Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first;
nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
-Charles De Gaulle

The American Legion is busting an artery over John Edwards’ suggestion that Americans celebrate this coming Memorial Day by speaking out against the war.  Heaven forfend we should take an interest in the welfare of our troops during memorial day.  But the Legion is yap, yap, yapping that Edwards is violating a sacred day by injecting politics into it.

But the national commander of the American Legion isn’t happy about a solemn holiday being used for political purposes. In a posting on the legion’s Web site, Commander Paul A. Morin blasts Edwards’ suggestion that Americans bring anti-war signs to local Memorial Day parades, saying that Edwards "has blatantly violated the sanctity of this most special day."

"Revolting is a kind word for it," Morin writes. "It’s as inappropriate as a political bumper sticker on an Arlington headstone."

And you just know the mainstream news media is going to treat the American Legion like it’s some sort of hallowed representative of America’s war veterans, and not the republican party attack dog that it’s always been.

Digby and Jonathan over at A Tiny Revolution are exploring the history of the American Legion in the wake of their sanctimonious outburst.  But Rick Perlstein over at Common Sense.Org, author of the forthcoming book Nixonland, remembers the American Legion I once knew…back in the days of Vietnam and good old Tricky Dick…

Historian Tom Wells writes about how, in the fall of 1965, as people were beginning to realize that the Vietnam War was insane, and started marching in the streets to stop it, the government, hiding its hand, organized a pro-war march down Fifth Avenue in New York, with the Legion in the front ranks. The Pentagon’s Paul Warnke lamented such efforts were "quite ineffective" in stemming the antiwar tide. Indeed, not all Legionnaires got with the program. Two weeks later the commander of the American Legion post in Jewett City, Connecticut marched in his uniform with a sign, "Withdraw U.S. Troops From Vietnam Now!" He and his fellow protesters were met by the sign, "You Fairies Couldn’t Pass the Physical." Eleven days later, one hundred members of Post 15 showed the Legion’s true, nonpolitical colors by crowding into a room with 36 chairs to vote him out of the organization, as 500 happy townspeople gathered outside to jeer him as he left.

…

My friend Tom Geoghegan tells me the story of attending Boys State, the Legion sponsored public-service camp for high school kids, that year in Ohio. The lads were to supposed vote unanimously on a pro-war resolution. Tom voted against it. He was promptly kicked out of Boys State.

It was hardly just Vietnam. Also in 1966, Congress debated a landmark civil rights bill that would have banned racial discrimination in housing (it failed). In July the chaplain for the Maryland Legion testified against it in subcommittee. This was what he had to say about Martin Luther King’s open housing movement:

The same church leaders who join subversive forces in demonstrations against the established social structure also agree to banning the Bible and prohibiting prayer in public places. They are the same advocates of the new morality of situation ethics, and of liberation of the moral laws governing sex and marriage.

Nice guys.  You’d think this nation’s war dead all gave their lives for the rights of straight white republican males with good incomes to tell everyone else what to think, how to vote and what they could and could not say in public about their government, and not for a land of freedom of speech and liberty and justice for all.  But that’s the American Legion.  The same one that, as Perlstein notes, literally embraced fascism in the 1920s.  No, you won’t see that side of them in the news media reports about John Edwards’ call to protest the war.