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As gripping in its own way as a cloak-and-dagger thriller or John Grisham procedural, Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America, by co-directors Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith and about the famous Rand analyst turned Pentagon Papers whistleblower, is a smart, tautly-made conjuring of recent American history that's well worth the trip. And, fortunately for me, it's also a perfect movie to contemplate and write about this President's Day.

On one hand, the film makes for an interesting moral counterpoint to The Fog of War: Ellsberg's actions put the lie to a lot of McNamara's convenient post-hoc rationalizing therein -- clearly, SecDef could've done more at the time to end the war in Vietnam.) On the other, Ellsberg also works as a prequel of sorts to All the President's Men -- to say nothing of a generation of seventies paranoia epics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. But in the end, The Most Dangerous Man in America probably works best as an eloquent testament to the words of the late Howard Zinn (who appears here as an old friend of Ellsberg): "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

Like Man on Wire, Ellsberg starts here in media res, and at the scene of the history-making crime. Furtive eyes scan back and forth as an old-school Xerox copier whirrs in the dark, its green light illuminating maps of Southeast Asia and the ominous words "Top Secret" from below. With no zip drives or electronic files to speak of, analyst Daniel Ellsberg is forced to copy the 7000 pages of the Pentagon Papers page by painstaking page. It'll take months (and eventually he enlists the aid of his kids.) As the Xerox churns, we get up-to-date on the ramifications of the document being processed -- bombs fall from the sky over North Vietnam and Cambodia, weary troops patrol the hot, fetid jungle, and Nixon and Kissinger obsess over the leaks in their war machine (with Kissinger giving Ellsberg his moniker: "the most dangerous man in America.")

Cut back to several years earlier, when the future leaker of the Pentagon Papers seemed quite a different man indeed. A fresh-faced young ex-Marine with a crisp, no-nonsense Kennedy era haircut, Ellsberg began his tenure in government as one of the Best and the Brightest, with an enthusiasm for his 80-hour workweek matched only by his hawkishness. As one of McNamara's boys, Ellsberg concedes to helping massage the data to create a casus belli for the war. His first day on the job is the Gulf of Tonkin incident that wasn't, and he spends subsequent weeks trying to dredge up some, any, horrible atrocities in the region that might involve Americans.

But, over time, the scales fall away from Ellsberg's eyes. In part because he makes the acquaintance of a luminous lefty-leaning journalist named Patricia, who eventually becomes his fiancee...twice. (Ellsberg has a great line about a guy he meets at a peace rally who's a Trotskyist. He asks this fellow how in Hell he ever became a Trotskyist. The answer: "The same way anybody becomes anything. I met a girl.") And in part because, driven with an analyst's overriding compulsion to find the right answer, he starts going to Vietnam himself to lead recon missions on the side and get a better sense of the situation on the ground. Simply put, the Ground Game is not going well.

The rest, as they say, is history. Moved to throw a shoe into the gears of the war machine he had helped nurture into existence, Ellsberg goes rogue and decides to publish the top-secret history of the war. But, even if you feel like you know the story of the Pentagon Papers pretty well, and I thought I did, there are some fresh and intriguing insights here. For example, I'm not really one for Freudianism or overthinking coincidences, but it turns out Ellsberg suffered a tragedy at the age of 15 that made him uniquely primed to play the role in history he ended up playing. (His father fell asleep at the wheel during a road trip, prompting a crash that sheared the car in two and killed Ellsberg's mother and sister. In other words, watch the authority figures at the wheel verrry carefully.)

And then there's the man himself, who's an engaging presence throughout (if perhaps with a touch of monomania -- I could see him being a hard guy to get along with.) If The Most Dangerous Man in America has a flaw, it's that the movie is quite one-sided in the end -- Ellsberg even narrates much of the story, and you get the sense at various points there may well be some whitewash being applied. (Ellsberg has an ex-wife, and kids, that aren't even mentioned for the first 45 minutes or so.) Still, I'm inclined to give Ellsberg -- and Ellsberg -- the benefit of the doubt (and not just because the man loves his movies.) Ever since George and the cherry tree, we've been smoothing the edges of our patriotic tales. And, whatever his misdeeds as a man, Daniel Ellsberg, the film makes clear, is a patriot, through and through.

I use this Cornel West quote rather often, but that doesn't make it any less true: "To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it."

Daniel Ellsberg is one of those citizens. He saw an obvious crime being perpetrated by our government across multiple presidencies, and he did his part to help put a stop to it. In many ways, the story told in The Most Dangerous Man in America seems quaint: Johnson actually asked Congress for authority to bomb Vietnam? The press wasn't rolling over like a lapdog in the wake of obvious propagandistic lies? (In fact, the media types who show up late in Ellsberg clearly possess some of the narcisstic sense of self-entitlement that has been our undoing of late. Ellsberg the civilian sweats blood and tears to get this 7,000-page document out in public, and the press poobahs act like they're both the knowing gatekeepers and the heroes of the story.)

But just because Ellsberg's brand of patriotism has fallen out of fashion in the era of Judith Miller and the chattering class doesn't make this story any less relevant. It makes it more relevant. If we're going to keep our young republic through its third century, we need more men and women of Ellsberg's stripe. Men and women who will buck the trend, risk the ridicule and wrath of their well-connected peers, and stand up against injustice done under our collective name when they are party to it.

Presidents will get their due on this and every subsequent Presidents Day to come. But, now and again, it's good to honor those patriots who, through non-violent principle and sheer, dogged determination, help to keep our leaders in check when the separation of powers fails -- ordinary folks like you, me, and Daniel and Patricia Elllsberg.

"[L]ong before Hollywood discovered the Texan, he cut a wide swath through the House, always playing the roguish ladies' man and macho militarist...[His] frequent, much more sober-styled partner was Democratic Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania powerhouse who chaired the defense subcommittee so important to CIA funding for the Afghan cause. And the fact that both have died now within days of each other punctuates the end of a major chapter for the House left behind."

Charlie Wilson, 1933-2010, and John Murtha, 1932-2010.

"Farmer's verdict: 'History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks.'" To paraphrase Mark Twain, a lie gets halfway 'round the world before the truth can put its boots on...or any plane can get off the ground. In his new book The Ground Truth, 9/11 Commission Senior Counsel John Farmer points out yet more lies from Cheney and the Dubya administration, this time about their behavior during that fateful morning.

To wit, waist-deep in My Pet Goat at the time, they didn't know their ass from their elbow when the attacks were happening: "Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military's readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed." Well, they've lied about just about everything else -- can't say this is much of a surprise.

"During the discussion, Clinton told his vice president that he was disappointed that Gore had not used him in the last ten days of the 2000 campaign in strategically significant states -- Arkansas, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Missouri...Clinton insisted to Gore that he hadn't cared about how Gore had referred to Clinton -- and his personal scandal -- during the campaign. Paraphasing this portion of the conversation, Branch writes that Clinton told Gore, 'To gain votes, he would let Gore cut off his ear and mail it to reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, the Monica Lewinsky expert.'"

In Mother Jones, David Corn previews some of the interesting tales disclosed in historian Taylor Branch's forthcoming The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. "In 1997, after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an acerbic column about Clinton and golfer Tiger Woods -- maintaining that the the two green-eyed hucksters deserved each other -- Clinton told Branch, 'She must live in mortal fear that there's somebody in the world living a healthy and productive life.'"

"That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise."

As I'm sure you know, President Obama delivered his health care reform address to Congress last night. [Transcript.] My thoughts on it are mixed.

On one hand, speaking in terms of rhetoric, style, and delivery, this was an amazing speech, his best since the campaign days. While it's an open question how long its effects will linger, the address clearly and decisively helped move the reform ball forward. And the emotional closer, featuring Ted Kennedy's heartfelt final words to the President, was incredibly moving. In sum, it's the exemplary address we knew Obama had in him on this issue, and he brought it home perfectly.

But, all that being said, I can't shake the nagging feeling that [a] the policy being outlined last night didn't quite jibe with the wonderful speech, and, as all too common of late, [b] the president far too readily threw his left flank -- the very people who sweat blood and tears to get him elected -- under the bus.

To take the second part first, Obama early on indulged in an irritating and textbook case of Beltway false equivalence by setting himself up as the sensible middle between those cuh-rrrrazy single-payer types on the left and the free market fundies on the right. ("There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada's...") Uh, yes, and not so long ago, Mr. President, you were among them. I feel like I've said this several times recently, but painting the left as dingbats to shore up one's centrist bona fides is a pretty tired parlor trick at this point, and it never gets any less insulting.

As an aside, on the way into work yesterday, I -- and everyone else around the Metro -- was accosted by guys in Grim Reaper costumes and bullhorns, telling us all, basically, that violence will erupt and we will all die if this health care bill passes. Y'know, there's a term for telling people they'll be killed if a political event happens -- We call it terrorism. (As it turns out, there's a term for wearing a hood while telling people they'll be killed too.) Well, imagine my surprise to hear -- from the president I've vocally supported for two years now -- that me and my fellow clowns on the left are just as part of the health care problem as these jokers are on the right. I have to admit, it kinda tempers the enthusiasm.

And then there was the discussion of the public option. Yes, the President did make a case for the public option in last night's remarks: "[A]n additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange...It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better." In addition, the President correctly pointed out, "It's worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I've proposed tonight."

But what the President giveth, the President also taketh away. The public option was clearly brought up in the speech after the non-negotiable section. ("While there remain some significant details to be ironed out, I believe a broad consensus exists for the aspects of the plan I just outlined.")

Indeed, in case we missed the point, President Obama later made it clear: "To my progressive friends, I would remind you that...[t]he public option is only a means to [an] end - and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal."

He then went on to float two "compromise" ideas that, for all intent and purposes, are public option killers: (1) a trigger and (2) co-ops. ("For example, some have suggested that that the public option go into effect only in those markets where insurance companies are not providing affordable policies. Others propose a co-op or another non-profit entity to administer the plan.")

The trigger notion -- the idea that if the insurance companies don't fix the problem themselves, a public option would then be "triggered" into existence -- is in effect, as one progressive well put it, a threat made with an unloaded gun. It's kabuki theater, pure and simple, because everyone knows that Congress never pulls the trigger in question. (See also the cost of prescription drugs in Medicare Part D.) As Slate's Tim Noah recently ably pointed out, triggers are used all the time as "compromise" fodder, and what they really mean is we're going to pretend to have addressed the problem and let things go on as they have. And, really, how much worse would insurance companies have to fail before this trigger kicked in? We're talking about health care reform right now because the system is already broken.

As for co-ops, there's a good reason they are the compromise that the insurance industry tends to favor. Most likely, they'll be too small, weak, and scattered to bring real competition to the market.

So, granted, we don't have a final bill yet, and there are many strong advocates of a public option in the House who will continue to fight for it. But, if the public option is as expendable to the administration as it seemed last night, then we may have some problems.

To wit, if a health care reform bill passes that has an individual mandate (i.e. everyone has to buy insurance), limited subsidies (to keep costs down), and no public option, than what's basically happening is this: People are being forced to buy insurance they likely still can't afford from the very private companies that are making vast amounts of coin from the current, broken system. If this sounds like a huge boon for private insurance companies, it is. (One might even start to think they had a hand in writing the legislation.) Yes, a larger risk pool should make health insurance cheaper -- but without a public option keeping rates honest, what guarantee do we have that these savings would be passed on to the consumer?

Along those lines, President Obama also made the case last night for a tax on premium plans to help pay for reform. ("This reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their most expensive policies, which will encourage them to provide greater value for the money - an idea which has the support of Democratic and Republican experts.") But, again, without a robust public option holding the private industry's feet to the fire, what will stop said insurance companies from just passing these costs down the line, in the form of higher premiums across the board?

(I'll confess to being confused about this element of the plan anyway. The article I just linked on this premium plan tax says: "The hope is that employers would buy cheaper, less generous coverage for employees, thereby reducing the overuse of medical services." Uh...cheaper, less generous coverage for employees? That's a good thing? And I'm by no means an expert on these matters -- far from it -- but is "the overuse of medical services" really the main problem afflicting our health care system? It sounds a bit to me like "too many notes.")

All of which is to say that I really hope the substance of the final plan matches the beauty of last night's rhetoric. Now, I understand the counter-arguments: As Paul Begala recently reminded us, the Social Security Act of 1935 had serious problems too, and look how that turned out. The great is the enemy of the good. Politics is the art of the possible, etc. etc.

I don't disagree with any of that. But I also believe that leadership is the art of expanding the horizons of the possible. (Cue RFK: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.") We always knew that the President is a master of oratory, and that he would move us all with his eloquence when the time came. But, in setting their sights so low on this bill, the administration, in my view, have come close to squandering both the historical moment and the president's once-in-a-generation gift.

A historical puzzle lingers over the entire health care reform enterprise at the moment: How is it, with a Democratic House, a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, and a Democratic president, that the proposal for health care reform on the table basically remains to the right of Richard Nixon? (See also: The Family Assistance Plan.)

Well, the short answer, imho, is lack of meaningful campaign finance and lobbying restrictions. (A key problem that's about to get a whole lot worse.) But I would also argue in favor of another cause. For decades now, Democrats have tried to find that safe happy moderate middle, while Republicans -- flaks, representatives and presidents alike -- have willfully and consistently pushed that center to the right. The president's address, however magnificent and even moving at times, felt like another step in the same old vicious cycle. And at this crucial historical moment, I strongly believe it would be a better demonstration of "our American character" if we Dems -- and this administration -- showed the courage of our convictions in words and deed.

"So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are 'either' the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube?...They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests."

In the WP, historian Rick Perlstein puts the latest incarnation of the stark raving right-wing in historical perspective. The difference this time? The media is completely failing at its job. "The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the 'death panel' canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of 'complaints over the provision.' Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites."

"'There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,' he told an aide, before adding, 'Or a rape.'" Another round of newly-released Nixon tapes sheds more light on the dark and troubling imaginings of the 37th president. "'What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up,' Nixon said...'It may be they have a death wish. You know that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.'" Class act, this guy.

"If there is part of him that secretly covets Obama's job, he is burying it inside. 'I like my life now,' he said. 'I loved being president and it's a good thing we had a constitutional limit or I'd have made the people take me out in a pine box, probably. But we had a constitutional limit and I knew that in the beginning. And so when I left, I had to go out and create another life. And I did it, and I love doing it.'"

In a wide-ranging piece in the NYT Magazine, Peter Baker checks in on the post-presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. Among the topics discussed: Election 2008 fallout -- Obama is forgiven, Kennedy and Richardson are not -- and Clinton's retrospective view of his own administration's economic policy in light of the "Great Recession." "He added: 'If you ask me to write the indictment, I'd say: "I wish Bill Clinton had said more about derivatives. The Republicans probably would have stopped him from doing it, but at least he should have sounded the alarm bell."'"

As many readers here well know, I've spent a good bit of time over the past decade studying US history. (In fact, over the past few years, I've occasionally helped my advisor keep a textbook up to date that recently drew the ire of right-wing blowhard Bill O'Reilly. Apparently, those damn pesky facts were somehow mitigating O'Reilly's ability to spew forth the usual idiotic blather.)

Anyway, over that period of time, I believe I have in fact learned me a few things. So, as a public service of sorts, and because, after this morning's revelations, I've reached the limit of craven and/or patently stupid falsehoods that I can feasibly ingest over so short a time, some "U.S. History for Dummies." I expect most everyone who comes by this site with any frequency knows all this, but ya never know. Apologies for the didacticism in advance -- if this were this a Coors Light commercial, this would be where i vent. (And thanks to Lia for the timely visual tax lesson, above.)

The Tea Party: As you no doubt know, the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was recently appropriated by FOX News and the conservative group Freedomworks to simulate a widespread popular uprising against high taxes. (In other words, it was an "astroturf," rather than a grass-roots, movement.) And, yes, the inconvenient fact that President Obama and the Democratic Congress actually lowered income taxes for 95% of Americans earlier this year didn't seem to dissuade them from trying to jury-rig some rather dubious anti-tax ramparts and gin up enough disgruntled FOX-watchers to man them.

At any rate, as most people remember from high school, the original 1773 Tea Party was not a protest against high taxes or high prices at all. (In fact, legally imported tea -- i.e. that of the East India Company, which was both suffering serious setbacks over in India and losing market share to smuggled Dutch tea at the time -- was actually cheaper in the colonies after the Tea Act, since it was now exempt from the usual obligations.)

In small part a reaction of the East India's commercial rivals to this sweetheart deal, the Boston Tea Party was mainly held to uphold the principle of No taxation without representation. Which I don't think I need to explain. So, with the minor exception of DC-area conservatives who attended the tea gathering in Washington (without crossing over from Virginia or Maryland), the, uh, "teabaggers" don't really have a leg to stand on here. This is particularly true after you consider that both ruthless gerrymandering and the vagaries of the Electoral College (I'm looking at you, Wyoming) actually tend to lead to over-representation of conservative Republicans in our halls of governance, even despite heavy losses for the "Grand Old Party" in 2006 and 2008.

The "Right" of Secession: Apparently, Rick Perry, the right-wing governor of Texas, really wants to keep his job. As such, he's scared stiff of the forthcoming primary challenge by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who happens to be much more popular than he is among Texas Republicans. So, to sow up his "activist" (re: freak show) bona fides, this desperate fellow has been doing anything and everything he possibly can to prostrate himself before the paranoid ultra-right, including appearing before the current poobahs of the GOP's lunatic fringe, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage. As you no doubt know, this recently culminated in Gov. Perry's upholding Texas' right to secede before a crowd of rabid teabaggers. Said the Governor: ""We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that..."

Well, in fact, no state in the Union has any legal right to secede. (Not even Texas.) The existence of such a right was posited and debated quite often in the early years of the republic: by Jefferson and Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, by the members of the Hartford Convention, by South Carolina's philosopher-politician John C. Calhoun, and countless others.

But the illegality of secession was eventually confirmed -- in blood -- when eleven states attempted to pull out of the Union in 1861, due mainly to differing opinions on the institution of slavery and its expansion into the western territories. As a result of this insurrection by the southern states, a violent conflict broke out, which we call the Civil War. It lasted four years, and it was kind of a big deal.

Prior to the war, the states of the Confederacy believed secession to be their natural right, while those remaining in the Union believed it to be tantamount to an act of treason. With the Union victory in that conflict, and the subsequent readmittance of southern states in such a manner that reaffirmed that no right of secession exists, the question was settled. So it remains to this day.

Waterboarding, Torture, and "Just Following Orders": In the wake of recent revelations, there's been a renewed push among certain conservatives to laugh off waterboarding as not being constitutive of torture. (See also Rush Limbaugh's fratboy defense of Abu Ghraib a few years ago.) But (as even John McCain concedes), in the years after World War II, there was no question among Americans that waterboarding is torture. In fact, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes for waterboarding American GIs and Filipino prisoners. When you think about it, it's not really a tough call.

Another argument we've heard lately -- today Sen. McCain made it with his usual comrades-in-arms, Sens. Lieberman and Graham, while trying to protect Dubya's lawyers -- is that the CIA officials who actually conducted these recent acts of torture should be exempt from prosecution, because they were following the legal dictates of those higher-up in the administration. (To follow the reasoning around the circle, the torturers should be exempt because they were listening to the lawyers, and the lawyers should be exempt because they didn't do the actual torturing. Cute.)

Anyway, whatever you think of the merits of this argument, this is usually referred to as the Nuremberg defense, and it is in fact no defense at all. Argues Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles, devised by the Allies after WWII to determine what constituted a war crime: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." Insert "CIA interrogator" for person in that last sentence and you can pretty much see the problem.

Is America a Christian Nation?: At the end of his recent European tour, President Obama told an audience in Turkey the following: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." This statement -- well the "not a Christian nation" part of it, at least -- prompted no small amount of consternation from the porcine-moralist wing of the GOP -- James Dobson, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and sundry other freaks of the industry -- all of whom fell over themselves to proclaim to the Heavens and preach to the FOX News choir that, yes, Virginia, America is a glorious Christian nation.

America is not a Christian nation. This will be patently obvious to anyone who's ever heard the phrase "separation of church and state." Unlike, say, England, America does not have and has never had an official, established church. This is very much by design. For proof of this not-very-radical claim, see the very first clause of the very first amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

If that doesn't do it for you, see George Washington's famous 1790 letter to the Jewish residents of Newport, Rhode Island. "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Or consider that Thomas Jefferson skipped his presidency on his tombstone to make room for his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: "Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." (We could also make mention of the Jefferson Bible, but let's start slow.)

Is the reasoning here too circuitous for Rove, Gingrich, et al to follow? Ok, then, here's the cheat sheet: the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, passed by a Congress of our Founders without declaim and signed into law by President John Adams. It begins: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." Did y'all catch it this time? Good, let's move on.

A Smile for Chávez: Our new president also attended the Summit of the Americas recently, at which he was photographed smiling and shaking hands with Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez, a particular bête noire of the right who has said all manner of unpleasant things about America over the past few years.

After the picture was taken, conservatives went predictably livid, with Matt Drudge headlining the offending photograph with the usual red text, Dick Cheney deeming Obama "a weak president" on FOX News, and Gingrich arguing that it made Obama look "weak like Carter." "We didn't rush over, smile and greet Russian dictators," said Newt, and he wasn't the only potential 2012'er aghast at Obama's behavior. Sen. John Ensign of Nevada called the president "irresponsible" and the consistently shameless Mitt Romney painted Obama a "timid advocate for freedom".

Um, ok. Well, let's see here...

I could go on. With regards to that last one -- Reagan yukking it up with Mikhail Gorbachev, then of "the evil Empire" -- it didn't take long before (surprise) Newt was caught in a contradiction. Apparently, Gingrich had previously argued on his website that Ronald Reagan's good humor with Gorby was a sign of strength, not weakness.

Speaking of which, as Lawrence O'Donnell noted on MSNBC the other day, saintly old Ronald Reagan didn't just smile and shake hands with America's enemies. His administration sold them weapons under the table. So, please, assorted puddin'-heads of the GOP talkocracy, spare me your warmed-over tripe about poor diplomacy and weak leadership. As with everything else above, I've swallowed enough of your swill over the past few weeks to last me a lifetime.

"'There will be people in districts all over the country that will wonder why, when there's a good bill to get the economy moving again, we still seem to be playing political gotcha,' White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in an interview." Well, so much for the post-partisan era. Despite several attempts at across-the-aisle diplomacy by the new administration, the House passes President Obama's stimulus bill 244-188 without a single Republican vote. Sigh.

Perhaps a little history lesson is in order. Journey with me, if you will, back to 1993, the last time a new Democratic president tried to work with this same crew of jokers on a new, recession-busting economic plan. As you may remember, Clinton's 1993 budget also passed the House and Senate without a single GOP vote. Let's see what the Republicans had to say back then (courtesy of some old, off-line research of mine):

Dick Armey (who, btw, made an embarrassment of himself on national television last night): "This bill would grow the Government...shrink the economy" and "will mean fewer jobs for ordinary Americans." [Congressional Record, 8/5/93]

Newt Gingrich: The bill will "kill jobs and lead to a recession" that would "force people off of work and onto unemployment and will actually increase the deficit." [Houston Chronicle, 8/7/93, 1993; AJC, 8/6/93]

Bob Dole: The bill "would take America in the wrong direction." [WP, 8/4/93]

Ronald Reagan (yes, they wheeled him out with talking points): The bill will "only cause the deficit to increase and will likely wreck any hopes for economic recovery." [“Just Say No to Clinton’s Package,” NYT op-ed, 8/3/93]

Rush Limbaugh: True to form, the GOP's poster boy bet the DNC $1 million on the air that three of the following five things would happen by 1996: 1. The deficit would grow. 2. Unemployment would rise. 3. Inflation would swell. 4. Interest rates would surge. 5. The President's approval rating would fall below 45 percent. [ James McTague, “Off to the Races,” Barron’s, 3/18/96]

Well, I'm sure I don't need to remind you of the untold economic devastation that was the remainder of the Clinton years. (If you're keeping score, Rush went 0-for-5, and never paid up.) As it turns out, just as with Boehner this time around, the GOP had decided beforehand they weren't going to vote for any Clinton bill. As Bob Woodward notes in The Agenda (p. 109), Dole told Clinton this three weeks before the bill was even proposed.

Then as now, the modern Republican party doesn't seem to understand the first thing about basic economics (their right-wing dogma precludes any grasp of Keynesianism, I guess.) They don't seem to "get" rudimentary American history. (I've seen so many dumb things written about Herbert Hoover and the 1937 "Roosevelt recession" -- which was caused by spending cuts and fiscal retrenchment by the FDR admininstration, not "over-regulation" -- by right-wingers of late that it's hard to even know where to begin.)They don't seem to understand basic politics. (The American people have obviously voted for action, and a path away from Dubyanomics. Getting in the way of this bill won't "reboot" their party in any way, shape, or form.) At this point, it's an open question whether they can distinguish their asses from their elbows.

So...can we please stop spoon-feeding these guys now? The GOP has proven yet again that they're not looking to play ball. If they want to be on the wrong side of the problem as usual, let them. It's useless to spend any more time bending over backwards to accommodate their lousy, discredited ideas and inchoate, faith-based economic beliefs. It's time to move on.

Ron Howard's version of Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, the first of many 2008 prestige films I caught over this past weekend, is a solid two hours of decently diverting edutainment. It's not an earth-shattering, must-see film or anything, and Morgan (and Michael Sheen)'s last recent "mini-history," The Queen, is ultimately a more memorable moviegoing experience. Still, Ron Howard's film has its merits. It's much better about opening the space and feeling less play-like than John Patrick Shanley's recent reimagining of Doubt. And it has considerably less of the dry, "Will this be on the test?" feel of much of Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, which sometimes seemed designed as a go-to staple for high school history teachers feeling under the weather. Throw in two highly watchable performances by the main sparrers in this tale, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen as Nixon and Frost respectively, and some scene-stealing buffoonery by Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell in the margins (Think Rosencrantz/Guildenstern), and you've got a keeper here with Frost/Nixon. And, fwiw, it's probably Howard's best film since Apollo 13, perhaps ever.

As you might expect, the movie begins with a brief recap of the Watergate crisis, culminating in the memorable departure of Richard Nixon (Langella, beady-eyed and furtive) from the White House grounds on August 9, 1974. And, while the mid-Seventies unwind, Nixon licks his wounds, and Rocky Balboa trains on the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for his one shot at Apollo Creed, another challenger -- this time from across the pond -- begins his own preparations for taking on the champ. In this case, the challenger is David Frost (Sheen), a talk show host and television personality whose American show failed in syndication and who has since been relegated to covering stupid-human-tricks Down Under. Hungry to get back into the Stateside game, Frost sees immediate opportunity in a series of interviews with Nixon, and, by dint of sheer ambition, manages to rope in his BBC producer friend (Matthew MacFadyen of Pride and Prejudice), two down-and-out researchers (Platt and Rockwell), and a leggy brunette he meets on the plane (Rebecca Hall of The Prestige and Vicky Christina Barcelona) into his audacious proposal.

At first, it seems, Frost is in luck. When not dying a slow death on the lecture circuit, the former president has been languishing in San Clemente, and he and his handlers (most notably Kevin Bacon) have been looking for a way to get back in the game themselves. So after Nixon's agent (Toby Jones) extracts from Frost a price the television "performer" can't really afford, and it is deemed by all involved that Frost is a certifiable lightweight, who can be molded as needed to fit the president's new media strategy, the interviews are agreed upon. In the early rounds -- and rounds they are, with points scored, corner men, sweat towels (no 1960 redux for Nixon this time) and the like -- everything proceeds according to plan, with Nixon pontificating presidentially and Frost (and his increasingly exasperated researchers) completely hemmed in. Will this spirited but out-of-his-depth newsman manage to break out of the corner and land a few punishing blows himself? I dunno, but we'll definitely need a montage...

To be honest, I don't think Frost/Nixon ever really succeeds in selling us on the purported importance of the Frost interviews. Granted, I'm too young to remember how they played at the time -- I was sorta more focused on Electric Company and Star Wars right around then. But for all the talk of much-needed national catharsis throughout the film, the world-historical stakes here seem rather small. Coming after all the investigations into the break-in and subsequent cover-up, the congressional hearings on Watergate, the ultimate resignation of the president, and the pardon by Ford, it's hard to see these 1977 talks as much more than a coda to the main event. And, while Langella is exemplary as the 37th president and definitely deserves his recent Oscar nod, I actually think Oliver Stone's Nixon did a better job of humanizing Tricky Dick and animating his demons. (In fact, there's a midnight drunk-dialing episode here in Frost/Nixon (an obviously fabricated event) which wouldn't seem out of place in Stone's film.)

Still, once you move past its historical pretensions and realize that, for all intent and purposes, Frost/Nixon is basically just the political debater's version of a boxing movie, there's still some good fun to be had here. And, hey, he may now seem like a piker when compared to the intelligence-falsifying, torture-happy shenanigans of 43 -- can we expect Lauer/Dubya just around the corner? -- but at least we'll always have Nixon to kick around some more.

Update: David Frost, Michael Sheen, and others talk about the film here.

It took awhile to get here, but Gus Van Sant's timely and vibrant biopic Milk, which I caught on Christmas day, is well worth the wait. In a year that witnessed a former community organizer take his message of hope all the way to the White House, and saw a majority of Californians vote for legislating and invalidating their neighbors' marriages (my favorite pin: "Can we vote on your marriage now?"), Milk couldn't feel any more of the moment. (If anything, I wish Milk had come out before the Prop 8 vote, when it might've done some good.) Arguably the best film about the realities of politics since Charlie Wilson's War, Milk is blessed with excellent performances across the board -- most notably Sean Penn, James Franco, and Josh Brolin, but also supporting turns by Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and others. And as a chronicle of a key moment in an ongoing civil rights struggle, Milk also feels like a watershed film of its own in its approach to its gay and lesbian characters. In short, it's one of the best films of 2008.

"My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you." So began the oft-repeated speel of the San Francisco city supervisor and "Mayor of Castro Street," who, in 1977 and after several attempts, became the first openly gay official elected to office in the US. But, seven years before those heady days, Milk (Sean Penn) was just a 40-year-old insurance man (and Republican, even), living a closeted life of quiet desperation in NYC. After a chance encounter and illicit proposition becomes an impromptu birthday party, Milk and new beau Scott Smith (James Franco) fall in love, talk about starting over, and decide to go West. Life is peaceful there...or is it? Even as Milk's camera shop in the gay-friendly Castro district becomes a salon of artists, thinkers, and free spirits, bigotry is rampant even in the streets of San Francisco, and the cops at best turn a blind eye to -- and at worst actively participate in -- antigay violence. No more, says Milk. Taking a page from the ethnic political machines of an earlier century, he organizes Castro's gays and lesbians into first a protest movement and then an organized voting and boycotting bloc. And when a redistricting plan emphasizing community self-rule in San Francisco is put into effect, Milk becomes an actual, legitimate political wheeler-and-dealer, with all the benefits and aggravations attending. (For more on the man and the movement, see the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, now on Hulu for free.)

But, even as Harvey Milk rises to power in San Fran, a parallel movement stirs amid the churches and suburbs of Orange County. Led by former beauty queen, singer, and orange juice shiller Anita Bryant, the ever-so-Christian "Save Our Children" campaign gathers steam across the nation in its quest to roll back what meager protections gays and lesbians have managed to establish over the years. And when conservative state senator John Briggs (Denis O'Hare, seemingly forever destined to play assholes) brings the fight west in the form of Proposition 6, an initiative that would ban gays and lesbians from public schools, the battle for California is on. And even as Milk becomes the poster boy against Prop 6 and for recognizing gays and lesbians as full citizens and fellow human beings, he has to contend with trouble on the homefront -- not only in his personal life (his new boyfriend Jack (Diego Luna) is more than a little erratic) but in his political backyard, where supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin), from the Catholic, working-class district next door, is starting to act increasingly unstable. (But, I guess this is what happens when society is so permissive as to let a man get all hopped up on twinkies.)

Which reminds me: A word of appreciation for Josh Brolin's work here. Sean Penn is garnering kudos across the board, and a likely Oscar nod, for his portrayal of Milk, and they're very well-deserved. It's really an astonishing transformation Penn accomplishes here -- not so much because he's playing someone who's gay (homosexual), but because he's playing someone who's gay (happy).This is the same guy who sulked through Mystic River?) And, while Brolin will likely -- and, imho, justifiably in the end -- get edged out for Best Supporting Actor by Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight, his work here suggests he's got some serious chops. At first it seems as if Brolin will just be coasting on his recent Dubya impression -- another good-natured, hard-hearted conservative fratboy for the resume. Then, just as you think Brolin's endangering himself in terms of typecasting, it's suggested Dan White might also be a deeply repressed closet case. (I tend to find the argument that all frothing-at-the-mouth homophobes are in reality trapped in the closet to be too simplistic by half, but apparently there's some grounding for it in White's story. In any case, Brolin underplays it beautifully ) As Milk progresses, we begin to sense other reasons why White is such a strange and ultimately homicidal bird -- he's envious of Harvey, he feels personally screwed over by him, he's something of a friendless wonder, he's not the brightest bulb on the tree anyway, he feels trapped by, and powerless before, the authority figures in his life (his wife, his cop buddies, his church). Brolin lets all of this play out without tipping his hand in any one direction. It's a subtle, complex, and very worthwhile performance, and it's a testament to the film's heart that it extends such empathy even to its ostensible antagonist.

Speaking of empathy, this isn't at all a surprise coming from Gus Van Sant, always a very humanistic director, but it should be noted regardless: When it comes to full recognition of gays and lesbians, Milk laudably practices what it preaches. Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia was good for its time, but nowadays (it's on heavy rotation on AMC) it gives off a distinctly Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? vibe. And, as I said when it came out, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain often seemed "as somber, restrained, and delicate as Kabuki theater." By contrast, the couples of Milk are passionate -- both physically and emotionally -- messy, flawed, and alive. Of course, there have been other well-rounded depictions of gays and lesbians in film in the past -- in Van Sant's earlier work, in the films of other gay directors like Todd Haynes, John Cameron Mitchell, and Kimberly Peirce, and in countless others. Still, Milk feels like an event of sorts. Unlike many of its forebears, it's a mainstream Oscar-caliber movie that just takes its characters' sexuality at face value and without apology. In that sense, it feels like a film whose time has come.

I said earlier that Dan White was ostensibly the villain of Milk, but that's not entirely true. Rather, to its credit, the film is pretty bold about pointing the finger where the trouble really lies: at the conservative-minded legions of organized Christendom -- or at the very least its right-wing, for-profit flank -- who've decided that arbitrarily upholding one proscription mentioned in passing in the Old Testament (shellfish, anyone?), and then ruthlessly enforcing it on the backs of their neighbors and co-workers, is more important than upholding the central tenet of the actual teachings of Jesus: "Love one another." (Along those lines, expect a good bit of "godless liberal Hollywood" bluster from the usual corners if this film gets any Oscar buzz.)

Which brings us to that Wal-Mart of spirituality, Rick Warren, who as you all know will be delivering the invocation at Obama's inauguration this month, and who has said all manner of intemperate things about gays and lesbians (as well as jews, pro-choice voters, and others) in the past, even going so far as to campaign for Prop 8 in California two months ago.

Now, when the Rick Warren pick first came out, I didn't say anything here for two reasons. One was deeply selfish: That was the week I was finishing up my speechwriting app, and it didn't seem like the most opportune time to be too critical of the administration around here at GitM. (In the end, it didn't matter anyway, of course.) More importantly, though, I am -- and still partly remain -- of the mind that the bigger picture needs to be kept in mind here. If it keeps the right-wing fundies relatively happy and docile, and helps them to buy into the notion of a post-partisan Obama presidency, then Rick Warren can give all the one minute ceremonial speeches he wants, so long as Obama ultimately shows himself a friend to gay and lesbian rights in his presidential actions.

But, there's a sequence in Milk that brought me around a bit. When Dan White mentions the "issue" of gay rights in one crucial scene, Harvey replies: "These are not issues, Dan. These are our lives we're fighting for." And, put that way, the calculus changes. To straight progressive folk such as myself, one can easily -- too easily -- get to thinking of gay rights as an "issue" among many. But, for gays and lesbians all around the country, this is their lives. And, when considered thusly, the president of these United States -- least of all a president who ran and won on a campaign of hope -- should not be legitimizing bigotry, such as that continuously expressed by Warren without apology, in any kind of forum, let alone the most portentous and culturally significant inauguration in at least fifty years, perhaps ever.

In an eloquent column last week, the NYT's Frank Rich articulated basically where I stand on Obama's decision at this point: His choice of Warren is "no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history." Let's hope that Obama doesn't follow in the footsteps of the last Democratic president, who very quickly started backpedaling on gay rights once in office, vis a vis "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." And, while I'm sure he's pretty busy these days, the president-elect (apparently a movie buff of sorts) could do worse than spend a few hours to reflect on the story of another community-organizer who believed in the transformative power of hope, who carried the hopes of his constitutents into higher office...and who faced unflinching and unwavering contempt from an irreconcilable opposition once he got there.

"[N]ote a curious fact about his career: It maps perfectly onto the 25-year bull market in stocks that, like Cruise, is starting to show its age. Nascent in the early '80s, emergent in 1983, dominant in the '90s, suspiciously resilient in the '00s, and, starting in 2005, increasingly prone to alarming meltdowns. For both Cruise and the Dow Jones, more and more leverage is required for less and less performance. Place Cruise next to Nicholson, Newman, and Tracy, and he is a riddle. Place him next to Reagan, and he is not so confounding at all."

In an extended meditation on the overlooked merits of Risky Business, Slate's Stephen Metcalf argues for Tom Cruise as an exemplar of the 80's, Reaganism, and the boom-and-bust market. "More so than any of his contemporaries, Cruise brought to '80s cinema an aura that corresponded to the novel tonalities of Reaganism."

"It's impossible to exaggerate how high the stakes were in Watergate...From the start, it was clear that senior administration officials were up to their necks in this mess and would stop at nothing to sabotage our investigation...What we needed was a 'Lone Ranger' who could bypass the administration's hand-picked FBI director and Justice Department leadership and derail the White House cover-up." W. Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, 1913-2008.

"Another Greenville, another Magic Mart, Jeffer, grab your fiddle... So, pop quiz: What do old-school R.E.M. and Sarah Palin have in common? They've both sung paeans to "Little America," or as Governor Palin rather awkwardly put it recently, the "pro-America areas of this great nation." In case you somehow missed what she was trying to get at, NC GOP candidate Robin Hayes said it even more plainly: "Liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God." Or consider Minnesota freakshow Michele Bachmann, soon after deeming Senator and Michelle Obama enemies of the people: "I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America."

Now, I realize the once-powerful conservative movement is now entering the late, terminal stages of its malignancy, that these floundering insults and echoes of McCarthy are all just part of the right-wing death rattle, and that it's probably best just to look away from their interminable gesticulating and shrieking while the right melts away into electoral oblivion. But, really, eff these people. I'm so utterly sick of these conservative assholes wrapping themselves in our flag every time their narrowness and stupidity is exposed before all the world. America is so much more than the pathetic litany of grievances and bigotries these jokers trot out every time their flank is exposed. And if they truly loved America as much as they claim to, they'd know this, and stop embarrassing us all by conflating their ignorant and unprincipled antipathies with what's good and true in our national life.

The consul a horse. Jefferson, I think they're lost.

"My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, it is so wonderful to be here. And nothing going to keep me away from this special gathering." In an emotional valedictory of sorts, Ted Kennedy kicked the major speeches off in grand fashion, brain tumor be damned. [Transcript.] "Yes, we are all Americans. This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I've seen it. I've lived it. And we can do it again. There is a new wave of change all around us, and if we set our compass true, we will reach our destination -- not merely victory for our Party, but renewal for our nation. And this November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, so with Barack Obama and for you and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on."

Now, that's a great introduction. However you feel about Sen. Kennedy, he undoubtedly stands like a liberal colossus over the straits of our times. In one of the darkest periods in our history to be a lefty, Sen. Kennedy has kept the flame alive, from the horrors of '68 through Nixon, Reagan, 41, and Dubya. Given everything he and his family stand for, it's hard to think of a better or more moving way to commemorate this week's passing of the torch. Get well, Senator -- We want you back in 2012.

"When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." The new trailer for Ron Howard's film adaptation of Frost / Nixon is now online, starring Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Oliver Platt, Matthew McFadyen, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones, and (naturally) Clint Howard. I'm intrigued by this project (haven't seen the play), but this, sadly, is a pretty poor trailer ("In a world where the president blah blah blah, these men stood up for the truth...") And, while I know he played the part on Broadway, Langella's Nixon-voice sounds even more distracting to me than Christian Bale's bat-rasp.

A personal plug: Also out in stores this week, my fourth collaboration with Democratic pundit Bill Press (1, 2, 3): Trainwreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and not a moment too soon). If you couldn't guess from the title, it basically argues that, just as the New Deal era lasted from 1932-1968, the Age of Conservatism that began in '64 with Goldwater, hit its stride in the 70's and 80's, and gave us the likes of Reagan, Gingrich, and, of course, Dubya, has now hit the proverbial, inevitable, historical brick wall. So let's survey the wreckage: On one hand, from Katrina to Abramoff and Ed Meese to Alberto Gonzales, right-wing attempts at governance over the past thirty years have usually degenerated into dismal experiments in cronyism and/or incompetence. On the other, conservatism has strayed so far from its ideological roots in the Reagan and particularly Dubya eras that the likes of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley would never even recognize it. (Case in point, the Ron Paul candidacy, wherein a traditional Taft conservative ended up being treated by his esteemed Republican contemporaries in every debate as either a fringe joke or a terrorist-sympathizing dupe.) Either way, the right-wing ascendancy is over, and it's our time again now (and, though it's not reflected in this tome, I think y'all know who I'd prefer to be carrying our progressive standard into battle in 2009 and beyond...)

"If National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." A farewell to one of the left's most formidable and forthright adversaries, who began his career as a nonconformist and, from the war on drugs to Dubya and the neocons, relished bucking the trend until his final days. I hardly ever agreed with the man, and, indeed, found many of his strongly-held views repellent. But, particularly as far as arch-conservatives go, I did have a good bit of respect for him. William F. Buckley, 1925-2008.

If you haven't been following the recent flap about Ronald Reagan among the Democrats, I've been covering it in the comment thread here. Basically, the point Obama was making to the Reno Gazette-Journal, which Clinton and Edwards have both since jumped on, is this: For all his lousy policies -- and Obama has said before they were lousy -- Ronald Reagan was without a doubt a paradigm-changing candidate in 1980. In that election, he encouraged many "Reagan Democrats" to switch parties to back his candidacy, thus forging a new coalition which enabled right-wingers not only to win most presidential elections since but to pass legislation that is more conservative than the mainstream. Bill Clinton's election in 1992, on the other hand, was not paradigm-changing. He won a plurality of votes in a three-way race and, by 1994, was already on the defensive again.

So, in 2008, the Democrats can back a possible paradigm-changer such as Barack Obama, a candidate with considerable independent and crossover appeal who might well be able to forge a new progressive governing coalition (as Reagan did for the Right.) Or we can back a polarizing figure such as Senator Clinton, one whom almost half the country is already dead set against and who rests her appeal on repeating the same cautious, poll-tested GOP-lite centrism we had under eight years of her husband...assuming, of course, she can eke out a victory over John McCain or his ilk anyway. (And there's John Edwards too, of course: While that's definitely more of an open question, I made my Obama-over-Edwards case here.)

As I said in the comment thread linked above, when it comes to a choice between Clinton or Obama, it would seem a no-brainer, particularly when you factor in her campaign's tactics of late.

Update: To help put the Clintons' attacks today in perspective, a December 22 press release from Hillary Clinton lists Reagan among her "favorite presidents." Oops.

"I can remember when I heard about the change being made. I was driving home from -- I think it was law school, but I was driving home -- going through the Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept." Regarding the thorny question of the Mormon church and race (discussed earlier here), Mitt Romney, to his credit, addressed the issue about as well as can be expected this morning during the Russert treatment on Meet the Press, even going so far as to tear up a little (Video). My, we've come a long way from the days of Ed Muskie. Update: Must be catching...Now Clinton's crying too. Update 2: And Romney again.

So, sorry to regale y'all with another long-winded, bloviating political post only two entries after the last one. But Ted of The Late Adopter asked an important follow-up to my comments on David Greenberg's Obama piece and public-interest progressivism, namely: "If FDR, Stevenson, the Kennedys all spoke with the rhetoric of citizenship, when did the Democrats stop? With Johnson? Carter? During the 80s while trying to oppose Reagan?" And, while trying to respond in the comment section, I apparently blathered on so long that I broke the site. ("Access Denied with Code 406....severity [EMERGENCY]") So, I'm posting my response as an entry instead (and there's precedent for this anyway, as when Scully and I discussed the space program a few years ago.) So, if you find this all ponderous and insufferable, feel free to skip down to the previous entry, where I raved on at equal length about Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (10/10!) And I promise to get back to more concise entries again soon...

"The upshot was that by 1980, race and ideology had become so commingled that one's stand on racial issues served as a proxy for one's partisan preference. Previously, economic issues had been the chief dividing line between the parties. By 1980, though, according to the Edsalls, the changes that followed the civil rights movement had crystallized, and racial politics figured just as strongly." Slate's resident historian David Greenberg weighs in on the recent furor at the NYT (and elsewhere) over Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign kickoff speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the 1964 Schwerner-Chaney-Goodman murders. (Coincidence? Sheah.) Therein, Greenberg correctly and succinctly argues that Reagan's "I believe in states' rights" was, in an apt turn of phrase, "a dog whistle to segregationists."

Honestly, I'm not really sure how you could dispute this, unless you want to argue that Reagan and his political handlers were completely ignorant about the civil rights struggle, massive resistance, and the significance of Philadelphia, Miss. in those struggles. (Of course, then you'd have to explain how Reagan remained blissfully unaware of the fact his 1966 gubernatorial bid often relied on similar loaded language.) Was Reagan a racist? I dunno, that's not the issue. Did Reagan rely on coded racial messages to appeal to white conservatives, akin to what Dubya does these days with pro-lifers and Dred Scott? Obviously.

"I'm leaving on my own terms and I'm leaving with a clear-eyed realism that this isn't going to mean fewer investigations or subpoenas or weird comments by members of the Democratic caucus." Well, Karl, we'll always have hip-hop. One of this administration's biggest rats leaps off the sinking ship as Karl Rove announces his resignation at the end of the month. But, not to worry. Dubya's infamous consigliere will no doubt be back in the public eye when the investigations clear and the indictments come down. So, see ya soon, Turd Blossom, and sorry your grand visions of a Republican realignment turned to ashes. I'm sure we'll still fit you in the history books...somewhere.

Newly released papers from the 1972 election reveal more of the Nixon re-election campaign's dirty tricks operation at work. "Nixon aides worked assiduously to plant negative stories, including one alleging [Dem VP candidate Sargent] Shriver 's ancestors were slave-holders. An operative 'is trying to get the story fed into certain segments of Black media and will give it to Black surrogates,' an aide told Chuck Colson, Nixon's chief counsel." And, also among the new stuff, a detailed account of eventual White House whistleblower Alexander Butterfield's exasperation with Nixon's dog, King Timahoe. 'I think the miserable sessions I endured in Latin II as a high school sophomore were easier,' he groused to Haldeman after meeting Nixon's valet to discuss 'doggie affairs.'" (Further excerpts.)

In a document dump of both exhilarating and terrifying proportions, the CIA announced it will release its "family jewels" next week: close to 700 pages of documents chronicling secret Agency activity from the fifties to the seventies. (A preview of what's to come includes reports of detentions, wiretapping, surveillance, and other sordid current administration favorites.) "CIA Director Michael Hayden on Thursday called the documents being released next week unflattering, but he added that 'it is CIA's history.' 'The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency,' Hayden told a conference of historians." Hmm, we'll see.

Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007. My thoughts on this are basically the same as on Strom's passing in 2003, and once again I'd refer everyone to Hunter S. Thompson's Nixon obit. Of course, it's bad form to speak ill of the dead...still, I'm sure countless people and pets around the world passed yesterday who are more deserving of eulogy than this contemptible, hypocritical bigot. Let's just hope, for Falwell's sake, that God is more compassionate and forgiving than he ever was.

"Morgan's grasp of Nixon's place in American culture is confirmed near the play's end, when Reston endorses an opinion that one seldom hears in routine journalistic commentary but that I believe is undoubtedly true: Nixon was never rehabilitated. He never came back. Despite the pomp and fine words at his funeral, his name remained a synonym for presidential corruption and crime, and the '-gate' suffix attached to scandals ever since certified Watergate's cultural importance" Rutgers professor and author of Nixon's Shadow David Greenberg reviews Frost/Nixon for Slate.

Also among the intriguing recent disclosures of the Nixon years are newly released State Department records which reveal further Nixon's contempt for his Foreign Service. "Just before saying he was going 'to take the responsibility for cleaning up' the department, the president told Kissinger on November 13 that he was determined that 'his one legacy is to ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it -- the old Foreign Service -- and to build a new one. I'm going to do it.'"

"As President, my primary concern must always be the greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am. As a man, my first consideration is to be true to my own convictions and my own conscience. My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book." Gerald Ford, 1913-2006.

"As George Shultz liked to say: 'Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there.'" Milton Friedman, 1912-2006.

"Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left. The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio." As Foleygate continues to conflagrate and the FBI looks for answers, a TIME cover story wonders if the Republican Revolution of 1994 is dead. Yep.

"Lyndon Johnson was probably right to fret about the political consequences of civil rights. And even he, who knew more about the intricacies of Southern politics than any 20th-century president, could not have known how complicated the future would be." By way of Cliopatria, Jefferson Decker, a former managing editor of Boston Review and one of my friends and colleagues here at Columbia, takes a look at two new books on the rise of the Republican Party in the South: Kevin Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism and Matthew Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.

"Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities." As seen all over the place, historian Sean Wilentz wonders aloud in Rolling Stone if Dubya is the worst president in American history.

To my mind, the only other president that even comes close is James Buchanan. Sure, Warren Harding was lousy, but he knew it ("I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don't seem to grasp that I am President."), and thus didn't go out of his way to be actively terrible like Bush has been. (Plus, for all the corruption of the Ohio gang, Harding's cabinet also included Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover, all impressive in their own right.) Speaking of Hoover, both he and Ulysses Grant have been given a bad shake. Even if the Depression basically ate his administration alive, Hoover -- once renowned as the "Great Engineer" -- was a more innovative president (and empathetic person) than he's often remembered. And Grant's administrations, although plagued by corruption, at the very least tried to maintain Reconstruction in the South. (In fact, I'd argue that Grant's sorry standing in presidential history is in a part a reflection of the low esteem in which Reconstruction was once held by the now-woefully obsolete Dunning School.) Regarding the other Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson is assuredly down near the bottom too, but to be fair, he faced an almost impossible situation entering office in the time and manner he did, and -- as with Clinton -- his impeachment was a bit of a frame-job. And Richard Nixon, for all his many failings, had China (as well as the EPA despite himself, and, although it didn't pan out, the Family Assistance Plan.) Nope, I think it's safe to say that we may be experiencing perhaps the most blatantly inept, wrong-headed, and mismanaged presidency in the history of the republic. Oh, lucky us.

In somewhat related news, the administration's freefall in the polls continues, with even conservatives now admitting that Dubya is quacking like a lame duck. Meanwhile, some congressional Republicans begin to hear strains of 1994 in their own corruption and excess. And, with the Christian Coalition also nearing the End of (its) Days to boot, one has to wonder: Could we Dems ask for a more favorable electoral terrain against the Dubya-DeLay GOP heading into this November? And when are our party leaders going to rise to this opportunity and start offering a vision of leadership the American people can get behind?

"The Nixon Library has a history of extreme politicization -- the library has seldom hosted serious historians, who tend to be at least somewhat critical of Nixon, more typically showcasing assorted Nixon apologists and right-wing pundits -- and so the imminent transfer remains worrisome." Historian David Greenberg explains how, over thirty years after Watergate and on the eve of finally joining the official presidential library system, the Nixon Library is still trying to resuscitate its namesake's image, to the detriment of sound history.

"More alarming were Richard Nixon's last years at the White House. After a good many evening martinis, he would call Henry Kissinger, and the secretary of state would grin silently as he passed around the telephone so that others could listen to their commander in chief's unbalanced ramblings. Since Nixon was in a position to blow us all up, this suggests a somewhat esoteric sense of humor on Kissinger's part." With the fall of Britain's Charles Kennedy, Slate's Geoffrey Wheatcroft very briefly surveys the sordid history of alcoholism in politics. (He could, I think, have done more with The Alcoholic Republic.)

"The blend of businessmen's aversion to government regulation, down-home cultural populism and Christian moralism that sustains today's Republican Party is a venerable if loosely knit philosophy of government dating back to long before the right-wing upsurge that prepared the way for Reagan's presidency...Insofar as perennial themes shape our politics, it is remarkable how so many of contemporary conservatism's central ideas and slogans renovate old Whig appeals."

By way of Cliopatria, historian Sean Wilentz compares today's GOP to the Whig Party of the 1830's and '40s. Food for thought, but, as Wilentz himself admits, the general lack of state power back then -- and, more importantly, the absence of corporate consolidation in the antebellum era -- significantly changes the rules of the game. While laissez-faire policies more likely meant increased competition and economic growth in the 19th century, it means something else entirely in today's world, when long-standing, fully-formed corporate behemoths are ready and willing to fill any power vacuum left by less government regulation. (That's why the Gilded Age analogy, I think, still makes more sense -- It's business cronyism, and not economic competition, that drives Dubya republicanism.) Update: Via The Late Adopter, Eric Foner, the centerpiece of a weekend conference around these parts, reviews Wilentz's new tome in The Nation.