies" whether you are 14 or 41. And think of that thin veneer of civilization and the terrible power of the cruel and brutal mob to strip it away.

Posted by David at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of my favorite inside-the-Capitol news sources did some checking and has returned with confirmation that Judith Stish Guiliani, wife of Rudy, and former Rep. Tom Stish, the party-switcher, both of Hazleton, Pa., are indeed cousins. Most likely first cousins. We had some brief excitement earlier with another Capitol report that Mrs. Guiliani was the ex-wife of Tom Stish, but while his first wife was indeed named Judith, her maiden name wasn't Stish.

Apart from this interesting family tree, if former Mayor Guiliani gets the Republican nomination for President, he'll face a dilemma in visiting the hometown of his beloved third wife. No matter how much he says an official visit is just for Judi, it will look like (and be construed by city officials as) a backhanded endorsement of the failed effort by the Republican mayor and city council to make it illegal to rent to illegal aliens. Figure that one out, Rudy.

Posted by David at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a political teaser: is Judith Stish Guiliani, wife of former New York mayor and Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Guiliani, a relative of former Pennsylvania state Rep. Tom Stish? The one whose switch from Democrat to Republican after the 1994 elections gave the Republicans control of the Pennsylvania House by one vote? The one whose name became a political noun, as in, do a Stish? Who is execrated by the Democratic leadership even today?

Judi Guiliani grew up Judi Stish in an Italian-American family in Hazleton, Pa., also the hometown and political base of Tom Stish. Her father is Donald Stish, Sr., one of three Stish brothers in Hazleton, the others being Richard and John Stish. A fourth brother, Frank, now deceased, lived in South Carolina, and a fifth, Robert, lives in New Jersey. All are sons of the late Frank Stish, Sr., of Hazleton. As the New York Times notes in its article about Mrs. Guiliani today, Stish is an Americanized version of Sticia. It's hard to imagine that Tom Stish isn't related to Judi Stish Guiliani.

Stish didn't last long as a Republican. His hometown voters threw him out pretty quickly, and he has said to have left the state. But the damage was done and the Democrats didn't regain control of the House until 2006.

It's not like the Pennsyvlania Democrats will need any motivation to oppose the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, whether it's Guiliani or Mitt Romney, or Fred Thompson. But when the Democratic nominee stops in Hazleton, Pa., to condemn the Republican mayor and city council's misguided and costly attempt this year to ban rentals of housing to illegal immigrants (the ordinance was just thrown out by a federal judge), it will certainly add a little zing.

Can anyone out there add any more details on the family ties? I'll update as I learn more.

Posted by David at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the end of World War II in 1945 through the end of the Johnson Administration in 1968, the United States was in a golden era. Or to be more specific, it was a golden era for the nation's middle class. Jobs, even blue-collar jobs if they were union, paid well enough for families to buy homes, send their kids to college, and put away money for retirement.

That didn't happen by accident, or solely from individual effort, or because America had some special blessing from God. It was social democracy, a polite term for socialism.

Thanks to the great paradigm shift engineered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, but which didn't come to full fruition until the 1950s, government in that period believed it had a mission to help people get into and stay in the middle class. The majority of the American public believed it, too, and expected as much from government. Unions were legally protected and encouraged, which pushed up wages and benefits for everyone. Employer-sponsored health insurance that didn't cost the employee anything was the norm. College aid was plentiful. Social Security and Medicare ended the economic terrors of old age.

And all of that was critical to creating a vibrant American middle class, argues Monmouth University economist Steven Pressman in an essay published in March in the Journal of Economic Issues. Little noticed until now, his essay was brought to light in an article by Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Doug Saunders. Saunders has been exploring the stresses on middle classes around the world, and how difficult it is for countries like India to build and sustain a middle class despite have the same income levels the U.S. and Canada did when their middle classes began to grow. He defines a middle class family as one with household income between 75-125 percent of the median income.

Pressman, not to be confused with the New Jersey anti-cult activist of the same name, crunched the numbers on middle classes in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Sweden, Norway, and Germany, looking at the period between 1980-2000. It was a period of explosive growth in most of those countries, but downward mobility exceeded upward mobility by two to one. The U.S. middle class shrank by 2.4 percent. In a nation of 250 million, that means about 4.8 million people, or well over a million families, fell out of the middle class.

But that didn't happen everywhere. As Saunders notes in his article about Pressman, the middle classes in Switzerland and Germany stayed about the same size. Those of Norway and Canada actually grew, in Canada's case by 4 percent. He ran the numbers this way and that, and the results were the same. Whether a nation's middle class stayed the same size or grew was entirely dependent on what their governments did to help the middle class. In other words, how much they spent.

In the U.S., of course, the years 1980-2000 coincided with the rise of the rightwing Republicans, who had been against Roosevelt and his paradigm shift all along but who, in the wake of the Great Depression, had no credibility. They took power in the wake of the oil shock and inflation of the 1970s, aided immensely by the skilled and popular President Ronald Reagan. Reagan's personal affability masked a political agenda aimed at stopping many of the policies of government, especially those regarding unions, that helped the middle class. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his howling hordes picked up the torch during the Clinton Administration and stopped a national health insurance program in its tracks. It's been downhill from there.

Pressman told Saunders that after completing his study, he doesn't think a middle class can be self-sustaining without active government assistance. And that those countries which tend to do best in the turbulent global economy are those "with the most robust tax-and-spend programs," Saunders writes. "But they have to be aimed at the right places...And countries such as Canada, which can and do spend that money, have done the best at surviving the social turmoil of our age."

And of course, things have gotten much worse for the American middle class during the eight lost years of George W. Bush. Is anything not made in China? And better for the Canadian middle class, which pays no less for oil products than we do despite having vast reserves in country. The Canadian dollar has appreciated by 50 percent in the past five years and is now nearly at par with the U.S. dollar. Think about it. We're going down, absent a strong Democratic president and Congress taking office in 2009.

The current administration professes to want to help the entrepreneurs, the "risk takers," or less politely, the people who think they can make a killing and want to give it a try. It's time we stopped giving that idea a pass. Only a tiny minority of Americans will ever be entrepreneurs, and even fewer of those will be successful entrepreneurs. Most of us will always be wage slaves. The entrepreneurs can look after themselves, and here's to their success. They deserve a halo, but not government policies and tax incentives that hurt the rest of us. It's time to help the wage slaves of the middle class and restore the American dream.

Posted by David at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)