The Hand That Feeds Jonah Goldberg

Like I suspect many of you did last week, I popped off a note to National Public Radio the other day about Weekend Edition Saturday’s choice of National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg as a stand-in commentator. I’m afraid I didn’t keep a copy of my message, although I do remember copying them his Superdome post, pointing out that his comment about Bureau of Justice Statistics leaks damaging the Bush administration could only be valid if the reports they were putting out weren’t supported by the statistics, and wondering if they’d hire ex-Klansman David Duke as a guest commentator if he could keep his mouth shut about the blacks and the Jews for seven minutes.

Yesterday, I received what appears to be their stock response from Lee Hill at NPR’s Audience Services (emphasis mine).

We appreciate your comments regarding Jonah Goldberg.

Jonah Goldberg provided guest commentary for the vacationing Dan Schorr on the August 27th edition of Weekend Edition Saturday, in the “Week in Review” segment with Scott Simon. As you might be aware, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius served as guest commentator in the same segment the previous week while Dan was also away. When a staff member is away for vacation or travel, we occasionally find someone to fill their position, on a temporary basis, and they are held to the same high editorial standards expected of NPR employees.

While we appreciate your opinions regarding Mr. Goldberg’s column and remarks on the Internet, or any other news outlet, please know that these are independent of his recent guest commentary on NPR.

Apparently, a middle-of-the-road journalist like Ignatius is no different to NPR than a partisan hack like Goldberg.

I wrote back to Hill. What’s funny is that Goldberg’s latest column about himself — “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers: Bush-blaming derangement” — begins with these words:

Back when NPR and other news outlets were reporting that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet” on hurricane Katrina I made an ill-conceived joke in The Corner about how the Superdome was going to hell-in-a-hand basket.

A “Morning Edition” story by John Burnett the day of Goldberg’s post does indeed focus on the French Quarter and how it made it through the first day post-storm. But perhaps Goldberg was so involved in chortling about his Superdome idea that he missed these words (from 4:33 into the story):

JOHN BURNETT: Freeman Spears (sp?), with the Orleans Levee District Police Department, tried to do his job and not think about what lay ahead for him. His house is located in East New Orleans, where police say many, many homes — perhaps hundreds — were inundated by floodwaters.

FREEMAN SPEARS: My house has about eight feet of water in it, but my family is safe and that’s all that counts. And I’m out here trying to help other people. And stop the looting.

Hundreds of homes inundated by floodwaters. That’s “dodging the bullet” to the Bush administration’s — ahem — water-carriers.

The After-Inaction Reports

In the Gaggle today, Scott McClellan repeated the administration talking point that “now is not the time for blame-gaming.” Michael Chertoff stayed on point Sunday saying there would be plenty of time for accountability in the “after-action” reports. But what about these statements?

“I want to congratulate the governors for being leaders. You didn’t ask for this, when you swore in, but you’re doing a heck of a job.”

“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

“Mr. Mayor, that after a lot of hard work, people are going to be — people will be proud of the effort. And I want to thank you for your leadership here. And Haley, I want to thank you for yours. Again, I want to thank Trent and Thad.”

“Results are acceptable here in Mississippi.”

“Governor, thanks for your leadership.”

“We’re making progress.”

Why is there no time to assign blame if there’s plenty of time to assign praise?

Nagin on Race and Class

On Sunday (4 September), New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was interviewed on a special edition of ABC’s Nightline. This is my transcript (ABC doesn’t make theirs freely available) of a portion of his interview. Click on the image above to watch the entire interview (Quicktime, 20MB).

JOHN DONOVAN, ABC NEWS: The last thing I want to ask you about is the race question.

So, I’m out at the highway — it was last Thursday — huge number of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Jesse Jackson comes in, looks at the scene, and says it looks like the scene of a, from a slave ship. And I said, “Reverand Jackson,, the imagery suggests you’re saying this is about race.” And he didn’t answer directly, he said, “Take a look at it, what do you think it’s about?”

What’s your response to that?

RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: (Sighs) You know, I haven’t really thought much about the race issue. I will tell you this. I think it’s, it could be, but it’s a class issue for sure. Because I don’t think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California. This response definitely wouldn’t have happened if it was Manhattan, New York. And I don’t know if it’s color or class.

DONOVAN: In some way, you think that New Orleans got second-class treatment.

NAGIN: I can’t explain the response. And here’s what else I can’t explain: We are basically, almost surrounded by water. To the east, the bridge is out, you can’t escape. Going west, you can’t escape because the bridge is under water. We found one evacuation route, to walk across the Crescent City Connection, on the overpass, down Highway 90 to 310 to I10, to go get relief.

People got restless and there was overcrowding at the convention center. They asked us, “Is there any other option?” We said, “Well, if you want to walk, across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief.” They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying “You have to turn back…”

DONOVAN: Go back.

NAGIN: “…because a looter got in a shopping center and set it afire and we want to protect the property in this area.”

DONOVAN: And what does that say to you?

NAGIN: That says that’s a bunch of bull. That says that people value their property, and were protecting property, over human life.

And look, I was not suggesting, or suggesting to the people that they walk down into those neighborhoods. All I wanted them to do and I suggested: walk on the Interstate. And we called FEMA and we said “Drop them water and supplies as they march.” They weren’t gonna go into those doggone neighborhoods. They weren’t going to impact those neighborhoods. Those people were looking to escape, and they cut off the last available exit route out of New Orleans.

DONOVAN: And was that race? Was that class?

NAGIN: I don’t know. You’re going to have to go ask them. But those questions need to be answered. And I’m pissed about it. And I don’t know how many people died as a result of that.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Morial Convention Center, this is a picture of the bridge (the Crescent City Connection) passing right over the center (hilighted in red), with colored highlights on the nearby exit and entrance ramps. The convention center is about a half-mile long.

Photo from the Bayou

Last Halloween, Barbara and I took a little airboat ride south of New Orleans, where we each got a chance to hold a gator. I’m regretting now that we didn’t take more pictures than we did.

Our best wishes go out to everyone we met on that trip.

8 September 1935

Louisiana. Floods. Poverty. And, on 8 September the 70th anniversary of the day Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long was assassinated (he died two days later) in the capitol building he built in Baton Rouge: 8 September 1935.

In 1992, just before the election that replaced George H.W. Bush in the White House with William Jefferson Clinton, I wrote this essay for the first issue of my book review magazine, Plant’s Review of Books. It’s been one of the most popular items on my site for over ten years.

Incidentally, on 8 September 2005, the Global War on Terror will have lasted as long as the American Civil War.


Huey Long
by T. Harry Williams
Bantam, 1969

It is a measure of the depth of desire for change in this country that we’ve seen not just the ghost of Harry Truman pop up but also, lurking in the corners of the political discussion, the specter of Huey P. Long. Columnists across the country, from the national level to the Oregonian‘s own David Reinhard (yes, David Reinhard!) have mentioned the Kingfish in their election-year chatter. Used most often merely as a touchstone of rabble-rousing, anti-intellectual, brute force demagoguery, at times Long is shaken aloft as an example of the Bolshevist, fascist, populist end we could all come to should the great unwashed be allowed to have their way with us.

Of course this leads one to the question of just who us is (or are). Or perhaps more pointedly, who are they? And who was Huey Long that he should be a bogeyman of modern American politics, despised by those on the right, left, and center?

Many know of the Railroad Commissioner, Governor, and Senator from Louisiana only through the fictional mirror of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King’s Men. Or the stage play. Or the Academy Award-winning movie. Warren’s Willie Stark is a tireless self-promoter, a man driven to accumulate power and fortune at the expense of all those around him, whose one contribution to the common good, a hospital, literally backfires when its director shoots him.

The Huey Long of T. Harry Williams’s (again) Pulitzer Prize-winning biography shares all of Stark’s qualities and more. The more being specifically the accomplishments and advances that Long brought to a state that, in his time as now, languished near the bottom of the nation not only geographically but in average income (thirty-ninth of forty-eight), farm property value (forty-third), and literacy (forty-seventh). In an era when Wisconsin had four millionaires, Louisiana had one, and if the general poverty of the state wasn’t enough, Williams relates:

[Educational and other services] were poor for the additional reason that the ruling hierarchy was little interested in using what resources the state had available to provide services and was even less interested in employing the power of the state to create new resources so that more services could be supported…. A woman who was a member of the caste described its psychology frankly: “We were secure. We were the old families. We had what we wanted. We didn’t bother anybody. All we wanted was to keep it.”

Those were the people that Huey Long took on in his meteoric rise toward what he was unabashed in admitting was his goal: the Presidency. Long’s plan was to “Share Our Wealth,” and he wasn’t about to wait for the wealth to trickle down to the general populace of Louisiana (or anyplace else that might elect him to high office). To the (comparatively) wealthy, “Share Our Wealth” seemed less the outstretched palm of an occasional beggar than the rending claws of an army of zombies. Apart from the aristocracy of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Long took on the lumber, sugar, and oil industries in the state, most notably Standard Oil, Louisiana’s largest economic power and “the only really big corporation in the South.”

Huey Long’s first (unsuccessful) bid for governor in 1924, at the age of thirty, was based on a platform of road construction, increased support for public schools, free textbooks for all children, improvements in the court system, and state warehouses for storage of farm crops.

He approved the right of labor to organize, and he condemned the use of injunctions in labor disputes, corporate influence on government, and concentrated wealth (the “bloated plutocracy” of two per cent owned sixty-five per cent of the wealth)…. He had said what he stood for — an increased role for the state government in the economy — and if he decided to denounce in his own style the things he had said he was against, blood might indeed appear on the moon.

As Williams’s largely respectful biography attests, the concentration of wealth was a long-time concern of Huey Long’s which fully formed during his law studies. Charles Payne Fenner, an authority on civil law, spoke to Long’s class on the practicality of Louisiana’s inheritance law, based on Napoleonic code, which stipulates that all heirs to an estate, both male and female, receive a certain share. Williams conjectures that as Huey spoke to Fenner privately afterward, one of them made the connection between Hebrew law and wealth, because afterward Long turned to study of the Bible.

[W]hat struck him particularly were the commandments [in Leviticus] that every seven years there should be a release of debts and that every fiftieth year, the “Jubilee” year, there would be a return of possessions to every man…. This was not the first time he had heard the question raised…. But now it was brought before him in a peculiarly authoritative and institutional way….. It was ironic that he should have learned the lesson at such a citadel of conservatism as Tulane University.

While reading Huey Long it’s easy to understand how the brash young farmer’s boy from poor Winn parish, where “young bloods of Huey’s age thought it was the height of urban elegance to saunter into one of the eateries and order `a chili,'” might have offended the sensibilities of the established order. Quite apart from his politics, his campaigning style, with its innovative use of mailed circulars, automobile stumping, radio speeches, sound trucks, and cruel personal invective was designed precisely to appeal to that part of the populace that wasn’t sitting in the halls and offices of power. Long knew what appealed to them in part because he was one of them, and though blessed with a phenomenal memory, razor-sharp wit, and a personality that drove him to work twenty hours a day, he was nonetheless the product of his upbringing in Winnfield, a town where some of the stores and shops were located in tents, where there were no sidewalks, no paved streets, and farm stock roamed the town.

Little of Long’s early life is well-documented, perhaps because no one thought he’d amount to much. Long himself gave a variety of answers about some episodes in his life, depending on the audience and time of day. Almost necessarily, the portrait of Long that Williams paints, drawing on over a decade of research and interviews with hundreds of Long family members, friends, associates, and enemies, contains a plethora of contradictory stories. When given the option between positive and negative views of his subject, Williams predominantly chooses the former. His decisions are naturally backed up with volumes of supporting evidence–not the least of which are the actual accomplishments of Long’s tenure as governor and senator.

Long did more than just talk about the things he campaigned for. When he won the gubernatorial election on second try in 1928, he embarked upon a series of changes that went beyond reform to outright rebellion against the ruling class. He raised severance taxes on natural resource industries to pay for schoolbooks for every child, regardless of whether they went to public or private school. During his term as governor, the state built over 2,300 miles of paved roads, 111 bridges, and in 1931 employed ten percent of the men involved in road-building nationally. He moved to abolish the practices of strait-jacketing and chaining and to introduce dental care at mental institutions (at one, he claimed, dentists extracted seventeen hundred diseased teeth from inmates). Long’s appointee as head of Angola, still considered one of the toughest prisons in the country, instituted the state’s first prisoner-rehabilitation program. Long implemented an adult literacy program in Louisiana that largely served African-Americans, despite the racism of the overwhelming white majority. The list is extensive and surprisingly progressive for the time, the place, and most particularly the man he has been portrayed as. Many of his progressive policies were unthinkable to large sectors of his electorate, but the breadth of his programs drew in people who supported him in some areas and not others.

Williams details the political career of Huey Long exhaustively. Many of the chapters chronicle a blinding array of events condensed into a period of time that seems far too short to contain them. What is more incredible is that chapter after chapter covers a parallel set of events occurring within the same time frame.

What made critics claim Huey Long was the “despot of the delta,” the “first great native fascist?” It is true, Long abused his position as governor of Louisiana-he was far from the first. He appointed members of his family and supporters to government jobs. He rewarded political benefactors with state contracts. He used the position to live a fine life and dress swell. Show me a politician who hasn’t done at least two of the above and I’ll show you a politician who didn’t get elected. What set Long apart from the fascists was his belief in the democratic process. Long would, as Williams demonstrates in his opening paragraph, do just about anything to get people’s votes except lie to them about what he’d do. What Williams reveals to us in Huey Long is a man who bent every fiber in his body to force it into the same mold as his will. Louisiana was his because the people of Louisiana had given it to him, and they’d done that because he told them in no uncertain terms what he was going to do with it. That directness and honesty set Long apart from his predecessors in and of itself, apart from his radical message.

Long’s exploits as governor (he once met the commander of a German cruiser in his pajamas and he touched off a debate over the merits of crumbling or dipping cornpone into the Southern dish known as potlikker) propelled Louisiana and himself onto the national stage, just in time for his election to the US Senate. In the Capitol, he advocated legislation that would prohibit family incomes of more than one million dollars a year (or three hundred times the annual family income) and prevent ownership of more than five million dollars (or three hundred times the average family value) by any one family. He attacked his own party’s leadership in the Senate, denouncing them as corporation attorneys in the pockets of big business, and producing lists of the clients of their law firms. He openly broke with President Roosevelt (who, while governor of New York, had offered that when eating potlikker he crumbled his cornpone), when it became clear to him the President wasn’t advancing on redistribution of wealth. Siding with progressive Republicans from the Midwest farm states, Long rammed through an extension of bankruptcy privileges to farmers hit hard by the Depression, over the objections of the administration. After he denounced his old enemy, Standard Oil, for bankrolling Bolivia in its oilfield war with Paraguay, the grateful Paraguayans named a stronghold “Senator Huey Long Fort.” The Share Our Wealth Society rose from nothing in early 1934 to 27,431 chapters, in every state, with a total membership of more than four and a half million, in less than two years. Tourists in Washington, Williams recounts, wanted to see: “White House, Monument, Capitol-and the Kingfish.” People responded to Huey as they did to nothing else at the time. “After one of his radio speeches and during one of his encounters with the Roosevelt administration, more than thirty thousand letters a day poured in for twenty-four consecutive days.”

A number of people have ridden the populist bandwagon this year. George Bush, that pork-rind eatin’ guy from Texas, who just happens to have a multi-million-dollar estate in Maine and no friends who aren’t members of country clubs; Bill Clinton, whose supporters claim will be unfettered by his backwoods state now that he’s President and who hasn’t accomplished in all his time as governor of Arkansas what Long accomplished in four years in Louisiana sixty years ago; and Ross Perot, who has about three billion reasons he’s not qualified to be a `man of the people’ and still hasn’t said exactly what he’s going to do except make things better. What all of them lack is Long’s sense of purpose, his determination to do for the people what he had said he would do for them, no matter how difficult, no matter who he had to fight or outfox. That such a radical candidate was elected in what has always been a conservative state was a measure of the times and the disgust of the people with the status quo. Populist campaigns are a barometer of how difficult the times are, and if you think things are bad now, wait until you hear a politician comparing himself (or herself) to Huey Long.

Fear of a Black New Orleans

I can’t believe that Google didn’t turn up anything with this title already.

For everyone who claims that racism didn’t have anything to do with the laggardly relief effort, I’d like to offer this tidbit that caught my ear when I heard the phrase “civil rights violation,” now that the transcript’s up. From MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews (2 September):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Carl, when your family asks you about this week and your friends ask you for the war stories, what are you going to come to your mind with?

CARL QUINTANILLA, NBC CORRESPONDENT: It is going to come down to one kid. He‘s about 7 years old. He was sweating in 95-degree heat. He was walking on the interstate. He had walked about, I would say two or three miles to a bus that he did not know whether it would be there or not. And he was carrying his baby brother. We saw that and we realized that this—I think that was the turning point where we realized, this was no longer a hurricane aftermath story.

This was no longer a weather story, a devastation story. It was a human, almost a civil rights violation story.

MATTHEWS: Do you have a sense that this is going to go down—I know you have to be an objective journalist. We all do. But, in analyzing this story, from the reactions of the people in New Orleans, especially, do you have a sense that people feel that not only are they poor and they‘re a minority group, African-American, mostly, but that they were dissed, as we say in the big cities; they were disrespected by their own government this week?

QUINTANILLA: I think it is going to be a really interesting question, Chris, to look at over the coming years. What does it mean when you do not—when you fear your own populace, a populace that you have seen with your own eyes is hurting and you are afraid to get to get in the car, to get in an ambulance and come into a city that has been covered from the beginning by the media?

We have had photographers, Chris, go out outside the city limits to ambulances and buses, standing, running with the air conditioning on, and drivers saying, I can‘t go in there. I told my wife I would not go in there. It is a powder keg. That‘s—it was an interesting dynamic and something we had—I have never seen before.

MATTHEWS: Why were the ambulance drivers, rationally or irrationally, afraid to go in the city?

QUINTANILLA: Well, you did have reports of shots being fired at helicopters. And there was a natural fear that, if these people were denied resources long enough, that they would become desperate enough to do unique things.

The line here was, they‘ve lost everything, but they still have guns. And that could change things rather quickly. But once we—once we got to the Convention Center and once those pictures got out, it was clear. These were not troublemakers. These were simply people from poor neighborhoods and, in some cases, not even that poor, but just black neighborhoods, who were standing waiting for someone to pick them up.

Extra props to Matthews for “being down” with the current big-city lingo.

That Explains It

Friday, I noted that Richard Falkenrath — a CNN “security analyst” — replied “having it [flooding in New Orleans] occur simultaneously with a horrific hurricane … was I think beyond the planning parameters for the federal government,” in response to Paula Zahn’s question “How did the government blow it?” I wondered whose butt he was blowing smoke up, because the flooding of New Orleans was always connected to the impact of a large hurricane.

I ran across another reference to him yesterday. Prior to CNN, Falkenrath was a Deputy Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy Assistant to the President.

Half-Staff or Half-Assed?

Note the lag time between event and response.

Terrorists Kill Thousands in An Attack On the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, September 11, 2001:

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 12, 2001

Honoring the Victims of the Incidents on Tuesday, September 11, 2001
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation

As a mark of respect for those killed by the heinous acts of violence perpetrated by faceless cowards upon the people and the freedom of the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me as President of the United States of America by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, Sunday, September 16, 2001….

Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist Dies, September 3, 2005:

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 4, 2005

Proclamation by the President: Death of William HR Rehnquist
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

As a mark of respect for William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, including section 7 of title 4, United States Code, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, Tuesday, September 13, 2005….

Hurricane Katrina Kills Thousands and Causes Widespread Destruction on the Gulf Coast, August 26, 2005:

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 4, 2005

Honoring the Memory of the Victims of Hurricane Katrina Proclamation
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

As a mark of respect for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, Tuesday, September 20, 2005….

Who Coulda Thunk 3?

From FEMA’s daily National Situation Update:

National Situation Update: Saturday, August 27, 2005

Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED).

. . .

State of Emergency Declared in Mississippi, Louisiana DueIn anticipation of a possible landfall, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco declared States of Emergency Friday. In Louisiana, New Orleans is of particular concern because much of that city lies below sea level.

According to Gov. Blanco, Lake Pontchartrain is a very large lake that sits next to the city of New Orleans and if the hurricane winds blow from a certain direction, there are dire predictions of what may happen in the city.