The Opinion Mill

Barbara Ehrenreich (author of the classic Nickel and Dimed) has a new book out, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, a collection of essays, articles and columns — gathered from The Progressive, The Nation and the NYT, among others — chronicling the social and economic wreckage that will be the Bush administration’s legacy in America. In the clip above, Ehrenreich talks about her book with Minnesota talk-show host Jack Rice. Ehrenreich will be online for questions next weekend at the Firedoglake book salon.

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David Sirota, author of The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, goes on Fox Noise to demolish the GOP’s let-them-eat-cake attitude as typified by Phil Gramm and his notion that people caught in the economic downturn are a bunch of whiners. (Actually, it’s more a let’s-give-their-cake-to-our-rich-campaign-contributors attitude.) Going up against a Republican wingertron who can do nothing but recite discredited nonsense, Sirota acquits himself admirably.

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Given the rock-bottom ratings of the Fox Business channel, Naomi Klein’s appearance on its surrealistically vapid “Happy Hour” probably did more to boost the channel’s fortunes than it did to boost sales of the new paperback edition of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Nevertheless, Klein took her message right into the faces of the Fox news twinkies, who were reduced to hollow-sounding laughter as Klein explained how the Bush administration’s attempt to expand offshore drilling by manipulating worries about the oil crunch is classic “disaster capitalism” — using calamities and fears to ram through measures and changes that would never have passed muster with the voters.

One of SCTV’s later seasons included a spoof of local TV children’s programming, which back in the days when there really were local TV channels meant getting some over-the-hill actor to dress up as a ringmaster or a ship captain and introduce ancient Three Stooges films and cartoons nobody else would touch. The SCTV spoof show was called “Happy Hour,” featuring a well-oiled host named Happy Marsden. I’m not sure Fox Business wants to cultivate that kind of association with its own “Happy Hour” show, but from what I’ve seen the SCTV version isn’t that much goofier than what Fox is trying to do.

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When Bruce Bartlett walks down the street, do people roll their eyes and use their fingers to make little twirly motions next to their heads? Even by the sub-sub-basement standards of the Wall Street Journal, Bartlett’s column arguing that the GOP is the true party of civil rights, the theme of his new book Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. The childlike inanity of Bartlett’s attempt to pretend that the GOP is still the party of Lincoln, not the party of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott, brings out the best in some bloggers. Matt Yglesias points out that while the Republican Party had a great record on race in the 19th century, there’s been some water under the bridge since then. John Hobo decides that Bartlett is asking African-Americans to vote for long-dead candidates and takes it from there.

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Pioneering hip hop artist Grandmaster Flash has a book out: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats. Listen to him talk about it with Bat Segundo.

Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? was an expert demolition of the notion that the GOP is “the party of the people,” and a scathing examination of how conservatives have exploited stereotypes and distortions to get working-class people to vote against their own interests. Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, due out next month, carries this argument forward by showing that the damage wrought by conservative doctrine is not a matter of incompetence, but the logical, predictable outcome of conservative doctrines.

Shakesville has some spicy-hot excerpts, like this:

Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident; nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. [...] Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. [...] The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job.

In many ways, The Wrecking Crew sounds like a complementary work to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, just out in a new paperback edition. One of Klein’s themes is the penchant of conservatives to use disasters like the flooding of New Orleans to force their pet nostrums on the victimized populace. In this video clip, Klein shows this approach at work in the way wingers have used rising oil prices as an excuse to push for drilling in ecologically sensitive areas:

Klein will appear on Crooks & Liars this Wednesday, July 16, for a live chat.

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One of this year’s publishing success stories has been Vincent Bugliosi’s The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, which has been on the lower reaches of the NYT bestseller list despite a notable reluctance among mainstream venues to review or even take notice of it. The secret has been an under the radar promotion campaign using the Internet and extensive radio interviews. That and the fact that the book’s message — that Bush lied America into an unnecessary war and should be prosecuted for the damage he’s done to ths country – is howlingly obvious.

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Right up there with Vogon poetry, it’s the verse of Mao Zedong! How does it compare with the romance novels of Saddam Hussein? Or the love poetry of Josef Stalin? Or the hot bestiality of Lewis “Scooter” Libby? Or the sizzling falafel action of Bill O’Reilly? Do we have the makings of a readers’ circle here, or what?

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The New York Sun, a money-losing neocon rag, employs a jailbird to write a book review! Not only that — the jailbird is one of the paper’s backers! What will we tell the children?

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Bidding farewell to writer Thomas M. Disch.

Happy Fourth of July, everybody. For this Extended Weekend Edition of the Sunday Bookchat, we’re taking the words right out of the mouths of authors of new books that deserve the attention of lefty and progressive readers — and potential recovering wingers who have gotten tired of kindergarten claptrap from Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck and want to see what real books look like.

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Kerwin Swint, author of Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes:

He makes a big deal out of saying, “You don’t even know what my political views are,” and you’ll hear some people say that he’s really a businessman, and I think there’s some truth to that. But, he might not have started out in the 1960s as a conservative ideologue, but the people he has worked with, and the people he has come into close contact with, he’s bought into it. He’s well ensconced in the conservative movement and, in my opinion, a leader of the conservative movement. I think that he’s more conservative than some people might be willing to admit and certainly more conservative than he’s willing to admit.

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Ernest Freeberg, author of Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent:

The press defended its own right to operate without censorship, but most editors were also eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the war [World War I] and their loyalty to the government. They did this in part by bashing the radicals. It seems odd that these editors were so jealous of their own First Amendment rights, and so cavalier about the speech rights of others. But they held the common view that constitutional rights only belong to those who use them responsibly. In their view, the radicals wanted the right to say things that might, in the end, lose the war and even tip the country into a revolution that would overturn the Constitution.

And so they were happy to see Debs go to jail. The New York Times ridiculed Debs’s claim that he enjoyed a First Amendment right to speak his mind about the war, insisting that the government had a more important right to “defend itself against unbridled speech.” And the Washington Post called Debs a “a public menace” whose free speech claims were nothing more than “hairsplitting over the infringement of liberty.” My favorite, though, is the editor who called Debs a “treasonably-inclined blatherskite.”

The radicals were not surprised by any of this. Long before the war broke out, they had argued that the mainstream press was owned by, and operated for, the master class. Their critique of the impact of media monopoly on democratic debate was prescient.

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Paul Alexander, author Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove:

When Rove headed with Bush to Washington after winning the presidency in 2000, Rove had one overriding goal, which he would state publicly over the coming years: to set up what Rove termed “a permanent Republican majority.” “When Karl got to the White House,” Texas-based Republican strategists Mark Sanders told me, “he immediately started putting together a plan for what was essentially the Third Reich of Republican majority in this country. That was absolutely his plan, a Republican majority domination not just of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the presidency, but also state legislatures across the country. This was not just a pie-in-the-sky dream that Karl had. He wanted to see the Republican Party rule for the next 30 to 40 years.”

To do this, Rove needed the South to remain solidly Republican, and of looming concern was Don Siegelman—a popular, effective governor in Alabama, and a Democrat. It is not surprising, then, that Rove targeted Siegelman as someone who needed to be defeated and then driven from the political scene so he would not be able to reappear in the future to pose a threat.

“So all roads lead to Karl Rove, who wanted me out of the way,” Siegelman told me, “because I was a threat not only in Alabama but also on the national level. I was the first Democratic governor to endorse Al Gore. Heading toward 2004, I had spoken out at a Democratic Governors Association meeting against Bush’s policy in Iraq and his education and economic programs, and I was ready to take that message to key primary states.” To achieve this, Rove participated in a political prosecution of Siegelman that culminated with Siegelman going to prison which ended Siegleman’s political career—or so it appeared at the time.

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Peek in on the launch party for the Progressive Book Club. Reading the Freedom Writers gets a schoollteacher suspended. Ahmed Rashid talks about the new wave of Jihadis.

After the World Trade Center collapsed in an cloud of human smoke, people trying to make sense of things looked around for good information. Fortunately, they were able to find a previously obscure book called Taliban by Ahmed Rashid, an Asian journalist who had been covering all the major players in Afghanistan and the Middle East for years.

Rashid’s new book, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, is a scathing analysis of the bad faith, corruption, incompetence and unfathomable stupidity that have characterized virtually everything the Bush administration has done in the Middle East since the Boy Emperor used 9/11 as the pretext for invading Iraq. Rashid’s conclusions won’t be startling to any longtime critics of the war: he thinks the removal of resources from Afghanistan to Iraq was a mistake we’ll be paying for a long time after Bush scuttles out of the White House; he thinks Pakistan has played the U.S. like a violin; he thinks the invasion has fueled Islamic extremism, regardless of whatever short-term shifts take place in Iraq.

Rashid’s book is a dense read. He’s been reporting on this region for a long time, he is deeply versed in the issues at play, and he backs up his conclusions in nearly encyclopedic detail. Descent Into Chaos is not light reading, but reading it will shed necessary light.

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As we mark the one-week anniversary of the Democratic Party getting rolled on FISA and warrantless wiretapping,  Barry Siegel’s Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets, 1953 Supreme Court decision, United States vs. Reynolds, that became a cornerstone of legal doctrine on “states secret privilege” and the power of the executive branch to withhold information from individuals suing the government because it might endanger national security.

In this case, the lawsuit stemmed from the 1948 crash of an Air Force bomber over Georgia, which was secretly testing a long-range guided missile system. Nine of the 13 crewmen were killed, including three civilians. The widows of the dead civilians filed a negligence suit against the government and demanded to see witness statements and other government documents central to the case.

At first the government refused to turn over documents on the grounds that disclosure would hamper future investigations of aviation disasters. When that argument appeared doomed, the government shifted gears and claimed the documents contained national security secrets. This ploy received the Supreme Court’s approval, and the widows, unable to pursue their case, settled for peanuts.

This L.A. Times reviewer notes:

As Siegel reveals — and this is no shock to the cynics among us — the privilege claim was based on a lie. The suppressed documents, which were declassified in 1996, did not reveal anything about the guided missile program or contain any other national security secrets. Rather, they added to the considerable public information showing the tendency of B-29 engines to catch fire and revealed that the Air Force had failed to install heat shields on the engines of the plane that went down, despite a maintenance order calling for this retrofit. The reports also suggested some potential missteps by the crew after an engine fire put the flight in jeopardy.

In short, the Department of Justice asked the courts and the nation to trust it precisely when it deserved no trust at all. And in a political context heavy with the fear of Soviet spy schemes and international threats, the Supreme Court acquiesced, setting aside the skepticism of the lower court judges closest to the facts of the case.

Claims of executive privilege are one of the Bush administration’s calling cards. With this case, the idea of executive privilege can be shown to trace an unbroken, nearly 50-year-long line of bad faith.

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Gus Russo, your go-to guy for the latest dirt on organized crime in America, takes his tommy gun to The Road to Dallas, a book that purports to offer fresh insight into the assassination of John F. Kennedy but ends up being, to Russo’s disgust, a rehash of tired conspiracy theories, with a heavy overlay of Oliver Stone-style hocus pocus. “Political myths are potent things,” Russo writes, “and The Road to Dallas stands as a sobering reminder of how they can work to distort the course of open-minded research and good-faith debate.”

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Douglas A. Blackmon digs deep into original documents and personal narratives in his new book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. As with the recent books Redemption and The Bloody Shirt, Slavery by Another Name reminds us that the Civil War did not spell the end of slavery in America, and that the interruption of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the defeated Confederacy simply paved the way for what blackmon calls “neo-slavery,” a sinister web of restrictive laws and economic practices designed to keep blacks in servitude. Blackmon’s detailed Web site for the book is loaded with disturbing images and facts, and his blog tracks the book’s reception.

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Eric Alterman says this new, much-hyped book about the Cuban missile crisis is loaded with bunk, and that goes double for the NYTBR review that has launched it to success. And here’s a new biography of the emperor who tried to stop Christianity.

The Progressive Book Club has been launched, and the June selection is The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse. It’s a great idea for a book club, and we wish it all success, but there’s no doubt the Progressive Book Club will be fighting an uphill battle. Book clubs are, after all, losing their customer base. The Conservative Book Club is a poor comparison because conservative books are lifestyle accessories meant to be displayed, not read. You don’t think people actually read Liberal Fascism or An Inconvenient Book, do you? Those tomes exist to be placed on coffee tables in bunkers. Liberal books are meant to be read and thought about. Original thinking is so scarce in conservative circles, every wingnut book is simply an exercise in foregone conclusions.

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Are we living in Nixonland or Reaganland? Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, and Sean Wilentz, author of The Age of Reagan, thrash it out.

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Fred Smoler of Dissent reviews a mixed bag of books about the complicated moral implications of the rise of privatized military firms, or PMFs.

Though Blackwater, the PMF that is the Bush adminsitration’s BFF in Iraq, has been accused of numerous abuses, other PMFs have been used effectively to halt anarchy on the ground and restore stability to civil war zones. Peter Singer’s Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry recounts at least two instances in which PMFs were the saviors of people in desperate trouble:

Corporate Warriors opens with two anecdotes, the second concerning the Croatian 1995 offensive Operation Storm, which began the sequence of events that broke Serbian military power in what had been Yugoslavia and within a few weeks stopped the carnage in Bosnia, reversing the balance of power on the ground and bringing the wars to an abrupt and relatively just end. American air strikes on Serbian forces also played a significant role in ending Serbian aggression, but the Croatian offensive is generally acknowledged to have been the more important factor. Operation Storm seems to have been planned by Military Professional Resources Incorporated, a PMF based in Alexandria, Virginia. The company’s success in planning a devastating combined-arms offensive is by no means astonishing, given that its twenty-three founders had between them more than seven hundred years of military experience . . . Singer’s first anecdote, also set in 1995, is at least as interesting, and if you are prone to assume that PMFs are always a bad thing, a bit disorienting, for he recounts the swiftness with which truly ghastly anarchy in Sierra Leone was brought to an end when the Revolutionary United Front was turned back from Freetown by a South African-based PMF called Executive Outcomes. For Scahill, who also knows this story, the apartheid-era origins of Executive Outcomes’ personnel seem sufficient to damn the firm; for Singer, the end of the horrific reign of the child soldiers, the first free elections in twenty-three years, and the creation of a democratic government at least complicate the lessons. Sierra Leone’s democratic government did not in fact survive (nor, in the long run, did Executive Outcomes), but the former perished in large part because it thought it could do without the services of a PMF, instead placing its trust in UN and African peacekeepers, and Executive Outcomes, although officially dissolved, has spawned some very effective successors.

Of the books under review, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Nation writer Jeremy Scahill, comes off the worst. On the credit side, the reviewer acknowledges that Scahill has done much valuable spadework in exposing the rather disturbing worldview of the tops executives at Blackwater, which has received $700 million in contracts form the State Department since 2003. On the debit side, Scahill is entirely too credulous in reporting alleged atrocities by American soldiers and mercenaries — so credulous, Smoler says, that the reader becomes reluctant to take his reporting at face value.

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Using Philip Roth’s new novel to pick up girls. A history of the drug Ecstasy that may be even more fun than taking the stuff.

It’s hardly a secret that we are currently ruled by people whom a tapeworm would consider beneath contempt, but Paul Alexander’s new book, Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove, promises to be the deepest look yet into the American “Heart of Darkness” that is the Bush administration.

Rove has already been the subject of studies like Bush’s Brain, but judging from the excerpt that ran in Salon this past week, Alexander’s book will advance the story considerably. Read Alexander’s account of the drowning of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the way Rove and the Bushies used the catastrophe to stage political theater:

On Thursday, as New Orleans remained underwater, with countless thousands of people stranded in their homes, on their rooftops, or at the Convention Center or Superdome, there was still no federal help. What continued unabated, though, was the assault on [Louisiana governor Kathleen] Blanco, questioning her handling of the disaster. “We were in life-and-death mode and every minute counted,” Blanco says. “I found my staff having to do public relations in the middle of the most disastrous days Louisiana has ever experienced. The talking heads had been turned on. My staff was saying, ‘My God, governor, they are crucifying you politically.’ I finally pulled all of my staff together and said, ‘We are wasting our energy. We do not have a stable of talking heads. We cannot control the national media. We have lifesaving missions to accomplish, so let’s do it.’ My staff was upset with me.”

Blanco sought out Michael Chertoff. She found him in one of the emergency headquarters trailers. “Turn off the talking heads,” she told him point-blank. “People are dying while you people are playing politics. Turn them off.” It was Thursday, and so far the FEMA buses had still not arrived to help evacuate people from the Convention Center and Superdome, nor had Bush sent any federal troops, who were desperately needed in the search-and-rescue efforts. Instead of sending help, the administration had come up with a ploy. “I was on a conference call with the White House,” Adam Sharp says, “where they were saying: If you want any help, you have to turn over all control of your state to the president. We won’t help until you give us control of your National Guard and your law enforcement agencies, until Louisiana becomes a federal territory. They were using this as the excuse for their delaying on the issues. They kept trying to put it on Blanco. But no governor would ever give control of her state to the president.”

Bush and Rove pressured Blanco to give the federal government control over the Louisiana National Guard. Realizing that Bush and Rove wanted this done in order to paint the Louisiana government as a bunch of corrupt clowns who had to be bailed out by the feds, Blanco refused.

Not only did Blanco refuse to sign, she gave Bush a two-page letter detailing everything the state needed to cope with the disaster — troops, buses, supplies, money, and more. It would not be until several days later, when Blanco’s aides released the letter to the press and got frantic phone calls from Rove’s aide Maggie Grant, that it became clear that Bush had taken the letter Blanco had personally handed to him — and lost it.

Yep, that’s right — Bush lost the letter detailing what the state of Louisiana needed to help one of America’s major cities recover from a disaster.

After days of political game-playing, the feds finally allowed the Army Corps of Engineers to begin repair work on the 17th Street Canal. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu went along for the photo ops and the speeches at the work site, reasoning that at least the president had finally gotten the ball rolling. The next day, she heard from TV squawker George Stephanopoulos, who wanted an interview.

“Then, on Saturday,” Landrieu says, “George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, ‘George, I’m tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what’s going on down here.’ He wanted to go to the Superdome, and I said, ‘We still have people stranded on their roofs. If you want to tell the right story, I will help you tell the right story. You get a helicopter and I’ll go up and I will show you what is actually happening. It’s awful what’s happening at the Superdome, but the reason the people can’t understand the story is because the entire region is under 20 feet of water. People can’t get into the Superdome to help. They can’t get out. People are drowning in their homes.’

“So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, ‘George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can’t send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.’ So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there — people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it.” There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.

“I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I’ve been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life.”

If a Democrat were trying to rescue children from a burning building, George W. Bush would refuse to help or even call the fire department until the Democrat had signed over his credit cards, his bank account and his Social Security number. Then Bush would call FoxNews for a photo op, posing with an unconnected hose, and leave the building in flames while Karl Rove issued a statement calling the Democrat a baby-burner.

Bush sycophants are forever praising their boy for his moral clarity, his unfashionable willingness to call good and evil for what they are. Which word, do you think, should be applied to a president who allows the destruction of a city, then jockeys for political benefits from the disaster?

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Congratulations to Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, whose rollicking book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire is scaling the NYT bestseller list. Check out the chat he just gave at the Firedoglake Book Salon.

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Get out your walking shoes! Bloomsday is almost here!

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John McCain is a man of many facets: Vietnam veteran, senator, presidential candidate. And now, thanks to the Cunning Realist, we can add another item to the McCain CV: book blurber. Actually, it’s eve better than that: McCain wrote an introduction to an edition of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s 1972 study of the way the Kennedy and Johnson administrations drew America deeper and deeper into the Vietnam disaster with “brilliant policies that defied common sense.” McCain, a victim of those policies in that he was sent to fight in a war even its architects knew was futile, had this to say about the book:

It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.

My goodness! He sounds like John Kerry! What will we tell the children?

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While performing fleas like David Horowitz try to undermine academic freedom by painting universities as left-wing re-education camps, a far more damaging assault has been going on behind the scenes: the growing corporate culture on America’s campuses, undermining the humanities and the tradition of tenure. Frank Donoghue discusses the McDonaldization of academe in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, and in this interview with Inside Higher Ed, he talks about what he calls the “casualization” of teaching through the hiring of adjuncts instead of tenure-track professors:

The liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, suffer the most because they lack any connection to sources of funding outside the university. Humanists typically don’t do consulting work, they don’t compete for large corporate or government grants, they don’t have the option of working in the private sector (and thus insisting that universities pay a competitive wage). These factors conspire to put humanists in a bad bargaining position: We depend entirely on our home institutions not only to pay us a fair salary but to determine both the kinds of work and the amount of work we have to do (publishing, teaching, service, outreach) in order to earn that salary.

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It’s become something of a cliche to say that it’s easier to have a rational political discussion about Israel in Israel rather than the United States, but this article about “revisionist” historians of Israel shows how true that statement is. It also points up the benefits that accrused from a spate of books, keyed to Israel’s 40th anniversary, that upended the spotlessly heroic Leon Uris view of the Israelis as blameless settlers surrounded by ravening, blood-crazed Arabs:

The new history had a significant impact on a number of different levels. First, it influenced the way the subject is taught in Israeli schools. Textbooks were rewritten to incorporate some of the findings of the new historians. Students were exposed to different and conflicting interpretations of the birth of Israel.

Second, the new history helped Israelis to understand how the Arabs view them and the conflict. Third, to Arabs the new history was in line with their own experience instead of the one-sided account of the victors. And finally, the new history helped to create a climate, on both sides, in which the Oslo peace process could move forward in the early 1990s.

Palestinian negotiators at the Camp David summit hosted by Bill Clinton in July 2000, and in the bilateral talks held in Taba in the Gulf of Aqaba early the following year, referred to the work of the new historians, especially Benny Morris, in trying to establish Israel’s share of responsibility for the plight of the 1948 refugees.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former professor of history at Tel Aviv University, was Israel’s foreign minister at the time of these negotiations. He says, “the new historians definitely helped in consolidating the Palestinians’ conviction as to the validity of their own narrative… the Israeli peacemakers also came to the negotiating table with perspectives that were shaped by recent research… But the introduction of new and powerful arguments on the 1948 war into the public debate in Israel became part of the intellectual baggage of many of us, whether we admitted it or not.” In short, it was a history that made a difference.

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Eliot Asinof, the tough old bird who wrote Eight Men Out, the classic account of the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, is dead at age 88.

Time and again, the Bush administration has shown that its interest in and concern for America’s military personnel ends the moment a photo-op is concluded. Jim Sheeler’s Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (based on Sheeler’s Pulitzer-winning reporting for the Rocky Mountain News) is an unblinking look at the soldiers who have died in Bush’s war and the wrenching sorrow of their families and friends.

One of the book’s many fine qualities is the way it removes the cloak of invisibility the Bushies have thrown over the human cost of their Iraq war fantasies:

While “Final Salute” is not a muckraking book, it is still quietly horrifying. It bears witness to the ways in which casualties from Iraq are shielded from sight. Mr. Sheeler’s readers may not have realized, for instance, that dead soldiers’ coffins have been hidden in cardboard boxes (ostensibly to protect the coffins), toted by forklifts and stowed in the cargo holds of passenger planes.

Among the eloquent Rocky Mountain News photographs included here is a shocking image — by Todd Heisler, now of The New York Times — of commercial airline passengers looking out plane windows at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, trying to see what is happening beneath them. Down there, in the cargo hold, a Marine honor guard is preparing to deliver the flag-draped coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to its final resting place.

Since Mr. Sheeler followed the individual stories of several military men and their families (no dead female soldiers are included in the book), “Final Salute” seemingly qualifies as an extended human-interest story. To some extent that’s what it is, if human interest includes the pain and frustration of surviving the death of a loved one (or breadwinner) in battle. But the book is given tighter focus by the man whom Mr. Sheeler treats as a central figure: Maj. Steve Beck, a marine who specializes in helping the bereaved. When Major Beck became a marine, he had never heard the term “casualty assistance calls officer.” Now he knows exactly what it means. And Mr. Sheeler’s readers will too.

Remember when Dick Cheney, asked what he thought about the death toll exacted from American soldiers in Iraq, shrugged it off by saying “they volunteered”? If Cheney ever says that again, he should be slapped in the mouth with this book.

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Harlan Ellison, the larger than life author, critic, political activist and litigious slayer of Hollywood Goliaths, is the subject of a new documentary, Dreams With Sharp Teeth, now in a limited New York run. Meanwhile, online publisher E-Reads has secured the rights to offer 32 out-of-print Ellison titles as e-books or print-on-demand trade paperbacks. Among the titles are such classics as Strange Wine, Deathbird Stories, Ellison Wonderland and Shatterday.

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Nick Taylor wants to rescue the Works Progress Administration (and the New Deal) from the mists of the past and the distortions of conservative critics. Philip Bobbitt wants to rescue the war on terror from the Bushies. Arianna Huffington’s book Right Is Wrong will be the discussion topic this week at the TPMCafe Book Salon.

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Elizabeth Drew reviews Jim Webb’s A Time to Fight and finds its author to be a complex, deeply interesting man whose views do not dovetail neatly with liberals and progressives, but who overlaps with them sufficiently to make him one of the more intriguing politiicans in Washington. Besides, he knows how to deal with frauds and clowns:

So Jim Webb arrived to the Senate with a reputation for being unpredictable, even a little weird, a little bit out of control, a little hotheaded. The sense in Washington that he was—well—different was enhanced by his famous first encounter with President Bush after the election, when at a November White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Webb refused to shake Bush’s hand. Bush then sought Webb out and asked him about his son, who was serving in Iraq, “How’s your boy?” and Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.” “That isn’t what I asked,” Bush snapped. “How’s your boy?” Webb responded, “That’s between me and my son, Mr. President.”

In A Time to Fight, he explains that what some criticized as impertinence was a result of his disgust over the nasty Republican campaign against him, which, he said, “fell into the predictable hog trough of Karl Rovian negativity.” Webb was particularly outraged by the Allen campaign’s attacks on his writing as “pornographic” and the work of a “pedophile.” As in the case with John Kerry, in not shaking Bush’s hand Webb was following his own code of honor. When Webb’s son returned from Iraq, he asked for a meeting of the two of them with Bush, and the matter was smoothed over. Webb was learning to soften his edges.

Not too much, I hope.

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Can you guess which science fiction author is one of the Library of America’s biggest sellers? Can you guess which Israeli writer has a knack for pissing off Israelis? Can you guess the source of over 90 percent of the books published since 1972 that dispute mainstream environmental science?

The most interesting thing about What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, the new memoir from former White House spokesweasel Scott McClellan, is that the reactions it provokes are far more interesting than the book itself. For one thing, for all the talk about Republicans distancing themselves from Bush, the reaction to McClellan’s “revelations” — which hardly merit the term — have been fully in keeping with the usual GOP defense cordon around He Who Must Not Be Blamed: check out this emission from Bob Dole and repent of any time you considered him a man of integrity. TV newsies Katie Couric and Jessica Yellin admitted in public that they’d been under corporate pressure to present the war in the most glowing Greatest Generation terms.

Karen G., filling for in Matt Yglesias, tries to find some nice things to say:

I think McClellan deserves quite a bit of credit for going public with this, even at this late date. Writing this kind of book could not have been easy for him. He has undoubtedly lost friends. Many of his former colleagues will never speak to him again. If he’d written the kind of anodyne snoozer that Ari Fleischer did, then surely he’d be set for life on the wingnut welfare circuit. But now? Well, let’s just say he’ll never eat lunch in that town again. And it’s not like the liberals are eager to embrace him with open arms, either.

But in coming clean, the man has performed a public service. Unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of those freaks, McClellan, for all his deep moral deficiencies, is not a sociopath. And yeah, that’s defining deviancy down, for sure. But at least it’s something. McClellan seems to feel genuine regret at what he did, and that’s more than I thought we’d ever get out of any of the Bushies.

Sorry, Karen, but this doesn’t wash. In the contest of viewpoints between bloggers whose names end in a single letter, I’ll go with Tim F:

Without a doubt the most annoying aspect of this firestorm is the way that it validates a criticism that Atrios makes of the media all the time. We had credible people arguing these same points back when airing them might have made a difference, but somehow they never made onto the Sunday opinion shows or got credible treatment by the major news broadcasts. The few journalists who did their job were either ignored like McClatchy or fired like Donahue. The evidence wasn’t exactly hidden – guys like Eric Alterman had it in book form while McClellan was still spreading what he now calls propaganda and bullshit. Yet somehow the range of acceptable opinion in the major media stretched from Joe Lieberman to George Bush. Ideas that everybody takes for granted now – that the WMD argument was poorly founded or invading Iraq unprovoked and occupying it indefinitely might have strategic risks – were considered laughably ‘unserious.’ It often seemed like an idea wasn’t worth taking seriously until someone in the administration brought it up.

This latest brouhaha reinforces that point. Scott McClellan wasn’t a very bright or important guy when he served the president, and he isn’t very bright or important now. Yet in the same way that we still call Jimmy Carter ‘President’ McClellan is still a Bushie. Thus, now the press has permission to talk about being willingly led around by power-drunk morons.

Meanwhile, would somebody like to untangle all the knots Peggy Noonan manages to work into a mere three sentences while talking about the book:

The left, while embracing the book’s central assertions, will paint him as a weasel who belatedly ‘fessed up. They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive.

I mean, what the hell is Nooners trying to say? The Right’s been sticking to its message on Iraq with zombielike discipline while the Left has been clamoring for investigations, but the Left is big on the code of silence? Have years and decades of bought-and-paid-for ideological babbling left this gnat-brained parody of a pundit unable to write a simple, comprehensible English sentence?

Whatever, Peggy. What the fuck ever.

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Three books attempt to derail the Straight-Talk Express by asking, Who is the real John McCain? Michael Tomasky finds a common thread in their answers:

But each of the three—all follow the same basic template of critically reassessing the stages of McCain’s career—makes persuasive arguments that while there has been much to respect in McCain in the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man; that in doing what he had to do to become the nominee of a party of orthodox conservatism, he has so sublimated his honorable instincts that they have all but atrophied. He’s not only adopted domestic policy positions he’d long opposed, he has openly pandered to the conservative Republican base by supporting most of Bush’s positions in legislation on the treatment of detainees.

It’s often said of Hollywood that “There’s no there, there.” That appears to go double for John McCain.

We observe Memorial Day in this week’s Sunday Bookchat by highlighting Andrei Cherny’s The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour, which will be the discussion topic for the week of June 2 at the TPM Cafe Book Club. Calling this an “untold story” is pure hype: the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949 is an oft-told story — Jon Sutherland’s The Berlin Airlift: The Salvation of a City was published only a few months ago — but Cherny is right about it being America’s finest hour.

In a nutshell: after the defeat of Germany in World War II, the capital city of Berlin was divided into occupation zones separately controlled by the U.S., France, the U.K. and the Soviet Union. Germany itself was similarly divided, but Berlin lay deep within the eastern section of the country and was surrounded by the Soviet occupation zone, though the Soviets had agreed to permit highway and rail access through their territory. Already suspicious of the U.S.-led Marshall Plan to restore the war-shattered European economy, and at odds with its former allies on the fate of postwar Germany, the Soviets made a series of moves in June 1948 that left West Berlin isolated from the Allied-controlled sectors. With only about a month of coal and food supplies on hand for civilians and soldiers, America and Britain conducted a joint airlift into the city that staved off disaster and boosted America’s moral standing around the world.

The book’s title refers to “Operation Little Vittles,” started by airlift pilot Gail Halvorsen, who began dropping candy bars and chewing gum to Berlin children. Other pilots joined in, and American candy companies began donating sweets to the project. Because he always bobbled his wings as a signal that he was about to drop candy, Halvorsen became known as “Uncle Wiggly-Wings” to the children of Berlin.

The airlift reached its peak with the April 1949 “Easter Parade” in which a continuous stream of landings brought thousands of tons of coal into the city. The Easter Parade was the last straw for the Soviets, for whom the airlift was a daily humiliation, and they lifted their blockade a month later.

Since Bush sycophants and conservatives are determined to appropriate World War II imagery to sanctify their disgusting and contemptible venture in Iraq, let them contemplate the story of the Berlin Airlift and consider how much of America’s moral capital has been squandered over the last few years. To go from Uncle Wiggly WIngs to “Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas” is a very steep drop indeed, and a marker of just how badly the Bush administration has soiled America’s good name.

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It was only to be expected that Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson, would turn his attention to George W. Bush. And, doing so, he asks: Why do so many people think impeachment is the proper response to Bush’s crimes and corruption?

Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about the belief of many that George Bush lied to the American public in starting his war with Iraq is that the liberal columnists who have accused him of doing this merely make this point, and then go on to the next paragraph in their columns. Only very infrequently does a columnist add that because of it Bush should be impeached. If the charges are true, of course Bush should have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. That’s almost too self-evident to state. But he deserves much more than impeachment. I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe. That’s just common sense. If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he’d still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths?* For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did.

As to what Bugliosi would do, take note that the title of his upcoming book is The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Anybody out there ready to make this dream a reality?

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With so many conservatives trying to distance themselves from King George II and his glittering record of disaster, it’s good for J. Peter Scoblic to remind us — as he does in his new book U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security — that Bush’s foreign policy failures are grounded in the very foundations of conservative thought.

Actually, “thought” isn’t the appropriate word here. As this NYTBR writer explains:

Cast adrift after the cold war, conservatives seized upon the 9/11 attacks to craft a new “them”: Iraq, Iran and North Korea, sponsors of the formless evil of terrorism. The Bush administration ached for a world where America could guarantee its own safety without the messiness of alliances, diplomacy and compromise, a dream that appealed to both the newfangled unilateralism of neoconservatives and the old-fashioned nationalism of paleoconservatives.

And though all three countries epitomized for conservatives the futility of trying to negotiate with or contain evil regimes, only Iraq offered the tantalizing promise of a quick, satisfying and demonstrative military victory. “Iraq,” Scoblic writes, “was the most invadable member of the axis of evil.”

Along with its analysis of Bush foreign policy, “U.S. vs. Them” doubles as an incisive intellectual history of conservatism. Scoblic briskly traces the movement’s evolution from pre-World War II isolationism to the active anti-Communism propounded by William F. Buckley. He provides a useful corrective to the conservative myths about Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. Reagan was a staunch anti-Communist and pursued a military buildup against the Soviet Union, Scoblic notes. But most pivotal was Reagan’s decision to overrule conservatives in his own administration and negotiate historic weapons reductions with the Kremlin, paving the way for an end to the cold war arms race.

The recent childish attacks on Barack Obama for saying he would talk with Iran and other antagonistic countries show that the conservative learning curve is shallower than ever when it comes to foreign policy.

When neocon warwhore William Kristol suggested that the New York Times be charged with treason for exposing some bit of Bush administration malfeasance, he was making himself part of a long, dishonorable line of scoundrels. Maybe he was just feeling nostalgic for the days when Eugene V. Debs (above), the firebrand Socialist leader and political candidate, was thrown into prison and his stripped of his right to vote in 1920 for the crime of criticizing the draft and America’s involvement in World War I.

That blot on America (in this case, I mean the jailing of Debs, not Kristol) is the subject of Ernest Freeberg’s new book Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. As Freeberg points out, the uproar over the Debs case created a national coalition of labor leaders, writers and political activists that eventually gave rise to the American Civil Liberties Union. Read some of the rhetoric directed against Debs by the government and war-supporters, then compare it with the slime still being hurled at critics of the Iraq calamity, and you might feel a little chill of recognition.

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You say you don’t want to waste your time reading David Horowitz’s nonsensical wingnut books? That’s okay – turns out Horowitz himself doesn’t want to waste his time writing them.

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If you’re a parent of a young child, you’re probably having a hard time explaining the Bush administration to your kids. Fortunately, there is now a children’s book, Young Dick Cheney: Great American, will help you enlighten your kids on the origins of the biggest snake in the Bush herpetarium. The authors will be speaking to all comers June 15 at the Firedoglake Book Salon.

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In reviewing Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, George F. Will churns the old culture war buttermill while claiming that the culture wars begun in the Nixon era no longer exist. “Today a woman and an African-American are competing relatively civilly for the right to run for president against the center-right — more center than right — senator who occupies the seat once held by Goldwater,” Will sniffs. “Whoever wins will not be president of Nixonland.” As if Will’s fellow travelers on the Great Wingnut Way haven’t been doing their best to paint Barack Obama as a Sixties-style black nationalist, or Hillary as a bra-burning feminist who will sap America’s manhood!

Will himself fluffs up a bit of Vietnam resentment by taking Perlstein’s dismissal of the South Vietnamese Army: “Calling South Vietnam’s army ‘a joke’ is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade.” For anyone who remembers the way the ARVN turned tail and ran, trampling civilians in their haste to get out of the country, as soon as American support was withdrawn may just conclude that Perlstein was being too kind.

But Will knows the old knife-in-the-back myth remains as potent as ever on the right, and by evoking it during the course of his review, he scores a winger hat trick: he subtly links Perlstein to those legendary hippies who disdained and slandered the military during the Vietnam War, he distorts the nature of the corruption-sodden South Vietnamese regime, and he provides a talking point that the likes of Sean Hannity can use to dismiss Nixonland, to the extent that they notice it at all. That might seem like a lot of manure to stuff into a single sentence, but where there’s a Will, there’s a way.

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Larry Bartels will be talking up his new book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age at the TPM Cafe Book Club.