September 25, 2007 (Originally published April 29, 2005)
To understand how the United States got into today’s political predicament – where even fundamental principles like the separation of church and state are under attack – one has to look back at strategic choices made by the Right and the Left three decades ago.
In the mid-1970s, after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, American progressives held the upper-hand on media. Not only had the mainstream press exposed Nixon’s dirty tricks and published the Pentagon Papers secrets of the Vietnam War, but a vibrant leftist “underground” press informed and inspired a new generation of citizens.
Read on.
1 comment:
Spot on! After Vietnam and Watergate, we thought "Hey! We won! Now we can go home and get on withour lives."
Wrong.
Your analysis is absolutely accurate. We left the playing field to the Right. (And a note re the rise of the Christian Right: not only did media play a huge role, but that media didn't come out of the collection plate. It was funded by folks like Richard deVos and Sun Moon.)
Getting back to the Betrayus ad: when choosing our wording, we need to sit and look hard at how it will be twisted, and get our ducks in a row. Have the arguements ready for the shitstorm that will follow. Would the Senate have voted to censor the ad if the first response to their screams of pain was, "Hey! We got the idea from Rush Limbaugh, you know, _Senator_ Betrayus." Do you really thing the Right would have written that bill if _that_ factoid were on the table?
Always, always, always remember that Bush and his cronies first, last, and only thought is best summed up by Condi Rice's comment at the first NSC meeting after 9/11: "I want you to think about 'How can we capitalize on these events.'"
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