Obama's critics have nothing on 1960s peaceniks

Obama's critics have nothing on 1960s peaceniks

http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20090925/NEWS01/909250306

Robert Warner
September 25, 2009

Hey, look! Freaks with questionable backgrounds leading a highly
divisive challenge at the very heart of a president's policies --
policies that in hindsight, may be terribly misguided.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and their legions of followers vs.
President Barack Obama?

Naaaaah. I'm thinking more of Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and the
anti-war movement of the 1960s.

Scary stuff, the hordes swarming Michigan Avenue in front of the
Chicago Hilton hotel, where the 1968 Democratic nominee for
president, Hubert H. Humphrey, was hunkered down. "The whole world is
watching!" the young, long-haired crowd chanted. "Sieg Heil!" they
screamed at Chicago police, who answered the Nazi taunts with
billyclubs and tear gas in a violent night of reprisal.

The Vietnam War was a holding action against the spread of communism
in southeast Asia, we were told. When the United States took the
offensive by bombing North Vietnam beginning in 1965, the sprinkling
of pacifists across the country multiplied into a storm of outrage.

But don't think the outrage was mainstream. It was far from that.
Radical, even.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson chose not to run again and Richard
Nixon won election to the presidency in November 1968, the course of
aggressive action against the guerrillas attacking our troops was
stayed -- even expanded to include bombing of neighboring countries
that harbored the enemy.

And the opposition grew.

Nixon was mocked viciously. Protesters rained debris on Nixon's
motorcade at his second inauguration in January 1973, mocked him as a
pig and pretended to assassinate him.

Over the years, Nixon's outward response took two tacks.

First, he embraced the mainstream, with a phrase that stuck: "To you,
the great silent majority of my fellow Americans: I ask for your
support," he said in a televised speech to the nation in November 1969.

Second, he sicced his attack-dog vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, on
the opposition. You didn't have to parse Agnew's language to
understand the strategy. He referred to those who spoke out against
the war as "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "pusillanimous
pussyfooters." There were "hard-core dissidents and professional
anarchists" out there, threatening the nation's security.

Today's attacks, in substance targeting the massive cost of
government bailouts and raising the specter of socialism in the
health-care reform debate, don't seem quite as vicious or incendiary
in the cold light of the 1960s.

Maybe that's why Obama has been pretty tame in his reaction to the
attacks, seeming content to try to shame dissenters and mute the hysteria.

And the players? The weepy, fear-mongering Glenn Beck -- he of the
claims that Obama is "racist" and "has a deep-seated hatred for white
people" -- seems pretty tame when you size him up against Abbie
Hoffman, leader of the Yippie movement in the '60s.

"All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs, the only dope
worth shooting is Richard Nixon," Hoffman recited on a 1970
spoken-word album. His 2008 obituary in The New York Times noted that
he'd gone underground for six years to avoid jail for dealing
cocaine. Rather than raising his hand to be sworn in during his trial
over the 1968 Chicago protests, Hoffman raised his middle finger to
the courtroom.

Tom Hayden, meanwhile, rooted for a communist victory in Vietnam and
was at Jane Fonda's side in 1972 when his future wife posed at a
North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, condemned U.S. soldiers as "war
criminals" and broadcast radio calls for American troops to refuse to
participate in bombing runs.

Sounds a little like Rush Limbaugh, the onetime pain-pill addict who
has openly rooted for the failure of Obama administration policies,
doesn't it? Actually, Limbaugh's rantings seem tame by comparison.

Maybe this summer of shrill rhetoric is just a warm-up for the kind
of nation-wrenching conflict seen 40 years ago. I tend to think not,
because the issues keep shifting and the fervor is generated by
talking heads, not radicals in the streets.

And if it does get crazy, so what? It's just another pendulum swing
in a republic born to be riled.
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Robert Warner can be reached at 966-0674 or rwarner@gannett.com.

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