Who Ordered Chaos? - Democratic Underground

McCamy Taylor

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Sat Aug-23-08 06:50 PM
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Who Ordered Chaos?

Intro. Who Ordered Chaos?

One of the dirty tricks from the 1972 election was order a bunch of pizzas to be sent to one of the Democratic primary headquarters---which no one there was expecting, of course, and which no one there was prepared to pay for. Instant chaos and bad press for a Democratic candidate who would get the reputation of being disorganized and/or broke.

I. Chaos

Surprise! Rush Limbaugh did not dream up the idea of Chaos at the Convention . As I will show, he is not even the first national news figure to promote the phrase this election season.

It has been a long, strange trip, and all for nothing. The convention is going to be a lot like a wedding, with something old---two nights devoted to the Clintons---and something new—the rest dedicated to Obama. Disaffected Dems (and there are always Democrats who do not agree with the party platform) will have a meeting hall and a microphone to make their voices’ heard. But, with all the candidates supporting the winner, we are unlikely to see a replay of Chicago 1968, when Gene McCarthy took his marbles and went home.

However, there is always the chance that the RNC has paid people who have been laid off their jobs thanks to the Bush recession to board buses for Denver. Or maybe some more GOP Congressmen (think Brooks Brothers Riot) have ordered their aids to take vacations in Colorado where they will pose as disgruntled, unwashed, unshaven Democrats. So, I thought that it would be a good idea to remember who the forces of chaos are .

They are not Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has been making campaign appearances for Sen. Barack Obama all through the month of August. Her future political career depends upon her playing nice. Only the Republicans benefit if a bunch of crazed old biddies in pantsuits run wild through the streets burning Obama in effigy, since it damages the Clinton brand name, one which the GOP fears, and since it gives McCain something to criticize Obama for ( “He is divisive”).

Unfortunately, some members of the press have been salivating at the thought of covering Chicago 1968, so I can make a prediction right now even though I do not possess a crystal ball . Every troublemaker, disruptor, idiot, GOP plant, and media diversion in Denver will have about ten reporters on him/her clamoring to be the first to get exclusive coverage of real Democratic Convention chaos. Fox will have a special unit just for that purpose.

So, who are the masters of chaos in the real world game of dungeons and dragons for overpaid political geeks? Hint: they are the ones who want the Democrats to lose the election. They want Obama to look like Johnny Appleseed, except instead of sowing apple trees, he sows riots in his wake. Ooo. Scary. They include some of the same people who used the same tactics in 1972 to make the Democrats lose that election.

II. History

Just a word about history. By now, I thought everyone at DU had read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and the follow up chapters in The Great Shark Hunt . However, about a week ago, someone here at DU posted something that just about blew my mind. The gist of the remarks were (I paraphrase here) “the greatest evil in America during the Nixon administration was the silent majority, because they were a bunch of bigots.” As if to say If they did not vote for McGovern, fuck’em! .

This kind of thinking is not an anomaly at DU. We have all seen similar sentiments expressed regarding the upcoming general election. Some posters, disheartened at the closeness of the polls, have written that if Americans select McCain, they deserve what they get for being so easily swayed by fear ads or for being bigoted.

What struck me about the “silent majority” comment (I put the phrase in quotes, because it was a GOP propaganda term, much like “Reagan Democrat”) was that it betrayed a fundamental lack of knowledge of the criminal activities of the Nixon administration. What did the person who wrote this think that Haldemen and Ehrlichman and Colson and Magruder went to jail for? Delinquent back taxes?

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?nixon_and_watergate_tmln_legal_repercussions=nixon_and_watergate_tmln_watergate_prosecutions&timeline=nixon_and_watergate_tmln

The so called “silent majority” never had a chance. The 1972 election was stolen, and the American people were spied upon, lied to, persecuted, prosecuted, burglarized, bugged and fed propaganda in violation of the law. Everything that Bush/Cheney has done, Nixon did (allowing for limitations of technology) and then some.

The poster’s remarks struck me as fundamentally opposed to the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the republic was strongest when it was controlled by the vote of a majority which had been well educated in the running of the government. Rather than blame the system which criminals have corrupted, does not it make more sense to blame the criminals----and to educate the voters about their crimes so that they will be better able to spot them in the future? You can never design a democratic form of government that can not be played by a conman who is willing to break the law, since a million laws will not deter a criminal. However, an informed electorate will be wise to the con man’s tricks.

III. Con men

It is very easy to know the con men who have tried to bring us a Democratic Convention in Chaos. Some of them have used the phrase “Convention in Chaos”. Others participated in Nixon’s dirty tricks back in 1972, either as members (or as the architect) of CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President) and others have reprised the exact same roles that they played in 1972. I will not attempt to identify everyone, just some of the celebrities who caught my notice.

Pat Buchanan Pat Buchanan was Richard Nixon’s speech writer. Pat Buchanan is one of the people credited with formulating the so called Southern Strategy----remind Southern Whites that LBJ and the Democrats helped Blacks get equal rights and encourage them to flock to the Republican Party by promising that you will look the other way on matters like African-American voter suppression and that you will ignore equal education, equal housing opportunity or any other law that White bigots find inconvenient.

More important, Pat Buchanan is the one who devised the ultimate divide and conquer strategy for the 1972 election. Divide and conquer is an all important method of the haves to maintain control over the have-not’s, who typically out number the rich. It has been used for centuries in industrialized countries like England and the U.S. to divide the working class along any arbitrary ground. Race, gender, religion, ethnicity. It does not matter. All the boss has to do is tell his workers “Times are hard, I can not give you a raise. I might even have to let you go and hire me some ____, because they will work for half as much.” His employees do not hate the boss. They hate the ____, for threatening their jobs. If the employees try to strike, the boss brings in scab _____ to break the strike. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, where the ____ are dominant, the boss tells them the opposite if they try to ask for more money. Right now in the U.S., the ____are Latinos, that the feds allow across our porous border on purpose, so that the bosses can play this game, since improved access to education and jobs have made Blacks unsuitable as scab labor.

In 1972, Pat Buchanan decided that he would divide Democrats against Democrats, the young kids who were getting killed in Nixon’s illegal war versus the older white collar workers who were getting screwed in Nixon’s tanking economy versus the women versus the Blacks. He spelled it all out in this document in which he advises Nixon’s staffers to perform dirty tricks on Democratic presidential hopefuls and attribute them to other Democrats :

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/buchananmemo.htm

Part of the plan was to knock off the contenders who might actually win---esp. Ed Muskie---and promote fringe candidates like the anti-war McGovern. Here is a list of the dirty tricks that were played against Muskie. Note that CREEP went so far as to drug him, a clearly criminal offense.

http://www.woodstockjournal.com/elections.html

Pat Buchanan was the mastermind behind all of this. He lied to Congress during the Watergate hearings, but he was never indicted for perjury.

Knowing all that, it is easy to see that the two following conflicting articles written by Buchanan, one in the winter of the Democratic Primary and the other in the spring of the Democratic primary were intended to be used by fellow conservatives as talking points in their efforts to divide and conquer the Democrats by raising the issues of racism and sexism---two questions which Pat Buchanan has never troubled himself with in his own political life---and attributing them to Clinton and Obama.

In. Jan. 2008 he wrote Ghettoizing Barack http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/ghettoizing_barack.html

"I guess this is how the West was won," Hillary Clinton exulted at her victory rally in Las Vegas after the Democratic caucuses.
Well, not exactly, ma'am. Yet how the Clintons, by deftly playing the race and gender cards, turned back the greatest single challenge to a Clinton Restoration will be studied for a long time to come.

In May, 2008 he wrote something very different.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/219

Bill and Hillary Clinton are not playing a race card. Rather, the liberal media and some black journalists with sentimental, emotional or ideological investments in Obama are playing the intimidation card.

Shall we step back a second and observe? The player was Pat Buchanan, and he tried to play the Democrats for fools. There were two effects of this inconsistent writing. One, it served to pit two Democratic groups against each other, furthering the goal of a Convention in Chaos. Two, Buchanan wrote to assist Obama when he was the underdog, in order to prolong the primary, and he wrote to assist Clinton when she was the underdog---because if the momentum kept changing, then there was always a possibility that there would be a brokered convention, which improved the chances of a replay of Chicago 1968---which turned the nation against the Democrats, by stigmatizing them as a party which could not protect the country from violence and the forces of chaos.

Nora O’Donnell

Why is Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC on my list? I am going to have to pull a Corsi, because I am not sure that anyone else paid any attention to that vacuous brunette on the night of the Wisconsin primary. I tuned in, because I was amused by the spectacle of Chris “Tweety” Matthews, who hated Hillary Clinton like pubic lice, having to endorse her, now that Barack Obama had taken the delegate lead. This about face was necessary in order to keep the Democratic primary race going so that the RNC could achieve its dream of a brokered Democratic Convention.

The guys and gals at the Olbermann network were in fine form, telling lies about Michelle Obama and instructing Wisconsin’s Republican voters how they could go to the polls, register, cross over and vote for Hillary in order to punish Michelle for her lack of patriotism and to achieve a Convention in Chaos . You can read my impressions here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=4668782&mesg_id=4668782

Since Nora O’Donnell was the one who actually interviewed the guy who was at Chicago 1968 who described the riots, and since she was the one who repeated “Chaos at the convention” and had a big headline with these words emblazoned across the screen months before Rush did it , I am giving her credit for it. However, she ain’t too bright, if you know what I mean, so I figure one of the others actually thought it up.

Bob Novak

Bob Novak was called upon to reprise his role from 1972. In the spring of that year, he said that George McGovern had been described by a fellow Democratic Senator as standing for “abortion, acid and amnesty.” Novak refused to reveal his source, until years later when he blamed the dead Thomas Eagleton. However, the quote was just as likely made up and then attributed to Eagleton after his death when he could not rebut it. That is how the GOP works in its divide and conquer games. Saying something nasty about one Dem that was supposed to come from another Dem was in keeping with the Buchanan playbook.

In the general election, the Republicans made much of the fact that a fellow Democrat was supposed to have labeled McGovern as too extreme, even for his own party. “Abortion, acid and amnesty” sounded benign in the primary and to the faithful McGovern supporters (like me) but it was general election death in 1972.

When Bob Novak crawled out of the woodwork this election, everyone who remembered 1972, knew what he was up to. "Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it, “ said Novak. Once again, he was playing according to the Buchanan 1972 rules. Say that one Dem is playing dirty against another Dem. and in doing so tarnish both of them.

Hillary, who had been a campaign worker for McGovern replied "A Republican-leaning journalist runs a blind item designed to set Democrats against one another. Experienced Democrats see this for what it is. Others get distracted and thrown off their games. We have no idea what Mr. Novak's item is about and reject it totally."

Rev. Moon

The first journalist to notice what the right wing was up to appears to have been Joe Conason at Salon. Here is a link to Ghosts of Dirty Tricks Past written almost eighteen months ago about one of the first attempts to use the Buchanan 1972 strategy. I refer to the Obama Was Educated In a Madrassa Story---And We Get Our News From Clinton Moonie Smear from Insight way back in January 2007.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/01/26/obama/

On Tuesday, Watergate felon E. Howard Hunt passed on into history at the age of 88. But even while he lay dying in Miami, not far from the late President Nixon's Florida retreat, Hunt's spiritual heirs were orchestrating a classic Watergate-style dirty trick against both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not coincidentally, the perpetrators included certain veterans of the old Nixon gang, whose baneful influence on American politics has only grown over the decades.

Rev. Moon had “the eager assistance of Fox News Channel and right-wing Web sites such as Lucianne.com.” as well as Rush Limbaugh and Melanie Morgan. Lucianne as in Goldberg, who was a member of CREEP—she infiltrated the McGovern campaign, stole documents and may have done even more illegal things, who knows.

It is worth pointing out that Goldberg is not the only contemporary propagandist whose sordid roots trace back to Tricky Dick. Fox News is the creature of Roger Ailes, the jolly face of the Nixon gang, and Gibson and all of the other spewing heads on that network are his minions and nothing more. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon was among the last and most bitter defenders of Nixon, whose brainwashed "Moonies," just as obedient as any Fox anchor, stepped lively whenever they were ordered to demonstrate against impeachment on the steps of the Capitol.

This strategy----call Obama a Muslim but claim that you got the information from Clinton---was later used by Matt Drudge to good effect (for the Republicans) on several occasions, but it is fitting that the attempt to revive Buchanan’s 1972 strategy to divide and conquer the Democrats should have begun with Rev. Moon and so many other associates of Nixon. But they are not the only ones still around.

Karl Rove

Karl Rove was also a member of CREEP. He got his start working for Nixon.

Roger Stone

Media Matters has a nice summary of Stone’s work for CREEP and for CREEP II.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200802250009

He may have been the youngest of Nixon’s dirty tricksters when he was recruited in 1972 to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. He has continued his career as a dirty tricks operative, targeting people like Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he called a modern George McGovern in an AP story this spring. I mention this, because it shows how the right wing conspiracy thinks. To Democrats, McGovern is a hero. To Republicans, he is someone who lost.

Politico

Can we just call this site RNC Propaganda RUS? I have seen more shit here than you would find in a hog farm. Since the topic was Roger Stone, check out this one from Politico.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0608/Roger_Stone_pushes_whitey_video_rumor_.html

June 2, 2008, Roger Stone pushes the “whitey” story. No mention of the fact that Stone worked for Nixon in 1972.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=2EC0F60E-3048-5C12-00410E5BC5CFBB24

When one Democratic politician said something unfortunate that should have been retracted and apologized for ( on Face the Nation, Doug Wilder predicted that if superdelegates voted for Clinton at that point, Feb 19, 2008, there would be riots in the streets of Denver just like Chicago, 1968) you would have thought that Elvis had risen from the grave and spoken. It was not who said the words in this case. It was what he said. The right wing had been holding its breath, waiting for someone that it could associate with the Obama campaign to say something like this.

Politico used that very unfortunate remark as the basis for a feature in which they predicted that Clinton was going to precipitate a party meltdown. Note the proximity of this story to the Nora O’Donnell atrocity in which she invited a guest to describe Chicago, 1968, while she told her Republican viewers how they could cross over to make a Convention in Chaos a reality.

If Politico really was a neutral political blog, the writers would have discussed the reasons why Wilder made the threat he did---to discourage superdelegates from casting votes for Hillary. Instead, Politico played along, because Wilder’s threat worked well with the RNC’s larger plan----Democratic Party infighting. The result was to make Doug Wilder seem much more powerful than he was---and to allow the right wing to pin the blame for Democratic Party disunity on him and Obama.

Since a newspaper/blog can not be biased all by itself, I thought that I would explore the man behind Politico , Frederick J. Ryan Jr. its president and CEO. Turns out he is a former Assistant to Ronald Reagan and he is now the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, making him a Reagan Republican. But wait. It gets worse. Glenn Greenwald at Salon did all my legwork for me last year. Here is his excellent piece detailing Ryan (and Politico's) ties to the Bush family, the Rigg's Bank which was found guity of money laundering and Augusto Pinochet (as well as Ronald Reagan).

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/04/politico_funding/index.html

In addition to his long-time Reagan connections, Politico CEO Frederick Ryan was also (along with Jonathan Bush and Joseph Allbritton) himself a Board Member of Riggs Bank (h/t EJ). And Ryan, in addition to serving as Politico CEO, is also President of Allbritton Communications (a subsidiary of Allbritton Group, Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of "Perpetual Corporation").

To take a step back, the picture that emerges from all of this is both clear and familiar. As became evident when Augusto Pinochet died, support for Pinochet was one of those true clarifying issues dividing left from right throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Supporting Pinochet was a major plank in the Reagan foreign policy, and opposition to Pinochet was a major left-wing cause (which is why Fred Hiatt's praise of Pinochet's dictatorship was so revealing).

Like most billionaires with diverse business interests, Joe Allbritton had political relationships of all sorts. But the coterie around him -- and those who created the Politico, including the Politico's current CEO -- are plainly firmly entrenched in the right-wing political movement, with overlapping business and other ties to the Bushes, all kinds of international financial interactions with the Saudis and various right-wing governments, and long-standing ties of many kinds to the Reagan circle.

We hear incessantly about how this group or that group is funded by George Soros, as though that fact, by itself, proves the group's political affiliations. But those groups do not purport to be nonpartisan newspapers or sources of news. The Politico claims exactly that. Surely it is notable that those who created The Politico, who are funding it, and who are in charge of its operations, are long-time Republican operatives and those firmly implanted in right-wing circles.

For those like me who have never paid a lot of attention to the Riggs scandal, the World Wide Socialist Web has a very concise summary.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/rigg-a24.shtml

Turns out the Rigg's scandal was huge. The bank had been violating anti-money laundering laws for years, for people like Pinochet and the Saudis. The money that went to the 9/11 hijackers went through Riggs bank. Why did the company get away with a little $25 million fine and a switch in ownership? Might have something to do with the fact that a company owned by a Bush uncle was brought under the umbrella of the Rigg's bank in the later 1990s by owner, Allbritton, a good old boy from Texas, making this a Bush family affair. Allbritton is now a media mogul and Ryan helps him run his media empire. They have gone from being the money launderers of the right wing to being the propagandists of the right wing.

Back to Greenwald. He points out the ties between Politico and Drudge. Recall that Ben Smith reported in March 2007 that Edwards was withdrawing from the race based upon a Drudge report alone. Also, Ben Smith is the source of the misquote that Hillary stated that LBJ realized MLK Jr's goal when in fact her real quote said that LBJ realized JFK's goal of bringing to life MLK Jr's dream---a big difference, since the first implied that she was criticizing MLK Jr and the second was a comparison of two presidents. This lie became important, because KO assumed that Politico was a reputable source and accused Hillary of racism based upon the story on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, falling victim to yet another divide and conquer diversion courtesy of a stealth right wing publication.

Last and certainly not as important in this scheme as he would have us believe

Rush Limbaugh:

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_042808/content/01125106.guest.html

I wonder, Senator Salazar, if you're going to send a note to Doug Wilder, who said that Chicago would be nothing compared to what Denver is going to be if Obama doesn't get the nomination?

The cabal turned to Rush when it became clear that Obama had the nomination sewn up and that Hillary was not going to contest the race all the way to the convention. Rush could reach the masses who were too dim to read the tea leaves that conservative pundits like Pat Buchanan had been brewing for them. Rush is also a convenient fall guy. If there are disturbances that are not blamed on either Hillary or Obama---say they arrest someone for a violent crime who turns out to be a Republican---the right wing can pin it on bad boy Rush. He can say "It was a joke! I didn't think anyone would take me seriously. I'm a comedian for God's sakes."

Plausible deniability is always part of the Bush planning.

IV. Why we must win: Chaos at the Convention Center