DEAD PARROT BULLETIN
9/6/03
This is the first of a series of issues that I hope to publish this fall. In contrast to DP #1-34, they will be sporadic, brief, and probably single-sourced. I think of them as a way for us to keep in touch as we turn the corner into election year. Small items will also continue to appear on the web site:
http://www.dead-parrot.com
RUMMY ON THE ROAD
Donald Rumsfeld has been in Iraq this week on a "fact-finding" mission. The depth of Rumsfeld's interest in "facts" may be gauged by his recent pronouncements on the history of American military occupations. Speaking to the VFW in San Antonio on 8/25, he described our occupation of Germany between 1945 and 1947 as a nightmare of lawlessness, sabotage, and attacks on both US forces and cooperative Germans, some of them committed by a trained Nazi resistance organization known as Werwolf. Naturally the Greatest Generation did not cave in to such sinister subversion, and neither--so went the Rumsfeldian logic--should we.
Unfortunately, this scenario, which was also promulgated by Condoleezza Rice, is as much a self-serving fantasy as Rumsfeld's famous pronouncement that "we know where the weapons of mass destruction are." An article by Daniel Benjamin in Slate (8/29) exposes the canard for what it is. Though Werwolf actually did exist and succeeded in assassinating the mayor of Aachen six weeks before Germany surrendered, its post-war exploits were nil. The total number of American combat deaths in occupied Germany (Japan, too) was ZERO.
READING RECOMMENDATION
Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is a sometimes frivolous, often hilarious, and ultimately earnest look at the right wing's contempt for truth. Franken calls Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity on their remarkable ability to make things up and then work themselves into a self-righteous rage about them. He also addresses the slightly more subtle form of deceit that depends on the corruption of language. The following passage is a specimen:
Anytime a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush's tax policies, Republicans shout, "class warfare!"
In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her.
That is class warfare.
Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.
The best and least funny part of the book is Franken's account of the Wellstone memorial service. Distortions of this event, relentlessly flogged by Limbaugh and others, may well have cost the Democrats control of the Senate. Franken, who was a friend of Wellstone's and was present at the service, unpacks the ghoulish and hypocritical version of it that echoed around the talk shows in the days leading up to the election. If you don't feel like buying Lies, go to the library and read this heartbreaking chapter.