- March 18: The Bush administration and the newly elected Spanish government trade slaps, with the Spanish government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero criticizing the US's occupation of Iraq, and the Bush administration accusing Zapatero of "appeasement" of terrorism. Rather than defeat terrorism, US military actions risk fueling it, says Zapatero, who has made clear he prefers Democratic challenger John Kerry over President Bush in the White House. He says that the occupation in Iraq "is turning into a fiasco" and he will stick by his decision to pull 1,300 Spanish troops out of Iraq unless the United Nations takes control of peacekeeping. "Combatting terrorism with bombs, with operations of shock and awe, with Tomahawk missiles, is not the way to beat terrorism. Not like that. It is a way of generating more radicalism, more people who can wind up being tempted by using violence," he adds. "Terrorism is fought by the state of law. I believe this is what Europe and the international community must debate."
- Top US Republicans, however, accuse the Spaniards of giving in to terrorist groups by turning out of office the party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a close US ally. House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Spain was "a nation who succumbed...to threats of terrorism, changed their government. Here's a country who stood against terrorism and had a huge terrorist act within their country, and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists." Adds fellow GOP congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee: "The vote in Spain was a great victory for al-Qaeda." Another Republican congressman, Tom DeLay, says that he hopes Zapatero will come to believe in the U.S. position - "that Iraq is central to winning" the fight against terrorism. Following the standard pattern, Republican lawmakers are issuing much harsher criticisms than are coming from the Bush administration itself, who chooses to let GOP spokespersons outside the administration do the bulk of the attacking. When Bush was asked whether the Spanish vote gave terrorists reason to believe that they can influence elections and policy, he replied: "I think terrorists will kill innocent life in order to try to get the world to cower. I think these are cold-blooded killers." Zapatero's threatened troop withdrawal worries US, British and some other world leaders, who say pulling out of Iraq after the bombings would amount to a victory for terrorists. Zapatero, who is putting together a Socialist government to take over next month, is asked how he might respond if Bush personally asked him to reconsider pulling Spanish troops from Iraq. "I will listen to Mr. Bush, but my position is very firm and very clear," he replies. (AP/Guardian)
- March 18: Poland's president Aleksander Kwasniewski says that his country had been "taken for a ride" about the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride," Kwasniewski says. However, he does not yet intend to pull the 2500 Polish troops out of Iraq. "What would be the point of pulling the troops if it meant a return to war, ethnic cleansing and conflict in neighboring countries," he asks. "If we protest against the United States' dominant role in world politics and we withdraw our troops knowing they will be replaced by US soldiers, what would be the point of such a move?" (Agence France-Presse/Channel News Asia)
- March 18: Italy's minister for European affairs, Rocco Buttiglione, says that the invasion of Iraq may have been a mistake and could have been avoided. Italy's government has strongly supported the Bush administration's Iraq policy, one of the few European nations to do so, and currently has around 3,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq. Buttiglione says, "The war may have been a mistake. Perhaps there were ways it could have been avoided. ...What is certain is that it wasn't the best thing to do." He continues, "Terrorism cannot be defeated only by the force of arms, and if we give the impression that weapons play the dominant role, we will only stir up nationalist feelings among the Arabs against us." Buttiglione says he doesn't believe that democracy in the Middle East could be achieved through war or because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been toppled. "Arab democracy will not be born through the force of arms or because we have defeated Saddam. It can be achieved through a policy of peace, cultural exchanges, inter-religious dialogue and development aid." He says he favors a stronger UN role in Iraq in order to give legitimacy to the country's interim Governing Council and the foreign military presence. (Agence France-Presse/CommonDreams)
- March 18: Former Iraq occupation administration General Jay Garner now says one of the main reasons he was abruptly fired by the Bush administration was because he pushed for early elections in Iraq and resisted the administration's imposed program of privatization and corporate exploitation. "My preference was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can, and do it with some form of elections," he says. "I just thought it was necessary to rapidly get the Iraqis in charge of their destiny." Asked if he foresaw negative repercussions from the subsequent US imposition of mass privatization, Garner replies, "I don't know...we'll just have to wait and see." It would have been better for the Iraqis to take decisions themselves, even if they made mistakes, he adds. "What I was trying to do was get to a functioning government.... We as Americans like to put our template on things. And our template's good, but it's not necessarily good for everyone else." Describing his dismissal after he called for elections, he says, "The night I got to Baghdad, [defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld called me and told me he was appointing Paul Bremer as the presidential envoy. ...The announcement...was somewhat abrupt." Despite being a protege of Rumsfeld, Garner was the subject of what was alleged to be a White House whispering campaign, describing him as weak. (Guardian)
- March 18: As part of the Bush/Rove assault on trial lawyers (under the rubric of "tort reform;" see related items throughout this site, particularly one item for July 2002), Treasury Secretary John Snow tells the annual meeting of the American Tort Reform Association, "We know that the current tort system is costing America well over $200 billion each year. That's a tort tax -- paid in the form of lower wages, higher product prices, and reduced investments -- of $809 for every individual and more than $3200 for a family of four. And this is a regressive tax, imposed indiscriminately across our economy. To make the situation even less fair, less than 50 cents of each dollar of those tort costs go to victims, and, of that, only 22 cents goes to compensate them for actual economic losses they have suffered. Meanwhile, the personal injury lawyers profit enormously."
- Snow is correct that the American judicial system is in dire need of overhaul, but not for the reasons he states. His figures, while specific, are highly misleading. The enormous costs Snow details are not, as he says during his speech, because of high payouts due to medical malpractice lawsuits filed by "greedy" trial lawyers, but because of enormous price-gouging and profiteering by medical and pharmaceutical corporations -- the same entities whose profits Snow wants to protect. As for Rove's scheme to weaken trial lawyers, the reason is not to protect American patients from soaring costs caused by malpractice insurance rates -- they are indeed high, but not for the reasons Snow cites -- but to lessen their political influence. Trial lawyers traditionally support Democratic candidates and campaigns with large contributions. Rove wants to help corporations raise their profits and, at the same time, weaken the ability of trial lawyers to impact elections for Democrats. Who actually suffers is the American medical consumer, as well as the American system of democracy itself. Officials at the American Trial Lawyers Association believe that, after the assault on medical malpractice suits and the lawyers who file them, Bush and Rove will go after asbestos attorneys and, eventually, no-fault auto-insurance lawyers. The entire scheme, writes James Moore and Wayne Slater, is designed to "shut down trial lawyers and close off the civil justice system to consumers who might harm corporations." ATLA's Carlton Carl says, "Go back and look at the [1994] Contract with America. When [Newt] Gingrich drew that up back in the early nineties, it was designed to take down the trial lawyer industry completely with one or two laws. It was a comprehensive attack. The larger point now, though, is that the Republicans in the chamger got smart and realized you don't have to take it down all at once. You take it down a piece at a time. You don't need umbrella tort reform." (James Moore and Wayne Slater)
- March 18: Refuting the Bush administration's attacks on Democratic challenger John Kerry, Republican senator John McCain says that Kerry will not be soft on national defense, nor will his election threaten national security. "This kind of rhetoric, I think, is not helpful in educating and helping the American people make a choice," says McCain. "You know, it's the most bitter and partisan campaign that I've ever observed. I think it's because both parties are going to their bases rather than going to the middle. I regret it." He says later in the morning, "No, I do not believe that he is, quote, weak on defense. He's responsible for his voting record, as we are all responsible for our records, and he'll have to explain it. But, no, I do not believe that he is necessarily weak on defense. I don't agree with him on some issues, clearly. But I decry this negativism that's going on on both sides. The American people don't need it." The Bush campaign has relentlessly attacked Kerry's voting record as well as his Vietnam service record and his anti-war activities after he returned from Vietnam. "The senator from Massachusetts has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security," Vice President Cheney recently said. McCain is joined four days later by fellow Republican senator Charles Hagel, who joins McCain in criticizing Bush campaign ads portraying Kerry as soft on defense. "The facts just don't measure [up to] the rhetoric," Hagel says. "You can take a guy like John Kerry, who's been in the Senate for 19 years, and go through that voting record," Hagel continues. "You can take it with...any of us, and pick out different votes, and then try to manufacture something around that."
- Unfortunately, the infelicitious Kerry hands the Bush campaign a whip with which to poltically flog him: trying to reconcile his September 2002 vote to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq with his later vote against the appropriations of funds to pay for the war, Kerry says, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Though technically true, the comment makes a devastating sound bite in the hands of Bush campaign flacks and spokesmen, even Cheney, who brings down the house the next day while speaking at the Reagan library merely by repeating Kerry's words and deadpanning, "It's a true fact." The comment fuels the Bush-Cheney strategy of painting Kerry as a mealy-mouthed flip-flopper. The campaign will use other opportunities provided by Kerry, including his zig-zagging back and forth while windsurfing as a metaphor for Kerry's supposed "going whichever way the wind blows" on issues. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times)
- March 18: Author James Mann reports on the ominously titled "Armageddon Plan" worked up during the 1980s by, among others, neoconservatives Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and revived after 9/11. During those years, Cheney was a back-bencher Republican congressman and Rumsfeld was an executive of G.D. Searle & Co., but once a year Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other neoconservatives would disappear from sight. No one in Congress nor in the Searle executive offices knew where either of them were -- even their wives were only given a Washington phone number for emergencies. It is not until much later that anyone finds where they disappeared to. Cheney and Rumsfeld would move secretly to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, where they would meet with forty or fifty federal officials and a single member of Reagan's Cabinet. From there they would head to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations. Mann writes, "Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it US officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new 'President' and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve 'continuity of government,' and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role. The inspiration for this program came from within the administration itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld; except for a brief stint Rumsfeld served as Middle East envoy, neither of them ever held office in the Reagan Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures in the program."
- There is evidence that elements of this "Armageddon Plan" were implemented on 9/11. Vice President Cheney urged Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town; Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of "undisclosed locations;" and other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital, to ensure the continuity of government in case of further attacks. All these actions had their roots in the Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises. Mann writes, "The outline of the plan was simple. Once the United States was (or believed itself about to be) under nuclear attack, three teams would be sent from Washington to three different locations around the United States. Each team would be prepared to assume leadership of the country, and would include a Cabinet member who was prepared to become President. If the Soviet Union were somehow to locate one of the teams and hit it with a nuclear weapon, the second team or, if necessary, the third could take over. This was not some abstract textbook plan; it was practiced in concrete and elaborate detail. Each team was named for a color -- 'red' or 'blue,' for example -- and each had an experienced executive who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had served at high levels in the executive branch, preferably with the national-security apparatus. Cheney and Rumsfeld had each served as White House chief of staff in the Ford Administration. Other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of the CIA, and Kenneth Duberstein, who served for a time as Reagan's actual White House chief of staff. ...It seems fair to conclude that some of these 'Presidents' [the surviving Cabinet members] would have been mere figureheads for a more experienced chief of staff, such as Cheney or Rumsfeld. Still, the Cabinet members were the ones who would issue orders, or in whose name the orders would be issued."
- How much did the survivors intend to reconstitute the American constitutional form of government? Not much. "One of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in the planning of the program explains, "was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." According to this source, who refused to be named, it was felt that reconvening Congress, and replacing members who had been killed, would take too long. Moreover, if Congress did reconvene, it might elect a new speaker of the House, whose claim to the presidency might have greater legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or Commerce who had been set up as President under Reagan's secret program. The election of a new House speaker would not only take time but also create the potential for confusion. The Reagan Administration's primary goal was to set up a chain of command that could respond to the urgent minute-by-minute demands of a nuclear war, when there might be no time to swear in a new President under the regular process of succession, and when a new President would not have the time to appoint a new staff.
- The Reagan administration, however, chose to establish this process without going to Congress for the legislation that would have given it constitutional legitimacy. Instead, Reagan implemented the plan with a secretly issued executive order. Acciording to Reagan's national security advisor Robert McFarlane, Reagan himself made the final decision about who would head each of the three teams. Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Much of this money was spent on advanced communications equipment that would enable the teams to have secure conversations with US military commanders. In fact, the few details that have previously come to light about the secret program stemmed from allegations of waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private companies, and claims that this equipment malfunctioned. The exercises were usually scheduled during a congressional recess, so that Cheney would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in each exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on who was available at a particular time. In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his President, each team included representatives from the Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and also from various domestic-policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the entire federal government with a skeletal crew during a nuclear war. At one point there was talk of bringing in the governors of Virginia and Maryland and the mayor of the District of Columbia, but the idea was discarded because they didn't have the necessary security clearance.
- The exercises were designed to be stressful. Participants gathered in haste, moved and worked in the early-morning hours, lived in Army-base conditions, and dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to eat). An entire exercise lasted close to two weeks, but each team took part for only three or four days. One team would leave Washington, run through its drills, and then -- as if it were on the verge of being "nuked" -- hand off to the next team. The plans were carried out with elaborate deception, designed to prevent Soviet reconnaissance satellites from detecting where in the United States the teams were going. Thus the teams were sent out in the middle of the night, and changed locations from one exercise to the next. Decoy convoys were sometimes dispatched along with the genuine convoys carrying the communications gear. The underlying logic was that the Soviets could not possibly target all the makeshift locations around the United States where the Reagan teams might operate. The capstone to all these efforts to stay mobile was a special airplane, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a modified Boeing 747 based at Andrews and specially outfitted with a conference room and advanced communications gear. In it a President could remain in the air and run the country during a nuclear showdown. In one exercise a team of officials stayed aloft in this plane for three days straight, cruising up and down the coasts and back and forth across the country, refueling in the air.
- The program continued under the Bush presidency, though Cheney, Bush's Secretary of Defense, dropped out as a team leader. Mann reports that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer plausible -- but what if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the President and the Vice President? Finally, during the early Clinton years, it was decided that this scenario was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy of the Cold War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was abandoned. Mann writes, "There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years before. Operating from the underground shelter beneath the White House, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney told Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to Washington. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a reluctant Wolfowitz to get out of town to the safety of one of the underground bunkers, which had been built to survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from the capital. Explaining these actions a few days later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, 'We did a lot of planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident.' He did not mention the Reagan Administration program or the secret drills in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly practiced running the country. Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States -- inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting." (Atlantic/CommonDreams)
- March 18: While Republicans complain of Democratic fundraising strategies, they ignore their own 30-year history of evading and sometimes outright breaking of election fundraising laws that have enabled them to obtain control of government at federal, state, and local levels. Jerry Landay writes, "[H]undreds of tax-exempt organizations of the far right have been exploiting the twilight zone of campaign and IRS regulations for three decades -- receiving billions of dollars in grants and contributions to wage ideo-political warfare for far-right ideas, causes, and Republican candidates. Liberal political organizations resort to the same shortcuts, but they pale when compared to the scale and duration of right-wing mischief." Landay describes "a vast machine that, in the judgment of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, has 'played a critical role in helping the Republican Party to dominate state, local and national politics.' It is now operating at full throttle to keep Bush in office. Though its activists like to call themselves conservatives, there is nothing they wish to 'conserve' beyond their power, status, and wealth. They are right-wing radicals who have stolen the GOP away from the true conservatives who once dominated it. ...[T]he NCRP has identified at least 350 tax-exempt, ostensibly non-partisan organizations within the right-wing's activist front, many operating at regional, state, and local levels. They have penetrated the three branches of the federal government, and dominate the political debate. They guide and oversee the agenda that directs White House action (or inaction). Two of these organizations housed the planners who invented the Iraq war. Rob Stein, an independent Washington researcher, follows the money flow to the radical activist establishment. He estimates that since the early 1970s at least $2.5 to $3 billion in funding has been awarded to the 43 major activist organizations he tracks that constitute the core of the radical machine." Stein terms the 43 largest activist organizations "the Cohort," and labels them an "incubator of right-wing, ideological policies that constitute the administration's agenda, and, to the extent that it has one, runs its policy machinery." He calls the cohort "a potent, never-ending source of intellectual content, laying down the slogans, myths, and buzz words that have helped shift public opinion rightward."
- Much of the movement's propulsive energies are largely generated within the Cohort. Stein describes it as the radical right's "intellectual infrastructure" -- multiple-issue, non-profit, tax-exempt, and supposedly non-partisan. Landay writes, "The apparatus includes think tanks, policy institutes, and media-harassment enterprises, as well as litigation firms that file lawsuits to impose their ideological templates on the law. They mastermind the machinery of radical politics, policy, and regulations. They include campus-based centers of scholarship, student associations, and scores of publications. The shorthand of their faith is well known: less government, generous tax cuts for the privileged, privatization or elimination of Social Security and Medicare, rollbacks of environmental safeguards, major curbs on the public's right to go to court, and a laissez-faire free market system unfettered by regulations or public-interest accountability. Bush campaigns to advance the ideological agenda of the right, and the radical front in turn campaigns for Bush." Stein and Landay trace the roots of this consortium back to a relatively few, but powerful and well-funded, organizations: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the John M. Olin Foundation of New York City, the quartet of foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, the Smith Richardson Foundation (Vicks), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors beer), and the Koch family foundations (energy). Today, the right's funding base has hugely expanded. The NCRP now identifies a total of 79 private foundations that make grants to right-wing political action groups. The NCRP estimates that those foundations granted some $253 million to the 350 activist organizations between 1999 and 2001 alone. Scores of for-profit corporations add millions more to the funding stream. These include Time-Warner, Altria (Philip Morris), AT&T, Microsoft, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and other members of the pharmaceutical industry, the two titans of the military-industrial complex Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as telecommunications, banking, real estate, and financial interests. Precise information on corporate contributions to tax exempt organizations is scarce since the IRS does not require their public disclosure. The NCRP report concludes that the right-wing domain these billions has built has "undoubtedly helped advance, market, and strengthen
the conservative agenda in all policy realms," from international relations and so-called 'preventive' war-making, to a raft of domestic issues.
- One of the many issues that these organizations have united on is thwarting the Democrats' attempt to raise funds for their own interests. In particular, these organizations, and the politicians and media pundits that they own, have targeted billionaire George Soros, who has single-handedly funded many of the left's own attempts to counter these organization's political strategies. They have done everything from challenge Soros's right to donate money through the FEC to Jew-bait him (conservative Paul Weyrich termed Soros "a Jew, a descendent of Shylock".) Soros and his recipients -- including Americans Coming Together, MoveOn.org, and the newly established liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress -- are no match, in terms of dollars or influence, for the vast alliance spearheaded by the Cohort. Landay lists some of the most prominent members of this group: the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Federalist Society, the Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the National Association of Scholars, among others. This network really began flexing its muscle during the Clinton years, working to successfully defeat the Clinton health care initiative and then concocting the so-called "Whitewater" and Paula Jones scandals which led to Clinton's impeachment. Now the organization has targeted the presidential campaign of John Kerry. The opening salvos were supposedly from "independent sources," but were concocted and coordinated within the framework of this network: the doctored photographs of Kerry and Jane Fonda, the fabricated "sex scandal" first planted in the Drudge Report alleging that Kerry had had an affair with an intern, which according to Landay was "designed to be picked up by the British press, with the intention that it would 'bounce back' into the American media. Ironically, the US media wouldn't touch the story, but neither did it expose the right's failed methods."
- Immediately thereafter, a coordinated assault against Kerry and his Democratic supporters was launched in the US media, spearheaded by a truly despicable attack against Vietnam veteran and Kerry supporter Max Cleland by right-wing maven Ann Coulter. Coulter's attack pieces appeared first on TownHall.com, a right-wing site featuring over 70 radical right columnists and pundits. TownHall often serves as the introduction for attack pieces to the US media, which often picks them up and runs them without comment. Landay writes, "The hailstorm of polemics generated by TownHall.com serves as the daily grist for the hundreds of talk-show hosts who have tilted the American airwaves sharply rightward." According to a Kerry spokesperson, "From Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham to Saxby Chamblis to the RNC, you can't turn on a TV or a radio without seeing a systematic, coordinated attack on John Kerry." Nine of the fifteen most widely syndicated media columnists are solidly right-wing, and many of them are affiliated with TownHall and Cohort organizations. Only three -- Molly Ivins, Nat Hentoff, and Ellen Goodman -- are liberals. The top 27 radio talk-show hosts are all conservatives, and again, many of them are affiliated with TownHall and the Cohort.
- Landay writes, "spokespersons for the radical front have already fanned out as ready-to-air guests on talk and interview programs, transmitting the identical pro-Republican line of the week. They pen hundreds of boiler-plate op-ed pieces daily, which newspaper editors are often happy to run, possibly because they are offered for free. The radical front links web sites to mobilize barrages of e-mails, letters, and phone calls promoting Republican causes. For a graphic idea of the reach of the propaganda operation, just one organization, the Heritage Foundation, notes in its 2002 Annual Report that more of its experts were seen on national television within that single year than during the entire 1990s. In 2002 alone, Heritage analysts were featured on more than 600 television broadcasts, more than 1,000 radio broadcasts, and in some 8,000 newspaper and magazine articles and editorials. Political commentator David Gergen has noted that the integrated propaganda organs of the far right have created 'a new politics in America,' with its 'ability to mobilize and interact with core constituencies on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to welfare reform.'"
- Landay continues, "While it is true that liberal operatives, dedicated organizations, and funding sources exist in some numbers, the current right-wing juggernaut of hard cash and sharp edged political power really has no equal in American history. Researcher Rob Stein says the key difference is that the left employs no organizational cohesiveness. Efforts are fragmented, disconnected, and, for the most part, focused on single issues. The lack of coordination is compounded by opposition control of the White House. The potency of right wing politics and opinion molding lies in the architecture of the movement. That is, its constituent organizations think and act strategically. Agendas, priorities, and propaganda are directed from the center. Members are disciplined and dedicated to the narrow theology of the right. The disparate streams of conservative thought and action -- social, economic, religious, libertarian, and corporate -- set aside major differences and march to a single drummer -- with the tempo set at weekly tactical conferences in Washington. This cohesion has undeniably had a large impact on the American body politic. The far right coalition now effectively controls the three branches of the federal government, overriding the checks-and-balances against rampant political power built into the Constitution. Conservatives now also set the terms of the national political debate through their dominance of the unofficial 'fourth estate,' the media.
- According to Landay, the model that appealed to pioneer right-wing organizers for this type of social/political/legal campaign was Ralph Nader and his Raiders, a band of activists united for consumer rights in the early 1970s: "Nader's campaigns against corporate excesses eventually galvanized businessmen to an aggressive defense of the capitalist system, which they felt was in danger. Conservatives feared that the war in Vietnam had rendered America a paper tiger. The failure to liberate the American hostages in tehran in 1979 became an emblem of the collapse of American might. Domestic tranquility had been shattered by racial unrest, assassinations, and burning cities. 'The glory hath departed,' intoned the Rev. Jerry Falwell on CBS, as he organized his Moral Majority to 'save' the nation. America, he preached, had lost its power, lost its values, lost its virtues. And he blamed the liberal movement for all the ills. With the Nixon landslide against McGovern in 1972, the right also sensed its moment. The Reagan victory in 1980 confirmed it. The ultra-conservative William Simon, a financier, Treasury Secretary, and then president of the Olin Foundation, decided it was time to bring conservative wealth, manpower, and organizational ability to bear on the creation of a 'counter intelligentsia' to roll back the 'despotism' of the 'Liberal Establishment.' The U.S. Chamber of Commerce widely distributed an influential memo by a Richmond attorney named Lewis Powell, who would subsequently become a Supreme Court justice, calling for a conservative assault against what he viewed as the central echelons of liberal power -- the campus, the media, the courts, and politics. Out of this tempest emerged what Sidney Blumenthal has called the 'counter-establishment.' A host of right wing intellectuals would staff 'new institutes, writing policy papers and newspaper editorials...serving as political advisers, lending the power of the word' to a movement to lead the counter-charge."
- Landay says that "[t]he architectural shape of the right-wing counter-establishment resembles the apparatus that ran the Soviet Union. The Russians called it the 'apparat' -- a vast bureaucratic web of power that housed the organs, official and unofficial, of the ruling Communist Party. It included the administrative departments that fictively ran the Soviet government. In fact, the party ran it all. Its ruling Politburo and Central Committee were paramount. The Soviet apparat was headed by a privileged ruling class, the nomenklatura, manned by a faceless army of bureaucrats, the apparatchiki. The structure of the apparat was triangular, comprised of the party, the organs of state security, and the military establishment. The leadership elite in the Kremlin presided over all of it. The organs of propaganda and media were also housed within the apparat, together with the Comintern, which oversaw the Communist parties of other countries. It included scores of activist front operations. They carried out agitprop -- incitement and manipulation of opinion among the masses. These popular-front operations appeared independent, but were linked covertly to the apparat in Moscow.
- "...The American apparat of the far right can be viewed as a variant of the Soviet model -- amorphous in overlapping functions at the top but monolithic in its aims. It is an external government that guides the federal government. In a stunning sense, it is counter-revolutionary and anti-Constitutional. The American apparat has learned from the failures of the Iran-Contra and Watergate operations, which functioned within the government, and were thus subject to governmental oversight and correction. Not so the apparat. With its operations spread over a spectrum external to government, it attracts neither official nor media attention. It operates invisibly -- in the open. The NCRP writes, 'There is considerable organic alignment and cohesion on the right.' Conservative funders and non-profits are all on the same page, dedicated to the broader goals of radical politics. The American apparat functions as a broad strategic, policy-formulating, and coordinating machine. Like the Soviet apparat, it is triangular in structure. The main leg can be viewed as the nomenklatura -- the central command of the cohort. Subordinate to it is the second leg -- the major units of government, including the White House and the Congressional majority. The President governs as the creature of the apparat, along with his cabinet. Vice-President Cheney bridges the two as a senior member of the nomenklatura. So does Karl Rove, the White House political operator, along with the leaders of the Republican Congressional wing -- Senate and House majority leaders Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. The third leg can be viewed as the Republican political wing. In the party realignment of 1992, the national Republican apparatus was taken over by the apparat, and reduced to an appendage. The national party is now principally a tool for the disbursement of campaign largesse; and it supervises the machinery of elections and coordinates state party functions."
- The organization at the center of the apparat is the Heritage Foundation. Heritage "laid down the primary policy blueprint for the incoming Reagan Administration in 1980. It was called Mandate for Leadership: Turning Ideas Into Action. Eighty percent of its recommendations were deemed accomplished by the end of the Reagan era. Heritage has produced similar action blueprints for succeeding Republican presidents, including the administration of George W. Bush. After Bush II's selection by the Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation also served as personnel clearing house and hiring hall for senior government positions. Elaine Chao, the former Heritage Foundation fellow who supervised the hiring, is now Secretary of Labor. Social and religious conservatives exert profound bottom-up influence on the apparat and White House. They spring from the bedrock, where the voters are. Only elections can overturn the apparat's hold on political power. The American apparat must be responsive to its popular base, especially the mandates of such populist organizations as the National Rifle Association, American Family Institute, and Family Research Council, with their roots in the grass roots. We have witnessed the President's sensitivity to the base, especially on such issues as gun ownership, opposition to immigration and abortion, resistance to gay marriage, and so-called 'activist judges.' Like its Soviet counterpart, the American apparat is also a closed society, largely unelected and unaccountable to the body politic, and casts its penumbra upon the White House. As in the former USSR, there is little discussion or debate. Loyalty is absolute -- 'you are either with us or you are with our enemies.' Under Bush and Cheney, brisk exchanges of view, the engine of policy formation in prior administrations, are discouraged. Cabinet meetings are scripted for a president unprepared for spontaneous exchanges.... The endgame for the apparat is a one-party state in which elections project only a vestigial appearance of democratic process. It is run, in effect, by the ruling oligarchy, whose members are beholden only to the apparat."
- Landay identifies Grover Nordquist of the influential conservative group Americans for Tax Reform as the "day-to-day operations director of the apparat's tactical machine. Every Wednesday at the Washington headquarters of ATR, more than a hundred representatives of major right-wing organizations throng the conference room. Present are White House and Congressional staffers, lobbyists, industry representatives, right-wing think tankers, hard-right editors, and litigators. Attendance is by invitation only. Norquist calls the Wednesday gathering his 'Leave Us Alone' coalition, an anti-government line that conceals the real goal of creating a corporate socialist state. 'Here,' writes Michael Sherer in Mother Jones magazine, 'Strategy is honed. Talking points are refined. Discipline is imposed.... Norquist plays the role of national ward boss, delivering the coalition that has rallied around the president's policy agenda.' Norquist consults regularly with the White House, notably Karl Rove and 'Scooter' Libby, Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff, and, in turn, channels the worldview of the apparat to them. Sherer took note of Norquist's view of his populist base: 'My ideal citizen [is] the self-employed, home-schooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit -- because he doesn't need the g*ddamn government for anything.' Here's where Norquist's standard-issue buzz-phrases find fertile pasture: 'out of sync with America,' 'card-carrying liberal from Massachusetts,' ;the extreme elements of his party,' 'pro-abortion and pro-gay.' As the adage goes, control the rhetoric and you control the debate."
- Landay says that the apparat has been successful at spending millions of dollars on propaganda to persuade a largely centrist electorate who largely agrees with liberal positions on social issues to accept its far-right proposals. "The Heritage Foundation, a leading promoter of the Bush tax cuts, spearheads the President's plan to make them permanent. In op-ed articles and interviews, Heritage scholars use sleight-of-hand to defend the deep deficit caused by the tax cuts; they attribute it to the 'runaway growth' of discretionary domestic programs. Actually, discretionary, non-security-related spending amounts to less than 3.4 percent of GDP, inconsequential compared to the whopping cost of Bush tax cuts and war. Economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reinforce the line. They present a welter of statistics to counter Democratic calls for tax rollbacks. Newspaper editors tend to view NBER numbers as non-partisan. In fact, NBER delivers customized numbers to sell the right-wing agenda. Its CEO, Professor Martin Feldstein of Harvard, headed the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan. NBER has received more than $10 million in support since 1985 from right-wing foundations. An examination of NBER by the New York Times found that its oft-quoted economic analyses are highly partisan, and that 'Feldstein has shown little taste since the 1980s for straying from the Republican Party line.' Early in 2004, the Washington Legal Foundation's Daniel Popeo placed ads on the op-ed page of the New York Times, defending the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties as the price of waging its 'war on terror.' Popeo's ads criticized 'ideologues' on the left for putting civil liberties ahead of 'Americans' right to live free from terror.' Meantime, the libertarian Cato Institute was promoting a four-day 'Social Security University' for legislators and their staffs on Capitol Hill -- a major effort to win Congressional support for the privatization of Social Security as the best medicine for the 'coming insolvency.' Cato has led the White House campaign for 'private savings accounts,' the cornerstone of the right-wing effort to transform Social Security from a durable pension program into a long-term source of commissions for Wall Street brokers. Cato's proposed 'reform' would cost the government an estimated $1 trillion to implement over the next decade."
- And, of course, the blueprint for the Iraq war was conceived and implemented within the apparat well before the 2000 elections. Dick Cheney and Richard Perle, then senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, collaborated with colleagues at the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century to come up with war plans to be implemented, one way or another, by the incoming Bush administration. Landay writes, "Both [the AEI and the PNAC] are hard-line organs of the apparat. In February [2004], news stories detailed the misuse of intelligence data by the Bush administration to justify its war on Iraq. Right-wing bankroller Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard responded with a cover article by neoconservative war boomers Robert Kagan and William Kristol of PNAC justifying 'the Right War for the Right Reasons' against the 'serial aggression' of Saddam Hussein. Further, they went on to blame the Clinton administration for the tragic events of 9/11. At the same time, the Foundation to Defend Democracy (FDD), yet another think tank of the apparat, was defending neoconservative hard-line positions on Iraq and North Korea. The FDD had been launched after 9/11 by Clifford May, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, to promote Bush doctrinal policies. FDD fellows are pushing their messages with regularity and vigor as contributors to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and other influential publications." The apparat is also involved in defeating Kerry. The Club for Growth is underwriting TV spots for the Bush campaign. So is Citizens United, a front for agitator David Bossie, last heard from as the congressional aide who got fired for doctoring audio tape in a failed attempt to incriminate the Clintons in the Whitewater affair. Citizens United is also responsible for the infamous 'Willie Horton' ads aired on TV in 1988 to help elect the senior Bush.
- Landay writes of the apparat's election fundraising tactics, "Right-wing organizations regularly stray across the no-politics restrictions placed on tax-exempt organizations. Mother Jones magazine relates that Grover Norquist's tax-exempt ATR applied nearly $5 million funneled from the Republican National Committee into attack ads and direct-mail solicitations in the 1996 presidential campaign. Norquist is openly soliciting contributions for ATR from wealthy GOP donors in 2004 to end-run McCain-Feingold limits: 'I am aggressively letting people who might want to be involved...know what we do,' he said. The line between many of these tax-exempt advocacy groups and the Republican Party is as porous for politicians as it is for money. The organizations of the apparat are incubators for putative political candidates on the rise, and bestowers of generous sinecures for Republican politicians between jobs. After serving loyally as House majority leader, Dick Armey moved effortlessly into the well-paid job of co-chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy. The Center of the American Experiment (CAE), a regional clone modeled on the Heritage Foundation, operates essentially as a personnel agency of the Minnesota Republican Party. It has been used repeatedly as a springboard for Republican politicians. In 2002 it scored a trifecta, helping elect three Republicans to high office: Norm Coleman as a US Senator, Tim Pawlenty as Minnesota Governor, and John Kline as a US Congressman. Now key members of the CAE populate top positions in the Pawlenty administration."
- The apparat is well-schooled in manipulating the US media. "The apparat's media-attack organizations are charged with keeping journalists in line, mobilizing the base to wage harassment campaigns against media organizations and reporters they dub as too 'liberal.' Journalists who dare criticize the Administration are priority targets for abuse. For that reason, among others, Americans learn almost nothing from mainstream media about the apparat, whose media-attack operations effectively silenced Hillary Clinton's charges of a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' operating against her husband's administration. In an essay critiquing the news media for its massive failures in the run up to the Iraq war, Michael Massing wrote in the New York Review of Books that reporters who wrote articles unfavorable of Bush received 'tons' of hate mail and threats questioning their patriotism. Massing wrote: 'Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals and traitors -- labels that could permanently damage a career.' Three core media-attack groups operate at the center of the apparat: Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media (AIM), David Horowitz' Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), and L. Brent Bozell's Media Research Center (MRC). All three are now mobilizing behind the Bush re-election campaign. Earlier this year, MRC, which takes on the task of 'neutralizing liberal media bias,' issued a broadside to its rank-and-file against CBS anchor Dan Rather, for tossing what it alleged were soft questions at Democratic primary candidates -- a marked contrast, it maintained, to the 'rough' treatment Rather allegedly dishes out to Republicans. Earlier, Accuracy in Media had joined the Weekly Standard in trying to shift responsibility for 9/11 away from the White House and onto the Clinton administration." Only in the last year or so have progressives and liberals attempted to counter the apparat on its own ground. Last year, John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff, established the first latter-day, purely liberal think tank to promote "progressive ideas" for "a strong, just, and free America," the Center for American Progress (CAP).
- According to the Times'Matt Bai, Podesta's goal is "[a]n organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country's political dialogue for a generation." CAP is also a recipient of funding from George Soros, who has spent most of his life fighting totalitarian dictatorships in Eastern Europe. Soros is motivated by what he terms the "supremacist ideology" of the far right, which kindles childhood memories of the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary. "America, under Bush," he has said, "is a danger to the world. And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is." Landay writes, "soros has created a philanthropic model for other progressive donors. Until now, they have largely been ineffective in their patronage, diluting contributions across a broad swath of single-issue advocacy groups on a short-term basis. The organizations of the apparat have been under no such strictures. Its benefactors have made long-term investments in multi-issue advocacy organizations, whose agendas promote the broad ideological agenda of the radical right. Progressive donors must study -- and improve upon -- their methods. That includes creating a centralized approach to united action -- a mode of operation to which liberals, until now, have been congenitally allergic. In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert Reich, the secretary of labor under Clinton, argued that progressive activism must extend beyond the race for the White House, and beyond campaign seasons. 'The conservative movement,' he writes, 'has developed dedicated sources of money and legions of ground troops who not only get out the vote, but also spend the time between elections persuading others to join their ranks.... It has a system for recruiting and electing officials nationwide who share the same world view, and will vote accordingly.' Reich calls for the creation of a broadly-based activist front on the left -- 'a populist movement to take back democracy from increasingly concentrated money and power.' Landay concludes, "As individuals, most liberals and many independent voters share a set of humanistic values that have defined America for most of its modern history. Win or lose in November, liberals must now revive that America, charting a return to power in a concerted, long-run campaign to unseat the anti-Constitutional, one-party apparat." (Media Transparancy)
- March 18: "shock jock" Howard Stern, formerly a supporter of the Bush administration, has become one of its loudest and angriest opponents, and observers speculate on the impact Stern's daily attacks on Bush and his administration might have on the electorate. Stern has been attacking Bush's yoking together of church and state, the legitimacy of his National Guard service, his use of Sept. 11 imagery in his campaign ads, his stances regarding First Amendment rights, his handling of Iraq, and his stands on gay marriage and stem-cell research. He has also voiced strong support for Bush's Democratic opponent John Kerry, and praised Kerry's Vietnam record as well as Kerry's later opposition to the war. "Join me and friends of this show who are outraged," Stern said recently. "Vote out every Republican you can find." "With all the talk of liberal talk radio," says Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, "we're seeing emerging from the ranks of `shock jocks' one of the most potent and articulate liberal talkers we've seen in years." Harrison calls Stern's's recent crusade "historic." "Anytime you have somebody suddenly igniting political interest with an audience who has the kind of loyalty factor Stern has, it could turn an election." A large percentage of Stern's listeners -- some 8 1/2 million a week -- were leaning in favor of Bush, Harrison says. "If Stern could turn several million Bush supporters away from Bush, that has even more impact than Rush Limbaugh, who's preaching to the choir. So this is pivotal to what is shaping up to be a close election." Chuck Todd, editor of the Washington political daily The Hotline, is less convinced of Stern's impact: "On a national level, I don't know how much influence Stern could have. But we assume too little at our own peril when it comes to Stern and talk radio in general. ...Does Bush really need to worry about him? If New York were a swing state, we definitely would take this more seriously. Is Stern's popularity as devoted outside of New York? We only know it is ratings-wise."
- Stern is frequently dismissed, by liberals and conservatives alike, as a sexist, a racist, and a narcissist. But he is one of the most influential entertainers in America, particularly among the much-sought-after 18-to-25-year-old male demographic. His show is a critical stop for actors plugging youth-market movies, and his skits serve as the blueprint for many reality TV concepts. Harrison says that Stern's audience is broader than most people realize. "They're not just 18-year-old, beer-drinking yahoos. They're 20- and 30- and 40-something professionals. They're mainstream American citizens who are well-educated and affluent and socially active and politically interested, though not politically active. But they're being motivated. Wouldn't that be amazing if millions of people vote who otherwise wouldn't, because of this issue?" Todd adds, "some people will dismiss Stern not because they don't believe he has a following, but because they believe his listeners don't vote. I would argue that a swing voter is just that; they swing between not voting and voting, not between the two parties. So if he brings some nonvoters to the polls, then that's a big impact." Stern's anti-Bush push began in earnest after the FCC crackdown on "indecency" inspired Clear Channel -- which he calls "Fear Channel" -- to remove his show from six cities the week of Feb. 23. His outrage has mounted with news that Congress is currently considering a radical increase in the amount of FCC indecency fines (from a maximum of $27,500 to $500,000). Stern also insists that Clear Channel dropped him last month not because of indecency but because of some of his Bush criticism earlier in the year. "There's a real good argument to be made that I stopped backing Bush and that's when I got kicked off Clear Channel," he said on the air earlier this month.
- "When he takes that FCC persecution mantle and wraps it around his political views," says Mark Walsh, CEO of liberal talk radio network Air America, "and when he implies that it wasn't until he started to criticize this president that he really started getting nailed for 'immorality' and `obscenity,' he throws gasoline on the fire. "If he says, 'I'm being stifled because I have the temerity to challenge this president,' and 'Remember a year and a half ago when entertainers were chastised for questioning the war and now I'm getting nailed for the same thing,' if he starts pounding that drum, I would contend that a significant portion of his listenership will take that as gospel truth." (Boston Globe)
- March 18: Venerated broadcaster Walter Cronkite writes an open letter to John Kerry, asking him to explain why he dodges the label "liberal." "...[T]he denial that you are a liberal is almost impossible to reconcile. ...Liberals, who make up a substantial portion of the Democratic Party and a significant portion of the independent vote, are entitled to ask, 'What gives?' ...[You say] you are for rolling back tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, for tax credits to both save and create jobs, for real investment in our schools. You've voted, in the words of your own campaign, for 'every major piece of civil rights legislation to come before Congress since 1985, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment.' You count yourself (and are considered by others) a leader on environmental protection issues. You are committed to saving Medicare and Social Security, and you are an internationalist in foreign policy. What are you ashamed of? Are you afflicted with the Dukakis syndrome -- that loss of nerve that has allowed conservatives both to define and to demonize liberalism for the past decade and more? You remember, of course, that it was during the 1988 presidential campaign that George Bush I attacked Democrat Michael Dukakis both for opposing the Vietnam War and for stating he was a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Both proved, Bush said, that Dukakis was a liberal. Dukakis responded to that as an attack on his patriotism. He defended neither liberalism nor the ACLU. Dukakis might have responded by saying: 'I am surprised, Mr. Bush, that you are not a member of the ACLU. We do not have to agree on all the positions that the ACLU may take on this issue or that, but we should applaud its effort to protect the rights of Americans, even those charged with heinous crimes.' Dukakis might have defended liberalism as the legacy of FDR and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy -- none of whom were anything like 100 percent liberals but all of whom advanced the cause of a truly liberal democracy. But by ducking the issue, Dukakis opened the way for the far right to make 'L' for liberal a scarlet letter with which to brand all who oppose them. In the course of that 1988 exchange, Bush offered a telling observation, saying, in effect, that liberals don't like being called liberal. You seem to have reaffirmed that analysis. If 1988 taught us anything, it is that a candidate who lacks the courage of his convictions cannot hope to convince the nation that he should be given its leadership. So, Senator, some detailed explanations are in order if you hope to have any chance of defeating even a wounded George II in November. You cannot let the Bush league define you or the issues. You have to do that yourself. Take my advice and lay it all out, before it's too late." (King Features/Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan )