The View From 1776

As part of its downsizing of staff, the Times must have discharged its fact checkers.

Read Times Again Fails to Hit McCain by Jack Kelly.

For an extnsive and perceptive analysis of the tranfromation, read Andrew Klavan’s The Lost Art of War on the City Journal website.

Some excerpts:

... Hollywood war films past and present reflect the political philosophy not just of a small lotusland enclave, but of a large segment of our culture-making classes. The changing ways that these films portray the internal experience of the warrior, along with the change in their overall depiction of the nation and its guardians, are signs of deeper developments with unnerving ramifications.

Movies about the inner experience of war frequently revolve around the relationship of a young soldier to a battle-hardened father figure. Such films underwent a violent transformation between World War II and the aftermath of Vietnam…

Whether through Stone’s tortured paranoia or Kubrick’s cultural self-hatred, the Vietnam films’ bitter vision of the warrior’s initiation went hand in hand with Hollywood’s increasingly negative depiction of America. That depiction depended partly on the filmmakers’ specific rejection of Vietnam-era policies. But it was shaped, informed, and encouraged by a larger phenomenon: the intellectuals’ turning away from nationalism itself.

...Nationalism had caused the war; therefore cosmopolitanism, and a stateless commitment to the People, would end war altogether.

The trouble with cosmopolitanism, as George Orwell pointed out, is that no one is willing to fight and die for it. When warlike racial nationalism resurged in the thirties, only an answering “atavistic emotion of patriotism,” as Orwell wrote, could embolden people to stand against it…

And as respect for America as a worthy nation waned among the elite, so, too, did respect for America’s guardians. Instead of a movie hero, the warrior became the self-serious militaristic buffoon of such antiwar films as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964)...

It’s a nightmare vision. American warriors are the extension of a clueless, violent, and imperialist culture. A rain of napalm burns away pristine jungles so that indigenous primitives can be replaced by Yank thugs drooling over Playboy bunnies in spangled cowboy suits. The supreme manifestation of this fantasy is Duvall’s aptly named Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, a madman who wipes out an entire village merely to clear the beach for a famous surfer likewise aptly named L. B. Johnson. In a film that denigrates the nation and its culture, the patriot warrior can only appear absurd…

Liberals often argue that in criticizing American actions and culture, artists are actually defending American principles by holding the nation to its own standards. That argument would make sense in an atmosphere of contending visions that showed both America’s greatness and its imperfections. But when the arts purvey only a consistently anti-patriotic and anti-military message, it seems clear that they have in fact detached the ethos from the country that embodies it. In doing so, American artists are adopting European-style cosmopolitanism, which leaves them virtually incapable of depicting warriors as heroes. “International society has ideas to defend—ideas of universal justice—but little actual ground,” the political thinker Robert Kaplan wrote recently. “And without ground to defend, it has little need of heroes.”

...With 9/11 violently awaking us to the fact of ongoing global jihad, real war came again. And not merely war, but a war that made nonsense out of cherished cosmopolitan left-wing doctrines like multiculturalism and moral relativism. Rather than face the obvious failures of their philosophy, intellectual and creative elites retreated into their present high-sounding but secretly selfish antinational moralizing.

...In Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Lions for Lambs—as in more successful thrillers like Shooter and The Bourne Ultimatum—virtually every act of the American administration is corrupt or sinister, and every patriot is a cynically misused fool. Every warrior, therefore, is either evil himself or, more often, a victim of evil, destined for meaningless destruction or soul-death and insanity.

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In one of his usual clear-eyed examinations of liberal sacred cows, New York Times columnist John Tierney exposes the media’s one-sided presentation of climate data and the mob psychology that drives it.

Key quote:

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

Read the entire essay.

Reflections on the Watergate Tragedy
By Jeff Lukens

To understand Watergate, we need to understand the times in which Richard Nixon was president. Nixon was the only president of the 20th Century to face an unyielding and organized resistance to a war. LBJ had handed him a war without end in Vietnam, and consequently, great unrest at home. Washington was regularly filled with thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of protesters. The counterculture movement, born in those days, was bent on overturning the very foundations of American life.

Skillful at old-time politics, Nixon was ill-equipped to oppose the guerilla war being waged against him. Wiretaps and IRS audits were no match for a force whose foot soldiers worshiped sex, drugs and rock and roll. Many called Nixon paranoid because he saw himself surrounded by enemies. But his enemies were real, and they were waiting for the opportunity to ruin him.

He had been a target for the Left ever since the Alger Hiss case in 1948. The worst thing that anyone can do to the press and the liberal establishment in Washington is to prove that they were wrong, and that was exactly what Nixon, as a young congressman, had done. Hiss was a sophisticated career State Department diplomat, but he was also a communist spy. The case also begged the question on whether or not there was a communist influence in Washington. With the help of Whittaker Chambers, Nixon exposed Hiss. But Hiss was one of them, the liberal establishment, and they never forgot it.

Consequently, the rules of discretion and respect the media and Congress applied to previous presidents did not apply to Nixon. In his position, he knew he should have been careful not to do anything wrong. Instead of accepting the double standard and holding himself to a higher level, he took for granted he would be treated in the same way as they treated Kennedy and Johnson. That was his first mistake.

The Origins of Watergate

The road to Watergate began in 1971 with the Pentagon Papers case. Nixon was outraged by Daniel Ellsberg’s leaks of classified information about the Vietnam War to The New York Times. When he tried to block the press from publishing any more of the story, the liberal Burger Court ignored the law and ruled against him. One senator even went as far as to enter the documents into the Congressional Record. It was truly outrageous. Nixon’s anger at the reckless disregard of national security by many people was quite understandable, but his response to it was not.

He pushed White House staffers to do something to stop the leaks. He pushed them so hard, in fact, that he effectively forced them to act outside the law. The “Plumbers” were formed and soon afterwards broke into in the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist hoping to gain embarrassing personal information on Ellsberg in which to discredit him.

That was over the line. Warrantless break-ins of any sort are unacceptable. We halfway expect this sort of behavior from the agents of the Left, but not from Republicans. Republicans, and conservatives overall, must call to a higher standard.

But why would Nixon risk so much to gain so little? Well, for one, leaks threatened to blow the confidentiality of his prize project, the secret diplomacy of Henry Kissinger. But there was more to it than that. Like so much else in Washington in those days, emotions overruled rationality. Nixon was apparently striking back in a fit of rage.

He should have known that break-ins would eventually cause something like Watergate. Although he denied it, there is a high probability that Nixon had prior knowledge of the Ellsberg break-in and may have even ordered it. At the very least, he was responsible for the actions of his subordinates. He compromised himself under pressure, and set a precedent that lead to his political destruction.

Break-in at the DNC

Even now, we can only speculate on the possible motive for the Watergate break-in. It has been alleged that Nixon’s wanted to know what the Democrats knew about a $100,000 donation from Howard Hughes to Bebe Rebozo, who passed the money through his Florida bank to the Nixon reelection campaign. Hughes Aircraft Company had many government contracts, and it was good business to have the president on your side.

Nixon may have been worried that the Chairman of the DNC, Larry O’Brien, would pull an October Surprise by revealing the payoffs from Hughes. Nixon’s ties to Hughes had hurt him in his losing 1960 and 1962 campaigns, and he did not want it to happen again.

The Watergate break-in likely came about by Nixon telling Charles Colson to find out what O’Brien knew about Hughes. Colson assigned the job to Howard Hunt who with Gordon Liddy used campaign resources to repeat the precedent of the earlier Ellsberg break-in.

There were two break-ins at the DNC Headquarters at the Watergate complex. The first break-in occurred on May 28, 1972. When the bugs that were planted then failed to yield substantive information, Hunt and Liddy planned a second break-in three weeks later. It was the second break-in that made history. That break-in likely failed because Democratic Party operatives may have suspected it was coming and were ready for it. It is doubtful, however, that Nixon knew the details of the plan.

At the time, wiretaps were legal, so we can take no issue with them. After news of the story broke, Nixon was just trying to contain the political damage. One falsehood lead to another and soon it became a cover-up. Legally and morally, a cover-up of a break-in was wrong, and on a practical level, it was almost sure to fail. He and his people had taken many foolish risks, and too many people knew too much. When faced with jail time, many of them decided to save themselves no matter the cost to anyone else. This was especially the case with John Dean.

The Tapes

Nixon meant the tapes to be a private record of his presidency that he could later use for his memoirs. Many hours of the tape involve Nixon with his aides brainstorming and searching for ideas, both good and bad, to solve the problems they faced.

Years later, Nixon privately admitted it was a mistake not to destroy the tapes. Without the tapes, the evidence on Nixon would have been circumstantial and gone nowhere. Rather than serving as personal recollections, his own words becoming the basis for his fall.

Nixon also admitted later that he shouldn’t have discussed, or even thought about, cover-ups or hush money. While his opponents were quick to point out that he had discussed such things, they ignored that he rejected them as wrong a few sentences later. Although he discussed possible obstruction of the FBI investigation by the CIA in the “Smoking Gun” tape, no obstruction actually occurred.

Revenge Politics

As a political force against communism, and resolute in his convictions, to the liberal establishment, Nixon had to be brought down. The political firestorm that resulted was a coming together of many political factions. Congress, the press, the intelligence community and the federal bureaucracy all had reasons to see that Nixon fell. With the tapes available as evidence, Nixon gave his opponents the sword they needed to take him down, and they did.

Those who were after Nixon for Watergate had been after him for a long time. Watergate was just the pretext. They sought to prosecute him as aggressively as he had prosecuted Hiss and the Vietnam War. The relentless deluge of accusations hurled at Nixon day after day, both true and false, ultimately undercut his ability to govern. While the Ervin Senate Select Committee on Watergate held center stage, cuts in South Vietnamese aid, and limitations on what our military response could be, were being quietly slipped through congress.

In his 1990 book, In the Arena, Nixon writes:

“We remember as the Watergate period was also a concerted political vendetta by my opponents. Anyone who knows the workings of hardball politics knows that the smoke screen of false accusations - the myths of Watergate - were not at all accidental. In this respect, Watergate was not a morality play - a battle between good guys in white and bad guys in black - but rather a political struggle. The baseless and highly sensationalistic charges, blatant double standards, the party-line votes in congressional investigating committees, and the unwillingness of my adversaries and the media to look into parallel wrongdoing within Democratic campaigns, all should tip off the causal observer that the opposition was pursuing not only justice but also political advantage . . . When a balanced historical appraisal emerges, the partisan political dimension of the investigation and prosecution will stand out as the feature of the period . . . The smoke screen of false accusations magnified tenfold the public’s perception and outrage over the wrongdoing that actually occurred.”

A National Tragedy

After two years of Watergate paralysis, the nation braced for months of impeachment in the House and trial before the Senate. Maybe he could have survived by a vote or two in the Senate, maybe not. But they had marginalized Nixon, and the nation needed a full-time President. His final service as president was to resign rather than put the nation through more anguish.

Nixon, once a brilliant politician, would always be seen as a man shattered by his own determination to succeed. The Watergate scandal severely disappointed his supporters. I was one of them. It also portrayed Nixon as an invalid force in American politics, which was not true.

He had been correct about his opposition to communism. He had been correct about Alger Hiss and how to end the Vietnam War. But what did that matter to the Left? Watergate was the result of Vietnam, and the collapse of South Vietnam was the result of Watergate. The upheaval that followed his presidency in Southeast Asia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere proved that his policies had been correct all along.

Nixon was devastated in an epic calamity partly of his own making, and partly from a liberal assault on a successful politician who represented traditional American values. It is an assault that continues to this day. Conservative politicians might earn the animosity of those who oppose them, but their methods and politics must always be above reproach to avoid a fate similar to that of Richard Nixon.

Jeff Lukens is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal and a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

Major liberal propaganda organs presented a false report of a speech by General Ricardo Sanchez, the former military commander in Iraq.  By isolating one part of the General’s plaint, for purely partisan political reasons, the press illustrated General Sanchez’s indictment of their coverage of the Iraq war.  The press’s version of the speech is the equivalent of describing the day-night cycle while omitting the sunrise.

In a prime example of the falsified coverage, New York Times’s reporter David S. Cloud, in an October 13 article headlined Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort is ‘a Nightmare’, fails to mention General Sanchez’s criticisms of Congress and his scathing denunciation of the partisanship of the media, which he said has contributed to the deaths of American military personnel.

To see specifics regarding what the Times elected to omit, read the following column by the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page deputy editor Daniel Henninger.

General Sanchez’s Scream
By Daniel Henninger

October 18, 2007; Page A16
Over the past weekend there were front-page accounts everywhere of Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez’s description of the war in Iraq as a “nightmare.” The New York Times led its story this way:

“In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war ‘incompetent’ and said the result was ‘a nightmare with no end in sight.’” Gen. Sanchez said this last Friday to a gathering of reporters and editors in Washington who cover military affairs. It was a dramatic denunciation from the man who led U.S. forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2004.

On Monday my colleague John Fund wrote an item for the Journal editorial page’s daily email newsletter, Political Diary, noting that most of the news reports of the speech had failed to note that Gen. Sanchez had also severely criticized the press’s performance in Iraq. “For some of you,” Gen. Sanchez said to the reporters, “the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases and agendas.”

By now I was curious to see what Gen. Sanchez actually did say. The full text is an indictment all right, of everyone connected to this war—the president, the press, Congress, the bureaucracy and maybe the country itself.

Gen. Sanchez was running the U.S. war effort in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up, though an investigation absolved him.

It’s possible to dismiss some of what he says as over the top or to cavil with the particulars. One cannot really know how extensively Gen. Sanchez’s views are shared across the officer corps. But there is a discomfiting, Cassandra-like quality to this speech. It is a scream of rage.

Whatever happens in Iraq, this country at some point will have to think seriously (if possible) about the war’s effects on its politics and its institutions. Gen. Sanchez’s scream is as good a place as any to start.

With elided excerpts, I’ll summarize what he said. Body armor recommended.
• The media. “It seems that as long as you get a front-page story there is little or no regard for the ‘collateral damage’ you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct. . . . [Y]ou assume that you are correct and on the moral high ground.”

 
“The speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry.” “[T]actically insignificant events have become strategic defeats.” And: “The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war.”

• The Bush administration. “When a nation goes to war it must bring to bear all elements of power in order to win. . . . [This] administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power . . . and they have definitely not communicated that reality to the American people.”
 
• Congress and politics. “Since 2003, the politics of war have been characterized by partisanship as the Republican and Democratic parties struggled for power in Washington. . . . National efforts to date have been corrupted by partisan politics that have prevented us from devising effective, executable, supportable solutions. These partisan struggles have led to political decisions that endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield. The unmistakable message was that political power had greater priority than our national security objectives.”

 
• The bureaucracies. Gen. Sanchez argues that “unity of effort” was hampered by the absence of any coordinated authority over the war effort of the bureaucracies: “The Administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the Department of State, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure.”

 
“Clearly,” he says, “mistakes have been made by the American military in its application of power. But even its greatest failures in this war can be linked to America’s lack of commitment, priority and moral courage in this war effort…America has not been fully committed to win this war.”

He says leaving Iraq is not an option, and he has no doubt about the threat: “As a nation we must recognize that the enemy we face is committed to destroying our way of life.”

In sum, what Gen. Sanchez is describing here is a nation that is at risk and is in a state of disunity. Does disunity matter? He is saying that in war, it does.

In politics, a degree of disunity is normal. But in our time, partisan disunity has become the norm. The purpose of politics now is to thwart, to stop.

We may have underestimated how corrosive our disunity has been on the troops in Iraq, and how deeply it has damaged us.

Those of us in politics—politicians, reporters, bureaucrats—are largely inured to all this, and we seem to have assumed that the system shares our infinite capacity for antipathy and tumult. But is this occupational toughness natural to politics, or is it cynicism? I don’t think the soldiers or the American people see the difference.

Arguably it is the proper role of politics to intervene, to question. But during Vietnam and again now, we haven’t been able to avoid simultaneously putting troops on the battlefield while fighting bitterly amongst ourselves at home for the length of the war.

The U.S. officer corps is aware of this. While no one is talking about a stab in the back, they may conclude that the home front and its institutions are unable to, or will not, protect their back.

One may ask: Will we ever want to do this again? Are we able to undertake military missions that prove difficult? Or is the projection of U.S. military power into the world an idea that now irreparably divides the American people? Before November 2008, we had better have some answers, from our presidential candidates and from ourselves.