OK, we hate to include Sheldon Drobny among our "Media Whores USA," he has done some good things for the liberal/Democratic message in America, including his affiliation (as a cofounder) with Air America radio.
BUT! When a "lefty" message, such as the Nader campaign of 2000, ENABLES the Right-Wing propaganda and lust-for-power machine, we must confront it.
In this case, Drobny includes President Harry S. Truman at THE VERY BOTTOM of the US presidents list... below even George W. Bush!
All we can say is, "WTF, Sheldon!" and "Thank god for the David McCullough bio of Truman, which dispels so much of Sheldon Drobny's bunk!"
http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205
So here goes. "THANKS," Sheldon, for providing a text-book example of a smart guy being completely clueless on such an important subject. To Begin with, try three words: "THE MARSHALL PLAN." In the video biography of his life (a must see for anyone interested in the post-WWII balance of world power) Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff and later Secretary of Defense and State George C. Marshall said that the European reconstruction miracle that bore his name should really have been called "THE TRUMAN PLAN." Original plans for the US reconstruction of Europe called for PUNITIVE occupations of Germany and Japan (see "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss), but Truman swiftly changed that policy (in consensus with other US leaders) when he realized that European reconstruction (and a strong barrier to Soviet designs on Western Europe) depended on Germany's successful reconstruction as well.... Leading to the greatest humanitarian success story in world history.
Russia and the SSR's were ALSO INVITED TO PARTICIPATE in the "European Recovery Act" but Molotov (under orders from Stalin of course) declined and disparaged the US plan. IF that's not refutation enough for Mr. Drobny's "Russia as nice guy" see also the biography of UAW President Walter Reuther, who actually went to Stalin's Russia as a top machinist to help industrialize "the workers paradise," but returned to America a determined anti-Communist after witnessing his friends being dragged off into oblivion for daring to protest factory conditions or party policies in the 5-year plan factories. (This writer) is such a liberal that we still suspect BOBBY KENNEDY for his role as lead counsel on Senator Joe McCarthy's House un-American Activities Committee, but underestimating Stalin's ruthlessness and expansionism is myopic at best. See how Stalin purged Red Army WWII hero General Zhukov simply for being popular, how Stalin was preparing to purge the "Jewish doctors plot" in the early 1950s, which in turn was just an excuse for the paranoid dictator to embark on another massive, wholesale round of purges. Here's the first sentence of Publisher's Weekly review for the Amazon listing of "Stalin's Last Crime" << Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. >> Which reviews also speculate that the dictator may have been poisoned by his terrified aides, who calculated their chances of survival were bleak if Stalin did enact a new wave of purges and/or a (big) war. (Note: Stalin was a Central-Asian warlord first, in the manner of the Mongols, Turks, and Persians (etc.), and a "Communist" socialist, or industrialist second.)
Getting back to Truman, the Junior Senator from Missouri DID NOT WANT the VP nomination in 1944, and his wife detested Washington. (She would leave him behind, alone in DC, for months at time.) Roosevelt insisted on Truman's nomination and is reported to have said "If Harry Truman wants to be the destruction of the Democratic Party [by not accepting the nomination], let it be on his head!"
Truman reluctantly accepted the nomination... and upon Roosevelt's death, went on to lay the Western foundation for winning the Cold War (the "containment" strategy, which beats the hell of Bush Jr.'s "attack first" or "One-percent solution" strategy), Europe's post-war recovery, the GI Bill, Truman DESEGREGATED the US military, oh, and he courageously WON REELECTION DESPITE the defection of Strom Thurmond's "segregation today, tomorrow, and forever!" Dixiecrat Party, Thurmond taking almost every one of the Deep South states away from the Democratic roster in the 1948 presidential election, which Truman miraculously won. (Insert photo, Truman holding newspaper headline "Dewey Defeats Truman!" here.)
Not bad for an over-the-hill horse soldier who commanded an artillery battalion in brutal conditions in WWI France, paid off his Depression era business debts on Depression-era wages, a man whose grandmother recalled "The Bluebellies" (Yankee soldiers) burning the family farm during the Civil War in slave state Missouri.
Compared to Harry S. Truman, what has Sheldon Drobny accomplished? What has George W. Bush accomplished compared to the 33rd president? Truman was not responsible for the Korean War, it was the American public who DEMANDED that the troops be brought home after WWII, leaving a vacumn (skeleton US presence) in South Korea (a nation that was only partitioned at the whim of Russia and America in the first place.) Indeed, we suppose Drobny will somehow blame the North Korean attack on South Korea on Truman as well... supplies and blessings of Uncle Joe Stalin notwithstanding!
It is such sweeping, unsubstantiated claims as Drobny's op-ed blaming Harry Truman for the ENTIRE Cold War, which have allowed the Righties in the press and corporate media over the past two decades to entirely DISMISS the "lefty," progressive, or Democratic POV as easily as they do.
http://www.amazon.com/Biography-General-George-C-Marshall/dp/B000006QIA
http://www.amazon.ca/Bt-Conquerors-Michael-R-Beschloss/dp/B000C25VRS
http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205
NOTE: According to the Marshall bio-video, President Roosevelt selected Marshall to the ultra-hyper-crucial job of Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; precisely because Marshall refused to agree with Roosevelt during a White House meeting of senior military commanders. As Marshall left the WH grounds, his fellow generals and admirals sympathized with him, such a refutation of the Commander in Chief was a one-way ticket to professional exile or retirement. Instead, Roosevelt was impressed by Marshall's honesty and outspokenness, and selected him to be the nation's highest uniformed officer during WWII. Marshall survived the Pearl Harbor disaster, fired a lot of senior generals as "deadwood" unable to adapt to the raging worldwide war, and promoted dozens of junior officers to high command slots. Including a certain colonel from Kansas, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower may have been a "Republican" president, but he was promoted over dozens of senior officers by a Democratic president, a president who accepted opposition members into his cabinet (Secretary of War Henry L Stimson) and who didn't surround himself with yes-men.
=============================
The Worst POTUS - [TRUMAN!]
by Sheldon Drobny
12.13.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-drobny/the-worst-potus_b_36264.html?p=2#comments
Many people on both sides of the "aisle" have debated recently about Bush being the worst POTUS. Although W is a strong candidate for that dishonored position, my vote would go to Harry Truman. W is probably psychologically unbalanced and represents the last in a breed of failed post WW II Presidents. But, it was Truman who started this disastrous policy and condemned us to a phony confrontation with the Soviet Union. People talk today about the failed and skewed intelligence concerning the threat of WMD from Iraq in 2002. That pails by comparison to the skewed intelligence that was used to make the Soviet Union our mortal enemy between 1945 and 1950. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA was the final "nail in the coffin" concerning our post war relationship with the USSR. And although the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, that country was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and they were not a threat to the U.S.
America was at a critical juncture at the end of the war, in terms of its relationship to the Soviet Union. According to Alderman Edwin M. Burke, co-author of a 1996 book with R. Craig Sautter and Richard M. Daley called, Inside the Wigwam, the 1944 Chicago Democratic Convention was the stage on which the very political future of America itself was played.
Burke's book is a history of Chicago Presidential Conventions from 1860-1996. At the Democratic convention of 1944, the party bosses around the country knew FDR was seriously ill and was likely not to finish his fourth term. The idea of Wallace being the next President was a terrifying thought to those in the conservative and southern wing of the Democratic Party. They were strongly anti-Soviet and knew Wallace was disposed towards normalizing relations with the USSR.
Unlike Roosevelt, who was a shrewd politician, Wallace was a true idealist. Although Roosevelt was very progressive in his policies, he knew that the coalition of southern and conservative Democrats was necessary for the Democrats to win a national election. The party bosses in Chicago, including Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly, intervened just as Wallace was about to be re-nominated. Kelly instructed the Chicago Fire Commissioner at the time to close down the convention hall. The party bosses wanted Harry Truman to be nominated because Truman was part of Missouri machine politics and could easily be manipulated in the postwar policy toward the Soviet Union.
The party bosses succeeded in getting Truman to be FDR's running mate in a dramatic and brilliant series of political maneuvers. As Wallace was being nominated, Mayor Kelly had the fire commissioner evacuate the Chicago Stadium. He did it by engineering an artificially created fire hazard. The Chicago Stadium doors were opened to the skid row bums in the neighborhood. People poured into the convention in droves causing the overcrowding of the building, which then had to be evacuated because of fire hazard limits. That nomination was postponed for a day. Party bosses quickly took over the process by "influencing" the delegates to switch their allegiance to Truman. And the nomination of Harry Truman as Vice President and the death of FDR in April, 1945 made it much less likely that Wall Street would be exposed to a scandal that would have exposed their support of Hitler before the War.
It is clear from archival records that Prescott Bush helped finance Germany's military buildup. But, he was not alone. The Dulles brothers were instrumental in representing many firms that did business with the Nazis. Unfortunately, Allen and John Dulles became powerful influences in skewing the intelligence against the Soviet Union. The U.S. had the atomic bomb in 1945 and the Soviets were only interested geo-politically in protecting themselves from another invasion from Germany, something that had happened 3 times in the 20th Century. So the CIA got to work on this and fed the people with skewed intelligence about the Soviet threat. They even kept this up during the Reagan years when all of our real intelligence had shown that the USSR was on the verge of collapse. They just could not out spend us for 50 years militarily.
ALLEN DULLES
In the 50 years that followed WW II, the CIA was busy exporting terrorism throughout the world on the false premise that so-called monolithic Communism was threatening the world. Reagan praised the so-called freedom fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting the USSR. In fact, Reagan's freedom fighters were the extreme Muslims that were responsible for the rise of Muslim extremism and 9/11. At the time, we could not conceive of the idea that the USSR was defending its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to support a secular government there that was aligned with the Soviet Union. When it came to Soviet Russia, an entire generation of Democrats and Republicans supported the idea of containment of the USSR that was expressed in NSC Directive 68.
One of my good friends, John Loftus, was working in the Justice Department in the 1970s. He was assigned to the division that was prosecuting former Nazi war criminals. John has written about this in his book, The Secret War Against The Jews. It is a great read about the intelligence community and the Justice Department's views concerning the Nazi Genocide. John, who is not Jewish, told me that secret intelligence documents showed that the CIA in its pursuit of Soviet confrontation actually used many of the former Nazi war criminals in their anti-soviet covert operations. When it came to a choice between prosecuting war criminals and using Nazis as covert agents, the choice was easy for the Dulles controlled CIA.
Perhaps G.W. Bush will at long last be the end to an era of failed Presidents that have deprived the American citizens with the truth and more importantly the fruits of their labors to make this country so great. Today we honor Truman and his legacy of Cold War Presidents who won the "Cold War." We especially honor Ronald Reagan, the man who armed Saddam Hussein, and the Afghanistan Mujahaden.
The truth be told, the U.S. has been responsible for a post war foreign policy that has caused the death and starvation of millions of people, far more than any other country in the world since 1945. And it all started with a political hack, Harry S. Truman
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment