Clear-Eyed Antidotes to Ingenuous Accolades for George H.W. Bush view post on FAIR.org The Daily Beast (12/3/18) marveled that discussion of the death of a US president could devolve into a political disagreement. The Daily Beast (12/3/18) saw itself scoring easy points off TV chat show The View, chiding hosts for disagreeing in a discussion of recently deceased former president George H.W. Bush: If there was one thing it seemed most Americans could agree on this weekend, it was that former President George H.W. Bush was generally a good man who had the country’s best interest at heart. And yet, somehow, the hosts of The View still found a way to turn his tribute into an argument. Thus sniffed the Daily Beast, which, like numerous other outlets that engaged in ingenuous whitewash of the former president, said more about itself than anyone else. It isn’t merely that it’s no part of journalists’ job to stoke misty visions of powerful public figures, dead or living; asserting that George H.W. Bush was America’s lovable Grandpa—that only the insolent would gainsay such an image—erases the many people harmed grievously by his actions and inactions. But those bombarded with corporate media accolades about how “responsible and reasonable” Bush Sr. was (according to the Washington Post—12/1/18); how he, in USA Today‘s words (12/1/18), “personified a time when….careful international diplomacy was not scorned as a sign of weakness”; how as the Chicago Tribune (12/1/18 ) had it, we were all touched by his “modesty, seriousness and gentlemanly grace,” could find their antidotes—not mean-spirited, just clear-eyed. Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept (12/1/18) ran down some of Bush Sr’s “war crimes, racism and obstruction of justice.” (Bush campaign director Lee Atwater eventually apologized for the infamous Willie Horton ad; Bush never did). USA Today‘s two-minute video “look back [at] the life of George Herbert Walker Bush”  (12/1/18) devoted all of six seconds to his presidency. Richard Prince at Journal-isms (12/1/18 ) reminded of the Clarence Thomas appointment, as well as Bush’s stage-managed TV set up of a DC teenager as the face of the “crack epidemic”;  Steven Thrasher at The Nation (12/1/18) wrote about the “disgrace” of celebrating Bush on World Aids Day, reminding of how he chided those dealing with the disease to just “change your behavior!”; and The Nation‘s Greg Grandin (12/4/18) reminded us of Bush’s wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf—remarkable for their “gratuitous killing.” Author Nora Eisenberg (12/5/18 ) elaborated at AlterNet on the myth of the “good” Gulf War, and how Bush “disinformed congress and the public to drum up support” for it.And before you get nostalgic for media coverage that never was, look through FAIR.org; you’ll find things like Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (Extra!, 3/93) demanding of a guest who insisted on talking about the Iran/Contra scandal, in which Vice President George Bush’s office helped funnel covert weapons to Nicaraguan terrorists after Congress made such support illegal: Why does this issue remain important? Clearly, the public is bored with it. The polls all show that years ago they stopped being interested in it. Why not, as Mr. Bush describes in his pardon statement, why not bring in the healing power of the pardon and sweep it away and sweep the bitterness away? Of course, Bush Sr. did some important, positive things—the Americans with Disabilities Act leaps to mind—but media who insist on “sweeping away” everything else, who reduce to a footnote all those he harmed, are revealing their own view of what and who matters…which may not be history’s, and need not be our own.

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James Fallows | Was Gary Hart Set Up?

17 October 18 PM

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James Fallows | Was Gary Hart Set Up? 

James Fallows, The Atlantic
Fallows writes: "What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?"
READ MORE

Sec. of State Mike Pompeo meets with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. (photo: Getty)

ALSO SEE: Finance CEOs Pull Out of Saudi ‘Davos in the Desert’ Over Khashoggi,
Risking Lucrative Role in Kingdom’s Economic Reforms

SEE ALSO: After Journalist Vanishes, Focus Shifts to
Young Prince's 'Dark' and Bullying Side

Report: $100 Million in Saudi Money Lands in US Accounts as Pompeo Landed in Riyadh
Michael Burke, The Hill
Burke writes: "On the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Saudi Arabia to discuss the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a previously promised $100 million landed in American bank accounts from Saudi Arabia, according to a The New York Times report."
READ MORE

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman with murder suspect Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb. (image: Anjali Singhvi/Steve Gonzales/AP)

ALSO SEE: Saudis Plan to Pin Khashoggi Slaying on ‘Rogue’ General

Suspects in Disappearance of Khashoggi Linked to Saudi Security Services
Shane Harris, Erin Cunningham, Aaron C. Davis and Tamer El-Ghobashy, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Two weeks after the disappearance of Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post's Global Opinions section and critic of the Saudi government, there is mounting scrutiny of the 15 men identified by Turkey as members of the Saudi team involved in his death."
READ MORE

Twitter and Facebook have been widely criticized since the 2016 election for not doing more to stem the abuse of their platforms by Russians. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty)

Massive Twitter Data Release Sheds Light on Russia's Trump Strategy
Nancy Scola, Politico
Scola writes: "Twitter on Wednesday released a trove of 10 million tweets it says represents the full scope of foreign influence operations on the platform dating back nearly a decade - including Russia's consistent efforts to disparage Hillary Clinton and an initially erratic approach to Donald Trump that eventually settled on a concerted pro-Trump message during the 2016 campaign."
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Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Brian Kemp talk at a rally in Macon GA Saturday, July 21, 2018. Vice President Mike Pence endorsed Kemp for Governor during the event. (photo: Steve Schaefer/AJC)

Hundreds of Absentee Ballots Rejected in Atlanta, Prompting Legal Challenge
Justin Wise, The Hill
Wise writes: "Election officials in a suburban Atlanta county have reportedly rejected hundreds of absentee ballots just weeks before the midterm elections, sparking legal challenges from voting rights advocates."
READ MORE

Two people hold a modified design of the Canadian flag with a marijuana leaf in in place of the maple leaf during the '420 Toronto' rally in Toronto, April 20, 2016. (photo: Mark Blinch/CP)

ALSO SEE: Canada Has Made It Easier for Anyone Convicted of
Simple Marijuana Possession to Get a Pardon

'It's An Awesome Day': Canada Legalizes Recreational Cannabis
Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, Al Jazeera
Kestler-D'Amours writes: "Canada becomes second and largest country in the world to legalize the recreational use of the drug."
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An elderly man sits next to packages of bottled of water. (photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty)

The Poisoning of Flint
Dianne Feeley, Jacobin
Feeley writes: "Racism, inequality, and austerity politics were the culprits in the poisoning of Flint, Michigan. And residents are still living with the consequences."
READ MORE

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THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DESTROYED

David Gerrold

So some people think that Trump is going to destroy the Republican party.

No. The party destroyed itself a long time ago.

It started almost a century ago. It started when the Republican party decided to obstruct FDR's attempts to pull the nation out of the Great Depression.

After WWII, the decline of the party began with Nixon's smear campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas — the campaign that got him into Congress, where he and Joe McCarthy were known as impossible mudslingers.

It found momentum with Fred Koch funding Robert Welch's John Birch Society in the early fifties.

It became public when Ike misguidedly put Nixon on the ticket as VP, thereby legitimizing his antics.

It became obvious with Nixon making an unholy alliance with racists so he could win the presidency.

It grew serious with Nixon's antics that led up to Watergate.

It continued with post-Watergate Nixon training other Republicans in dirty tricks — like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

It grew worse with Reagan, who was used by the radical right to insert key people into important government positions. That same radical right believed that only they were allowed to win elections.

It became policy with Haley Barbour, then head of the RNC, who declared on the evening of Bill Clinton's election, that the Republicans would never allow Clinton to enjoy a single day in office.

It got dirtier with Richard Mellon Scaife and his trumped up lawsuits against both Bill and Hillary Clinton, all of which used up time and money and accomplished nothing.

It got ugly with Newt Gingrich and his infamous Gopac memo telling Republicans how to campaign against Democrats by using specifically inflammatory adjectives. (He taught them how to lie more effectively.)

It got worse with a colossal waste-of-time attempt to impeach Bill Clinton — not about impeachment as much as obstruction.

It became totally corrupt with the theft of the 2000 presidential election — and deliberately treasonous with the theft of the 2016 presidential election.

No Trump won't take down the Republican party — the party abandoned its principles when it chose to engage in obstructionism against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.

There is only one thing that can destroy the Republican party — the American voter refusing to give it credibility, refusing to vote for any more of this incompetent, selfish, treasonous, petty bullshit.

RSN: In the Year of Trump, the Joke Was on Us

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FOCUS: Matt Taibbi | In the Year of Trump, the Joke Was on Us

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Taibbi writes: "Shortly after Trump jumped into the race, he stumbled onto a secret: whenever he blurted out forbidden thoughts about race, ethnicity or gender, he was showered with the attention he always craved."
READ MORE 

How the campaign's biggest laugh turned ugly in 2015

t started out as a joke: Donald Trump running for president! What better way to spoof the thinness of the Republican field than to shove a bombastic reality star with orange hair, a sixth-grade vocabulary and no behavioral filter onto the debate stage with the likes of Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham? The only thing more perfect would have been to add a head of lettuce and Koko the signing gorilla to round out the candidate slate.

Trump seemed like a perfect foil in particular for Jeb Bush, a hesitating, gelatinous aristocrat who lacked the cocksure brainlessness the previous Bush used to sell himself as a "regular guy." In an era when Republican voters were more distrustful than ever of the Same Old Politics, stiff, birthright-bearing Jeb was exactly the wrong candidate for the party elders to back.

And they seemed to realize it, too. Once the Republican race got going, the party appeared too disorganized and fractured to throw its institutional weight behind anyone. This left a comically enormous cast of hopefuls to duke it out in the equivalent of a schoolyard rock fight. And without the gravitas of party and media support, the candidates on the Republican side turned out to be just a bunch of chattering, defenseless, fourth-rate flesh-bags, exquisitely vulnerable to any strong personality. The entrance of Trump into the race on June 16^th therefore offered the potential of an entertaining car wreck of awesome proportions.

But things turned ugly less than 45 minutes into his run. In his announcement, Trump told the world that Mexican immigrants were "rapists" who needed to be stopped. Then, in an interview with CNN's Don Lemon, he doubled down on the remark instead of recanting. "Well, somebody's doing the raping," he seethed. A week later, Mexicans, to Trump, were not just rapists but "rapists and killers," and he was now adding aproposal to build a giant wall across the Mexican border to stop the Army of Darkness-style invading rape-murder horde. The wall would be "tall" and building it would be "easy," he said, adding that he would get Mexico to pay for it, because he knew the "art of negotiating" and wasn't a "clown."

To the astonishment of most observers, Trump soared to second place in Iowa and New Hampshire, and was the clear frontrunner by mid-July. Except for a brief surge by crazy-ass Ben Carson in the fall, he's remained there ever since. Heading into the holiday season, he was pushing 40% in some national polls, more popular than ever.

The appearance of a onetime Spy magazine punchline and WWE performer as the real leader of a real screwball nationalist movement has been at least partly an accidental phenomenon.

The ancient report that he used to keep a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside notwithstanding, it's very likely that Donald Trump never in his life thought seriously about things like nativism, fascism, eugenics, or any kind of ideology at all. This was not someone who likely ever dreamed of cattle cars and rivers of blood. Trump is a narcissist, not a demagogue; his pathology is himself, not politics. 

A pre-2015 Trump fantasy was probably something like romping with models after simultaneously winning the Nobel Prizes for Peace, Literature and Physics (they love me in Sweden – scientists were amazed by the size of my skyscraper!). He almost certainly would have been grossed out by a Ghost-of-Christmas-Future-style image of his 2015 self being feted by crowds of rifle-toting white power nerds.

But shortly after Trump jumped into the race, he stumbled onto a secret: whenever he blurted out forbidden thoughts about race, ethnicity or gender, he was showered with the attention he always craved.

A sizable portion of the country seemed appalled at the things he said. But at the same time he was suddenly attracting huge and adoring crowds at down-home sites like Bluffton, South Carolina and Mobile, Alabama, pretty much the last places you'd ever expect the Trump brand to take off.

Trump had spent his entire career lending his name to luxury properties that promised exclusivity and separation from exactly the sort of struggling Joes who turned out for these speeches. If you live in a Trump building in a place like the Upper West Side, it's supposed to mean that you're too cosmopolitan, stylish, and successful — too smart-set — to mix with the rabble.

But the rabble — white, working-class, rural, despising exactly those big-city elites who live in Trump's buildings — turned out to be Trump's base. They're the people who hooted and hollered every time he said something off-color about Muslims or Mexicans or Asians ("We want deal!" Trump snickered earlier this year, in a Chinese-waiter voice) or "the blacks."

It was a bizarre marriage, but it made sense from from a clinical point of view. Attention is attention. Patient with narcissistic personality disorder discovers massive source of narcissistic supply, so he sets about securing its regular delivery.

So one comment about Mexicans turned into another about Megyn Kelly's "wherever," which turned into a call for a Black Lives Matter protester to be "roughed up," which turned into an insane slapstick routine about a Times reporter with arthrogryposis, and so on. By December, you had to check Twitter every few hours just to see which cultural taboo Trump was stomping on now.

The presidential campaign Trump began as just the latest in a long line of zany self-promotional gambits has now turned into the long-delayed other shoe dropping from the American civil rights movement. This goofball billionaire mirror-gazer has unleashed a half-century of crackpot grievances about the post-civil rights cultural landscape that a plurality of seething white people felt they never had permission to air, until he came along.

White America has been talking about race in code for more than half a century. You can trace the practice back to Barry Goldwater's 1964 acceptance speech, when he talked about "law and order" and the need to restrain "marauders," after a series of race riots in east coast cities. The speech struck a chord with white voters.

Goldwater's discovery that you could use crime as a proxy to talk about race helped define the next half-century of major-party politics in America. Later generations of pols used other issues like immigration, tax reform and "income redistribution" to achieve the same end.

We called it "dog-whistle politics" because after the Civil Rights Movement, the party line was that we were now all partners in Dr. King's famous dream of racial harmony. So there were certain things you were no longer supposed to say out loud.

You couldn't just come out and say black people were lazy anymore. But you could talk about how "good people" in "small towns" do "some of the hardest work," as Sarah Palin did in 2008. And you could hint that there was another group of people who preferred just to get "free stuff," as Mitt Romney said in 2012. 

But people get tired of talking in code. In this sense Trump's campaign isn't repudiating the Civil Rights Movement per se, but the Republicans who give fake lip-service to it. Even the worst race-baiters of the recent Republican past conceded that racial appeals had to be cloaked.

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,'" strategist Lee Atwater, the creator of George H.W. Bush's infamous Willie Horton ad, once said. "By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights."

Trump made the Republican field look weak by blurting straight-out what they would only say in code (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie all parroted Romney's pathetic "free stuff" line this year, for instance). This part of Trump's act has to thrill Democrats, since he's stealing away from Republicans the illusion of centrism. Future Republican nominees will have a tough time remembering how in the world George W. Bush ever won 44% of the Hispanic vote, as he did in 2004.

But Trump's act isn't all about race. He's also scoring points by mining the same mainstream frustrations over language-policing and political correctness that made Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay famous. Trump's broadsides about Megyn Kelly aren't that far off from the Dice-Man's "Pattycake" routine.

The difference is, Clay and Kinison and comedians like them were trying to make a point about the absurdity of policing away forbidden thoughts, while Trump is basically a cretinous dinosaur who doesn't understand why slurs about periods or the disabled or "the blacks" were ever made taboo in the first place. He's not pushing back with a laugh, from a nightclub. He wants to do it from the Oval Office. Even Dice Clay thinks he's nuts.

All comedy is about misunderstandings. A little town gets word that a government inspector is coming, so it mistakenly rolls out the red carpet for a visiting drunk on a gambling spree.

2015 was the same kind of mistaken-identity tale. The Silent Majority has been waiting 50 years for a prophet, but this year it settled for a billionaire loudmouth with a comb-over and a personality disorder. Like all comedies, this one is bound to end with an explosion of unintended consequences. What we won't know until 2016 is whether this joke will end up being on all of us — or just those of us who waited too long to take Trump's accidental war seriously.

 http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34338-focus-in-the-year-of-trump-the-joke-was-on-us

Louisiana Nazis, “Judaism is Satanic!” GOP leaders have circled the wagons.....

This article reminded me of Middleboro!

It is often repeated by some with pride and long memories that Middleboro is the only Massachusetts community George Wallace visited when he was running for President....so it's been said.

And Middleboro has the distinction of electing OVER and OVER and OVER again the SAME REPUBLICAN STATE REPRESENTATIVE who never seemed to find Boston....very often...not that local REPUBLICANS ever faulted him for it. HAIL FELLOW! WELL MET! Was he the invisible Town Counsel to whom taxpayer provided a generous pension and health care as well? [And who wonders why Middleboro was gerrymandered?]


It's frequently denied.....but it's there!




 

(photo: Louisianavoice.com)

The Louisiana Nazis Who Courted Steve Scalise

By Jason Berry, The Daily Beast

04 January 14

Kenny Knight and Howie Farrell, the two men at the heart of the Steve Scalise scandal, were well known in Louisiana politics as longtime operatives of Duke’s Holocaust-denying hate machine.

n 1989, a newly registered Republican in Louisiana named David Duke won his only election by a fluke.

That year, a state representative in Metairie, an affluent Jefferson Parish suburb just across the line from New Orleans, vacated his seat to become a judge. The off-year special election into which Duke threw himself drew little media notice at first. Duke, who touted himself as a pro-life fiscal conservative, was known as an ex-Klan leader; he eschewed overtly racist language and instead pointed to crime in the city, criticizing affirmative action and minority set-asides. He landed in a runoff with John Treen, a silver-haired homebuilder, GOP stalwart and brother of the state’s first Republican governor, Dave Treen, who had left office in 1983.

 

Media coverage failed to probe the depth of Duke’s ties to neo-Nazi groups. But as national Republican strategist Lee Atwater and others realized, Duke’s background would be a stigma for the party if he won. So then-President George H.W. Bush and other prominent Republicans endorsed Treen in the House runoff. George W. Bush made a campaign appearance for Treen. Yet Treen was a poor match for Duke in the sound-bite department, or in appealing to the latent racial fears of many voters in Metairie, which was at the time a classic Reagan Democrats enclave. They liked what Duke was saying and were willing to look beyond what little they knew of his past.

 

During that 1989 campaign, I interviewed Howie Farrell, one of Duke’s campaign aides—and one of two longtime Duke allies, the other being Kenny Knight, who invited Steve Scalise to give the speech to a white racist group called EURO in 2002. Scalise was a state representative old enough to remember the notoriety of Farrell and Knight from years before.

 

That afternoon in 1989, Farrell stood on a street corner of Metairie Road as Duke handed out campaign fliers to motorists at the stoplight. After a day spent perusing the books Duke sold from his National Association for the Advancement of White People catalogue, I asked Farrell how many people died in the Holocaust. For Duke’s long-cultivated base, Holocaust denial was a scrim for anti-Semitism.

 

“I have no way of knowing,” said Farrell. “I can accept reasonable arguments on either side.” Church bells pealed from St. Catherine of Siena parish one block away. I asked Farrell, who claimed to be a Catholic, what this statement said to Jews.

 

“So what?” he replied with a smirk.

 

When Duke won the election a few days later, the rally that night in a Lion’s Club just down from Metairie Road featured the weirdest gaggle of people I ever saw in politics. The brother of a girl who made her debut in New Orleans society was shaking his fists in excitement. I stood with a tape recorder, listening to men denounce the liberal media controlled by Jews. Several of them disputed the figure of six million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust.

 

A small guy in his sixties with a megaphone voice was yelling: “Channel Four—Communist! Channel Four—Communist!” Channel 4 is WWL TV, the CBS affiliate.

 

A man who had driven two-and-a-half hours from Cajun country, one Joseph Vidrine, thundered into my microphone: “Judaism is Satanic!”

 

As zealots poured in from Arkansas and Mississippi, a wire service reporter got punched in the ribs.

 

Farrell and his fellow campaign adviser Kenny Knight were happy men that night—they’d won an election, their guy beat the liberal media and Treen, despite his endorsement by President Bush, by 89 votes.

 

News coverage of Duke’s triumph that night—other than on Channel 4, and what I wrote in a later commentary—ignored the hostility and anti-Semitism, treating it as a standard-issue victory party.

 

In fact, it was the shape of things to come.

 

Duke, and Knight and Farrell, have popped back up in the news cycle the last few days, as the House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R., LA) has tap-danced around the revelation that he gave that 2002 speech, at the invitation of Knight and Farrell, to the European-American Unity and Rights organization, another hate group entwined with Duke.

 

Scalise has called the talk, which he delivered in a hotel outside New Orleans, “a mistake I regret.” He added (with dangling modifier): “As a Catholic, these groups hold views that are vehemently opposed to my own personal faith.”

 

House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders have circled the wagons, vouching for Scalise. And yet the exploits of Farrell and Knight—bottom feeders well known to area politicians and journalists as allies of Duke —should have made Scalise run for the hills.

 

Knight was a long-time member of Duke’s NAAWP with its mail order operation selling books that promoted the “myth” of the Holocaust. Knight now brags that he donated $1000 to Scalise’s 2008 Congressional campaign.

 

And Duke, a media hound wallowing in the press attention, gleefully told the Washington Post that

“Kenny would keep Scalise up to date on my issues.”

 

Knight and Farrell were both fired from the New Orleans Police Department before they gravitated to Duke. Both men were subjected to harsh media coverage in Duke’s gubernatorial bid.

 

“According to police records,” reported Tyler Bridges in a front page Times-Picayune story of Nov 12, 1991, “Farrell was fired from the police force in 1972 for bullying a citizen and then writing a false report about the incident.”

 

Farrell issued a ticket to an 18-year-old shipyard worker for speeding and an improper exhaust mechanism, according to the TP. When the man threatened to report him for harassment to the NOPD, Farrell arrested him.

 

“The investigation that led to Farrell’s dismissal revealed that Farrell had not clocked [David] Daigle’s speed,” wrote Bridges, who later published a book,The Rise of David Duke. “It also revealed that Farrell had harassed Daigle in the past, trying to bribe him for information. Farrell later claimed he was fired for union organizing.”

 

The NOPD fired Knight in 1973 for stealing lumber from a construction site as an off-duty cop.

 

Knight appealed his firing to the Civil Service Commission. The Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the NOPD decision, overruling Knight’s contention that he was framed by the two police officers who detained him. The judges noted that he told one of the officers he had “copped some lumber.” He was not prosecuted.

 

Knight and Farrell gravitated to Duke’s message of a beleaguered white race. They were major campaign figures in his 1989 election to the legislature, his losing U.S. Senate race in 1990, and his 1991 gubernatorial bid.

 

In the Louisiana governor’s race, Duke, running as a Republican, made the runoff with Edwin Edwards, the Democrat. The Louisiana Democratic Party’s TV spots in that race, showing grainy footage of Hitler and SS troops, blasted Duke for his web of neo-Nazi alliances.

 

Scalese was 26 at the time, a former LSU student body president who had yet to run for office during “the race from hell,” as political writer John Maginnis called the 1991 election.

 

Edwards, a flashy Cajun trailed by corruption scandals in three previous terms for governor, was a living symbol of Louisiana sleaze. And Duke was a closet Nazi getting exposed by an avalanche of reporting. He was also a charismatic, telegenic speaker with a face improved by plastic surgery several years earlier. He affected an anchorman finesse in apologizing for “past mistakes” as a Ku Klux Klan leader.

 

The state was in a deep recession as Duke galvanized a racial backlash. He won 60 percent of the white vote by hammering against affirmative action and welfare in coded racist messages. Edwards won in a huge landslide, 61 to 39 percent. What finished Duke as a viable politician was his astonishing array of ties to neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic hate groups as reported in the media.

 

In Duke’s meteoric rise, the local media had been slow to grasp the importance of his Nazi book list as an organizing and fundraising tool. He was still selling books on the myth of the Holocaust from his state legislative office six months after he won the ’89 race. When news of his book sales broke, John Treen and two members of the Republican State Central Committee pushed the party to censure Duke.

 

GOP leaders refused; they saw that Duke was pulling blue-collar Democrats to the party. Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement deploring the state GOP for its failure to censure Duke.

 

During coverage of that issue, Farrell went on a WSMB AM radio talk show to defend Duke. In the broadcast, Treen read a letter that the Loyola University President, Rev. James Carter, S.J., had sent before the election to area alumni, deploring Duke’s NAAWP group for what Treen called “anti-Catholic doctrine.”

 

“That’s not true,” Farrell retorted.

 

Treen countered: “Specifically, anti-Semitism and bigotry and Nazism are considered contrary to Catholic doctrine. Now, Father Carter made his statement … Are you calling Father Carter a liar?”

 

“Yes I am,” said Farrell. “Yes, I think Father Carter is something less than honorable. I think he has mislead the community for a number of years, dating all the way back to his initial involvement in the civil-rights movement.” In response to the broadcast, Carter declined to comment. A Loyola spokesman said: “Consider the source.”

 

Four years after Duke’s losing gubernatorial bid, Scalise—an arch-conservative of gentlemanly demeanor—won his state house seat. That was in 1995, the year that GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Mike Foster reeled from news coverage that he secretly paid Duke $150,000 for a list of supporters. A grand jury investigated but found Foster had broken no law. Critics accused Foster of giving Duke a payoff to stay out of the race; that was never proven. Foster won the governorship.

 

Scalise watched as Duke’s toxicity registered across the political grid. Politicians who openly associated with Duke, or his hard-core associates, did so at their own risk.

 

Duke kept running for offices and losing by ever-greater margins.

 

He stopped after his 2003 sentence of 15 months in a federal prison for defrauding donors to his white supremacist fundraising projects, using money for gambling trips in Las Vegas and Gulfport.

Knight and Farrell were true believers as Duke’s post-prison career of Holocaust denial took him to speaking venues in Austria, Ukraine, and even Iran, in 2006, where he told the AP: “The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder.”

 

What is it about Duke loyalists that Scalise missed?

 

Gambit, New Orleans’ alternative weekly, reported that because of the EURO workshop where Scalise spoke in 2002, the Iowa Cubs minor league baseball team cancelled reservations at the Best Western Landmark for a May 16-19 series with the New Orleans Zephyrs.

 

“We would just as soon stay away from a group that will create controversy,” the Cubs general manager Sam Bernabe told the paper.

 

“A contract to book this event was made some time ago, and it is our practice to fulfill our contractual obligations,” a spokesman for the hotel said. Our company does not share the views of this organization.”

 

Knight is now telling news outlets that he invited Scalise to speak at a neighborhood association that happened to be meeting in the same hotel.

 

Veteran Louisiana journalist Jeremy Alford, writing in the New York Times, quoted a person at the EURO conference who said that Scalise did in fact speak there on “how America was founded on Christian principles, Christian men who founded this country and…how we’re getting away from that.”

 

Scalise’s “mistake” may pale against Duke’s long career as a merchant of hate; but the House Majority Whip is putting the Republicans through the same kind of wringer that Duke did in the bad old days, and stretching his own credibility thinner with each passing day.

 

New Orleans Advocate columnist Stephanie Grace writes that, years ago, Scalise told her that he was like David Duke, but without the baggage.

 

His baggage now is the unanswered question: why would any politician in his right mind speak to a group associated with Knight, Farrell and Duke?

RSN: Jim Hightower: Truth Is the First Casualty of War

Jim Hightower was one of the first victims of Karl Rove's Dirty Tricks, a la Sleazy Lee Atwater!

Jim Hightower's insight is always impressive!

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FOCUS: Jim Hightower | Truth Is the First Casualty of War

Jim Hightower, OtherWords
Hightower writes: "Reflecting on World War I, California Senator Hiram Johnson famously said: 'The first casualty when war comes is truth.' Actually, in America's recent wars, officials have slaughtered the truth even before the fighting."
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Lee Atwater must be rotting in Hell somewhere proud of his buddy, Karl Rove.....

when you hear 'Karl Rove' think SLIMEY DIRTY TRICKS that would make Lee Atwater proud!

Is this the lowest common denominator we want?

Are we willing to accept such Slime-Ball Tactics? Or do we want Democracy to work? 

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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported Karl Rove and his shadowy campaign groups raised "$180 million in 2012 from 291 unnamed people, who gave an average of $618,000 each."

291 people -- a group smaller than my high school class -- sought to influence the opinions of over 146 million registered voters using resources only massive amounts of money can buy.

Our chances of winning any battle -- against the NRA, Wall Street, or others -- will go way up if we can clean up the system of legalized bribery that pervades Congress.

Over 55,000 people have endorsed our 5-part Take Back Democracy agenda. Can you join the fight for campaign finance reform?

This past year, we've run over $100,000 in TV ads against Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the #1 opponent of campaign reform and the #1 most vulnerable Republican senator in 2014.

In addition, we've worked with top House Democratic leaders to craft a bold new campaign finance bill (coming soon!) and organized a coalition of 8 organizations representing millions of people who are ready to push for big reform in 2014.

We need to know if you'll be with us in 2014 -- as we push reform in Congress, elect reform heroes, and fight those like Karl Rove who try to control Congress by spending millions of dollars.

Join the fight for campaign finance reform -- click here.

Thanks for being a bold progressive.

-- Amanda Johnson, PCCC Campaign Director

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The Origins of GOP Slime

"BoogieMan": The Lee Atwater Story, a documentary on Lee Atwater, will be available at the end of October on DVD. For those unfamiliar with the origins of Republican slime campaigning, even the trailer provides insight.

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Below is Bill Moyers' epitaph, done with grace and kindness as only he could do.

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BoogieManFilm.com

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Karl Rove was Atwater's protege, and George W. Bush, a kindred spirit, rode shotgun with Atwater during the infamous "Willie Horton" campaign of 1988.The '88 campaign, in which Dukakis was 17 points ahead before Atwater "Swift Boated" him is the playbook for the 2000, 2004, and 2008 campaigns. (Atwater died of brain cancer about half way through George Herbert Walker Bush's first term and wasn't around to torpedo Bill Clinton's campaign.)

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For all the nastiness of this year’s presidential campaign, the downward spiral into ever-meaner electioneering really started about 20 years ago. The political Magus who ushered in our new muddier era was Lee Atwater, best known for engineering George H.W. Bush’s win in 1988.





Moyers on Lee Atwater's Epiphany