The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.

Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”

On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.

Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.

“Last week the left and right reached a rare consensus,” Rich says, and I agree, although there are plenty of people in blogland who would disagree. “The war logs are no Pentagon Papers. They are historic documents describing events largely predating the current administration (like the Pentagon Papers). They contain no (real) news. They (may) not change the course of the war.”

“About the only prominent figures who found serious parallels between then and now were Ellsberg and the WikiLeaks impresario, Julian Assange,” Rich cliams. They are off the mark (not on the mark) — “in large part because the impact of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War (as opposed to their impact on the press) was far less momentous than last week’s chatter would suggest.”

Because of the massive release of mostly old military documents about the war in Afghanistan, WikiLeaks has emerged as the anonymous Web site of choice for leakers and those who like to keep up with leaks. Assange and the others who anonymously produce WikiLeaks, who can’t be found in the real world anywhere (allegedly for security reasons) are not journalists, or even bloggers. They had to go to the New York Times to get somebody competent enough to go through the documents and make enough sense of them to decide what was newsworthy and to write a narrative story people could comprehend.

Of course with its Pentagon Papers reputation, and its capitalistic drive, the Times agreed to go along with helping make sense of the documents and promoting the leaks.

But I am not going to spend my time going through old documents mostly from the Bush era, documents for which I do not know the source because they were not provided to me by a source I know. When a real journalist writes a report based on anonymous sources, he or she best know who that source is and have some trust that they are not just being used by someone with a political axe to grind.

That is a much different thing than using documents leaked to someone else, and it is a far cry from what passes for anonymous sources on so-called blogs these days. An anonymous comment from a paid political operative is not the same thing as a journalist writing a story based on a leak from an anonymous source who he or she knows and has time to check out.

The other reason I will not promote WikiLeaks is because I believe the leaks are the product of Bush loyalists burrowed into the federal bureaucracy who will stoop to any dirty trick in an attempt to damage President Obama’s reputation and pave the way for Sarah Palin’s run for president in 2012.

Which brings up the other point I want to make on this Sunday over my morning coffee on my Web Press.

Some of the people on the Gulf Coast, and some liberals all over the country, are bashing President Obama for his response to the BP-Transocean-Halliburton oil spill, playing into the hands of the political right who want to call it “Obama’s Katrina.”

The lackadaisical response to the New Orleans flood in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could be blamed on Bush. That president was on vacation at his Texas ranch at the time and didn’t bother to come back to work for days. His administration had gutted the Federal Emergency Management agency in the wake of 9/11 and made it part of the new, massive bureaucracy at the Homeland Security Department, and Bush hired Michael “Brownie” Brown, who had no experience in emergency response, as head of FEMA.

Glynn Wilson

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge

True, Obama named Ken Salazar as head of the Interior Department, and Salazar had not moved fast enough to clean house at the Minerals Management Service, the agency that was supposed to watchdog the oil companies in the Gulf.

I confronted Salazar in person on May 6, less then three weeks into the oil spill response, in the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge, and produced one of my first videos from this catastrophe.

But at least Salazar had quite a bit of experience in government as Attorney General and Senator from Colorado, where he did deal quite a bit with environment-related issues, although his record was as a moderate and certainly mixed.

Brownie’s job before being hired by Bush was as a judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, for crying out loud. After numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization over disciplinary actions that Brown took against members violating the Association’s code of ethics, Brown resigned and negotiated a buy-out of his contract. He couldn’t even make it in that dumbass little job.

But like everybody hired by Bush, he was a card carrying member of the Republican Party, who had on his political resume campaign contributions to Republicans and Bushes, and a letter from a preacher. As a lawyer, he probably also possessed the other credential necessary to get hired by Bush: A membership card for the Federalist Society, a not-so-secret fraternity of hard corps right-wing lawyers, perhaps more important than the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale.

It is now time for Sunday brunch, so I will end with this video and this point.

For all my friends on the left who would rather blame the disaster in the Gulf on the “government” under Obama than the multi-national corporate giant BP and its criminal subsidiaries, watch this video from John Stewart of the Daily Show.

Stewart aimed his comments at Fox News. I redirect them to my friends on the political left.

”Nothing Obama does will ever make you fucking happy, will it?”

He gave us our first ever law regulating the health care industry, something that had been tried by half a dozen former presidents. In doing so, he defeated the right-wing Republican Tea Party in a year-long war on the subject.

Obama also seized $20 billion of BP’s revenue to make sure the American people get paid legitimate claims for losses caused by the oil spill, an action that would never have been taken by ANY Republican president, not Bush or Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich.

The Democrats, with a majority in Congress, this week passed the Clear Act, which reforms the structure of the offshore drilling oversight agency to avoid clear conflicts of interest, enhances the role of science, independent review, and other oversight agencies, and calls for the establishment of mandatory safety and environmental management standards. The law fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund, helping to offset the inherent risk offshore drilling poses to our wildlife and important lands and waters. It also allows national wildlife refuges to collect and retain funds for damages from oil spills for the first time ever.

Can you imagine a Republican-controlled Congress even bringing such a law up for consideration? Not on your life.

The best I can tell, Obama is showing up for work every day trying to get us out of the mess caused by eight years of anti-government rule. It might take eight years to accomplish the task of restoring something resembling American democracy again.

He can’t please everybody, but if you don’t want to see Sarah Palin in the White house in a couple of years, you might think about blaming the corporations, rather than the government, for our current problems. They have had their say over American life for far too long now. It is time to get a grip on that, or nothing will change for the average American.

Let there be no mistake about it now. Run amok corporate capitalism DOES NOT WORK!

Nobody is advocating turning this country into a socialist dictatorship. It was set up as a democratic republic designed to be governed by people through their own ability to reason, not a monarch who derived his authority from a god. The model was supposed to foster a middle class, not a few rich corporate CEOs and a bunch of poor working stiffs who can’t afford a mortgage on a house, much less a vacation to the beach.

That is the mission, people. The big picture. The war that should never be abandoned.

If we could just somehow stay focused on that battle and not get bogged down in the sensational minutiae of everyday bullshit on TV and Facebook, enough of us might be able to get together and get it right for a change. Anyway, that’s my hope and prayer.

I don’t hold my breath waiting for these things to come to pass. I just get up every day trying to figure out what stories really matter and which ones I can get to, research and write myself.

I hope a few people like some of them. That’s all any artist can do. Produce something from the heart and strive to find an audience — and maybe on occasion make a difference.

Tags: Afghanistan, Frank Rich, Glynn Wilson, Gulf Oil Spill, Ken Salazar, Let's Not Kiss This War Goodbye, Pentagon Papers, President Obama, Republican Party, Ron Amok Corporate Capitalism, Sarah Palin, Vietnam War, WikiLeaks

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 1st, 2010 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Big Oil, BP Oil Spill, Connecting the Dots, Glynn Wilson's Videos, Hurricane Katrina, LocustFork.Net, President Barack Obama, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.