“I’d rather see Jackson in the Cabinet than any of the more than 100 characters in the Reagan-Bush administration who variously have been accused or convicted of wrongdoing, making it, in my view, the most corrupt administration in my [life].”
The quote is from a column that appeared in the October 17, 1996 Chicago Sun-Times. The columnist was Dennis Byrne, who at the time was a member of the Sun-Times editorial board. The quote was actually taken from a column that he had written a few years earlier that was in response to how upset Republicans were by the fact that then-presidential-candidate Michael Dukakis was considering naming Jesse Jackson Jr. to his Cabinet.
It’s no surprise that the GOP engages in the same type of high-minded hypocrisy today and that it’s magnified by sadistic amnesia, or at the very least an insidious form of ignorance. I was reminded of the quote when I heard that Republican Congressman Darrell Issa proclaimed that President Obama was “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” Of course in the interest of self-serving civility he amended his original comment and said that he was actually referring to the Obama administration and not the President himself.
Mr. Issa’s remarks would be laughable if they were not so disgraceful and shameful in their disregard of history and truth. As Mr. Byrne mentioned in his column there were more than 100 members of the Reagan administration who had been either accused or convicted of wrongdoing. According to Wikipedia, “The presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States was marked by multiple scandals, resulting in the investigation, indictment, or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any US president at the time.” That bears repeating: Over 138 officials that served in the Reagan administration were either investigated, indicted, or convicted of wrongdoing.
But of course you wouldn’t know that from all of the worship and praise that Reagan received during the recent celebration and commemoration of his 100th birthday that took place across the nation. The media’s hyperbolic hugging of the man was so omnipresent that you could be forgiven for thinking that he had died, been buried, and was resurrected on the third day.
How can this be? How is it that a man who was at the helm of what has to be considered the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history be worshipped like a god in this country? I believe that the late Walter Karp- who was a journalist, historian, and contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine– can provide some perspective on how such a pervasive scope of malignant amnesty can be granted to the likes of a Ronald Reagan.
An article by Mr. Karp titled “All The Congressmen’s Men: How Capitol Hill Controls The Press” appeared in the July 1989 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Here’s an excerpt from that article:
On February 26, 1987, Reagan’s “special review board,” known as the Tower Commission, issued its long-awaited report on the Iran-Contra scandal. An hour’s reading revealed a President obsessively concerned with, and intensely curious about, Iran-Contra matters, and determined to keep those matters in the hands of close personal advisers. To the press, however, the three members of the commission said exactly the opposite. In public statements, interviews, television appearances, and private meetings with leading editors, they insisted that Reagan was victimized by a “management style” that kept him in complete ignorance of everything blameworthy. That disgraceful lie, which in effect accused the President of his own defense, was endorsed at once by Democratic leaders and duly became the day’s news, as if the report had never been written. When the Iran-Contra committees of Congress issued their report on the scandal, congressional leaders told the press at once that the whole sordid chapter was closed. The press did as instructed and closed the books at once on the most extraordinary abuse of power in presidential history. The report itself was ignored; a wealth of newsworthy information, impeccably “sourced,” sank into journalistic limbo. The report termed Reagan’s private war against Nicaragua “a flagrant violation of the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution,” but that grave charge, worthy of blazing headlines, was scarcely noticed in the press and ignored entirely by the Times. What rule of journalism dictates such base servility to the powerful? No rule save the rule of the whip, which political power cracks over the press’s head.
Again: The press did as instructed and closed the books at once on the most extraordinary abuse of power in presidential history.
Again: The report termed Reagan’s private war against Nicaragua “a flagrant violation of the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution,” but that grave charge, worthy of blazing headlines, was scarcely noticed in the press and ignored entirely by the Times. Mr. Karp is referring to the New York Times, the same paper with the motto “All The News That’s Fit to Print.”
I guess the fact that the president of the United States violated the very Constitution that he swore to uphold was not newsworthy or “Fit to Print”. It appears that the press (i.e. corporate media) has determined that it’s in their best interest to promote the worship of false gods rather than to expose the dangers of such worship. How does that saying about the blind leading the blind go again?
There’s a True Sheriff in Town
Tags: Clarence Dupnik, Conservatives, Culture, Democrats, Fox News, Gabrielle Giffords, Glenn Beck, Jared Loughner, Liberals, Media, Politics, President Obama, Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Society, Spirituality, Tea Party
A couple of days after the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson AZ I was walking through the supermarket where I normally shop, observing the other shoppers going through the mundane motions of daily living and I wondered just how many of them really cared that Gabby, as she is affectionately called, was laying in a hospital bed fighting for her life. I wondered if they had an iota of an inkling of just how volatile the situation is in this country.
An article recently written about a cognitive study done by researchers at The University of Michigan- as reported in the Boston Globe newspaper- highlighted some of the findings of that study. The major point was that:
Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
The article goes on to say:
In light of these findings, researchers concluded that a defense mechanism, which they labeled “backfire”, was preventing individuals from producing pure rational thought. The result is a self-delusion that appears so regularly in normal thinking that we fail to detect it in ourselves, and often in others: When faced with facts that do not fit seamlessly into our individual belief systems, our minds automatically reject (or backfire) the presented facts. The result of backfire is that we become even more entrenched in our beliefs, even if those beliefs are totally or partially false.
And here’s the cherry-on-top to sum it all up:
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” said Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher of the Michigan study.
During the news conference following the shooting Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was stating facts when he said:
“I think it’s time as a country that we need to do a little soul-searching, because I think it’s the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business…that may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”
What Sheriff Dupnik was basically saying is that the confrontational, inflammatory, and hateful language present in the political discourse in this country these days has created the type of climate that can produce murderous acts such as the one that occurred in Tucson.
I am one of the many people who agree with him totally and see his candid and heartfelt remarks as heroic, especially in light of the pervasive cowardice and complicity that is being shrouded as objective commentary. Watching pundits and politicians tip-toe around the issue has been a deeply sickening experience. And watching individuals from the right engage in pathological partisanship is both infuriating and terrifying.
Anyone that even suggests that liberals or the left have engaged in the same level of divisiveness as the right is either irreparably ignorant or consciously wicked. The evidence to the contrary is so absolutely overwhelming that the contrast wouldn’t be worthy of discussion if the national psyche wasn’t so grotesquely fractured.
One question that I haven’t heard either asked or answered in the aftermath of the shooting is this: Can anyone truly say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jared Loughner was not influenced in any way by the vitriolic rhetoric that Sheriff Dupnik was referring to? The answer is no, and that should be enough to trigger at least a modicum of human remorse or compassion. But human remorse or compassion is not the reaction coming from the right.
But that’s no surprise. As Mr. Nyhan pointed out, it’s absolutely threatening to admit that you’re wrong, especially when you’re engaged in a titanic struggle for control of the government of the most powerful country in the world. The question is: How can a society realistically hope to survive if facts and truth cease to have value to its citizens, especially those that have power or influence?
Again, thank you Sheriff Dupnik for telling it like it is.
My thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this horrible tragedy, their families, and everyone affected. May God have mercy on this nation.