Friday, February 28, 2014

Karl Rove's dirty trick on John McCain

By Pablo Fanque, national affairs ed.


I recently revised and reprinted an article on Dick Tuck, the master of dirty tricks.  In the course of writing that, I ran into some other famous dirty tricks.  One of the most famous occurred in LBJ's early days on the campaign trail.


In one of his early congressional campaigns, Lyndon B. Johnson told one of his aides to spread the story that Johnson's opponent f****d pigs. The aide responded "Christ, Lyndon, we can't call the guy a pigf***er. It isn't true." To which LBJ replied "Of course it ain't true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it." 

A fairly recent dirty trick that never got the attention it deserved is Karl V. Rove’s onslaught against Senator John McCain, who was running for President in the primaries against his boss, George W. Bush.  In 2000, John McCain won the New Hampshire primary and polls showed him ahead in South Carolina. McCain was on the verge of halting Bush's march to the White House and would likely become the nominee.

Rove chose one of the oldest weapons in the book of dirty tricks—the whisper campaign (see sidebar above).  A whisper campaign is spreading malicious and/or embarrassing rumors about your opponent, while making sure the rumors aren't actually traceable back to your campaign.

Two weeks before the election, pamphlets began appearing under windshields at candidate debates with a picture of McCain and his adopted Bangladeshi daughter.  The pamphlets alleged that McCain had an illegitimate African-American daughter.  This charge would cost him votes in a state that had never fully embraced desegregation.

Shortly after the pamphlet bombardment, anonymous pollsters began calling local Republicans to ask if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if he were mentally unstable because of his imprisonment as a POW in Vietnam.

McCain was so pissed off about the attacks that he confronted President Bush in person to demand that he stop; when Bush denied responsibility, McCain replied, “Don’t give me that s**t!” By Election Day, McCain's lead had vaporized and Bush won by 11 points.

With no realistic way now to nail down the nomination, McCain dropped out.  He never forgave Bush for the attacks on his family and wartime heroics.  He got his shot eventually, and went on with his VP nominee Sara Palin to get whipped by BHO.

Related:

Dick Tuck, American Prankster Hero
Teardrops: Glenn Beck, Anthony Weiner, John Boehner and remembering back to when Edmund Muskie's crying speech ended his Presidential campaign
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Dean Ericksen preparing for Cosplay

By Mona Goldwater, Cosplay ed.


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Drawing: Faces #636 - persons of interest

by Jack Brummet

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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Paintings: Faces #632 and #633: Portrait of Chou En-Lai

By Jack Brummet

I have had the second picture on the wall for years.  But today when I took it down to bring it to my office, I discovered I had done another painting on the back.

This silk poster was originally a portrait of Chou En-Lai.  I transformed it into the man with flaming hair.  But on the obverse side, I worked on the image of Chou En Lai.  And here it is, years later.

[Pen, ink,acrylic paint and brass buttons on Communist Party silk print of Chou En-Lai]






detail of above, showing the weave of silk

The other side:

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Monday, February 24, 2014

20 funny accident descriptions from car insurance customers

By Jack Brummet, Legal Ed.




These accident descriptions are fairly ubiquitous on the internet, with various claims about where they were found.  They are often said to be first hand from a car insurance company's files.  It is impossible to determine the original source.
  • The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him.
  • The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intentions.
  • I thought my window was down, but I found it was up when I put my hand through it.
  •  I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way.
  • A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face.
  • A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.
  • The guy was all over the road.  I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.
  • I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment.
  • In my attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole.
  • I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home.  As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up obscuring my vision.  I did not see the other car.
  • I had been driving my car for forty years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had the accident.
  • I was on my way to the doctor's with rear end trouble when my universal joint gave way, causing me to have an accident.
  • As I approached the intersection, a stop sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before.  I was unable to stop in time to avoid the accident.
  • To avoid hitting the front bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian.
  • My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle.
  • An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle and vanished.
  • I told the police that I was not injured, but on removing my hat, I found that I had a fractured skull.
  • I was sure that the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the roadway when I struck him.
  • Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have.
  • I saw the slow moving, sad-faced old gentleman as he bounced off the hood of my car.
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Painting: Tilt-a-whirl

By Jack Brummet

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Saturday, February 22, 2014

Jack Kerouac's cover concept art for "On The Road:"

By Jack Brummet, 20th century lit. ed.

This is Jack Kerouac's concept art for the cover of his 1958 novel On The Road. Of course, it was never used.

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The Green Slime: a perfect B Movie trailer


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Painting: Map No. 1 (with three detail shots)

By Jack Brummet

This is the first map I ever painted/drew. It is framed in a wooden window frame salvaged from our house. It has been hanging in my wife's office for many years (she wrote: "This map has lived in my office for years. It is taking a sabbatical at our house after all those hard years at the grindstone. Love it."
It is painted on three sheets of d'Arches cold pressed watercolor paper, with Daniel Smith watercolors, pencil, and of course, the ever-present Sharpie™.

The entire painting:

click to enlarge

Details of the maps (click images to enlarge):

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

click to enlarge
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Thursday, February 20, 2014

Drawing: Faces #628 - take a number

by Jack Brummet

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Loaded: Henry Kissinger ponders a call between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath.



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Snippets of abhorrent conversations between President Richard Nixon and his advisors

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Ed.


[From various sources, including The White House tape transcripts, oral histories, and previously unreleased Oval Office tape recordings]

On homosexuality and society (Oval Office with John Erlichman)

Nixon: "I do not mind the homosexuality. I understand it. (14-second beep to hide personal information) But nevertheless, the point that I make is that goddamit, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality… even more than you glorify whores. Now we all know that people go to whores…we all have weaknesses. But, goddammit, what do you think that does to kids? What do you think that does to 11 and 12 year old boys when they see that? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates."

Ehrlichman: "But he never had the influence that television had."
******

Responding to Senator Howard Baker who asked : "What do you know about the Kennedy assassination?" (from Oral History Interview with Don Hewitt October 8, 2002)

Nixon: "You don't want to know."
******

On dropping the big one - April 25, 1972 (Oval Office with Henry Kissinger)


Nixon: "I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people?"
Kissinger: "About two hundred thousand people."
Nixon: "No, no, no, I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?"
Kissinger: "That, I think, would just be too much."
Nixon: "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?…I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes." 
******

On Jews and marijuana - May 26, 1971

"You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose because most of them are psychiatrists."
******

On African-Americans and Espionage - July 5, 1971

"So few of those who engage in espionage are Negroes. …As a matter of fact, very few of them become Communists. If they do, they either, like, they get into Angela Davis — they’re more of an activist type. And they throw bombs and this and that. But the Negroes, have you ever noticed? There are damned few Negro spies." 
******

On abortion - January 23, 1973

"There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape."
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

72 years ago today, FDR authorized internment camps for American citizens: the internment of Japanese-Americans from Kent, Washington


It was 72 years ago today that FDR signed Executive Order 9066. Which paved the way for the American internment/concentration camps.  I wrote about this a few years ago, especially as it affected the little farm town (no longer) in which I grew up.  From All This Is That, 2012.  /jack

by Jack Brummet, Green River Valley Editor


On June 4 and 5, 1942, more than 1,000 Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) were rounded up in the Yakima Valley and sent to a camp in Wyoming, far from the west coast, where they would be presumably unable to assist Japanese invaders or terrorists.  Other Japanese-named citizens and immigrants were shortly rounded up in other areas of the state, including Seattle.  Many more Japanese Americans were rounded up in other states and areas--120,000 people all together were imprisoned.  Three-fifths of those people were U.S. citizens.


Dust storm at an internment camp a/k/a relocation center

The Japanese-Americans were sent to hastily, and flimsily, constructed camps called "War Relocation Centers" (which we now generally call internment camps)  in remote parts of the nation's interior. . .far away from where they might have, say, used a flashlight to guide a fleet of Japanese bombers toward the Boeing warplane plant.




I focus here on Kent, Washington (now a suburb of Seattle), because that's where I grew up, and know first hand about some of the aftermath of the camps.  The first wave of immigrants to Kent, Washington happened shortly before 1900. The immigrants were mostly European. There were, even as I was growing up, several Italian families still farming the valley. The 1900 census count shows just 13 Japanese-named  families in and around Kent.

The number of Japanese immigrants rose steeply over the next few years until 1907, when the US Government put the brakes on the number allowed to immigrate. Eventually, in the 1920's, Japanese immigration was banned altogether. The Anti-Alien Land Law in 1923 barred these immigrants from owning land, or even becoming citizens. Those with a child born in America could put land in the child's name. Some of the Japanese worked for established farmers and some cleared land and began their own farms in Kent, Auburn, and the tiny nearby villages O'Brien, Orillia, and Thomas.

Many Japanese farmers owned dairy farms until the price of milk plummeted after the World War I. Those farmers jumped into vegetable and berry farming, and their truck farms were profitable. They sold produce in Seattle, at the public market and farm stands, and shipped lettuce and cabbage to the east coast.


By 1930 there were around 200 Japanese families farming the White/Green River valley. In 1942, months after Pearl Harbor, all people of Japanese descent in the White/Green River Valley were evacuated and detained at an internment camp at Tule Lake, California. They lost their businesses, farms and personal belongings. They lost everything in the war hysteria.

.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them jailed under Executive Order 9066, a law designating certain "military areas" as zones from which "any or all persons may be excluded." In one of our more shameful national acts of jingoistic racism, all people of Japanese ancestry were removed from the entire Pacific coast--all of California, Oregon and Washington. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law, saying it is "permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity."

My mother, Betty Brummet, remembers Japanese American kids being marched from Ballard High School one day. Some of the students lined up and booed.

The phrase "shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") summarized the interned families' resignation to their helplessness. This was even noticed by the children, as mentioned in Farewell to Manzanar. They tended not to make waves, and complied with the government to prove themselves loyal citizens.

Dust storm at an internment camp

In our war hysteria, we didn't want any Japanese Americans near the west coast. They would form cells and assist soldiers and pilots from the motherland in attacking The Pacific Coast. The number of Germans and Italians placed in the camps is only a fraction of their total population compared with the Japanese, virtually all of whom were locked up.

After the war only about thirty families (out of the original 200) returned to the valley area. I knew the Miyoshis, Yamadas, Nakaharas, Koyamatsus, Hiranakas, and Okimotos. Some of them got back into farming (not on their old farms, which had been confiscated and sold). I worked on the Yamada's farm a couple of springs, cutting and boxing rhubarb, and I worked for a couple of weeks on Kart Funai's farm one summer, bunching radishes and scallions.


Photo of a shop owner in my hometown of Kent, Washington, in 1942

In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed legislation awarding formal payments of $20,000 each to the surviving internees—60,000 in all. This same year, formal apologies were also issued by the government of Canada to Japanese Canadian survivors, who were each repaid the sum of $21,000 Canadian dollars. President Ronald Reagan even apologized on behalf of the United States. $21,000 would buy a fraction of the hundreds of acres of stolen land.  It's better than the reparations paid to the families of slaves (zero, to date), but a pittance compared to losing everything you owned, and the farms you nurtured. If they held on until now, they'd all be rich.




Through the 1950's the Green River continued to flood the valley floor in late spring. This is what made the valley floor some of the richest soil in the world. . .but, alas, flooding prevented big business from locating there. In 1963 the Army Corps of Engineers built the Howard Hansen Dam (an earthen dam, still protecting the valley from floods) to regulate the river waters. The danger of uncontrolled flooding ended. The flat, treeless land on the valley floor now was an attractive area for business. And build they did.

Boeing built an aerospace lab, and the floodgates were opened. Farming was over, and dwindled rapidly, although there are a few pockets left. One of my old high school mates, Danny Carpinito has in fact become a wealthy vegetable farmer. Of the Japanese kids I knew in school, virtually none remained in Kent after high school. Of course, neither did I nor most of my friends, although some of our families still live there.

Sources:
The History of Kent, Washington: http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/curriculum/vtours/kent/
The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American
Previous articles, and photos on the Green River Valley and Japanese-Americans from All This Is That (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/)
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ATIT Reheated: Dick Tuck, American prankster hero

By Jack Brummet, Presidents Editor








"The real Nixon was always there, all I did was keep the spotlight on it." 

Dick Tuck is a legendary political strategist and hoaxer who made a life-long career out of making life miserable for Richard Nixon.  He's been a hero of mine ever since Hunter S. Thompson (a friend of his) wrote about him during the 1972 Presidential campaign.

Tuck writes on dicktuck.com: "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal. In the Chinatown Caper, a sign saying "Welcome Nixon" also asked – in Chinese – "What about the Hughes Loan?"  [Ed's note: Howard Hughes had made a large, no-interest,  loan, or possibly a large cash gift,  to Nixon's brother Donald.  This naturally erupted into a scandal...albeit, a containable one]. Once the phrase was translated for Nixon, he rushed over to the crowd, seized the sign and tore it up in front of the TV cameras.  The message was simple: do you want a guy like this running your state or nation? "

"This kind of behavior, these ethical standards had been Nixon's since law school, when he broke into the Dean's office with some friends to see if his grades were good enough to keep his scholarship. It continued in his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Pat Brown, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.



"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer." 

As Adlai Stevenson said during the 1956 Presidential campaign, “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”

My favorite quote by Dick Tuck is from his concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election, in which he received about 10% of the vote:


"The people have spoken, the bastards."


This poster is from Tuck's 1966 Congressional campaign.  He claimed his opponents added the Dick to form the F word, Tuck said he thought voters would think his opponent had done this and he'd "get the sympathy vote" with this tactic. 

In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. He watched first hand as Dick Nixon smeared her as "The Pink Lady."  After that, he made it his mission to mess with Richard Nixon every chance he got.

One of Tuck's best pranks was "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles where children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese.  As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered to him that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?, " a reference to an unsecured/illegal $205,000 loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald.  Nixon grabbed the sign on camera and ripped it up.


After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who gave Nixon a hug and said in front of TV cameras, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."



Tuck and many other people say that he was never malicious in his political pranks. Richard Nixon, however, became obsessed about Tuck, and even railed about him in some of the Watergate Tapes.  But Nixon also admired Tuck, and often compared the dirty tricks committed by staffer Donald Segretti unfavorably to the elegance and humor of Tuck's political shenanigans. After the Watergate blew up in the newspapers, Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, saw Tuck in the Capitol.  Haldeman reportedly turned to Tuck and said, "You started all of this." Tuck replied, "Yeah, Bob but you guys ran it into the ground."



In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck told a reporter, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit."  He organized a rally at UC Santa Barbara, and booked the largest auditorium they had.  He booked it on a day when no students would be able to attend, and didn't do any publicity for the rally.  Forty students showed up in the 4,000 seat auditorium.  Tuck got up to introduce Nixon with a long, rambling monologue with many references to Nixon's cut-throat, red-bashing campaign tactics against Jerry Voorhis.  He then announced that Nixon would now speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, of course, had not planned to speak about the IMF. Therefore, when he got up to the podium he was momentarily speechless.  When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."



In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower's Vice President. The Republican Convention was held in San Francisco that summer, and Tuck learned that the route taken by garbage trucks going to the dump led past the convention center. Tuck paid to have all the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon".

Tuck also performed other pranks to undermine Nixon's campaign effort like posing as a fire marshall to provide low estimates of the turnout at Nixon's rallies, or telling bandleaders at rallies that Nixon's favorite song was "Mack the Knife."


In one incident Tuck dressed up as a train conductor and signalled a train to leave the station while Nixon was delivering a speech from its rear platform. Reportedly, the train pulled out of the station with Nixon still speaking. [ed's note:  There is some debate about whether this incident actually occurred].

By 1968, when Nixon ran for President, Tuck spooked Nixon's campaign managers so badly that they  started imagining phantom pranks. A shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters for use at ethnic rallies in NYC. Nixon's campaign manager ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (he hadn't).


During the '68 Presidential campaign, Tuck often hired pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs with his campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One."

By 1972 Nixon decided he needed his own Dick Tuck. Naturally, Nixon's efforts to mimic Tuck's pranks had a vicious bent and went badly awry. Donald Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers alleging sexual misconduct on Hubert Humphrey's part and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included racist language.


Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, he rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally-wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.

Sources:  Dicktuck.com; Wikipedia.com/dick_tuck; jackbrummet.blogspot.com; Stephen J. Whitfield. "Nixon as a Comic Figure," American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring 1985, 114-132; Ron Kurtus, "Did Dick Tuck Cause Watergate?" revised August 28, 2000.
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