"Memorial Daze"

...on Decoration Day
Arthur S. Siegel, 1943
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

Charles Pierce—

We let them get on planes ahead of us, with the elderly and the infirm and the toddlers, but we underfund hospital care and live quite comfortably with the notion that a lot of the functions of the military have been privatized. (Are we that long from Honor The Contractors ceremonies?) We pay tribute to them at ballgames, but send them into battle ill-prepared, and bring them home to decrepit facilities and heedless bureaucracies. We give them parades, but had to be blackjacked into giving them a "new G.I. Bill" that is but a pale shadow of the original one, which did no less than create the modern American middle class. When I first started writing politics, there was an ongoing argument of what were then called "veterans preference" programs, a vestige once again of what was done for the returning World War II vets. The fight was over whether it would be extended to include the veterans then recently returned from Vietnam.

It is Vietnam that hangs thickly over our ostentatious public displays of affection for The Troops. It is a determination to Get It Right This Time. However, there is at the heart of it a fundamental misunderstanding of what we got wrong. The returning Vietnam veteran was treated abominably. But, in fact, if you want to find the people who did the Vietnam generation the most damage, don't look to the hippies. Look to the institutions staffed and run by what the Vietnam guys used to call, contemptuously, "the Class of '45," the people who ran the VA, and the VFW posts, The Greatest Generation, who looked down on them as losers and who stiffed them on their country's obligations. In actual fact, it was the remnants on the antiwar Left — the people who ran the G.I. coffeehouses and the like — who first took them seriously on issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and the lingering effects of Agent Orange. Those were the people who paid The Troops of that time the most basic tribute there is — taking their human problems seriously. The problem was not people shouting "babykiller" and those mythical expectorations that author Jerry Lembecke put paid to years ago. The problem was that the government abandoned them. The problem was that the community of other veterans abandoned them. And that went on for years. Ronald Reagan famously called their war "a noble cause" and then shut down all the out-patient psychiatric services that the VA finally put in place. What you did was noble, and now sleep on the sidewalk...

Predictably, there was to be little coverage of these veterans, just a few days ago—

Although clashes between police and demonstrators led the news from Chicago, the main act Sunday was the massive protest march which saw members of Iraq Veterans Against the War throwing their medals away in a symbolic gesture against the Global War on Terror. At the start of the march which preceded the ceremonies, we see the inordinate distance the police insisted on between photographers and the veterans.

Blue-eyed Boys

Silly me: assuming European reaction against austerity would be no more than a quick sound-bite in our media.

Though it may have been partly correct to expect little or no context to the story. That lack of context leaves a vacuum to be filled by the noise machine. Thus: a new story line in the making, and digby spotted it on Paul Ryan's Budget Committee page—

The President and his party's leaders are repeating Europe's mistakes by calling for job-crushing tax increases, making empty promises to citizens, and ensuring harsh disruptions for beneficiaries of government programs. Time and again, their approach to budgeting has been the very definition of European-style austerity. House Republicans reject this shrunken vision of our future. Instead of broken promises and shared pain, we must advance pro-growth reforms that make good on America’s promise and put the country on a path to prosperity.

The wing-nut logic here: everybody knows Europeans are socialists; socialism is a failure; "austerity" = socialist Obama's failed policies; opposite of austerity is TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH.

I don't know whether the guy gives leg tingles to Chris Matthews et. al. equaling those from Commander Flight Suit, but Ryan is the media's latest blue-eyed boy and GOP Big Thinker. It won't be be long before outlets other than Faux are broadcasting the Democrat Party Austerity line; as digby notes, Ryan is the new Gingrich and designated purveyor of the Big Lie to a receptive media.

To use the correct title bestowed by Charlie Pierce, that would be zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan. What he was up to during the week was—

...the "budget" passed on Thursday by the House. In addition to its being the nocturnal emission at the end of all those nights the teenage Paul Ryan spent playing circus tent under the covers with Atlas Shrugged, it is constructed specifically to avoid having to make the $55 billion in cuts to the defense department mandated by the debt ceiling deal, a committment, I would argue, that the Republicans never intended to honor, as is obvious from Boehner's statement last March. Rather than agree to those reductions, the Ryan "budget" does the following:

1) Cuts $83 billion in benefits to federal retirees.

2) Saves $49 billion in "capping" medical malpractice suits, the Dalkon Shield Protection Plan Of 2012.

3) Cuts $48 billion from Medicaid.

4) Cuts $36 billion from the food stamp program.

5) Drops approximately 300,000 children from school-lunch programs, and eliminates health-care coverage for just about as many.

The zombie-eyed granny-starver grew misty as he defended the DOD from the loss of a cent of the trillions efficiently used to Protect Our Freedom.

As Pierce says about congressional kabuki elsewhere in the piece, "The Republicans left their 'good faith' in the pocket of Howard Baker's overcoat 30 years ago."

Taking after the weakest is the behavior the modern GOP shows more nakedly all the time, despite the rhetorical clothing.

And the reporting of Romney's career as schoolboy bully: he was merely living up to expectations. And, as digby said, it bolsters his credibility with The Base.

The GOP is only about bringing on a final triumph of socialism for the rich and the harshest of capitalisms for the poor.

Pierce again, on the sabotage of We the People's constitutionally mandated postal service—

The entire modern conservative movement consists of an ongoing attempt to sever the relationship of a self-governing people to their government, to break down the concept of a political commonwealth. Many of the conservative attempts to wedge people apart through the use of an Other to be feared and despised — whether that was black people, or empowered women, or immigrants, or gay people — have been framed to attack the government's attempts to ameliorate discrimination against the groups in question. In modern conservative thought, then, and in the mindset it seeks to ingrain on the people of the country, the government is the ultimate Other.

In doing so, the corporate masters of the conservative movement are good with all of this because they seek a wary, frightened and insecure people. Those people are too cowed to make waves, too spooked to assert their rights as citizens, too confused to demand accountability. ...

There is a reason why we used to build buildings the way we built the post office in Geneva [NY], with its mural and its marble, and its great arching windows and its Doric entablature. It wasn't because we were profligate. It was because we considered self-government, for all its faults, to be something precious that belonged to all of us, and that it should be housed in places that looked as though we valued it enough to celebrate it and protect it at the same time. They were monuments we raised to ourselves, because we deserved them.

Eugene, Oregon
[More pictures of our national legacy on the block: Save the Post Office]

Exceptional Media For An Exceptional Country

French voters, like the Greeks, just rejected austerity.

1943: "Four Freedoms" matchbook, printed for distribution in occupied France.
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

The horse race results from France were reported here; the word "austerity" was even mentioned. But the term is conveyed as a foreign word for a foreign policy; our considerate media spares American voters having their heads hurt by polysyllabic words in any context they could relate to their own economic circumstances. Besides, the story line has long been in place, with said media long ago following marching orders on The Issues That Matter To American Voters: cut taxes; a federal budget is exactly like a family budget, and the rest of the drill.

While we have ever-better methods of vote suppression being put in place, it turns out the French encourage voting, by having it take place on weekends (to the tune of 80% turnout).

In other media spectacles, there's been the impressive speed with which a previously unknown Chinese dissident was pushed into being a top story, day after day. He went to the U.S. embassy but wanted to stay in China, and then said he didn't want to stay—and, oh yeah: he just happens to be a campaigner against his government's abortion policy.

Clearly a set up, from the beginning. My attempts at finding connections led to two kinds of results: the "objective media" take—Huge story! Obama mishandled! Scandal!—and all sorts of Catholic and Protestant fundie anti-abortion material. Like most of us, corporate journos may never have heard of the guy before, but those fundamentalist groups sure knew him.

For days, the only questioning note I could find was this kos diary: "Something's amiss: Chen Guangcheng, Fox & Abortion". There, dannyinla references a Washington Post story that mentions this actor, based in a certain location—

MIDLAND, Tex. — One week ago, Bob Fu was an obscure crusader for religious rights in China. His nonprofit group, China Aid, improbably based in this dusty West Texas oil town, followed the plight of persecuted "house churches," opposed forced sterilizations and abortions, and promoted pen-pal campaigns for pastors in prison.

In the past 72 hours, Fu has become an international media figure at the center of the most sensational human rights crisis in China in a decade. It erupted when blind lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng fled house arrest and took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing — just as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was arriving this week for critical and wide-ranging talks with Chinese officials.

On the WaPo site is stephenslhs' comment from May 2—

In the past 72 hours, Fu has become an international media figure at the center of something the media is trying to make into something bigger than the Cuban missile crisis.

To which ChasL1 replied on May 4—

You don't say, google this "Bob Fu China Aid Southern Baptist Convention". The whole episode timed right before the China economic summit is no coincidence. The players are linked to the International Republican Institute as well as SBC - yes the Republicans, upcoming election. Poor Chen Guangcheng is a mere pawn.