Month: February 2008

Look in the mirror

Republicans come November

“Q Is Finished”

“U.S. Struggles to Tutor

Iraqis in Rule of Law”

Small wonder

Whacking satellites

It’s the new arms race

Shooting money into space

This is something I ran across just yesterday in Glenn Hurowitz’s Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party about the DSCC’s reaction to Sen. Paul Wellstone’s opposition to the Iraq AUMF. It’s prior to Schumer’s stint as chair of the DSCC, but I think it exemplifies some of my misgivings about the organization, no matter who is in charge there (at the time, it was Patty Murray of Washington, who voted against the AUMF but wasn’t up for reelection in 2002):

Despite Wellstone’s instructions to leave politics out of the decision [about the AUMF vote], they inevitably reared their ugly head. On September 16 [2002], campaign manager Jeff Blodgett received an email from a senior Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee staffer implying that if Wellstone voted against the war resolution, it could impact the DSCC’s willingness to give Wellstone the financial resources he needed to win. It “makes me almost physically ill to even contemplate our spending 9m [$9 million] on a candidate who decides to commit [political] suicide [by voting against the Iraq war] — however principled and otherwise defensible,” the official wrote.

Pit nuclear missiles

Against Reagan’s fantasy

See which works best

Switch from left to right

To make tourists safer?

Just confuse the rest of Eire

At the end of last month, in a post about Senate hopeful Jeff Merkley reaching out to Harley-riding he-man types, one of the commenters mentioned that he had been spat on when he returned from service in Vietnam, presumably outside the Hunter’s Point naval station.

A couple of other commenters—myself included—asked about details, having remembered perhaps, Jerry Lembcke’s book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, in which he was unable to find any incidents of veteran-spitting reported in contempraneous accounts. Of course, that led to Pat Ryan, the author of the post and one of the regular contributors at Blue Oregon to advocate assault.

A couple of days later, I ran into this passage, from Curtis Austin’s Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (p. 81):

One week later [after July 1967 riots in Newark] in Detroit a similar, but more destructive, rebellion occurred when police arrested a group of blacks celebrating the return of a Vietnam veteran at the United Community League for Civic Action, which doubled as an after-hours drinking spot. Racial tension had been running high because a few weeks earlier a group of whites in Rouge Park community had murdered black Vietnam veteran Danny Thomas.