Former Nixon aide admits racist roots of America’s drug war: Bernie and Hillary must own this issue and fix this injustice — now

www.salon.com|Sean Illing

The drug war is an issue in this campaign, but it ought to be front and center. America’s war on drugs hasn’t worked – for anyone. It’s been a boon to the pharmaceutical companies, who don’t want the competition, and to the prison-industrial complex, who profit from locking up nonviolent offenders, but it’s been a disaster for everyone else.

The April cover story of Harper’s magazine explains not just how counterproductive the drug war has been but also, and perhaps more importantly, its racist roots. Written by Dan Baum, the article lays out the case for legalization, which is worth absorbing on its own. But it begins with a startling revelation from John Ehrlichman, one of Richard Nixon’s close aides and a Watergate co-conspirator.

Hurricane Donald is destroying the GOP coalition: How Nixon & Reagan’s “Southern Strategy” finally imploded

www.salon.com|Conor Lynch

There has been a lot of discussion lately about “civil war” and revolt in the Republican party, and whether it can survive for very long with factions that not only disagree with each other on major issues, but seem to downright despise each other. Since Donald Trump ascended to the top of the GOP primary polls, and establishment favorite Jeb Bush collapsed like a mountain of mortgage-backed securities, we have witnessed the ongoing disintegration of a once-strong alliance formed during the Civil Rights era, matured during the Reagan era, and largely exhausted by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, as the excesses of neoliberalism, which this alliance had ensured, exploded.

The South won the Civil War: White men, racial resentment, and how the Bitter Minority came to rule us all

www.salon.com|Paul Rosenberg

Donald Trump’s recent failed attempt to surprise the political world with a sizable group endorsement by black ministers occasioned a very sharp observation from Joy Reid on The Last Word. After Jonathan Allen noted that Trump was desperately looking for “a racial or ethnic or any other type of minority that he can go to and not already have basically poisoned the well,” Reid helpfully clarified the why of it all: “Republican primary, that’s not about black and Latin voters, because there really aren’t any in the Republican primary,” Reid said. “That’s about white suburban voters who want permission to go with Donald Trump.”

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When Rahm Emanuel was a congressman, he was nicknamed “the Jewish LBJ,” not only for his ambition, but for his reputation as an amoral political animal focused only on power. Now that he’s facing his biggest crisis as mayor of Chicago – the coverup of a video showing a police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times – he’s looking much more like Richard Nixon.

On Tuesday morning, Emanuel began attempting to excise this cancer on his mayoralty by firing Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, a move reminiscent of Nixon’s dismissals of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Then he held an “I Am Not Corrupt” press conference, which one veteran City Hall reporter called “the most unusual in his four-and-a-half years as mayor,” because he showed up on time and answered questions. When Rahm Emanuel starts treating people with respect, you know he’s in trouble. He also appointed his very own special prosecutors, announcing the formation of a Police Accountability Task Force, to be advised by former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a Chicago native.

Henry Kissinger’s genocidal legacy: Vietnam, Cambodia and the birth of American militarism

www.salon.com|Greg Grandin

In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death.

As a journalist, Power had made her name as a defender of human rights, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.Having served on the National Security Council before moving on to the U.N., she was considered an influential “liberal hawk” of the Obama era. She was also a leading light among a set of policymakers and intellectuals who believe that American diplomacy should be driven not just by national security and economic concerns but by humanitarian ideals, especially the advancement of democracy and the defense of human rights.

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Détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China were significant breakthroughs in their own right. Indeed, a positive appraisal of the Nixon administration’s foreign policies is predicated on our viewing them this way. But Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not view them in isolation at the time. Instead, both men believed that Moscow and Beijing, keen to extract economic and strategic benefits from an improved relationship with Washington, would apply pressure on Hanoi to agree to peace terms permitting a full American withdrawal. On this topic their reasoning was misguided. It did not accord sufficient respect to North Vietnam’s fiercely guarded status as an independent actor, or indeed to the ideological solidarity that existed on at least a bilateral basis between Hanoi and its two Marxist-Leninist patrons.

So when the United States withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, when “peace” was finally achieved, it came at a horrendous cost. Cambodia was dragged directly into the fray, leading ultimately to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and a genocide that killed approximately 1.7 million people— 20.1 percent of Cambodia’s population. Hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers and noncombatants lost their lives. Of the fifty-seven thousand American soldiers who died on or above Vietnamese soil, twenty thousand perished during Nixon’s presidency. During the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon had stated his intention to achieve “peace with honor.” In 1971, a returning veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

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Watergate was changing journalism in ways too numerous to count. Not only had the Washington Post gotten the scoop of the century; it had established itself as the second most important paper in America, behind only the New York Times. The Starlagged badly behind. Watergate also produced a new zeal for investigative journalism, pushing reporters and politicians into ever more wary and antagonistic relationships.

In the fall of 1973, a television crew filming a documentary on the media and Watergate caught up with Mary McGrory as she sat in the hearing room. The young interviewer asked why the reporters covering the hearings were not out scouring for new evidence and allegations.

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We’ve come to the stage in the Donald Trump farce where progressive analysts must try to see him as more than just an avatar of white grievance, or else we’ll have to be heavily medicated for the rest of primary season, at least.

For my money, the two best recent attempts at this have been Jamelle Bouie in Slate, and Lee Drutman in Vox. Both tune into populist, even progressive strains in Trump’s appeal, though they’re hard to hear with all the shouting about Mexican “rapists” and menstruating bimbos. Trump promises to raise taxes on “hedge fund guys” and to protect, not cut, Social Security and Medicare. He rails against lobbyists and the politicians they buy, bragging he’s so rich he can’t be bought.

Bouie even hears echoes of pollster Stanley Greenberg’s advice to Democrats, to focus on the role of money in politics, and the perception that government is allied with big business to screw the rest of us, as a way to appeal to alienated white working class voters.

It is disturbing to observe famous ex-government officials paid one complement after another, given the floor in the auditorium of an elite university, and then protected from actual, difficult questions the public may have. Why is it that “intellectuals” like Mr. Kissinger are so afraid of being confronted, through argument and evidence, over their records? My own question, on Kissinger’s complicity in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh that left up to three million people dead, was conveniently ignored by Ferguson. The moderator is supposed to ensure a real conversation takes place. Ferguson did the opposite: He guarded his subject and censored tough questions.

Legendary comic Harry Shearer: Nixon was the last great tragicomic character of our time

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The "SNL" alum and "Simpsons" actor talks to Salon about his Nixon satire and how he wants to revolutionize comedy VIDEO