This Means Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton are Truthers

The Right Blogosphere is in a feeding frenzy after someone discovered that White House “green jobs” consultant Van Jones signed a “truther” statement in 2004. As I pointed out in the last post, the “truther” statement in question is not as insane as most truther statements are, so I’m not too concerned about it.

But now rightie blogger Gateway Pundit believes he found damning evidence that Van Jones was part of the Truther movement in its infancy. This is in the form of a document at Rense.com dated September 2, 2002, that announces a march in San Fransisco calling for a congressional inquiry into September 11. You know, like the 9/11 Commission that victims’ widows like Kristen Breitweiser had to fight the White House tooth and nail to get started.

People forget that in those days there were moderate elements of what came to be called the “truther” movement. These were not the hard core who insist 9/11 was an “inside job” and the WTC towers came down by controlled detonation. Rather, these were people who felt that what media had written about 9/11 didn’t add up, and believed the Bush White House was at least guilty of gross negligence for ignoring warnings about a terrorist attack.

In 2001 and 2002 the moderate truthers and the 9/11 families calling for a congressional commission were working together loosely and dragging around the same or a similar set of questions they wanted answered. Some of these questions eventually were passed on to and addressed by the 9/11 Commission.

If pushing for a 9/11 Commission makes someone a Truther, then I argue 9/11 Commission Chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton must be Super Truthers.

If it turns out that Jones really does believe 9/11 was an “inside job,” then I’d be among the first to question his judgment. But so far I’m not seeing that.

Update: Although there was talk of an “inside job” on 9/11 almost immediately after the attacks, if I can believe my own archives, the Truther “inside jobers” didn’t completely swamp the “truth commission” movement until 2006. I had thought it was earlier than that, but maybe not.

Update: Chris Good reports, “This morning, ABC’s Jake Tapper reported that Jones was on the “organizing committee” of a 2002 march in San Francisco demanding a congressional inquiry into 9/11.” Wow, a congressional inquiry into 9/11. How shocking. Not. Am I the only one who remembers how people had to fight to get the White House to agree to the 9/11 Commission?

Watch Out for Those Czars

Speaking of the ghost of Joe McCarthy (see previous post), Joe Klein writes,

I was at a Blanche Lincoln town hall meeting in Russellville, Arkansas, yesterday–and the number of people who believe that the President has larded the government with communists (!) was astonishing. One woman said there were four known communists in the government and that she’d researched it on the internet. When I asked her afterwards, she said environmental adviser Van Jones, legal advisor Cass Sunstein (who was last spotted being excoriated by the left for supporting the FISA revisions), someone named Lloyd and she didn’t remember the fourth. And wasn’t it suspicious that Obama had all these czars working for him–that was a Russkie commie term, wasn’t it? When I asked, the woman admitted that, among other things, she occasionally listened to William Bennett’s conservative radio show. I pointed out that Bennett had once been the Drug Czar, appointed by Ronald Reagan. Life sure can be complicated sometimes.

I love the czar story.

Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary…and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal–rushing us toward a tragedy far greater than the California health care forum finger-biting Karen describes below.

Considering that for the past few years Klein willingly helped dismantle the brakes — thanks for starting to catch on, Joe.

Also, right now the righties are going ballistic because White House green jobs adviser Van Jones signed a “truther” statement in 2004. You know I have no patience for truthers, but the statement being linked to that Jones signed is not as full-out crazy as truthers usually get.

It does not say that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the World Trade Center towers collapsed from a secret planned demolition, or that the airplanes that struck the towers were holograms timed to cover up the detonation of explosives planted in the towers, or that the New York Fire Department was in on the conspiracy to destroy Tower 7. No; this is how it starts out —

An alliance of 100 prominent Americans and 40 family members of those killed on 9/11 today announced the release of the 911 Truth Statement, a call for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. The Statement supports an August 31st Zogby poll that found nearly 50% of New Yorkers believe the government had foreknowledge and “consciously failed to act,” with 66% wanting a new 9/11 investigation.

Read the whole thing; it’s “out there” but not utterly lunatic.

We know that before 9/11 there were all manner of warnings of an impending terrorist attack hurled at the Bushies by foreign governments and by our own intelligence operatives. It is a plain fact that the government DID have some foreknowledge of the attacks and “consciously failed to act.”

Now, I do not believe they had specific, detailed knowledge of what was planned. Bush was too obviously caught flat-footed by the attacks; if he’d been prepared, he would have had a fake bravado act ready on Day One. As it was, it took him at least three days to pull one together. But there were warnings up the wazoo that a terrorist attack was impending, and it was understood by some in U.S. intelligence that such an attack could involve hijacked airplanes. This, again, is plain fact. Another president — a competent one — would have been busting chops, as they say in New York, and telling NORAD and the FAA and everybody else to step up and stay alert.

But the Bushies did nothing. I personally think they failed to act because the entire White House national security team, plus the President and Vice President, had their heads shoved up their asses. Subsequent behavior by the Bushie team (e.g., the response to Katrina) revealed the lot of them to be world class heads-up-ass shovers. So it could be debated they did not consciously fail to act; but rather failed to act because they were largely unconscious to anything not on their political agenda to-do list.

However, although I think it’s unlikely, I have never ruled out the possibility that the Bushies acted out of a deliberate calculation that a terrorist attack would be politically useful. (Again, what might be called the Bushies’ second-wave response to Katrina was a political calculation to make Louisiana Govenor Blanco look bad. And this political calculation probably cost some people their lives.) If this was the case with 9/11 we’ll never know, but if it was, I doubt they imagined the attack would be anywhere near as massive as it was.

So I don’t find the 2004 truther statement particularly shocking. There was a time I might have signed it myself, and I genuinely dislike truthers.

However, how come it’s OK for Republicans to throw a screaming fit because someone questioned Dear Leader Bush, but it’s OK for the Right to step up to the line of inciting violence against President Obama every time the man so much as blows his nose?

Update: Steve Benen writes,

It’s possible that Arkansas is just uniquely strange right now.

The entire Ozark Mountain region is uniquely strange, and always has been. I have first-hand knowledge of this.

The crazies have a political party, a cable news network, and a loud, activist base. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take their medications anymore.

Today’s quote, I’d say.

A Core Threat to Democracy

A Famous Pundit said:

Have you noticed that we’ve moved from the age of the culture wars to the age of the presidency wars? Have you noticed that the furious arguments we used to have about cultural and social issues have been displaced by furious arguments about the current occupant of the Oval Office?

It’s obvious that, for the Right, the health care debate is not about the health care debate. It is about the eternal Zoroastrian struggle between Good and Evil.

The Right’s new pop culture hero is William Rice, who yesterday lost part of a finger to the Cause. The takeaway line from an interview with Neil Cavuto was “freedom is not free.”

And there is no free lunch, all roads lead to Rome, and the the first rule of Fight Club is–you do not talk about Fight Club. These are all equally rational explanations of why Rice was compelled to throw two punches at another man who allegedly called him an “idiot.”

Rice continued, “I think health care is how we are being diverted while the government grabs what’s left of our freedom away from us.” This was a few hours after Rice relied on Medicare for treatment of his injured hand because, he admits, he had no other options.

Meanwhile, the President of the United States announces he will give America’s schoolchildren a back-to-school pep talk about the importance of doing well in school, and the Right goes bat-bleeping postal and screams about “indoctrination.” School districts in six states are refusing to show the message. Joan Walsh reports, “Crazy Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin are raging against ‘indoctrination’ while Townhall’s Meredith Jessup is calling it ‘a massive abuse of government power.'”

Presidents have made similar addresses to schoolchildren in the past, notably Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Walsh also reminds us that in one of his speeches George W. Bush called on the nation’s children to help him win the war on terror, and no one complained about that. But when President Obama wants to tell children to do well in school, it’s “indoctrination” and “a massive abuse of government power.”

And you have to ask, in what universe would that be true? And the answer is, a universe in which the POTUS was not legitimately elected, but instead was installed in the White House by means of a coup d’état backed by evil foreign powers. Thus, William Rice actually fancies himself to be some kind of freedom fighter for trying to block health care reform.

And, yes, racism is a component in this, but I don’t think it’s the only component. A President Hillary Clinton would be getting equally hysterical pushback every time she so much as brushed her teeth. A white male Democratic president would be getting the Bill Clinton treatment. In this case, however, the President’s race makes the manipulators’ job a bit easier.

Famous Pundit continues,

The fundamental argument in the presidency wars is not that the president is wrong, or is driven by a misguided ideology. … The fundamental argument now is that he is illegitimate. He is so ruthless, dishonest and corrupt, he undermines the very rules of civilized society.

To the warrior, politics is no longer a clash of value systems, each of which is in some way valid. It’s not a competition between basically well-intentioned people who see the world differently. …

The warriors have one other feature: ignorance. They have as much firsthand knowledge of their enemies as members of the K.K.K. had of the N.A.A.C.P. In fact, most people in the last two administrations were well-intentioned patriots doing the best they could. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it’s the haters themselves.

Famous Pundit, btw, is our old friend David Brooks, from 2003. He was reacting to a piece by Jonathan Chait in the New Republic called “The Case For Bush Hatred: Mad About You.” Here is the rhetoric Brooks singled out as the “core threat to democracy”:

“I hate President George W. Bush,” Jonathan Chait writes in a candid piece in The New Republic. “He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school ? the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks. . . . I hate the way he talks. . . . I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.”

If you read Chait’s piece, it’s actually a fairly balanced acknowledgment that some on the Left were allowing hatred of Bush to override their judgment. But he went on to express, candidly and reasonably accurately, what Bush and the Bush Administration represented to us lefties in 2003.

However, at no point did Chait call for taking action to make the Bush Administration fail. Merely expressing hatred of Dear Leader was a “core threat to democracy.”

Frankly, I don’t give a bleep if William Rice or Neil Cavuto or Michelle Malkin or anyone else hates Barack Obama, for whatever reason. If that’s how they feel, that’s how they feel. And I don’t mind if they write nationally published columns saying how much they hate Barack Obama. It’s called “free speech.” Democracy has taken bigger blows and survived.

However, today a large number of media and political elites are sending big, honking signals to the William Rice’s of America that the President of the United States is an enemy of the nation who must be stopped by any means necessary. This is a real core threat to democracy.

Yes, we’ve always had paranoid whackjobs in America. Joe McCarthy made his name in history for shamelessly fanning the flames of paranoia and then exploiting them to further his political career. And for a time part of the Republican Party, including people who must have realized he was seriously unglued, supported McCarthy.

During the 1952 presidential campaign McCarthy issued a blistering attack on Gen. George Marshall, saying Marshall was “part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man.” McCarthy’s power was such that Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign managers compelled him to strike a paragraph from a speech that defended Marshall, because standing up to McCarthy might cost Eisenhower the election. Eisenhower genuinely hated McCarthy and regretted the deletion of the paragraph for the rest of his life.

But McCarthy’s reign of terror was short-lived, and in the decades after, McCarthyism came to be seen as a moment of insanity from which the nation recovered.

But today the entire leadership of the Right — congresspersons and senators, spokespeople, the Republican Party, media personalities — have become an army of Joe McCarthys. And no one stands up to them.

Joan Walsh continues,

And lest you dismiss these rantings as confined to the lunatic fringe and ratings-crazed talk-show hosts, the backlash has had an effect. First, after school administrators in mostly red states expressed concerns about exposing kids to the speech without knowing what’s in it, the president’s office said he’d make it available on Monday so they can read it in advance. OK, that’s nice of the president, but is anybody else a little rattled that some right-wing bullies appointed the nation’s unelected school administrators to vet our president’s speech?

We should be rattled, yes. The extend to which the nation accepts this bullying as normal is a core threat to democracy.

See also:

Max Blumenthal, “Ike’s Other Warning.”
Glenn Greenwald, “Deleting the Bush Personality Cult from history