Stalinism Lives in South Africa: Was Nelson Mandela a Secret Communist?

By Ron Radosh
PJ Media
December 3, 2012

Last week, a book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal by South African journalist Rian Malan, a man from the Afrikaner family who ran the apartheid regime but broke with them and became an opponent of apartheid. Still, he was a journalist of integrity who did not hesitate to report on and to write about the dark side of the African liberation movement.

His first book, My Traitor’s Heart, was an international bestseller in which Malan traced out his return from exile as he sought to learn the truth about his racist ancestors, as well as about the liberation movement that arose in response to the brutal apartheid regime. His new book, just out, is composed of a series of essays about South Africa today, including his investigation of the origins of the hit song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” made famous most recently by the hit play and film The Lion King.

In his book review, Malan reports on what to my knowledge is a little-known fact about Nelson Mandela, the first president of the post-apartheid South Africa and the titular leader of the African National Congress, which he became the symbol of during his many years of imprisonment on Robben Island.

Mr. Malan refers to the fact that all the contemporary black South African leaders, from Mandela on, have sung the praises of leftist dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and among other things have been vigorous opponents of Israel. Led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they all depict Israel, as Tutu recently put it, as a state even worse than apartheid South Africa. Malan writes, commenting on how liberal journalists have dealt with this:

Mr. Foster finds it “strange” that the leader of a noble liberation movement should side with a nasty dictator. Well, yes. American liberals have always viewed the ANC as an army of hymn-singing moderates, striving for democracy in a Western sense. Readers of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s will recall Thomas Karis’s campaigns against troglodytes who claimed that the ANC was communist-dominated. The New York Times’s Joseph Lelyveld took a similar line in his reporting, then offered readers of “Move Your Shadow” (his Pulitzer-winning 1986 book about apartheid) several witty caricatures of seemingly demented anti-Communists who cast South Africa as a Cold War battlefield. At the time, it was fashionable to laugh at such people. But I am not laughing anymore.

Why is Malan at this late date looking at this issue again, years after the Cold War’s end? The answer comes from reading one of the books he reviews, Stephen Ellis’s External Mission. What he found is the following:

“External Mission” begins by annihilating conventional understandings of the circumstances surrounding the ANC’s 1961 declaration of war on apartheid. According to Mr. Ellis, all critical decisions were actually taken by the South African Communist Party (SACP), which sought support from Moscow and Beijing and then “bounced” the ANC into following its lead. Since white and Indian Communists couldn’t join the racially exclusive ANC, much of this bouncing was done by a charismatic black lawyer who was secretly a member of both organizations: Nelson Mandela. Indeed, Mr. Ellis goes so far as to report that Mr. Mandela was almost certainly a member, at least for a time, of the SACP’s central committee. (emphasis added)

As Mr. Ellis tells it, Mr. Mandela and those around him were intoxicated by the ease of Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba and imagined a similar outcome for their own military venture. They sidelined ANC President Albert Luthuli, who was opposed to violence, and launched an amateurish bombing campaign. Within two years, they were all in prison or in exile.

Mr. Mandela’s membership of a militantly pro-Soviet movement was unlikely to win friends in the free world. More could be gained by portraying him as a black liberal, and Mr. Mandela and his lawyers crafted a masterful speech for Mr. Mandela to deliver from the dock during his 1964 trial for treason.

“The ideological creed of the ANC is African nationalism,” he said. “It is true that there has been close cooperation between the ANC and the Communist Party. But cooperation in this case is merely proof of a common goal — the removal of white supremacy.” Mr. Mandela went on to describe himself as a democrat in the classic Western sense, an admirer of the British and American systems of governance. “Africans just want a share in the whole of South Africa,” he concluded. “Above all, we want equal political rights. … It is an ideal I hope to live for. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

If Mr. Ellis is correct, Nelson Mandela was pulling wool over the eyes of the West. The SACP advocated not “equal political rights” but the establishment of what SACP theoretician Joe Slovo called a “vigorous dictatorship” in the Soviet style, with Slovo himself as Lenin. Comrade Slovo, a white man, dreamed of becoming black South Africa’s supreme leader after the Marxist takeover. His day never came. The Boers rumbled his bomb plot, and Mr. Slovo fled to London. His followers, the ANC’s rank and file, were consigned to military camps in Tanzania and later, Angola.

The bombshell, of course, is the news that Mandela himself was not only a Communist Party member, but a member of its central committee as well.

The truth is that the ANC leaders — all Communists — accepted “the logic of Stalinism.” That is why, he writes, the ANC guerrilla camps composed of rank and file young recruits treated dissidents in the old Stalinist way — through imprisonment, torture, and execution.

Some of us were not surprised to learn of this, although I must admit that I too never even thought that Mandela himself was a bona fide Red. Yet, on the general question of the ANC’s anti-Western radicalism, we were not fooled. Writing in Commentary about Mandela’s reception in America after he was released from prison, Josh Muravchik noted that “Mandela took the lead in persuading the ANC to abandon its policy of nonviolence in favor of armed struggle,” the strategy favored at the time by the hard international left. Muravchik quoted the late left-wing writer Andrew Kopkind, who wrote in The Nation that Mandela “reaffirms revolutionary values, socialist ideals, and egalitarian sentiments,” hence giving the Left “a sense that all is not lost.”

Mandela, Muravchik reminded us, supported Yasir Arafat, Libya’s Qaddafi, and, of course, Fidel Castro.

When asked about the repressive policies of such regimes, Mandela replied that “we have no time to be looking into the internal affairs of other countries.” Of course, the ANC and Mandela had argued that the rest of the world had to call into question the legitimacy of the apartheid regime, and indeed, look into its internal affairs.

Muravchik concluded: “That Mandela is a man of the Left there is no question,” but even he stopped short of claiming that Mandela was himself a Communist, writing only that he had said he believes in “socialism” and was influenced “by Marxist thought.” Muravchik himself, however, believed that Mandela’s chosen “rhetoric bears the earmarks of years spent within a Communist milieu.”

As for me, after a trip to South Africa for journalists, I wrote about my impressions in The American Spectator in an article titled “Red Hills of Africa.”  I argued the following about the hopes of the South African Communist Party:

But with Communism fallen and apartheid falling, why should we care that a powerful Communist party still holds forth in South Africa? The answer is put succinctly by the leading Western scholar of South African Communism, Heribert Adam. … “Because SACP members are the major force that dominates the theoretical debates and strategies within the broad apartheid opposition, its own practice of [or lack of] internal democracy influences the style of the entire movement.” Americans sympathetic to Mandela prefer to ignore that the SACP has cemented its ‘people’s alliance’ with the ANC.”

When I wrote that article in 1992, I pointed out that the Communists recruited scores of 25- to 30-year-old militants from the township underclass, which one writer called “street Jacobins of the 1970s ghetto revolts.” At the time, the Communists controlled three-quarters of the ANC’s National Executive Committee, as well as all the major posts in its policymaking divisions. One of the South African Marxist dissidents, ANC leader Pallo Jordan, wrote in that year that the Stalinist political culture in the ANC had “produced a spirit of intolerance, petty intellectual thuggery and political dissembling.” Although he too saw himself as a Marxist revolutionary, Jordan wrote that socialism had developed “in an authoritarian and totalitarian fashion.”

Writing in Dissent in that same period, professor of African studies Richard L. Sklar pointed out that South Africa’s Communists had rejected “a fundamental ideological shift from Leninism to democratic socialism,” thereby revealing its members were sticking to their true Leninist roots. Jordan at the time feared that internal tensions in his country “might cause us to move in a Stalinist one-party direction.”

More than a decade has passed, and one must say that Rian Malan’s fears, expressed in his recent book review, are well-taken.

Currently, one corrupt government after another has taken power, and instead of a thriving multi-party democracy, the seeds of one party rule, led by the ANC and its Communist allies, are doing all they can to hold onto power. Under the leadership of Jacob Zuma, he writes, “the rich have grown richer; hospitals and schools continued to degenerate; corruption remained endemic.”

Totalitarianism and the Soviet Union may have disappeared, but as Malan puts it, it “lived on in our political style.” He reveals how just as Zuma and his side purged the former president and once Marxist Theo Mbeki, when the press arrived, they pretended to have a united front and that no one was opposed to the brutal manner in which Mbeki’s removal was orchestrated by Zuma’s thugs. “The ANC,” Malan writes, “was serenely united; any talk of divisions was the work of enemies.” The ANC leaders, “like their Soviet mentors, thought their subjects were entitled to nothing, not even explanations.”

The question, as Malan says: how long can revolutionary martyrdom be used by the ANC “to discredit opponents and stifle dissent?” How long can the ANC leaders see themselves “as the only legitimate power in South Africa, entitled to rule ‘until Jesus comes back?’” Last August, police of the ANC regime fired on striking miners near Johannesburg, killing 34 and wounding hundreds, just as the apartheid government had done in well-chronicled attacks on the old liberation movement in the years of apartheid.

Malan says that “violent strikes are spreading, and the smell of anarchy is in the air.” All Malan can say, looking towards the future of his country, is “God help us.”

So it seems that the ANC now sees fit to use the same tactics the old Soviet state used against its opponents. Killing miners, the very working-class whose support it once sought, is now fair game to preserve stability and to prevent any movement rising that could challenge the hegemony of the ANC as the only force that holds political power. Leninist tactics, without a socialist regime, is the mechanism of political rule, evidently, to this day.

At least, now that the truth is out about Nelson Mandela’s political roots and the influence of the Communists in South Africa, we should not be surprised when, soon, that country’s troubles again hit the front pages.

UPDATE:

My friend, the journalist James Kirchick, has just informed me that Malan had a longer article on Mandela and his Communist Party membership last year. Indeed, Malan provides much more substantial evidence in this version, and as he writes, it was completely ignored in South Africa.

Light and Truth in New Haven

Dec 5, 2012

By Linda Bridges

http://www.nationalreview.com

In the post-election issue of NR, Jay Nordlinger wrote eloquently about the need for conservatives to resist the temptation to retreat home and cultivate our gardens, leaving the political arena to the Left. He emphasized the importance of building institutions that could counter the prevailing progressive orthodoxy.

One of the most heartening of these institutions, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, has grown up within a body, Yale University, that is widely considered a leading bastion of that orthodoxy. Of course, Yale was not monolithic back when the program’s namesake took his alma mater to task in God and Man at Yale in 1951, nor was it monolithic before the Buckley Program was founded 60 years later. A number of Yale professors have supported the program and spoken at its events, and indeed the program grew out of a for-credit seminar on WFB taught at Yale in the fall of 2010.

The seminar was the brainchild of Alvin Felzenberg, who has worn many hats in a distinguished career — as, inter alia, principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, adjunct professor at George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania, author of The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t), and, currently, communications director for the Republican contingent of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. In 2010 Felzenberg was traveling fairly often to New Haven to do research for a book on Buckley, and it occurred to him to propose the seminar to the Yale authorities — and they accepted. He drew up an impressive reading list, and the students, he reported, were conscientious, indeed enthusiastic, about undertaking it. On the occasion when I spoke with the class (he had a different guest each week), I found that they had learned — some of them just in that one semester — an incredible amount about NR’s founding father.

And one of them — Lauren Noble, a senior majoring in history — hatched what Bill Buckley himself would have called “a bright idea”: Why not have an ongoing program “dedicated,” as its formal description says, “to providing an otherwise lacking intellectual diversity on campus”? Again, the authorities gave permission, and the Buckley Program was born. It soon attracted a core group of enthusiastic members, notably Nathaniel Zelinsky, a sophomore majoring in history, who had also taken part in the Buckley seminar.

Noble graduated that spring and left New Haven, but remained deeply involved in developing the program. Zelinsky, who took over from her as student president of the program, juggled course work with on-the-ground planning for their first big public event: an afternoon conference and gala dinner in November 2011 celebrating the 60th anniversary of God and Man at Yale. The afternoon panels — featuring, among others, Felzenberg, Yale professor Gaddis Smith, Yale professor Ted Malloch (who did a delicious riff on Gamay — as publisher Henry Regnery had dubbed the book in correspondence with its young author — as a robust grape that flourishes in flinty soil), Midge Decter, Roger Kimball, Rich Lowry, and Bill Kristol — examined the book itself and the reaction to it when it burst upon the scene in 1951, its implications for higher education today, and the lessons Bill Buckley could have taught the Republican presidential field then jostling toward the primaries. The proceedings ended on a high note, with siblings Jim and Priscilla (R.I.P.), son Christopher, and close friend of 50 years’ standing Henry Kissinger recalling Bill’s presence and discussing his legacy.

The conference was superbly organized and gave reason to hope this was no flash in the pan. The intervening year has borne out that hope. In the 2011–12 academic year, the program sponsored 19 guest speakers (including Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield; Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, who served as U.S. administrator of Iraq after the 2003 invasion; and Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal), held two public debates and an essay contest, and provided stipends for Yale students serving as summer interns at National Review, The New Criterion, and The American Spectator. (NR’s intern, classics major Harry Graver, has just taken over from Zelinsky as student president of the program.) 

And last Friday, the Buckley Program held its second annual conference, this one celebrating the 60th anniversary of Whittaker Chambers’sWitness. The panels were rich and varied, and most of the participants are well known toNational Review readers. First up were Lee Edwards, Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, M. Stanton Evans, and, as moderator, Yale professor Danilo Petranovich (who was the researcher for WFB’s last book, The Reagan I Knew). They evoked the temper of the times and spoke of the courage it required for the comparative outsider Chambers to take on “golden boy” Alger Hiss, as Edwards put it, and the entire Eastern establishment. And that establishment did a very good job of stonewalling. Although Chambers’s testimony was fully corroborated by the FBI investigation, it was not respectable to believe him until the research of Allen Weinstein and the release of Soviet information via the Venona intercepts and, later, the books of former KGB official Alexander Vassiliev made the truth inescapable. And at that, Gaddis warned, “You could still get in trouble if you stood on certain streets in northern Manhattan and shouted, ‘Alger Hiss was guilty!’” And what exactly was Hiss guilty of? Evans explained that the real issue was not espionage in the sense of sending classified information to Moscow; it was “policy influence.” This was most critical at Yalta, where FDR was “almost dead” and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had been on the job only three months. “Hiss,” said Evans, “was the one American at Yalta who knew what he was doing.” Eastern Europe suffered the consequences for the next 45 years.

The next panel — Max Boot, Jay Nordlinger, Elliott Abrams, and, as moderator, Yale professor Charles Hill — discussed the continuing relevance of Witness to America’s dealings with the world. Chambers famously said that, in renouncing Communism, he was leaving the winning side for the losing side. As the Soviet empire was breaking up 20 years ago, it seemed that Chambers was proved wrong. But, Abrams starkly asked, is that true? The collapse of the Soviet Union meant Communism would die — but that did not mean Western civilization would survive. Chambers had contrasted materialism with “the instinct of [the] soul for God.” But all too often, in our battle with the new enemy of Western civilization, Islamism, we take the materialist side, and think, as Abrams put it, “that if we only create more jobs for Saudi youth” the Islamist problem will melt away. Max Boot took up the theme of confronting Islamism with a lesson from George Kennan (whose character, as John Gaddis described it, paralleled Chambers’s in many ways). Kennan had advocated political warfare, which we applied very competently in the Cold War — notably by helping forestall Communist political victories in Western Europe by assisting the Christian Democratic parties. Under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama we have missed myriad opportunities to help moderates in Muslim countries — and we must, said Boot, relearn how to do this. Jay Nordlinger concentrated instead on the pervasive double standard by which American intellectuals to this day rail against Pinochet’s crimes but completely ignore the Cuban gulag and the Chinese laogai. Nordlinger quoted Vladimir Bukovsky’s mordant remark about Joseph Brodsky, who had been so heroic as a Soviet dissident and then seemed to go soft when he came to the United States. “It is far easier,” said Bukovsky, “to stand up to the KGB than to The New York Review of Books.”

The final panel — Peter Berkowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Regnery, and, as moderator, Roger Kimball — addressed the question “Without Anti-Communism: What Defines Conservatives Today?” Podhoretz recalled how in the 1970s the American Left gave up defending Communism — instead, it turned to attacking America. And it is still doing so. Therefore, he urged, the task of conservatives of all stripes today is “to fight as passionate a war against anti-Americanism as we did against Communism.” However, that means that “great as Chambers was,” we must part company with him on one crucial point: He believed that the focus on material prosperity was a stain on the American character; he “never saw America as good.” Alfred Regnery, after pointing out that libertarians of the Rothbard stripe never embraced anti-Communism — on the grounds that fighting Communism would enlarge the state — sketched the enduring “pillars” of conservatism: liberty, rule of law, tradition and order, and belief in God. Peter Berkowitz continued this theme by saying that conservatives can rally around “a return to constitutionalism,” but he added that this does not mean rolling back everything the federal government has done since the New Deal — contra the early Bill Buckley, as Roger Kimball pointed out. Constitutional conservatism, Berkowitz explained, entails “a balancing and blending,” and any action requires taking account of “entrenched realities.” For him, calls for “small government” will not resonate: Too many Americans want a larger safety net. However, we can still call for, and fight for, “limited government” — a resolution, as Lee Edwards remarked, that is very much in the spirit of Chambers, who on political matters constantly weighed how much you can give up against how much you can’t give up and maintain your principles.

The tone of these panels was very different from that of last year’s — partly, no doubt, because the buoyancy of Bill Buckley contrasts so sharply with the plangent pessimism of Whittaker Chambers. The tone of the dinner, too, was very different. Last year’s was in high celebration mode; this year, outgoing Indiana governor Mitch Daniels gave a sober assessment of what conservatives must do going forward from November 6. He began with Witness, echoing Norman Podhoretz’s criticism of Chambers as being too critical of America. He then went on, in his quiet, unassuming way, to explain why Mitt Romney was so very wrong — not just politically maladroit, but wrong — in his famous remarks suggesting that nearly half our fellow citizens are parasites. Daniels, who has spent countless hours getting to know ordinary Indianans during his eight years as governor, retorted: “Think of people on Social Security earned through a lifetime of honest toil; of men thrown out of work by a reeling, mismanaged economy and desperately trying to find new employment while on unemployment insurance; of young families, including active-duty military personnel, working hard but still accepting food stamps, which, for the moment, they legitimately need to provide adequately for their families.” The vast majority of these people, Daniels continued, will respond to the candidate who says: “We believe in you and your ability to decide for yourself, and they don’t.”

What will the Buckley Program do for an encore? Well, the early Fifties were teeming with books by the people Bill Buckley would soon gather into the conservative movement. I’m sure these imaginative Yalies will have no trouble continuing their winning formula — or finding a new one. As we walked out into the streets of New Haven, I found myself thinking: WFB would be proud.

— Linda Bridges is an editor-at-large of National Review.

Benghazi Storytelling

Too many answers, not enough truthfulness.

Stephen F. Hayes

The Weekly Standard

December 10, 2012, Vol. 18, No. 13

The White House has had quite enough of the controversy over ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, the misleading talking points she used in TV interviews about the jihadist attacks in Benghazi, and the Obama administration’s contradictory narrative about those attacks. “There are no unanswered questions about Ambassador Rice’s appearance on Sunday shows and the talking points that she used for those appearances that were provided by the intelligence community,” asserted White House spokesman Jay Carney at his briefing on November 27.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has also had enough. In a tweet that seemed to capture the feelings of many of his fellow commentators, Kristof wrote, “I’m sick of Republican intransigence over Ambassador Rice. Her misstatements were small potatoes. Time to move on.”
New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane is on the same page. In a lengthy “news analysis” on November 28, he dutifully amplified the administration’s line: Obama officials stuck faithfully to intelligence community-approved assessments of Benghazi. Yes, there were “honest mistakes,” but Republicans who complain are acting from political motives. “A genuine tragedy has been fed into the meat grinder of election-year politics.” His point was clear: Enough already!
A few Republicans also want to move on. Some of them are tired of being called racist for criticizing Rice. Others would rather discuss different aspects of the Benghazi debacle​—​the inadequate security before the assault, the failure to respond effectively during the attacks.
Those other issues are important. But the talking points matter, too. Less than two months before the presidential election, the Obama administration attempted to sell the American public a narrative about the assassination of an ambassador that they now acknowledge was inaccurate. Credible information that contradicted the administration’s preferred storyline was minimized or ignored altogether. And there was lots of it. Significantly, this is not the first time this has happened. The White House response after two previous jihadist attacks​—​the attempted bombing of an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009 and the botched attack in Times Square in 2010​—​followed a similar pattern.
Jay Carney is wrong. The administration has not answered even the most basic questions about Susan Rice, the talking points, and the misleading narrative top officials pushed in the days after 9/11/12.
In mid-November, several top intelligence officials appeared before Congress to field questions about Benghazi. House Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers wanted to know who was responsible for removing references to terrorism and al Qaeda from the initial unclassified talking points circulated within the administration. He asked the officials​—​Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and acting CIA director Mike Morell on November 15 and former CIA director David Petraeus on November 16​—​individually and directly. Each response was the same: I don’t know.
Four days later, the story changed. CBS News reported that Clapper had made the changes. This caused some confusion on Capitol Hill among members of Congress who had heard Clapper say that he didn’t know who made the changes. Six days after that, the story changed again. Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin reported that Clapper “did not change the talking points on Benghazi.” A spokesman for the DNI told Rogin: “It was not Director Clapper who personally modified the talking points” but someone in his office. The CBS story was changed​—​the talking points were modified after they had been passed from the CIA to Clapper’s team and then were edited again when they went to the FBI.
This new version of the story didn’t last 24 hours. On November 27, as Carney was insisting from the White House podium that all questions had been answered, acting CIA director Morell offered yet another account of the talking points story in a meeting with three senators. Morell was on Capitol Hill with Susan Rice as she met with three Republican senators​—​John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte​—​in order to answer questions about the administration’s handling of Benghazi. Several minutes into the meeting, following some sharp criticism of the administration from McCain, Graham asked about the edits to the unclassified talking points provided to Rice. Morell told the senators that the FBI had made the edits​—​an explanation that surprised his audience. When Graham asked him why the FBI would have made the changes, Morell had an answer ready: They did not want to jeopardize the ongoing criminal investigation into the attacks. Graham was furious. He pointed out that this was yet another explanation of the changes to the talking points and asked Morell how referring to al Qaeda participation in the attacks would affect any investigation.
Within hours, the story changed again. The CIA notified the GOP senators that Morell had been wrong and that the changes to the language about al Qaeda had been made by the CIA and not the FBI. 
All of which raises the question: How is it that Morell, who accompanied Rice precisely so that he could provide an authoritative account of what had happened, didn’t know? Another problem: The latest version contradicts Petraeus, who had testified that the reference to al Qaeda that was in the version he approved was only taken out after the CIA passed them along.
That’s five changes to the story about the talking points in two weeks​—​and we still have a glaring contradiction between the testimony of the former CIA director and the latest claims from his replacement.
The reasons Obama officials have given for the edits have changed, too. At first we were told that al Qaeda references were excised because the links were thought to be “tenuous”​—​despite the fact that one of the pieces of intelligence supporting the al Qaeda ties was an intercepted phone call. Perhaps mindful of that evidence, we were later told that mentioning al Qaeda in the unclassified talking points could jeopardize sources and methods. Then came Morell’s contention that the FBI didn’t want to compromise an investigation and, following that, the current claim that we didn’t want to tip off the attackers that we were on to them by publicly assigning them responsibility.
When I asked a former senior intelligence official about that possibility, he said: “Nobody who can spell the word ‘intelligence’ believes that for a second.” A U.S. official investigating Benghazi was more blunt: “Complete bullshit.”
Senator Bob Corker, a top Republican on the Foreign Relations committee, met with Rice and Morell last week. The meeting, he says, “was a terse conversation, a direct conversation.” His questions remain unanswered. “I was in Libya after the attacks,” he says. “I spent a lot of time with our [CIA] station chief on that trip. He told me that he was communicating with Washington in real-time and said immediately that this was a terrorist attack that was probably carried out by al Qaeda and its affiliates.” He says the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli told him the same thing. (The Associated Press reported earlier that the CIA station chief sent a cable to Washington fingering Ansar al Sharia and possibly Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.)
The classified reporting, available to Rice before her September 16 TV appearances, “was filled with information about al Qaeda involvement” in the attacks, says one congressional Republican. “If she read any of that material, she knew.”
So why did Rice speak of a “spontaneous protest” sparked by a “hateful video”? Why was information about the involvement of al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists kept out of the administration’s public narrative? Good question. It’s happened before.
When the FBI questioned Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab after his failed attempt to bring down a jet over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, he offered abundant detail about his links to terrorists. The Washington Post reported on December 26 that “federal officials have strongly suggested to lawmakers that the Nigerian man who attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight has connections with the al Qaeda terrorist network in Yemen.” The paper quoted Jane Harman, a California Democrat who was then chair of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence. She said she’d been briefed about “strong suggestions of a Yemen-al Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the plane over U.S. airspace.” And yet two days after the story was published, on December 28, when President Obama first spoke to the country about the attacks, he suggested Abdulmutallab was “an isolated extremist.”
When Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate an SUV in Times Square five months later, administration officials at first attempted to downplay the incident and his ties to jihadists. Speaking the day after the attack on Sunday talk shows, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, claimed that Shahzad’s attack was a “one-off” event and that he didn’t have ties to terrorist networks. But U.S. intelligence had information immediately demonstrating Shahzad’s ties to the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda​—​something the administration would acknowledge several days later.
Is it possible that Janet Napolitano, the administration’s representative, hadn’t been informed about Shahzad’s ties to the Pakistani Taliban before she claimed his attack was a “one-off”? The intelligence community knew, and the information had been reported publicly, but the fact that she appeared just one day later makes a communication failure plausible. What about the president? Is it possible he was unaware of Abdulmutallab’s ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula when he spoke three days later and called the terrorist an “isolated extremist”?
And Rice? She addressed the country five days after the Benghazi attacks, at a time when the classified reporting was filled with information about the al Qaeda ties of the attackers. Was it another failure to communicate? Or was she sent out to sell a story she knew wasn’t true?
“She was far too ready to go on and be a political operative,” says Corker. Rice’s appearance came a little more than a week after the Democratic convention, where speaker after speaker praised the president for crippling al Qaeda and bringing the war on terror to an overdue end.
As Obama said himself: “We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.”
How would it look if a group “on the path to defeat” staged a sophisticated attack that took the life of a U.S. ambassador? Not great. We end, then, where we started—with lots of questions. Who wrote the talking points? Who edited them? Why? And why have top U.S. officials had so much trouble simply telling us what happened? The truth is rarely so complicated.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

Benghazi 'Narrative' reads like TWA 800's

By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com
November 30, 2012


Earlier this week on The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly and Charles Krauthammer came to the same -- and obvious -- conclusion as to why the Obama White House felt compelled to misrepresent the events at Benghazi on September 11.  As O'Reilly noted, the administration hoped "to tamp the story down so it didn't intrude on their narrative that the Obama administration had decimated al-Qaeda." 
"The real story would have gone against the narrative," Krauthammer agreed, adding, "I'm not saying that there was a deliberate conspiracy from day one, but as this story unfolded, they saw a way to make this non-political."
Sixteen years ago, also in the home stretch of a difficult re-election campaign, Bill Clinton faced a problem very similar to Obama's.  An event took place that threatened the "peace and prosperity" theme of his campaign -- specifically, the July 17, 1996, shoot-down of TWA Flight 800, with 230 people on board, just 10 miles off the coast of Long Island. 
I use the word "shoot-down" with total confidence.  Along with investigative reporter James Sanders, I produced a video on the subject calledSilenced and wrote a book called First Strike.  In a sense, Sanders was the Nakoula Basseley Nakoula of this event.  To prevent Sanders from reporting on the story, the FBI arrested him and his wife Elizabeth and convicted both of conspiracy.  As with Nakoula, the nation's civil libertarians chose not to notice.
It was the Sanderses' story, especially Elizabeth's, that first got me interested in the case four years after TWA Flight 800 went down.  A reluctant conspiracy theorist, I read everything I could find on the crash before I agreed to do the video.  By this time, the NTSB hearings had played out.  The evidence for a missile strike was overwhelming to any dispassionate observer.  So was the evidence of a cover-up.
Although the word was not used back then, the Clinton White House, with the help of a complicit media, rewrote the event's "narrative" to assure re-election.  Again, as with Benghazi, that narrative was clumsily improvised almost on a daily basis.  Knowing the media had his back, Clinton responded much as Obama did: deny, obfuscate, and kick the investigatory can down the road until after the election.
One central figure appeared in each drama: Hillary Clinton.  She stood by Obama's side in the Rose Garden on September 12 as he spun reality into confection.  She, Bill, and Sandy Berger holed themselves up in the White House family quarters, assessing their narrative options throughout that long night of July 17, 1996.
On that fateful night, FAA air traffic controllers saw an unknown object "merge" with the doomed 747 seconds before it exploded, and they rushed the tape to the White House.  Hundreds of people saw what the controllers did from the ground.  FBI witness No. 73, an aviation buff, watched a "red streak" with a "light gray smoke trail" move up toward the airliner and then go "past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing."  She even reported the actual breakup sequence before the authorities figured it out on their own.
High-school principal Joseph Delgado told the FBI that he had seen an object like "a firework" ascend "fairly quick," then "slow" and "wiggle," then "speed up" and get "lost."  Then he saw a second object that "glimmered" in the sky, higher than the first, then a red dot move up to that object, then a puff of smoke, then another puff, then a "firebox."  He drew a precise image of the same for the FBI.
Mike Wire, a no-nonsense millwright and U.S. Army vet, watched events unfold from the Beach Lane Bridge in Westhampton on Long Island.  Wire had seen a white light traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40-degree angle, sparkling and zigzagging before culminating in a massive fireball.
In a confidential taped interview with historian Taylor Branch on August 2, 1996, Clinton laid the blame for the presumed missile attack on Iran.  "They want war," he told Branch.  Clinton may or may not have been lying, but he did not want to mess with Iran, at least not right before an election he already had in the bag.
To control the post-crash narrative, the White House allowed the FBI to talk only to The New York Times.  Four weeks after the disaster, the Timeswould report, "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."
A missile attack was too obvious and ominous.  So a week later, likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI shifted its storyline fully away from a missile to a bomb.  "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800," reported the Times above the fold on August 23, just a few days before the Democratic National Convention.  The Times reached this conclusion by interviewing exactly none of the 270 FBI eyewitnesses to a likely missile strike.  Sanders and I interviewed scores of them.
But even this scenario threatened the peace and prosperity message to be promoted at the Democratic National Convention just days away.  And so the story was allowed to die.  For the next three weeks, there was no meaningful reporting at all.
In mid-September, two months after the crash, the FBI shifted the narrative once again from a bomb to a center fuel tank explosion, a possibility that had been ruled out a month earlier.  The other media unquestioningly followed the Times.  They too had a president to re-elect.
"Stories damaging to the media's preferred candidates are never tied together into a coherent narrative," writes John Hayward in an insightful Human Events article on Benghazi.  "You don't see links drawn between Event A, Speech B, and Subcommittee Hearing C.  You're not constantly reminded of inconvenient things the beloved candidate said last year, last month, or last week."
So it was with TWA Flight 800.  No one in the media saw fit to ask what happened to the "prime evidence" of August 23 or the "only good explanations" of August 14 or of Clinton's "they want war" of August 2.
As each week passed, even the Clintons had to be stunned that so obvious a truth remained so thoroughly ignored.  To sustain the lie, however, insiders had to tell more lies still.
The FBI would fabricate a second interview with Witness No. 73 that never took place.
The CIA -- yes, that CIA-- would fabricate a second interview with Mike Wire that also never took place.  NTSB insiders would lie outright about what Joseph Delgado saw, but the election came and went without anyone even knowing who these people were.
In 1996, however, there was no ubiquitous internet, no Facebook, no YouTube.  Fox News came online only later that year.  It would have been impossible for any White House to pull this massive a misdirection off in 2012 so close to home.  America would have seen videos of the shoot-down online before the White House could control the information flow.
In 2012, Obama had the advantage of geography.  No helpful citizens fixed their smartphones on the destruction of the American consulate in Benghazi.  He had the advantage also of a major media sixteen years more corrupt than in 1996
Obama had the disadvantage, however, of serving in a fully interactive age.  The added scrutiny has made Obama's attempt to bury the story seem obvious and amateurish by comparison to Clinton's -- at least to those who are paying attention.  Unfortunately, those paying attention include not a single major media reporter.

The threat to football

By Rich Lowry
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 4, 2012

There’s a reason that halftime of NFL broadcasts is usually reserved for game analysis and highlights rather than social science. NBC announcer Bob Costas showed why with a little sermonette during the Philadelphia Eagles–Dallas Cowboys game Sunday night.

Just a day earlier, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot and killed his girlfriend before driving to the Chiefs’ practice facility and shooting and killing himself in front of the team’s head coach and general manager.

During halftime of Football Night in America, which is not to be confused with Monday Night Football or Thursday Night Football, Costas referred to Belcher’s shocking murder-suicide as “nearly unfathomable.” He then proceeded to fathom it in terms of a clichéd gun-control fable. Costas quoted approvingly sportswriter Jason Whitlock’s argument that “our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy.”

Costas is an extraordinary and justly acclaimed broadcaster, who apparently hasn’t spared a moment’s reflection to the long-running argument over guns in our society. If he had, he wouldn’t have treated such tripe as priceless words of wisdom.

A Gallup survey last year found that 47 percent of adults have a gun in their home or on their property, the highest figure since 1993. Yet, as of 2005, the number of intimate homicides had steadily declined since 1993, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Overall, domestic violence has dropped by more than 60 percent since 1993.

That is not to deny that the presence of a gun makes a violent relationship much more dangerous. But what set of laws could possibly deny a gun to Jovan Belcher, who had no criminal record and was touted as a model NFL player, without denying them to the vast majority of gun owners who will never do harm to anyone? It is already illegal for someone convicted of domestic violence to own a firearm. 

Costas left out the most powerful part of Whitlock’s commentary, which was an excoriating attack on the NFL for letting the Chiefs’ regularly scheduled game be played the very next day after the killings. Nothing to see here — except more football.

If it proves to have any larger lessons, the Belcher story will tell us more about the NFL than the NRA. According to a friend’s account reported by the website Deadspin, Belcher “was dazed and was suffering from short-term memory loss” after his last start. The source described him as suffering from a “combination of alcohol, concussions and prescription drugs.” 

Nearly simultaneously with Belcher’s murder-suicide, Boston University researchers published a study that found, in the words of a Reuters report, that “years of hits to the head in football or other contact sports lead to a distinct pattern of brain damage that begins with an athlete having trouble focusing and can eventually progress to aggression and dementia.” It is apparently not big hits to the head that bring on the condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but a diet of small blows.

This phenomenon may have absolutely nothing to do with Belcher’s crime. But the question will be asked, and yet more attention will focus on the issue of brain injuries. The league is already being sued by thousands of former players and their relatives for not taking brain injuries seriously enough. The game is so hugely entertaining that it is hard to see it ever losing ground in American life — unless people eventually come to believe our viewing pleasure isn’t worth the price exacted from the players.

If Costas really wanted to issue a jeremiad in the aftermath of the Belcher killings, perhaps it should have been directed at the vastly profitable football-industrial complex of which he is a small part. In keeping with his view expressed in the past that the NFL is “unacceptably brutal,” he could have said: “As I stand here, I, too, profit from a game that depends on men doing violence to one another with effects we still don’t fully understand.” But that would have hit too close to home, and the third quarter beckoned. 

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail:comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2012 King Features Syndicate

The truth about Costas, Belcher and guns

By John Lott
Fox News
December 3, 2012

Did Jovan Belcher, the 6’2” 228 pound linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, need a gun to kill his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins? How about to commit suicide? Apparently some think that Saturday's murder-suicide tragedy in Kansas City wouldn't have happened if he hadn't had a firearm. Amazingly, during halftime on NBC’s "Sunday Night Football," Bob Costas told viewers he believed:
“If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

Belcher apparently killed Perkins, the 22-year-old mother of his 3-month-old daughter, at home.
The horrible tragedy occurred in front of Perkins’ mom. He then drove to the Chiefs' practice facility where he committed suicide.

Guns can make it easier to kill people, but that isn’t relevant here. Even if no weapon existed, the strength differential is so large that Belcher could have easily killed Perkins in any number of ways. The same is true, sadly, about suicide. There are so many ways that Belcher could have killed himself, including crashing his car at a high rate of speed into a wall or even another car as he drove to Arrowhead Stadium.

Unfortunately, pointing to two deaths here does nothing to advance the case for gun control. Costas’ rant falls under the category of if gun control could save just one life it would be worth it. The argument makes as much sense as saying we shouldn’t have gun control if guns can save one life.

The question is the net effect of guns, and what Costas ignores is that guns save a lot more lives than they cost each year. And that's not even mentioning the roughly 2 million times a year that people use guns defensively.

Whether people like Costas like it or not the facts speak for themselves:
Murder rates consistently rise when guns are banned.This is not just a US phenomenon in places such as Washington, DC and Chicago, but has been observed worldwide. When guns are banned, even in island nations such as the UK, Ireland, and Jamaica, the pattern has been the same. The problem is that gun bans disarm law-abiding good people, not criminals. With disarmed victims, crime is easier to commit.

Gun control advocates frequently point out that the majority of murders are committed by acquaintances, trying to make people fearful of letting relatives have access to guns. But this claim regarding domestic violence irresponsibly makes people afraid of those who they have no reason to be afraid of. What isn’t mentioned by these same advocates is that most of these acquaintances are not people who are

emotionally close to each other. They involve rival gang members who know each other. Acquaintance murders also include prostitutes and their pimps or Johns as well as cab drivers who are murdered by their fares.

To put it bluntly, criminals are not typical citizens. About 90 percent of adult murderers have an adult criminal record. They tend to have low IQs and long histories of social problems. Murders are also very heavily concentrated among minorities in urban areas. Over 70 percent of murders occur in about 3 percent of the counties in the US. Even if our country passed laws banning guns, most of these murderers are not the kind of people who are going to voluntarily turn in their weapons.

If women want to protect themselves, they should get a gun. The FBI’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that by far the safest course of action for women to take when they are confronted by a criminal is to have a gun.

There are two groups of people who benefit the most from gun ownership: people who are weaker physically (women and the elderly) and those who are most likely to be victims of violent crime (primarily poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas).

The research by economists overwhelmingly shows that gun ownership has no impact on suicide rates. To the extent that gun control has any impact, restrictions just change the way in which the suicide is committed.

Bob Costas’ emotional reaction to the deaths of Belcher and Perkins is understandable, even if a rant on gun control during a football game is misplaced. But hopefully cooler heads will prevail before we enact laws that will unintentionally lead to more deaths.

Colleges have free speech on the run

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
November 30, 2012

In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

“Openly.” “Related to.” Good grief.

The book, “Notre Dame vs. the Klan,” celebrated the 1924 defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in a fight with Notre Dame students. But some of Sampson’s co-workers disliked the book’s cover, which featured a black-and-white photograph of a Klan rally. Someone was offended, therefore someone elsemust be guilty of harassment.

This non sequitur reflects the right never to be annoyed, a new campus entitlement. Legions of administrators, who now outnumber full-time faculty, are kept busy making students mind their manners, with good manners understood as conformity to liberal politics.

Liberals are most concentrated and untrammeled on campuses, so look there for evidence of what, given the opportunity, they would do to America. Ample evidence is in “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate” byGreg Lukianoff, 38, a graduate of Stanford Law School who describes himself as a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, lifelong Democrat who belongs to “the notoriously politically correct Park Slope Food Co-Op in Brooklyn” and has never voted for a Republican “nor do I plan to.” But as president of theFoundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), he knows that the most common justifications for liberal censorship are “sensitivity” about “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” as academic liberals understand those things.

In recent years, a University of Oklahoma vice president has declared that no university resources, including e-mail, could be used for “the forwarding of political humor/commentary.” The College at Brockport in New York banned using the Internet to “annoy or otherwise inconvenience” anyone.Rhode Island College prohibited, among many other things, certain “attitudes.” Texas Southern University’s comprehensive proscriptions included “verbal harm” from damaging “assumptions” or “implications.” Texas A&M promised “freedom from indignity of any type.”Davidson banned “patronizing remarks.” Drexel University forbade “inappropriately directed laughter.”Western Michigan Universitybanned “sexism,” including “the perception” of a person “not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” Banning “perceptions” must provide full employment for the burgeoning ranks of academic administrators.

Many campuses congratulate themselves on their broad-mindedness when they establish small “free-speech zones” where political advocacy can be scheduled. At one point Texas Tech’s 28,000 students had a “free-speech gazebo” that was 20 feet wide. And you thought the First Amendment made America a free-speech zone.

At Tufts, a conservative newspaper committed “harassment” by printing accurate quotations from the Koran and a verified fact about the status of women in Saudi Arabia. Lukianoff says that Tufts may have been the first American institution “to find someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”

He documents how “orientation” programs for freshmen become propaganda to (in the words of one orthodoxy enforcer) “leave a mental footprint on their consciousness.” Faculty, too, can face mandatory consciousness-raising.

In 2007, Donald Hindley, a politics professor at Brandeis, was found guilty of harassment because when teaching Latin American politics he explained the origin of the word “wetbacks,” which refers to immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. Without a hearing, the university provost sent Hindley a letter stating that the university “will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct.” The assistant provost was assigned to monitor Hindley’s classes “to ensure that you do not engage in further violations of the nondiscrimination and harassment policy.” Hindley was required to attend “anti-discrimination training.”

Such coercion is a natural augmentation of censorship. Next comes mob rule. Last year, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vice provost for diversity and climate — really; you can’t make this stuff up — encouraged students to disrupt a news conference by a speaker opposed to racial preferences. They did, which the vice provost called “awesome.” This is the climate on an especially liberal campus that celebrates “diversity” in everything but thought.

“What happens on campus,” Lukianoff says, “doesn’t stay on campus” because censorship has “downstream effects.” He quotes a sociologist whose data he says demonstrate that “those with the highest levels of education have thelowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.” This encourages “the human tendency to live within our own echo chambers.” Parents’ tuition dollars and student indebtedness pay for this. Good grief.

David Stern stumbles again in his failed culture war against the Spurs, fines franchise $250K

By Adrian Wojnarowski
Yahoo! Sports
November 30, 2012

NBA commissioner David Stern has awarded Spurs coach Gregg Popovich four title rings. (Getty Images)

Before the emperor of the NBA leaves his Olympic Tower office, this is the holy war that those within the San Antonio Spurs' extended family expected David Stern to eventually wage on Gregg Popovich and his program's culture. The commissioner burped that terse, threatening statement promising "substantial sanctions" to the rogue state of his totalitarian nation on Thursday night. This has been a long time coming out of the commissioner's office.

And yet, once more, Stern's tossed a temper tantrum that left everyone around him embarrassed, humiliated and wondering why he insisted on staying until February of 2014. All these years, Stern and his underlings privately complained and moaned that no one wanted to watch the Spurs, that they destroyed his TV ratings, that they were uninteresting, unappealing and impossible to market to the masses.

And now, this act of condemnation for Popovich – which resulted in a $250,000 fine for San Antoniohanded down by the league office Friday evening – would be bathed in the ultimate of twisted irony: Without the Spurs' stars, Stern was selling that the NBA logo had been desecrated, that a public trust had been betrayed.

Suddenly, Stern had to issue an apology to NBA fans because Popovich sent his stars home to San Antonio at the end of a long road trip. No one in Miami bought a ticket to watch Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, because those players are relevant to no one in Miami. Mostly, they come to watch LeBron and D-Wade, or they don't come at all. Few people watch the Spurs on national television – unless they're playing the Heat or the Los Angeles Lakers – and that's because the Spurs never deliver the dysfunction and self-destructive bents that fuel the sport's storylines.

Stern once declared that his fantasy NBA Finals would be the Lakers vs. the Lakers, and no one laughed in San Antonio because they understood Stern was stone-cold serious. And well, if there was a little "Bleep You" out of Popovich toward Stern after shipping his players back to San Antonio after five games in seven nights, it was beyond understandable.

[Kelly Dwyer: David Stern ranting again about another minor misdeed]

Back in the Spurs' glory days, it was one disrespectful act after another out of Stern.

The Spurs don't forget how the NBA's vice president of operations, Stu Jackson, directly called Bruce Bowen to warn him about how he was playing defense and threaten him with future punishments. Jackson didn't show the respect of reaching out to Spurs officials before communicating with Bowen, but bypassed them and got into the heads of one of their most important players. Phil Jackson himself couldn't have orchestrated it better on behalf of the Lakers' Western Conference championship chances.

They don't forget how one of Stern's top public-relations officials went out of her way to try to dissuade an NBA team owner from hiring a well-regarded Spurs executive as general manager. And they don't forget that once that executive got the job, she went out of her way to try to undermine his operation.

They don't forget how Stern wanted to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the Spurs with TV cameras and microphones, with the kind of phony, superficial behind-the-scenes access that went against how the franchise conducted its basketball business and kept its edge. The Spurs have been a model of efficiency and innovation that has been an immense resource for the operations of small- and big-market franchises, but the commissioner can't leverage that on TNT with Ernie, Kenny and Charles.

Popovich had Manu Ginobili, Tim Duncan and Tony Parker skip the Spurs' game in Miami. (AP)They don't forget how Stern stood by as USA Basketball director Jerry Colangelo publicly embarrassed Popovich. Colangelo went out of his way to insist his close friend Mike Krzyzewski was chosen as Olympic coach because, in part: "I think [Popovich] had a bad taste in his mouth regarding his most recent experiences with USA Basketball, some bitterness, and that came out in my conversation with him. He seemed burned out by it. … He just wasn't as enthusiastic as Mike."

There's a double-standard to how this league operates under Stern, and it won't change until Adam Silver takes over and makes it a priority to do so. When Yahoo! Sports uncovered a pattern of deliberate predraft rules violations that benefited the New York Knicks and penalized the rest of the teams, Stern did little. Brandon Rush blew out his knee in an illegal workout, Wilson Chandler was stashed for weeks in Atlanta so no one else could get access to him before the draft, and Stern fined that Cablevision empire essentially lunch money for a weekend shindig in the Hamptons with the Dolans.

Teams had talked about these violations for years and complained to Jackson's office. Brandon Rush said the NBA had never once contacted him before the Y! Sports' investigation. For two years, the charges went uninvestigated. Had the Spurs been caught doing this, there likely would've been a loss of draft picks, suspensions and millions in fines. And rightly so for the Knicks, Spurs, or anyone who tried to get away with those things. That's the double-standard that Stern runs in the NBA.

[Adrian Wojnarowski: Celtics star Rajon Rondo picked unnecessary fight]

In that instance, here's a possible reason for the way the NBA never acted dutifully on its flagship franchise. The scout responsible for running those workouts? Rodney Heard. How did Heard get into the NBA? Jackson, as general manager of the Vancouver Grizzlies, hired him. Rival teams were always suspicious Heard conducted those illicit workouts on the Grizzlies payroll, too. If Rush told me about blowing out his knee as a Kansas undergraduate with the Knicks conducting an illegal workout – and then hiding it – wouldn't he have also told league investigators the same had they pulled him into their Manhattan offices and demanded the truth?

Stern never apologized to the paying public about allowing his franchise with the most resources to get away for years with this behavior. He fined them $200,000 – $50,000 less than he fined the Spurs for sitting their players – fined Heard $25,000, but never made an example out of them. The Knicks affected competitive balance, and it didn't matter that New York remained horrible. No one gets a lighter sentence for robbing a bank and dropping the money on the way to the getaway car.

Stern doesn't care about the realities of his league, just the appearances. To him, the appearance on Thursday night was that Popovich had tried to embarrass him on national television and that's why the commissioner tossed that tantrum. Apologize to the fans? In a league where the mere appearance of players on the floor doesn't guarantee preparation and effort, the Spurs never cheat the public. They're honest, in a way so few are honest. When too many others wear the uniform and yet still take the night off, the Spurs come to play – or they don't come at all.

Stern plans to retire as NBA commissioner on Feb. 1, 2014. (AP)In every way, Popovich let his players be the stars. He never self-promoted. He's never done endorsements. Stern wanted a players' league, and Popovich gave him the ultimate players' program. It was team, team, team. Only, Stern couldn't market it. He hated it. Four times they reached the NBA Finals, and Stern didn't like the TV ratings of those series.

For all of his so-called marketing genius, Stern could never sell the global appeal of Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker. They brought the NBA to the corners of the world, glamorized basketball over soccer, and somehow it was Popovich's failure that Stern couldn't market this to people. The NBA failed the Spurs, far more than the Spurs ever failed the NBA. After his fourth championship, I asked Popovich why he never cashed in on all the trappings that come to the immortal coaches.

"Listen," Popovich told me, "it's a player's league. I think it's very important for a coach to make sure that his players believe 100 percent – and not with lip service – that it's about them. Coaches are going to do everything they can to create that environment for them. It's not about creating an environment for us. It's a privilege to be able to coach these guys. We make enough money."

[Also: Phoenix Suns guarantee to entertain fans, or your money back]

When Pat Riley scored the greatest free-agent coup in NBA history, no one called to congratulate him – except Popovich. This was the kind of power play that should've served to put him out of the championship business in San Antonio, but, still, Popovich admired it. He respected that Riles played to his strengths, Popovich played to his own, and together they would compete for the title. Popovich never tells people that his way would work for them, but it works for him and the Spurs.

Against LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, against Chris Bosh and Ray Allen, what the Spurs did in a 105-100 loss wasn't an embarrassment to the NBA, but a celebration of it. This is how a franchise ought to be run, how winning is of foremost importance. Popovich empowered his bench to hang with the defending champion Heat, and gave his group even greater confidence and belief for when they're called upon again. What happened was one of the most compelling Spurs' regular-season games, and easily the most mesmerizing game of this season.

This was a testament to the Spurs' great scouting and player development, the great coaching and discipline. This was the ultimate testament to the Spurs' way, and it didn't repulse the paying public – it inspired them.

When David Stern issued that belligerent, foreboding statement before tipoff, it was clear he believed the Spurs would get blown out and make his case for him. He never imagined San Antonio would hold the lead into the final minute.

Stern could've waited until Friday, delivered his substantial sanctions – a naval blockade on the Riverwalk, a ban on Napa Valley imports for Popovich, whatever – but he couldn't help himself. He wanted to embarrass Popovich throughout that national TV game, and wouldn't you know it: Popovich embarrassed Stern because the Spurs coach has a complete understanding of his realm, his team, his players, in a way that Stern has lost touch with that with which he lords over.

The emperor of the NBA wasn't standing up for the fan on Thursday night, but settling an old score on his way out of office, on his way to a February 1, 2014, retirement date that suddenly seems so far away. Even within a league that would've never imagined the core of the Spurs dynasty could stay on top longer than the commissioner who wished them away, the expiration date on the emperor still feels so far away. Nevertheless, make no mistake: David Stern wanted these players gone all the way until Thursday night, all the way until they became convenient devices for his failed culture war on the San Antonio Spurs.

Revisiting 'Marie Marie' by The Blasters

By Easy Ed
No Depression
November 29, 2012

Back in the early eighties when I ran a record store on Wilshire in Santa Monica, my morning ritual for a couple years was to drop the needle on side one of this album at full volume as I turned the key and opened the doors. There was no other way to better start off my day than the opening chords of "Marie, Marie", as distinctive use of guitar as the Beatles' start of "A Hard Days Night". And that voice....Phil Alvin singing the lyrics of his brother Dave:

Marie Marie

Playing guitar on the back porch

I sit in my car

While she sings so sad

Marie Marie

Marie Marie

It's so lonely in these farmlands

Please come with me

To the bright lights downtown

Marie Marie

I said, "Hey, pretty girl

Don't you understand

I just want to be your lovin' man"

Marie Marie

The sun is down in the corn fields

The evening is dark

And you sing so sad

Marie Marie

Marie Marie

I got two weeks in back pay

There's gas in my car

And your folks say I must go

Marie Marie

I said, "Hey, pretty girl

Don't you understand

I just want to be your lovin' man"

Marie Marie

Playing guitar on the back porch

I leave in my car

While you sing so sad

Marie Marie

I'm choosing this morning to not do what I might normally do...give you a brief but thorough history of the band from Downey California. There are just so many places on the interwebs to easily get really good information. Here is the link to their first Blasters News Letter from 1994 which features the first installment of Billy Davis' extensive history of the band. If you like that, work your way back to the archive index for the rest of them. And our own NoDep archives have some fine reviews available for you. Probably hands down my most favorite Blasters piece is an interview from 2006 with Phil Alvin with a woman named Jenny Angel. It's located here and if you choose to read just one of these, go for this.

In my digital library I have all of Dave Alvins'  solo work, some Phil Alvin and no Blasters. Its one of those things where I've just heard it so much and so often that I figured I didn't need to hear it again. But my kid who devours music like slices of Sal's Pizza from Mamaroneck, threw the 2002 Complete Slash Recordings into my Drop Box and said "you need to listen to this again". And I did and he was right. Lurking around You Tube I discovered a video from January of this year at McCabes in Santa Monica. Just a few blocks south of where my old record store once stood. Long gone now of course.

For the past couple of years, Phil has been performing "Marie, Marie"  in Spanish. He does it with the Blasters minus Dave, and also with the Blasters when Dave is with them. So it's not something new or different he pulled out of his hat on this particular night. But I want you to watch this video and look at Dave. The first time I watched it I thought he was surprised, but now after repeated views I think its something else. It begins as amusement; Phil twisting it up and turning it into the San Joaquin Valley song it was meant to be. But then I think the feeling in Dave is pride and love. Both in the song, but more so in his brother. Am I reaching here? I don't believe so. It's a special moment. But you tell me if you feel it too.

If you made it to the very end, you heard Dave jump in and sing a verse in English. Almost as if he wanted to give the audience a reminder that "yeah...we were the Blasters...that was us". No need really, I think they knew.

I have no time today to get into this, but I'd like to leave y'all with a thought. The quintessential music "California Story" has always been that of the Wilsons...Brian, his brothers, cousin and friend. But there are more than just that one. Buck Owens has a story. Chris Hillman has a great one. Woody and Lefty Lou. Johnny Otis and his son. But the Blasters, they have an amazing musical journey. I hope you take the time to read some of those links.

They made American music. They're an American band. The original "Marie, Marie."