Give voice to the billyclub

What's Bob Greene's gig at CNN? To give sympathetic interviews to reactionaries.

Look, being a Marxist, much less being a war protester with no revolutionary impulses, is not sufficient reason to have your skull bashed for the "crime" of free speech. Taunting comedically doesn't deserve assault. It's not even illegal to be an asshole, as some of the protesters surely were. Look, these cops getting back together is definitely not a reunion of the Waffen SS. I'm sure most of the cops had long and honorable careers. But they're not heroes for their police riot.

The cops weren't in the right in August 1968. Never mind whether one or two of them now "remember" that they opposed the Vietnam War, they brutally defended the existing pro-war Establishment order. Greene says that their defense of their riot here in 2009 was only attention-getting. Oh bullshit.

The reason there's no healing from this is that journalists like Greene continue to help with the rationalization of brutality. In forty years, someone will take this role to excuse the Constitutional crimes of the Bushist regime.

The lesson: As long as there is no accountability, there's no learning, no progress, no resolution.

Died a-bornin'

Campbell Brown, who is too young to remember, finds some of the common threads that link 1968 to 2008. I'm too young myself to have mature memories, but I remember the titanic struggle America fought to try to grow into the outsize ideals that the Founders and Abe Lincoln and even FDR left still unrealized.

I remember a time when political violence robbed us of the people who might have led us from the mountaintop to the promised land - JFK, MLK, and RFK - a time when hope for a new flowering of freedom and democracy died a-bornin'. And Richard Nixon won the Presidency.

This is why those of us of a certain age feel gnawing fear even as we rejoice at the possibilities and promise of Barack Obama. To live in fear is to die by degrees, but I hope Obama listens to his Secret Service detail.

Image from Wikimedia Commons under CCA 2.0.