Author: jameswagner

Billionaires for Bush at the 2000 Republican Convention

Count me in!
It’s going to be a very interesting summer in New York.
We couldn’t make it to last night’s fundraiser, but we certainly want to catch up with this fabulous group. Politics, maybe it’s not just for those other guys any more!
Karl Rove attended a moneyed Bush election event at a nightclub on 24th Street last night, and it wasn’t always easy telling the hellfunders from the hellraisers. The NYTimes reports that even some of the demonstrators were confused for a while.

“Fabulous, fabulous,” Mr. Rove said as he left after giving a 20-minute talk to several hundred people gathered inside [and collecting about $400,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign].
But while Mr. Rove was inside, more than 100 protesters were outside, standing behind blue police barricades chanting slogans, waving placards and offering a bit of street theater that confused the police.
At one point, as hundreds of guests with invitations waited to pass through velvet barriers to enter the club, a small group of men in bowler hats and women in gowns marched up, chanting, “Four more wars” and “Re-elect Rove.”
As the group approached, a man who appeared to be a security agent of some type, was overheard whispering into a microphone: “We’ve got two groups. One for and one against.”
Actually, it was two against. The person was confused by a group that calls itself Billionaires for Bush, a collection of activists who use satire to make a political point. Indeed, members of the Sierra Club, who were protesting on the other side of the street were also confused and began shouting at what they thought was a pro-Bush contingent.
” We want the truth and we want it now!” the Sierra protesters shouted.
The billionaires shouted back, “Buy your own president!”
It took a few minutes, but the police finally realized what was going on when they escorted the group behind the blue barricades as well. Still, the show was not over. A black town car pulled up and out stepped a man whom who the crowd assumed to be Mr. Rove. “There is Karl Rove,” people shouted.
Reporters, photographers and television cameramen swarmed the man, but the police pushed them back. Another man lifted the velvet rope to let him enter. But the would-be Mr. Rove walked over to the crowd of protesters and began shaking hands, when finally, again, this was seen to be a joke. It was not Mr. Rove, but an actor playing the part.
Each of the groups has said it planned to stage similar events when the Republican National Convention comes to New York City from Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.

By the way, what’s this thing with Bush, and now Rove, regularly waving the adjective “fabulous” around like only the good fairies have been doing for years. It’s raising some fabulous eyebrows.

[image from Dru Jay at Monkeyfist]

I don’t even want to talk here about the relative merits of the various candidates for the club’s nominee for the presidency, but I am pretty amazed that such a sense of inevitability became attached to John Kerry’s name so early in the Democrats’ process.
I know, some will say it’s the invisible hand, the miracle of the democratic system, even the will of god, but I have another theory. I think it’s the poverty of our minds and our imaginations. Early on Kerry had somehow been perceived as the The One, and everybody wants to be with the winner. It’s the same phenomenon which creates blockbuster films, as Barry volunteered, or our mad obsession with SUV’s, this year’s Britney and the coolest camera cellphone of the month.
This time I’m not even sure that we’ve bought a bill of goods advanced by the market or the commercial media. It seems that we just don’t want to be different. Americans are both too ignorant and too insecure to think for themselves. Kerry doesn’t stand out much, but we understand that for some reason he just seems to be the one.
Who are we to argue with such evidence of virtue?

Drake University law professor Sally Frank


“a culture distracted into obedience by fear” [from a press release for a show, Halliburton”, of paintings by Adam Simon opening Friday at art Moving, 166 North 12th St. in Williamsburg]

Oh, I’ve neglected this followup until now.
The immediate crisis is over for this particular group.

Federal authorities retreated Tuesday in their investigation of an Iowa anti-war demonstration, withdrawing grand jury subpoenas delivered last week to four peace activists and Drake University.
The shift came as the investigation drew nationwide condemnation from civil liberties advocates, politicians and peace activists.
Also Tuesday, a federal judge lifted a gag order on Drake, where employees had been ordered not to discuss an inquiry into a meeting the anti-war activists held there Nov. 15. Federal authorities had asked for records of the campus chapter of the National Lawyers Guild – which hosted the anti-war conference – and for the impressions campus police had of the gathering.

Ah shucks, Barry.
But, seriously, it was the memory of the various surveillance authorities at all those old ACT UP meetings and demonstrations, including our own civil disobedience training sessions, that made this particular outrage so disturbing for me.
And we know the obscurants are even now regrouping for another opportunity to spread the fear with which they hope to preserve their power.
One reaction, picked almost randomly, appears in an editorial of The Examiner, where the outrage is much more restrained than that which can be found elsewhere, even among very reasonable people.

While it was good to learn the subpoenas had been withdrawn, the fact that they were ever issued raises some disturbing questions about why. An explanation put forward by many civil-liberties groups and peace activists is that it was a maneuver by the federal government to suppress antiwar activities by making potential participants afraid they could be arrested or prosecuted. Indeed, word the subpoenas had been withdrawn came as lawyers for Drake were preparing to fight the demands. They had intended to argue that the subpoenas would have put a damper on students’ constitutional rights to free speech and free association.
We’d like to think that’s not true. We’d like to think that partisan politics would not lead to abuse of the federal law-enforcement system. We’d like to think that public servants would not capriciously abandon their oaths to uphold the Constitution. But over the past few years, when the ability of the government to reach into the details of our private lives has been exponentially expanded without even the most basic oversight of a judge brought into play, it’s become difficult to think that way. It doesn’t help that everywhere the president goes, people who want to express opinions opposed to his are sequestered in distant pens insultingly labeled “free-speech zones.”
No, it unfortunately appears that the Drake subpoenas were inappropriate and unnecessary at best, and quite possibly nothing less than callous political thuggery.

[image from Common Dreams]