RIP Tulsi Twerker and 9/11 falser Mike Gravel

RIP Mike Gravel. 

In reality? Just.Another.Politician.™, including supporting the Vietnam War for election reasons before he was against it. (Even more problematic was this lie was told when the man he was challenging, Sen. Ernest Gruening, was on record with long-standing opposition to the war.) As part of that run, he was one of the first candidates for national-level office to hire an official campaign consultant, Joseph Napolitan.

A Tulsi Twerker and 9/11 falser. (And a UFO falser, which probably also needs mentioning given that the Pentagon's report on its investigation of latest unidentified flying object (that's what a UFO is and nothing more!) spottings by pilots etc is coming out now.

Per Wiki, In his time in the Senate decades ago, Gravel opposed Carter's eventually passed plan (supported by Ted Stevens!) for creating the state's current large national parks and preserves system. He supported the Alaska pipeline, and wrote an amendment to the bill for its authorization that blocked the use of the National Environmental Policy Act as part of review of its construction and indemnified it from any lawsuits related to that. He opposed President Carter's groundbreaking Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. In general, had zero serious pro-environmental record. Arguably an anti-environmentalist, as least in his Senate tenure. (He also opposed filibuster reform and sometimes backed Southern Dems against Northern ones just to be a pain in the ass. He joined Southern Dems in voting for Clement Haynsworth for the Supreme Court, even.)

 

Another example? He opposed Nixon's anti-ballistic missile system, but told Scoop Jackson he'd support it if Nixon opened yet more Alaska oil drilling. That included drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Yes, by 2008, he opposed ANWR drilling, and did so. It's nice that he became more environmentally minded, but would have been better if he admitted earlier that he was wrong.

If really a "progressive" across the board, Gravel would have left Dems for Greens or something, not Libertarians, in his 2008 departure from Dems. This would be the same Libertarian Party who back then, as well as today over the suicide of John McAfee, has fanboi members repeating the "taxation is theft" bullshit. In reality, given his lie above, I suspect he jumped the shark to Libertarians instead of Greens purely on vote numbers.

Yeah, he did support the Green New Deal and the Paris accords in his 2020 non-run "run." But, that was the Dems' ripoff version of the GND, and the Jell-O Paris accords. A real environmentalist? Maybe he evolved beyond his original Senate tenure, but that says nothing.

Counterpunch's puff piece says that he was environmentalist in other ways. Being against nuclear fission power may or may not be environmental, esp. if you want all-electric cars and other things. (And, it IS a puff piece; it omits everything I have in this piece. AND, it's a puff piece because it's by his daughter. Hey, St. Clair, is this going to be a regular deal? You essentially ran an Anchorage Daily News type family-submitted obit, not an obit story. Would you do this with, say, Tulsi Gabbard?)

Counterpunch has doubled down and is fellating his memory in a podcast. He may (or may not) have BECOME a man of principle. He sure as hell wasn't when he first got elected. He quite arguably was an anti-imperialist. Anti-capitalist? How many anti-capitalists run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination? (Gravel later admits he's not referring to socialism "in the classical sense." And, you know? Fascism didn't nationalize most businesses, but it did nationalize what they were supposed to be doing.) Again, it seems he looked at past Libertarian and Green vote totals, and saw which third party was bigger. Just.Another.Politician.™

Also, a Sarah Palin whisperer when the Schmuck Talk Express named her his Veep.

He did have his good side. Rational Wiki notes his support for various "direct democracy" initiatives.

But, given that Gruening was already against the war, Gravel actually brought little to the table in his political career.

And, since Tulsi Gabbard was and is NOT an "antiwar" candidate, his endorsement of her — his, not the college fanbois — actually undercuts his previous antiwar activism.

 

And, given that he told lies in his 2008 Libertarian run as well, Just.Another.Politician.™is something people need to remember about him. He lied then about stopping Nixon's Alaskan N-tests. He also lied about killing the draft by filibuster; on both these, see explanatory footnotes to his Wiki piece.

And, yes, he did call for people to help Howie Hawkins get ballot access last year. Did he actually endorse him? Well, it's a big argument, and it's filtered through Primo Nutbar and other things. But Wiki says Gravel didn't endorse him, by not listing Gravel among endorsees. And, as an independent leftist not a Green, this is yet another reason I won't vote for Howie in 2024 if he gets the nomination.

Speaking of, whether it was Gravel his own self willingly, or the college fanbois of the Gravel Institute dragging him around by the nose, he did get wrapped up with Primo Nutbar on this issue. And, it never got clarified. That was along with the fanbois backing Bernie, but then Gravel himself coming out personally as a Tulsi Twerker.

As for him lowering income inequality in Alaska? Given that he opposed the parks-and-preserves plan of Carter, even after compromises were made, I'm not buying that one, either, Ms. Mosier. On Indian affairs? He at one time wanted to abolish the BIA. (I know, from reading books about the modern Wounded Knee and more that the BIA is problematic, but, if your plan is to do nothing but abolish it?) He did fight for in-Alaska high schools for Natives. I'm unaware of any major connection he had to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act beyond being an original cosponsor and a couple of small amendments, not all of which passed. (That didn't stop him, about a decade ago, from BOTH claiming unwarranted credit AND still bashing Carter over ANICLA in the same interview. He bashes Carter when it was really his own fault; his meddling with previous versions of the bill led Carter to invoke the Antiquities Act.) His full record of sponsorship of Senate items re Native Americans is here. As Wiki notes, his Senate record on Indian affairs was "complicated."

So, this is not a full takedown obit, but it IS a semi-takedown, and as such .... #NotTooSoon. I had long know about him on 9/11, and of course, Tulsi just popped up with his 2020 campaign. I had never before looked in-depth at his Wiki page, though. The Vietnam stuff was new to me. And disconcerting, not just because it happened but again, it's not been "repented" of since then.

The final take? We all change. I grew up a conservative Republican. But, I admit I've changed, and I admit I rejected religious conservativism from both parents, racism from my dad and other things. Gravel seems to have pretended that he never changed. Second, regular readers know I loathe conspiracy thinking. Third, regular readers know I loathe Tulsi Gabbard. Enough said. (Unless you're at Counterpunch and choose not to say these things.) 

Counterpunch IS helpful in other ways. It has Gravel claiming Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, deserves the American Medal of Freedom. Anybody who actually knows anything knows that Felt started leaking because he was butt-hurt that Nixon wouldn't name him as J. Edgar Hoover's successor.

If you've been watching Ken Burns on Vietnam

Ken Burns/Wikipedia photo

First, the amount he gets wrong seems fairly big, and I'll detail that in a moment.

But, really, you shouldn't be surprised.

As I've noted, his bland pro-Americanism is like eating Chinese food. (And, as that link shows, his Vietnam series isn't the first time he's gotten Koch Bros money, either.)

As for what he misses or gets flat wrong?

He gets Tonkin Gulf, the non-event that LBJ used to get a blank check for war, totally wrong.

He doesn't even interview Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, brought to the eye of some younger Americans by the Edward Snowdon issues.

He acts determined to present the war as nothing but a simple mistake, rather than willful stupidity mixed with imperialism that could have been avoided. (More on this lower in the piece.)

Bruce Dixon, managing editor of Black Agenda Report, notes that the death of 3 million Asians is a "crime" not a "mistake." (Not sure if Burns provides totals on non-US dead.) Anyway, per the reference he and others make about Noam Chomsky, the war was indeed ultimately deliberate and ultimately in the service of American imperialism.

Related to that, History News Network says Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick are patronizing to the Vietnamese. This one deserves a pull quote.

Did the Vietnamese really need two Americans, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, to finally teach them about the bloodshed and devastation their own land suffered because of the Americans? 

And therein lies the core flaw of the entire project—it’s a series of stories, but not really a history of the war. That’s the Burns-Novick trademark and it’s worked for a long time, making them famous and I suspect wealthy. But it substitutes vignettes for ideas, personal anecdotes for larger structural factors, bathos for analysis.

THIS! Yes, Burns is an “auteur.” I’ve never denied it. But, per my top link, that’s why watching him is like eating stereotypical Chinese food.

And it ends up providing a misguided view of the war, one that has politically conservative consequences (ironic because Burns himself is openly liberal) by shifting attention away from the historical, material reasons for American intervention and focusing on 79 people interviewed who were directly involved in Vietnam. Instead of an exposé of aggressive militarism, they give us sentimental stories of survival and perseverance. 

Burns and Novick, despite their claims of originality, provide a pretty boilerplate liberal examination of the war.

And, even though Counterpunch went overboard in one piece in calling Dems the war party of the 20th century, nonetheless, the Wilsonian angle was partially there in WWII, and elsewhere in the 20th century. It was LBJ's meat and potatoes in foreign policy, arguably.

(Sidebar: The Eastern Establishment wing of the GOP,  including returning Bull Mooser TR, were just as pro-intervention as Wilson in 1916; they just tried to get TR to not be vocal about it. There was more geographical division within both parties than a split between the two. In 1940, GOP presidential candidate Wendell Willkie was just as pro-intervention as FDR. In Korea, don't forget that MacArthur had already toyed with trying to get the GOP presidential nomination in 1948. In Nam? Yes, LBJ was president, but look at the vote for Tonkin Gulf; totally bipartisan.

I earlier said on Twitter than Counterpunch sounded like Bob Dole, 1976, in talking about "Democrat wars." I stand behind that, redoubled.

And, for any leftists who think that Democrats are somehow especially warmongering? I guess this might make for a separate blog post.)

OK, we've not kicked the dynamic duo enough. More from the same piece:

Burns and Novick talk a lot about reconciliation and healing, sort of a Vietnam War version of Dr. Phil and Oprah. ... 

Is America really still divided over Vietnam the way it was in, say, 1968, when Walter Cronkite stunned the White House and Main Street by essentially declaring that the war was unwinnable? ... 

Reconciliation and healing are always worthwhile and necessary goals, but that process has been well in place long before Burns and Novick arrived. The promotional material for the series boasts that they “unbury the secrets of the Vietnam War.” They also stress they want to let Americans know about Vietnam. But don’t we know a lot already?

Indeed. 

They're really that way, in the smarmy-preachy liberalism way, that ALSO is a hallmark of 20th-century Democrats.

Finally, the "necessary" claim gets its own butt-kicking:

The war was necessary because the U.S. made it necessary—the politburo in Hanoi and the NLF in the south would gladly have taken control of Vietnam without getting blown up and killed in apocalyptic numbers by American weapons. Equivalency and objectivity are the tools of liberal apologetics, and Burns and Novick have always used them well to make Americans (and Americans below the Mason-Dixon Line) feel good about themselves. Instead of examining American aggression, they ruminate on Vietnamese irredentism. Love them, they’re liberals.

Indeed. This is what tempts me to drop the "left-liberal" phrase for myself and just call myself a leftist, or per the blog header, a "skeptical leftist."

Here's a politer version of some of the same criticism — claims of "false balance," an old bugaboo of centrist "the media."

It too gets a pullout, because it too expresses issues emblematic of Burns' whole corpus:

Burns and Novick are the masters of false balancing, the technique of countering one story line with another to create the impression of objective evenhandedness. The same good-guy, bad-guy lens through which the war was viewed also filtered perceptions of the antiwar movement at home. Jack Todd is one of 30,000 Americans who deserted to Canada but, we are reassured, 30,000 Canadians volunteered to go to Vietnam. Never mind that, by other estimates, over 100,000 Americans are estimated to have gone to Canada during the war. The first figure apparently called for such dubious balancing because, as we later learn, Todd regrets having renounced his US citizenship.

Indeed. The "false balance" of including Shelby Foote as one of the top talking heads on his Civil War series made it bad enough at the time, and much worse in hindsight. The "false balance" of not having more Eric Foner, or any significant black historians, made the Reconstruction series, with my having gotten wiser, suck at the time. More here, thanks to S-USIH, on the outright racism of Foote and Burns, when later corned on how much he used Foote, doing a tap dance around it. The general appeal to violence by Foote underscores that the South is one of those "honor cultures" similar to much of the Middle East that Southern white wingnuts foam at the mouth about.

And, if all that isn't enough, there's a full website devoted to nothing but what Burns, and his ilk, got and get wrong by either omission or commission. (It was started five years ago, but for obvious reasons, is getting new circulation now.)

Bottom line is that, contra Burns, the Vietnam War was more than a mistake, it was imperial hubris, and also, that to the degree it was a mistake, it was easily avoidable.

"Old China hands" who had not yet been chased out of the State Department by McCarthyism knew the millennia, literally, of Vietnam-China animosity. So, that part of the domino theory was out the door. Chinese-USSR animosity meant that, while the Russkies had Cam Ranh Bay, the Chinese wouldn't help them there. Old State hands in general knew the history behind the Geneva accords and knew that, if we had tried, we probably could have cut a deal to make a unified Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh the Yugoslavia of Southeast Asia.

But, that's not in Burns' narrative either.

Why is all of this important?

Tonkin Gulf was similar to Shrub Bush's request for Congress to let him use military force in Iraq. And thus, to pass one off as a "mistake" invites people to do the same with the other. You know, like Obama's "look forward, not backward."

Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, had leaks similar to Ellsburg, vis a vis Afghanistan. We didn't learn from them, either.

Today, many Democrats have joined Republicans in calling Afghanistan, now a longer war than Vietnam, a simple mistake, which it may or may not be, and many have done the same with Iraq, which definitely is not true.

And, President Obama, as the likes of Andrew Bacevich have noted, simply became a hypocrite on Afghanistan. Not only did he continue the war, he did a "surge" similar to what he opposed in Iraq. And politicized it further by splitting the difference.

My overall opinion on Afghanistan is not as harsh as Ted Rall's. In hindsight, I'm still OK with the original action — well, I'm OK with what SHOULD have been done, i.e., putting real amounts of US boots on the ground at the start of the war, rather than depending on Afghan tribespeople to hold the line at Tora Bora, which they deliberately chose not to do. Per Bacevich, Obama should have had some cojones and gotten us out of there rather than doing ANY version of a "surge." (I did not support any version of a "surge.")

But, he didn't want to. Per Consortium News:

Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led NATO forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.

That's pretty much right.

(Noting Bacevich, above, I think a number of non-imperialists of the right and left alike reject the idea that the Afghanistan war as originally presented to the American public was a war of imperialism. And, while Counterpunch has opened my eyes on some things, like Bosnia, on others, it and other leftist opinion magazines remain wrong, IMO. For all I know, somebody could call the American Civil War imperialist; certainly, Southerners did, in essence.)

On the link from my previous blogging? Besides this not being his first use of Koch money, Burns overhyped the National Park Service into "America's greatest idea," got a number of things about both TR and FDR wrong, turned dealing with cancer into an American-style war to win (at that top link), pulled punches on the history of baseball in his iconic early series and more in his folo, commits American exceptionalism and ignores the Russkies in WWII and more.

His American exceptionalism fellatio goes back to his original Civil War series, bad enough that a Smithsonian Magazine contributor now harshly scores him.

That WWII series also failed to include anything about Hispanic or Native American contributions. And, even though it was before good DNA testing, Burns got all the white historians in his Thomas Jefferson miniseries to pooh-pooh over the idea that he had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Now, it's true, that was before the 1998 DNA Y-chromosome testing, but still.

If it harshes some people's mellow too much, sorry. But, many you're viewing Vietnam through rose-colored glasses yourself.

(Update, April 23, 2019: This is all also bad enough to make me wonder if Burns is, if not necessarily consciously racist, at least carrying a big bag of implicit bias.)

And, I understand that for many from vague moderate conservatives to vague left-neoliberals, PBS = Polite Broadcasting System just like NPR = Nice Polite Republicans. I understand that a centrist version of Merika is engrained into its cultural DNA just as much as, by 1888, the fact that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was actually about emancipation was whitewashed into the pretense it was about post-Civil War healing and unity.

The idea that the NPS might NOT be "America's greatest idea" shocked a lot of environmentalists when the National Parks Conservation Association's Congressional liaison did a long blog post on its website, noting the Emancipation Proclamation + 13th Amendment would probably qualify instead. [I suggested the First Amendment myself. In any case, I agreed with the NPCA person that America's national parks not only aren't America's greatest idea, they're not even in the top three.] Seriously, a bunch of nice, polite, white environmentalists suddenly, for them at least, got strident. I suspect a fair chunk of them don't like to see that Ken's getting called out for whitewashing Nam, either.

And, for that matter, not only were national parks, and the Service, NOT America's greatest idea, Ken didn't tell you that, even as he was producing the episodes, the NPS continued to fall apart even as Dear Leader planned a thorough neoliberal centennial celebration. (And, per the likes of High Country News, Ken told you bupkis about the history of sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the Park Service.)

For you, whether or not this is particularly about being a Ken Burns fan or not, I understand the shock. But, if you're a left-liberal or beyond, this shouldn't be anything new. Sorry, but that includes my blogging cousin by a different aunt. (And, given that Ken didn't talk about petrochemicals — you know, in places like Houston's Petrochemical Alley — being carcinogens in his cancer series, again, left-liberals and beyond in places like that ... I don't get the love for Burns.)

Is this particular piece all bad? I'm sure it's not and even Consortium News mentioned good things in another link. But, for people under 40, and especially under 30, for whom Burns is quasi-godlike, there's a lot of problems.

Theoretically, the cuts to federal funding for PBS and NPR should make it more willing, not less, to take risk. In reality, the likes of George Soros aren't much more likely to fund anything that counteracts belief in American exceptionionalism much more than Charles Koch and David H. Koch.

Per that, Consortium News has a new piece up about Ken's funders in general, among other things, over whom he gushes.

Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans.” Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. 

Thanks, BofA. Maybe Ken can do a series about subprime loans and CDOs in a few years.

Real American exceptionalism, if it actually existed, would be a fairly widespread acceptance that America's shit does stink, stinks a fair amount of the time, and stinks in ways that should upset notional liberals as much as conservatives, if they're honest.

As for the "have you watched it?" rhetorical question? No. I'm in a place where, since my most recent forced job change, I'm pretty sure I can't get TV without cable and I'm pretty sure that PBS won't let me watch it online. Even if these weren't all problems, per Wiki, I don't think I need to waste 18 hours, longer than anything else he's done since his original Baseball series.

That said, I didn't say it was all wrong. And I've never claimed that in stylistic, framing and narrative skills, that Ken Burns is anything but a master of the TV documentary craft.

But, per my link at top, and chunk of links at bottom, I don't need to watch. I have no real surprise about what Burns does get wrong. And I have no need or desire to have American exceptionalism and mythmaking about the Vietnam War served up on a plate, even if it's by a French chef.

And, longtime Burns narrator sidekick Peter Coyote may be a nice and decent guy, and at one time more lefty than he is now, but he's not a national treasure, and if he really believes that Vietnam was "started in good faith by decent men," then he's whored himself out for Koch Bros money and contra a comment of his on his Wiki page, he's "capitalist first, activist second, actor third."

Hey, sh-it happens. John Kerry might have been a national treasure 40-something years before his presidential run, talking some truth as part of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but he's not today.

And, at times, I'm also a deliberate contrarian, part of becoming a neo-Cynic. Brains, at least, knows this. And, this is one of those times.

Burns also, while covering Speedy Express, pretty shortchanged it — and it was worse than MyLai and more emblematic of how America fought in Vietnam. See Nick Turse, then a decade ago, and Nick Turse now, directly on the series.

==

Sadly, Philip Weiss, editor of Mondoweiss, says he likes the series even though he admits he knows a fair amount of what I said above about Burns' modus operandi.

Wonder if he would say the same if Burns next makes a series about the creation of the nation of Israel that turd-polishes Zionism?

That said, Donald Johnson has a follow-up piece there, which more politely raises similar criticism.

==

Updates: First additional note? Burns (h/t Consortium News), if his series was trying to imply Merika is a specially peace-loving nation, sadly forced into Nam, is totally wrong on that.

Next: Per a comment back to me from S-USIH, I didn't need to watch this. Others' critiques confirmed my observations of Burns from having seen most of his previous documentary series. Seriously, when Doris Kearns Goodwin gets Taft v. TR more correct than you do?

Let's have video fun with #HillarySoProgressive at the #DemTownHall

I started tuning out Hillary Clinton more and more after her "George Bush hypnotized me into the Iraq War" answer about halfway through. That's because, of course, her actual past, as captured on non-fun video, refudiates her.



I didn't see that video until after the debate, thanks to a retweet by Brains and Eggs.

But, I did start thinking about videos at various points during the debate, and so now, on to the airing of grievances.

First, in relation to the rabbi's two pockets question, we have Gollum and "what has it got in its pocketses"?



Speaking of, doesn't Gollum look a bit like Lloyd Blankfein of GoddamSachs? I have no experience with videoshopping, but in straight photoshopping, could easily make that happen.

Then, thinking of Hilary's neoliberal non-roar? Helen Reddy was probably throwing up in her mouth, wherever she is these days:



Hillary, did you "roar" 675,000 times?

And "Down on Wall Street (stuck in the corner)" is certainly no CCR:



No common touch from her.

Of course, her answers on the Iraq War and her $675K bankster speaking fees only increased her "credibility gap" with me. Speaking of "credibility gap," I thought you'd never ask: