Les AuCoin Blog

Uncle Sam dropped off a $321.30 check today. The big economic stimulus. Dubya wants me to invest the windfall in my country. So my wife and I’ve reviewed our choices.

Oh, we thought of using the sum to reduce the budget deficit; fund the hydrogen car; retool U.S. manufacturing; rebuild aging bridges and roads; or reinvent American elementary, secondary and higher education. We’re supposed to have faith that the do-ray-me, used wisely, will make a difference. So we opted for the one choice that will do it.

We sent the dough to Barrack Obama—in time to help him beat John McSame in this month’s fundraising duel (deadline, midnight tonight).

Goodnight, John. G’night George.

Any reasonable doubt that Barack Obama possesses an epic dose of presidential mettle, idealism, and daring was shattered in 38 amazing minutes Tuesday in Philadelphia in a speech he entitled “A More Perfect Union.”

Not since JFK, LBJ and RFK has a presidential figure talked to us in such honest, edifying and ultimately uplifting words about race, America’s most open sore. And, since Lincoln, nobody has done it better.

There were no soaring rhetorical flourishes here, no focus-grouped talking points, no succumbing to the pinched vision of the pygmy class of political handlers. Instead we were given the ultimate gift a candidate can grant us—an intelligent, highly nuanced address on an issue lesser leaders avoid except, all too often, to exploit for narrow, manipulative ends. And Obama offered it with the faith that we are adult enough to handle it.

It reminded me of the day in September, 1962, when I was a young Army private in the Jim Crow South, and Jack Kennedy stirred me to the marrow of my bones by going on national TV and radio to explain why he—we—had a moral obligation to desegregate George Wallace’s schools and why he had federalized the Alabama National Guard to do it.

Seizing his own “teachable moment,” Obama set the diversionary controversy over his former pastor in the broader context of what Americans of all hues and ethnic and religious backgrounds must do to redeem the stake we have in each other and create that “more perfect union.” (Contrast this, please, with John McCain’s tolerance of televangelist Rod Parsley—his “spiritual adviser”—a man who believes Islam must be destroyed by Christian warriors and called Catholicism a “great whore” and “false cult system.”)

Lest anyone think it is reflexive for me to eschew the Clinton campaign, Bill Clinton generously returned to Oregon in 1992, long after he had sewed up the state’s electoral votes, expressly to help me in my Senate race against Bob Packwood. I’ve always remembered his generosity with gratitude. Although I have never met Hillary, I’ve been loyal to her as Hillary haters tried to destroy her.

But as my old colleague, Bill Richardson, said today as he campaigned for Barack in Oregon, Obama is a “once in a lifetime candidate.”

The nation’s only Latino governor may have had in mind what Jon Robin Baitz described in the Huffington Post about the Obama revealed by this speech. “This, then,” Baitz wrote, “is what it means to be presidential. To be moral. To have a real center. To speak honestly, from the heart, for the benefit of all. If there was any doubt about what we have missed in the anti-intellectual, ruthlessly incurious Bush years, and even the slippery Clinton ones (the years of “what is is”), those doubts were laid to rest by [Obama’s] magisterial speech—a speech in which he distanced himself from a flawed father figure, Reverend Wright, and did so with almost Shakespearian dignity and honor.”

Just so. It’s Obama for me.

A show of Mother Nature and her works—and a reason why I choose to live in the West.

My Slideshow 1/10/08

U.S. Rep. Charlie WilsonUnless you’ve been lost in Oregon’s Alvord Desert, you know that Tom Hanks’ new flick, Charlie Wilson’s War, is based on the wildest sumbitch ever to serve in the modern Congress and how the lewd, womanizing, Scotch-swilling swashbuckler from Lufkin, Texas, just about single-handedly got Congress to give the Mujahdeen modern weapons that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan in 1989, thus helping bring down the Soviet empire.

At the Khyber Pass with the ResistanceBut the truth is far more extraordinary—and the upshot in Afghanistan far less successful—than the 97-minute confection created by Director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and their heavyweight cast: Hanks (who plays Wilson), Julia Roberts (a Houston socialite/Soviet hater), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (a rogue CIA field man and Wilson co-conspirator who said what brought them together was “chasing pussy and killing Communists”).

The movie’s omissions turn it into a romantic adventure sprinkled with comedy, combat, and just enough fact to be believable. But it’s worth a ticket if only to see Hoffman, who deserves his second Oscar in as many years for his portrayal of Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent—a performance that makes Hanks scramble to remain the biggest man on the screen.

The Movie’s Missed Opportunity

My problem, and I expected it, is that, working with a compelling true story, the movie blew an opportunity to delve into the yin and yang of good and evil inherent in both realpolitik and the mortals who inhabit it, let alone explore the tendency for seeds of failure to exist in “victory.” (After our Mujahdeen “friends” defeated the Soviet Army, many of them gave our arms to or became Osama bin Laden’s ally and protector, the Taliban, with which the U.S. would be at war in 12 years.) Alas, paradox has never been a strong aspect of the Western mind, let alone the American mind. And Hollywood’s mind? Don’t get me started.

The real “Good Time Charlie” Wilson sat two chairs up from me on the House Defense Appropriations Committee for more than a decade. From that perch, I saw and (to an extent) helped him engineer what became the largest covert program in U.S. history—$1 billion—despite the initial timidity of the CIA and odd diffidence of the Reagan White House. And it was done entirely within the clandestine budget, with no publicly recorded vote ever taken.

I came to know and like the complex public and private Charlie Wilson, a man who was at once more disturbing and charming than either his movie incarnation or the figure described in the book that inspired the film (George Crile, Grove Press, 2003, ISBN 0802141242, 560 pp).

A long-legged, ramrod-straight Naval Academy graduate with a square jaw, wicked wit and booming basso profondo laugh, Charlie entertained elegantly in his Arlington, Virginia, condo overlooking the Iwo Jima Memorial, the Potomac River and the Capitol Mall beyond—affairs that I suspected but couldn’t prove were funded by his friends in the defense lobby.

That he had so many such friends, and carried their mail so brazenly, was one of Charlie’s many deep flaws. I recall him in committee, losing a debate on a dubious weapons system that even Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger didn’t want (and that’s saying something). Wilson held up the vote long enough to duck into the telephone booth and emerge with fresh talking points from the arms maker. I don’t remember if he won or lost; the point is that Wilson was butt-naked complicit with the defense lobby and didn’t give a damn.

The Better Angel of His Nature

Yet Charlie was a social and economic liberal who defied his Bible-thumping conservative district and its history of racial bigotry. He was a strong supporter of civil rights, minimum wage increases, Medicaid, and anti-poverty programs.

On women’s issues, Charlie was a dependable “yes” vote. He supported abortion rights, parental leave and the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet the hedonist in him collected women like a boy might collect marbles. His office staff was exclusively female, drop-dead beautiful and full bosomed. Everybody called them “Charlie’s Angels.”

In the movie, a visiting constituent glances at those aides and asks Hanks (Wilson) why he hired gorgeous women. Hanks’ reply is one I heard Charlie use in real life more than once: “You can always teach ‘em to type, but you can’t teach ‘em to grow tits.”

Aside from constituent service, stellar votes on social and economic issues, Charlie’s individual legislative efforts were unremarkable for many years. However, in the late 1970s he engaged in an act of foreign policy hubris that, seen now, foretold his Afghanistan adventure.

With Somoza Until the Dictator Made a Bad Move

Ever the Annapolis man, Charlie admired the Central American dictator, Anastasio Somoza, a West Point graduate, and threatened to wreak the Carter Administration’s Panama Canal treaty if Carter didn’t resume support for Somoza. Wilson’s ardor was unaffected by the Nicaraguan leader’s unsuccessful offer of a large cash bribe at their first meeting. Later Charlie arranged a meeting between Somoza and a high-ranking CIA official in a bid to save the dictator. But when Somoza fondled Tina Simons, Wilson’s girlfriend at the time, Charlie dropped him like a dead armadillo. (Fascism was one thing; a man’s woman was another!)

I’ve always believed that Charlie’s single-minded support for the subjugated Afghans came in equal measure from a zest for danger, revulsion at Communism and empathy for a people who told him of daughters raped, children mutilated, sons and fathers decapitated, and pregnant women bayoneted in the stomach. Yet he always said they would fight the Russians with stones if necessary.

Wilson traveled frequently to the region as modern arms began to arrive and Afghans brought down Soviet helicopter warships and fixed wing aircraft with increasing skill. Inevitably, he would bring along a personal cache of booze and a beautiful woman on his arm. Sex, war, and alcohol were the trifecta in the hierarchy of Wilson’s tastes.

Wilson’s Outlandish Revenge

Charlie stormed home from one such trip with blood in his eye. A U.S. Air Force colonel had banned his female companion from flying out of Pakistan with him on a government plane. Wilson and the officer almost came to blows before Charlie placed one call to the presidential palace in Islamabad. Soon General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s personal jet arrived, picked up Wilson and his date and roared off, leaving the American colonel slack-jawed on the tarmac.

Charlie would get his revenge in the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He passed an amendment (over my objection) to remove the officer’s plane. And just to make sure the colonel and his superiors got the message, Wilson’s measure reassigned the jet to the Texas Air National Guard.

In the larger sense, though, the Afghan issue brought out brilliant legislative skills few knew Charlie possessed. There’s a scene in the movie—true to fact—in which he promises Midwest congressmen, in return for their support, to deliver the Black Caucus votes for the Farm Bill, a political act as unnatural as the physical act Charlie told the Air Force colonel to perform on himself.

Wilson, 74, has moved back to Lufkin, Texas, his boyhood home, and finally married. Last fall he had a heart transplant when a congenital disease that had haunted him throughout his coke consumption, carousing and contretemps left him on death’s doorstep.

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote, It Can’t Happen Here, the seminal novel about how totalitarians take over the U.S.

It’s seventy two years later, and it’s happening. Has been, for several years. The latest move by our neo-con masters is to starve us of information we need to remain citizens, the better to make us serfs.

On December 18, the FCC relaxed the rules on media ownership, making it easier for conglomerates to buy up news outlets. It was another turn of the vise on the free flow of information.

Fascism is just another word for corporatism.

Keep that in mind as you watch this disturbing video about the FCC outrage and what it means to each of us, courtesy of Bill Moyers Journal (PBS). The story shows that FCC Chair Kevin Martin, a neo-con Bush appointee, had made up his mind and created a 3-2 majority for the new media consolidation rule even before the sham public hearings had been concluded.

El Duce didn’t listen to public opinion either.