;)
Sunday
May192013
The Commentariat -- May 20, 2013
** E. J. Dionne: Democracy is in trouble here & abroad. "... politicians might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal. They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points."
Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "President Obama on Sunday summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to 'transform the way we think about manhood,' urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities. Delivering a commencement address at the all-male private liberal arts college in Atlanta, Obama spoke in deeply personal terms about the 'special obligation' he feels as a black man to help those left behind":
... AND for another inspirational (pre)commencement address, Stephen Colbert speaks at the University of Virginia's "valedictory exercises":
... Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post reports on Colbert's address.
CNN: "President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady, according to a new national poll.... According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April."
Meghashyam Mali of the Hill: "White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday defended the White House handling of the Internal Revenue Service scandal, saying the legality of the political targeting was 'irrelevant' and vowing the administration would ensure it 'never happens again.' Pfeiffer, who made the full round of Sunday talk shows, as the administration seeks to calm anger over the IRS, the Justice Department's seizure of reporters phone records and lingering GOP questions about the Benghazi attacks, vowed that the administration would act quickly to address the tax scandal." ...
... AP: Pfeiffer "insisted Sunday that President Barack Obama learned the Internal Revenue Service had targeted tea party groups only 'when it came out in the news' while Republicans continued to press the administration for more answers." ...
... Peter Nicholas of the Wall Street Journal: "The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday. That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time." ...
... An Inconvenient Fact for Conspiracy Theorists. Steve Benen: "Last July, in the middle of the presidential election, the administration told House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) about an investigation into the IRS's potential mishandling of applications for tax-exempt status. And what did Issa do when he learned about this? Not a thing -- he decided to wait for the IG's report itself." ...
I know approximately what's in [the IG report]. I knew what was approximately in it when we made the allegations about a year ago. This is one of those things where it's been, in a sense, an open secret, but you don't accuse the IRS until you've had a nonpartisan, deep look. That's what the IG has done. That's why the IGs in fact exist within government, is to find this kind of waste and fraud and abuse of power. -- Darrell Issa, speaking to Bloomberg News a week ago, before publication of the IG report ...
Taegan Golldard: "Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told CNN there was a 'written policy' floating around the agency that said IRS officials were 'targeting people who were opposed to the president.' ... When pressed for details about the memo he was referring to, Paul said he hasn't seen such a policy statement but has heard about it." Via Greg Sargent. ...
... CW: "Leaders" like Rand Paul are a real threat to democracy. Since most of us know that members of Congress are privy to information not circulated to the public, it's not unreasonable to believe a Senator or Congressperson when s/he asserts, "there's a document that says blah-blah." In fact, that's how Jonathan Karl got in trouble, isn't it? So when these people lie or mislead the public, voters will form their opinions on disinformation. Oftentimes the truth comes out -- eventually -- but usually the "never mind" gets less publicity than the original inflammatory charge. I doubt (but I don't know) that Fox "News" was all over the debunking of Karl's claims, for instance.
... Glenn Kessler: Lois G. Lerner, the IRS’s director of the exempt organizations division, is a big fat liar.
Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) -- the GOP leader in the senate -- distanced himself from Republican efforts to portray the Obama administration's response to the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic issue in Benghazi, Libya as a Watergate-level scandal that should result in impeachment." ...
... MEANWHILE ... Zack Colman of the Hill: on "Face the Nation," "Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the Obama administration owes its recent troubles and controversies to a 'culture of cover ups and intimidation' within the White House." CW: both McConnell & Cornyn are up for re-election in 2014 & both face the prospect of winger primary challenges.
CNN: "Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, addressed criticism of his reporting on the Benghazi talking points controversy, saying in a statement to CNN that he regrets the inaccuracy of his report. 'Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it's become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately,' he said in the statement to Howard Kurtz, host of CNN's 'Reliable Sources.'" CW: yeah, the story still stands; it's just substantially different from what you wrote. Jerk. ...
... John Cole of Balloon Juice: "I guess when it is someone as ethically challenged as Howard Kurtz holding your feet to the fire, you probably just think you can tell people to piss off and be done with the whole matter.... Karl lied to us because he trusted his source. His source, however, burned him, and Karl's lie was exposed.... If the editors at ABC News had any damned integrity, Karl would be forced to expose his source, apologize, and then take a couple weeks off. Maybe some summer school ethics course." ...
... Just Who Is ABC News's Chief White House Correspondent? Peter Hart of FAIR says he's "a right-wing mole at ABC News": "Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses ... such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O'Keefe .... The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI's first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery.... He was a board member at the right-leaning youth-oriented Third Millennium group and at the Madison Center for Educational Affairs -- which ... seeks to strengthen young conservative journalism. After moving to ABC in 2003, Karl contributed several pieces to the neo-con Weekly Standard." Read on.
Ann Marimow of the Washington Post: "The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.... Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist -- and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources." ...
... Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: the Keystone XL pipeline -- "another step on the march to disaster."
CW: a couple of weeks ago I wrote that doctoral committees of most major universities would not approve a doctoral dissertation built on discredited assumptions that intelligence is race-based. Well, a thousand-plus Harvard students are wondering why their particular university isn't up to snuff. Jeff Spross of Think Progress: "Over 1,000 Harvard students delivered a petition to Harvard University's JFK School on Saturday, demanding an investigation into how and why the school approved a 2009 doctoral thesis arguing that Hispanics have lower IQs. The thesis was written by Jason Richwine, a co-author of a paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation that argued immigration reform would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The discovery of Richwine's paper by the Washington Post sparked a firestorm around the Heritage study, and several days later Richwine resigned from the think tank."
Erica Werner of the AP: "The Senate Judiciary Committee is aiming this week to pass a landmark immigration bill to secure the border and offer citizenship to millions, setting up a high-stakes debate on the Senate floor." ...
... Kevin Robillard of Politico: Two unions representing a total of 20,000 customs & immigration agents oppose the bill the Gang of Eight is crafting. They say provisions of the bill worsens the problems agent face. They claim the U.S. immigration service has turned into an "'approval machine' ...discouraging the denial of any applications." The complain the bill's authors did not consult them, instead relying on the input of "special interests."
Danielle Douglas of the Washington Post: "Banks have paid less than half the $5.7 billion in cash owed to troubled homeowners under nearly 30 settlements brokered by the government since 2008, delaying help to the millions of victims of discrimination and shoddy lending that epitomized the housing crisis, according to a Washington Post analysis...."
New York Times Editors: "New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come." CW: Read the whole editorial. I think the fix is in -- and it's another swell career move for Barack & Michelle Obama.
Paul Krugman: "In elite mythology, the origins of the [economic] crisis of the 70s, like the supposed origins of our current crisis, lay in excess: too much debt, too much coddling of those slovenly proles via a strong welfare state. The suffering of 1979-82 was necessary payback. None of that is remotely true.... It would be bad enough if we were basing policy today on lessons from the 70s. It's even worse that we're basing policy today on a mythical 70s that never was." ...
... ** Tim Noah, in a New York Times op-ed, on the skills gap nobody wants to talk about.
When the "P" in PBS is David Koch. Jayne Mayer of the New Yorker: how public television tried -- and failed -- to placate board member & big contributor David Koch. As Michael Moore said, "The words 'chilling effect' came immediately to mind." ...
... You can watch full video of the documentary "Park Avenue" at this PBS page.
Tough Critique. Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog has a good critique of MoDo's latest advice for Obama. Dowd has "written thirty columns so far this year, but hasn't once published the same kind of 'smackdown' of the Republicans that she's recommending to the president." ...
... Tougher Critique. I don't normally read Maureen.... I don't largely because it's sort of largely the same column for the last, like, eight years. -- Robert Gibbs, former Obama press secretary
I don't normally listen to Robert. I don't largely because it's sort of largely the same tired defense of President Obama for the last, like, six years. -- Maureen Dowd, in response to Gibbs' remark
Local News
Nicole Flatow of Think Progress: "The Virginia Republican Party this weekend nominated for lieutenant governor [E. W. Jackson,] a minister who has a history of virulent anti-gay statements, accuses the Democratic Party of enslaving African Americans, and criticized President Obama for having 'Muslim sensibilities.' The former Senate candidate, who in 2012 garnered less than 5 percent of the vote in the Republican primary, bested six other candidates during the Virginia GOP convention, and will join conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the Republican ticket. He is the first black candidate the state party has endorsed since 1988."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Homes were flattened, cars were flung through the air and at least two schools packed with children were destroyed as a huge tornado, perhaps a mile wide, tore through towns near Oklahoma City on Monday, killing at least 37 people and sending rescuers and residents dashing to dig out survivors buried in rubble." The Lede has updates here; it includes live video. A map shows the path of the tornado.
AP: "Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy ... warned that Monday's commute is expected to be 'extremely challenging' following the collision and derailment of two trains outside Bridgeport last week that injured 72 people."
New York Times: "Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China's People's Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials."
New York Times: "Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the [High Plains] Aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers' peak needs during Kansas' scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains."
Reuters: "At least 43 people were killed in car bomb explosions targeting Shi'ite Muslims in the Iraqi capital and the southern oil hub of Basra on Monday, police and medics said. About 150 people have been killed in sectarian violence over the past week and tensions between Shi'ites, who now lead Iraq, and minority Sunni Muslims have reached their highest level since U.S. troops pulled out in December 2011."
Reuters: "North Korea fired two short-range missiles on Monday, making six launches in three days, and it condemned South Korea for criticizing what it said were its legitimate military drills."
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Reader Comments (10)
"Conservative journalism?" What a concept!
Would that conservative journalism were reporting that restrains itself, not publishing until all the facts are in and all the claims checked, not journalism given to wild claims and screaming headlines but no, instead conservative journalism, like today's conservative economics or conservative governing, is a faith- instead of fact-based enterprise, where reality is never allowed to interfere with the Revealed Agenda...and it's a major blight upon the land.
Though, not always in every part of the land, equally.
According to a recent Washington Spectator (washingtonspectator.org) "Extremes in religion are almost as precise a predictor of the presidential vote as Nate Silver's analytical models...All ten states that Gallup categorized as 'very religious' voted for Mitt Romney in the past election by an average of 58.75 percent...the ten 'not very religious' for Obama by an average of 59.3..."
And it's not just in conservative journalism, economics, governance or presidential politics that the wish-it-were-so crowd, fueled by gobs of money--interesting intersection of money and willful ignorance here. Wonder who benefits?-- would substitute its magic wand for careful thought and real work. Though the congruence is not exact, the same delusional states that voted for Romney are also rejecting Medicaid expansion, impervious to inconvenient facts like one in this morning's AP report: a Texas resident is 36 percent more likely to die of a preventable or curable medical condition than someone in Massachusetts. (We'll not mention fertilizer plant explosions.)
If only death were also a delusion. But I guess it is, if you're "saved."
In support of Ken's take on conservative "journalism" (which didn't used to be an oxymoron of such elevated--or should that be degraded--status, but is now) we have the reports linked by Marie to ABC right-wing shill and galumphing liar, Jonathan Karl. I've felt for a long time that this guy had a lot more than his thumb on the scale whenever he made his "reports" (ie, winger homework) on ABC.
During the presidential race his overt crush on Paul Ryan couldn't have been more obvious if he had handed the guy a bunch of roses and a box of chocolates each time he gushed about how he was working to right the wrongs of liberal Washington and stand up for the little people (the Koch brothers, et al.).
There are only two explanations for this sort warped "journalism". One, his ardor for Ryan blinded him to all his many failings and the true nature of his putative budgetary genius. Two, he was simply being a good conservative foot soldier, doing his best to up all Republicans and down all Democrats. Well, okay, there might be a third option: he's a moron.
But with the revelation of his fast and loose handling of his Benghazi "source" and the e-mails that he read but really didn't (I'm thinking that he knew all along that he was shoveling shit, but took it for granted that no one would call him on it because, you know, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi...) it's pretty clear that Karl has been broadcasting similarly odiferous ordure for years. You don't just all of a sudden wake up and say to yourself, "Hmmmm....I've been a straight arrow, ethical reporter all my life, but today I think I'm gonna turn into a corrupt, lying, unscrupulous, slippery, intellectually dishonest, degenerate butt boil whose journalistic principles originate in Matt Drudge's bile ducts.
Nah, it doesn't work that way.
Karl's always been a slippery butt boil. Except now people are paying attention and doing the background research.
Liberal media? My ass.
And don't expect ABC to whack his pee-pee or anything like that. ABC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, according to Wikipedia, the richest media conglomerate in the world (or at least the one with the biggest revenue stream). And pardon me, but I don't ever recall old Walt or his company showing up on any "liberal media" radar.
So I guess no one can quibble if I say that Jonathan Karl's "reporting" is pretty Mickey Mouse.
Ain't it grand being a conservative "journalist"? Just make shit up, cash your check, and insult people when they call you on your lies.
Forecast for the next four years. 72 committees convened to investigate (translation: drag out bullshit, discredited conspiracy theories and assorted crap that has been long disproved, wave it around and around at innumerable breathless press conferences promising to break new ground any day now) Benghazi, the IRS, the AP issues, and any other scandally sounding scandal thingies that flash in front of the glazed eyes of impeachment hopefuls.
Clinton all over again. Only worse.
In other words, rather than dealing with serious issues such as unemployment, dilapidated and crumbling infrastructure, real improvements in education, problems leading to and stemming from disproportionate short and long term incarceration of a huge number of males from a single ethnic group (African Americans), election reform (fat chance there), sustainable energy sources that don’t involve despoiling enormous swaths of the country and a reduction of reliance on fossil fuels, reining in costs of medical care, a reasonable and humane immigration policy, foreign policy that doesn’t draw on Boy’s Greatest Adventure Tales and Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy stories for inspiration, rampant misogyny in the military, re-regulating the banking and investment industries, among many other dire needs, the GOP, Republican presidential hopefuls such as L'il Randy and the Cruz Missile, the dominant conservative media, the entire winger blogosphere, and every propeller-hatted teabagger able to misspell and carry a sign declaring their undying hatred of the Kenyan-Mooslim-Non-White Usurper in their White House, will for all intents and purposes, purposefully derail the true and serious business of the country and keep the present administration jacked up with investigations, threats of impeachment, watermelon jokes, the whole megillah, just to keep their outrage fresh and the nation hijacked.
This is nothing short of treason.
Again.
So we had eight years of treasonous behavior by Republicans during Clinton I and II, followed by eight years of the treasonous and murderous Bush administration and now another eight years of treason by virtue of stalling all serious business and thwarting democracy.
So in truth, the GOP is not just the party of no, they're the party of haters and traitors.
And a supine, invertebrate press of running-dog boot-licking lackeys to keep it all going 24/7.
Will it ever end?
Recently, my wife bought a new shirt for me. On the country of origin tag, it says "Made in Vietnam." I have a favorite jacket also made in Vietnam. Can someone, anyone, tell me why I spent two years of my life fighting in the Vietnam war. What was the point of the war, to make Vietnam safe for US multinationals? To kill off 30,000 excess Americans and who knows how many Vietnamese?
Akhelius, Marie, Kate, James, Ken, anyone?
Memorial Day is almost here. Time for my annual blue funk about the futility of it and all those lives wasted.
My doctor now is Vietnamese. He came to this country at the age of 14, got an education, went to medical school and made something of himself. It seems to me that he could have done that without all that blood and treasure expended by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
Okay, one more on this then I'll give it a rest. For now.
Marie has linked another story this morning, one involving the inroads made into public television by the Koch brothers. As an object lesson in how sponsors (and owners) can make a network sit up and beg, roll over and play dead, the author of this piece, Jane Mayer (herself the victim of smear campaigns by the Kochs) describes how in the late 90s, Micheal Eisner, then president of Disney and owner of ABC, killed a story ABC was about to run on Disney's hiring of pedophiles to work around kids at Disney World. Eisner, it is related, declared stories about Disney (bad stories, one would expect) off-limits to ABC reporters.
The best journalism money can buy.
Barbarossa,
I wish I had a good answer for you.
Off the top of my head, something sticks out regarding the futility you speak of. We can review all the debunked ideas like the Domino Theory and the irrational fears whipped up by demagogues to suit their own purposes, but I think Springsteen's song "Born in the USA" has something interesting to say about that war.
The singer is sent to Vietnam to "kill the yellow man" but comes home disillusioned, out of a job and left with little hope.
He sings:
I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
I could never get how fighting a war in Southeast Asia against a country that had nothing to do with us had something to do with keeping America free, same as I've never gotten how invading Iraq was done to "keep America free!" Whenever I hear windbags spouting that nonsense I want to punch them.
Guys like yourself went and fought did their duty but I doubt that few of them have ever been compensated in any real way for their sacrifices or given any reasonable explanation as to why all those guys had to die.
By the way, you may remember that "Born in the USA" was supposedly Ronald Reagan's favorite song. Morning again in America and all that happy horseshit.
One of my more mordant anecdotes involves the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Hundreds of millions watched while the winners of the Great War carved up the world according to their own particular prejudices and political stances. It was a time of hope for many people that finally their grievances might be heard and addressed. A busboy working at the Ritz in Paris sent a hand written note to the inner circle of carver-uppers, including Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, begging them to free his country from the yoke placed on them by France. His pleas were trampled by the demands of bigger players on the world's stage.
That busboy was Ho Chi Minh.
@Ak
"So we had eight years of treasonous behavior by Republicans during Clinton I and II, followed by eight years of the treasonous and murderous Bush administration and now another eight years of treason by virtue of stalling all serious business and thwarting democracy." -Ak
I was wondering if I should bother putting my thoughts out there today, particularly with the piece of Dionne stating that Democracy is in trouble these days... The highlighted part Marie posted really rang true to me...
"They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points."
I'm the quintessential protype of this example put forth (ok a little younger and not currently unemployed). Yet when you summed up the last two decades of American politics so succinctly, it got me thinking...
I consider myself half-way intelligent, I make an effort to read between the lines and I'd rather face cold hard reality than live in fantasy. Reading RealityChex keeps me in reality (thanks Marie). Quite often reading the day's summary of shameful twaddle leaves me with a sense of awe at the growing margin of cockamamie that is produced by our elected officials. To the point where X Files could possibly be reality.
Yet for us late 20 somethings that have actually paid attention to the last two decades of government, these shenanigans are reality. I've never known a real bipartisan Washington working for the public good. It's been monkey shit slinging and chest beating as long as I can remember. The recreants passing for high elected officials in our country no longer surprise me because I consider them depressingly normal. I can't believe this is the "cream of the crop" unless cream means the rotting cobs contributing to the compost pile. But I reason to myself saying, "ah fuck ya know it's always been like this, old white men comparing shriveled dick sizes in the backrooms while the public patiently waits. But, like Larry Summers says, that's American style government working in its fits and starts, but finally getting the job done..."
I suppose the fellow commentators here have lived through bipartisan compromise. I hear of an extinct race of Conservatives who debated, fought for their ideals, and came to the middle. Well for me those stories are reaching borderline fairly tale status; one of those back-in-the-days when you had to walk in the snow 10 miles uphill each way to get an education.
You ask the rhetorical question: Will it ever end?
The 20-something, college educated, temporarily employed but facing a Brave New World (see Colbert today) asks: Will it ever begin?
Safari,
True bipartisanship has not been seen in DC since the early 70s. By the time Nixon and his dirty tricksters taught Republicans that the best way to win was to cheat, there was no turning back.
Your points are well taken and I will have a lot more to say about all of them shortly.
Your question, "will it ever begin?" I take to mean will there ever be a functional government in which those of differing viewpoints can ever find some common ground.
The short-term answer is no. Not with any of the current crop of gangsters in the GOP. Not as long as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann are considered the "cream of the crop".
Democrats, and especially this president, have shown a willingness (mostly a bad decision) to try to work with Republicans, but the GOP idea of working together is "Do whatever we say and shut the fuck up".
This is a perfect representation of Yeat's widening gyre.
The center cannot hold.
Not with congenital assholes like this.
More later.
Barbarossa. I don't know, pard. I'm still trying, now and again, to figure out my war. Korea. Made no sense then; makes no sense now... unless, maybe, it was an excuse to keep the GI Bill rolling and, thereby, support the housing industry. Nothing else computes. Except stupidity.
@Barbarossa and All:
Of course, there is no good answer (good in the sense of justifying the sacrifice, not in the sense of explaining) for what we did to others and ourselves in Vietnam. As one of the privileged with an education deferment, later modified (twice; the infamous Oakland induction center believed--faith-based medicine or cranky army doctors?-- my unbending left knee would miraculously heal itself and made me repeat the failed physical a year later) to the 4-F my high school football heroics provided, I did not serve, and frankly by 1967 did not believe anyone should.
By then it should have been apparent to all, I thought, that the war was both un-winnable and wrong. Not to mention insane. Though it had its origins in an irrational but understandable fear of monolithic Communism, by the late sixties there were many signs that boogieman did not exist, but we fought on anyway. Inertia and misplaced pride and greed in high places, among other things, kept us going.
For me there were many reasons to detest the war and the people who arranged it, but even then I sensed the degree to which Vietnam highlighted the class issues that remain with us in a heightened form today. Along with the Dick Cheney and the younger Bush whom I had not grown to despise, I and most of my college cohort did not serve my country in the military. Aside from our politics, we did not have to. But it seemed only too obvious that the majority we sent into the cannon's maw in the name of patriotism were not from the higher economic strata....and that was wrong, just as is the disproportionate, tho' not so directly murderous (except for those forced into the military by family circumstance) as our treatment of of the poor and disenfranchised today.
As all wars do, the Vietnam War aroused high feelings that have remained with us for decades. Thomas Frank has famously asked what's the matter with Kansas, encapsulating the question of why so many continue to act in ways opposed to their own interests....as did the hard hats and police who happily beat on the hippies and war protesters. Neatly co-opted by the Right, they were losing sons and daughters and were pleased to have someone not of their tribe to blame
One of the answers to Franks's question, which today's Republicans know full well and have known since at least the 1970's, is that war, based as it is on fear and hate, is always the easy alternative. It requires no self-examination and accepts no hesitancy or second thoughts. All subtlety is reduced to for and against, and woe to the thoughtful person foolish or brave enough to utter his doubts. War is about tribalism, (im)pure and simple and as long as the enemy is clear, the war can and will go on.
Vietnam ended because the draft, despite its unfair application, made certain that too many of the middle and upper middle class were directly affected and because for a variety of reasons, the draft, the war's length and others, support for the war declined. The war itself became the enemy. Some anti-war politicians developed a national base and even Walter Cronkite took notice. It is very possible, I believe, that had he not been assassinated, Bobby Kennedy, now riding the anti-war horse, might have been elected.
That was then, but the tribalism and the class warfare persists. No one need wonder why the R's like a fight or why they are so quick to label disagreement unpatriotic or cowardly. The technique has served them well.