Speaking Truth To Power in Love
“Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.” - 2 Timothy 2: 22-26.
A series of emails and facebook comments between Steve and myself has prompted me to write on a subject that I feel is long overdue. Namely, how do we speak truth to power in love, when power is not interested in hearing the truth either in love or not? It is the question that defines our walk, and, more often than not, becomes our Achilles’ heel. The health care reform debate has garnered significant and heated exchanges, not only between political factions within the country, but within the pages of this blog, as well as those of facebook; and over the last few days I have had the occasion to reflect upon my own behavior and quite frankly have found it wanting. Knowing that I write a blog on hypocrisy within the Church is a heavy burden; knowing that at times the hypocrit is the one staring back at me from the mirror is sobering to say the least.
It is not so much my opinion of this most critical of issues, but rather the methodology behind it that needs examination. What the above passage makes abundantly clear is that we do not have the option of engaging in conduct that contradicts the edicts of Christ, no matter how entitled me may feel, or how righteous our cause might seem. For if we sink to such depths, even if we win the battle, we end up losing the war. Victories obtained under such pretenses betray the ideals that God sets for us, and undermines the ultimate purpose that he may have in store for us.
But while it is clear we are not to resort to tactics that stain our faith, it is equally clear we are not to cower in the face of that which we know is wrong. We do not have the option to run from truth, simply because it might offend those who do not agree. How then do we reconcile the two? The 12-step recovery program gives us a helping hand in the form of the Serenity prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Seldom has one prayer spoken so loudly and clearly as this. The words encapsulate the very essence of the journey of life. There is scarcely a successful human being who does not employ, whether he knows it or not, the precepts contained within its lines.
The first line speaks to letting go of the results in life. No matter how persuasive our argument or justified our stance may be, some will never be swayed or influenced. We must accept that God still has a plan for that person or persons; that simply because he or they have chosen not to hear or accept our point of view, that does not mean we have failed. God will credit us with at least the attempt. There is an “E” for effort in heaven.
The second line speaks of courage. This is where we fearlessly stand our ground and make our case. We “gently instruct” those who need it in the “knowledge of the truth” in love. We let go of any expectation that we will be liked or appreciated. Paul never gave it a moment’s thought that his words might offend those who needed Godly instruction; his purpose was to correct what he saw as unchristian-like tendencies that were sprouting up in the early Church. In this endeavor he was responsible and answerable only to God.
But it is the third line that defines our spiritual maturity. It calls for wisdom to know the difference between that which we can change or affect and that which we cannot. This wisdom can only come from God. We do not possess even a sliver of it. How do we know who can be persuaded to change a behavior or stance and who won’t? The answer is not easy but it is far simpler than we suspect. Basically, if we have done our best to call out injustice and hypocrisy, and done so lovingly, it is no longer our responsibility to “change” that person or persons. The sole responsibility is God’s. Note that it says, “God will grant them repentance” not “we” will grant them repentance. If wisdom comes from God, then so does everything else, including a changed heart.
But there is more to it than mere serenity, courage or wisdom. What is called for is an examination of our motives. This is the sticky part for many of us. Convinced of the righteousness of our position we valiantly march forward in our quest to “convict” those not of a like mind of the sins of their ways, not quite realizing that perhaps it was not so much righteousness as it was self-righteousness that propelled us in the first place. In these instances it is imperative to ask what our true aims are. Are we seeking God’s will in the situation not only for that person or persons, but for ourselves as well? Are we acting in love not to shame the other side but to give, as the letter says, “gentle instruction” so as to bring about correction, or are we simply participating in “foolish and stupid arguments” simply because they produce the very quarrels that feed not truth but deception?
And what if we have concluded, after much prayer and meditation, that we are right in our quest? What now? Do we proceed to shame our opponents in an attempt to bring them to their senses? If we were to turn that around, the question begs to be asked, how would we respond if we were on the receiving end of such shameful tactics. How “changed” would we be after being subjected to repeated jabs and barbs? Even Jesus, when he was calling out the Pharisees, did not resort to shameful tactics to make his point. He was steadfast and resolute, but retained his composure, even to the end of his life. Hence, he never ceded the moral high ground to his adversaries.
And therein lies both the rub and the challenge. It is not enough merely to be right; we must be righteous. To be correct in a point of view, but to lose one’s moral compass is to lose, period. This does not mean that we ignore the sinful ways of others or pretend, as so many apologists tend to, that there is more than one truth. Our path and our call means more than just fighting battles that stir men’s blood; it means conquering their hearts. To do that we must remember that, though they be of opposite mind, they are also God’s children, deserving of love, respect and empathy. If we would expect nothing less from others, then God surely demands at least that much from us.
It does violence to our cause if we respond to the fear and ignorance that is displayed at town-hall meetings with judgments and condemnations of such people, no matter how justified we may seem. Exposing the lies behind such displays is still essential, but we will not succeed if all we do is engage in the same tactics as those who initiated them in the first place. The real villain here lies beneath, and like the serpent in the garden, tempts and baits us to act tit for tat. We must resist the urge to act like him and instead proceed as Jesus would in such situations. He was tempted many times, yet never fell. Many of these people are frightened and are vulnerable to the kinds of deceptions that have found their way into this debate. We will not turn them by insulting and shaming them.
In the end our hope lies in a higher authority, and we must rely upon his guidance and justice. We do our part, fearlessly, but lovingly, and let God determine the outcome. If we have done our best with what God has graciously granted us, it will be credited to us in the long run.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Has Fascism Arrived in America?
Last Sunday, my wife and I were coming home from church and I stopped at a red light. A car pulled up around us and was on my driver’s side. The driver was laughing at something that I couldn’t figure out. I opened the car window to hear what it was that was so funny. He then opened his window and remarked, “You voted for Obama?!” It was clearly a reference to the bumper sticker on my car that says “Obama ’08.” My wife wisely suggested I close the window, which I did. When the light turned green I let him speed off, not wanting to get into a heated exchange with an obviously demented individual, especially one who was driving a car. But the episode left an indelible impression upon me.
Living in a free society with the right of expression does have its benefits. No body can tell us to shut up, and we are free to voice our opinions as we wish. But, unfortunately, the flip side of that coin is that along with the benefits comes the very somber reality that those who lack the basic tenets to form a coherent or cogent thought are also accorded the same rights. It is at those moments that I thank God that the Founding Fathers established not just a democracy, but a republic with a representative form of government. Men like Hamilton and Madison were petrified at the prospect of what they referred to as the “tyranny of the majority.” The specter of a simple majority taking control of the whole of society and deciding what all of its citizens could or could not do was as unacceptable to them as the system of government they had just successfully revolted against. Only a republican form of democracy insured liberty for all. It was an experiment that has thankfully lasted for over two hundred years, and there has never been anything like it since.
But as precious and as unique as our system of government may be, it is constantly under attack by groups who can’t stomach the idea of diversity of thought. There is, within these groups, an underlying and pathological contempt and hatred not just for those who are different than them, but for the values and beliefs such people hold. For these groups such values and beliefs pose a grave threat to their way of life. As long as such people are allowed to live and breath, they will always be feared and hated. The Nazis blamed the Jews for the nightmarish conditions that Germany had to endure after World War I, and the result was that six million of them were murdered. Pathological dissent often reads like freedom of expression until it is turned up a few notches and it is given voice in the form of riotous hatred. In such instances, the ignorant and frightened are often manipulated and mobilized to act in manners they normally would not be prone to do. Shakespeare understood this all too well when he wrote his masterpiece: “Julius Caesar.” Haven’t we seen the likes of Mark Antony all throughout history? Have we not seen the mob that turned on Brutus in the Nuremberg rally? Or in the town-hall meetings that have been taking place throughout the country? Whenever fear meets prejudice, the result is usually the same: the truth is drowned out and our baser selves come out in full force.
In an op-ed piece called “Fascist America: Are We There Yet?” in Campaign for America’s Future, Sarah Robinson describes in great detail how fascism takes root in a society.
"Historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as 'a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.' He goes on to add that it is 'a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.'
"According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.
"In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls 'palingenesis' -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
"Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that “the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.
"As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From 'Morning in America' to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.
"In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
"Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage 'depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner.' He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: 'deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement.'
"And more ominously: 'The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate.'
“That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity. When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.
“All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it 'fascism' because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
“Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to 'a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.'
“This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding. According to Robinson this is the 'catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.'
"According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.
Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?
2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?
3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
By Robinson’s reckoning, we're three for three. “That's too close. Way too close.”
“History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate / brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.
“What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.
“Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)
“It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.
“Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.
“We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.”
Austin Cline, Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and a former Publicity Coordinator for the Campus Freethought Alliance, recently wrote an article titled, “If Fascism Comes to America, It Will Be Wrapped in the Flag, Carrying the Cross.”
“It should be clear that there is nothing fascist about "Islamofascism," so that's an example of people using the fascist label as a means of attack rather than as a serious description. Fascism is more like a religion than it is like a political movement. Fascism isn't motivated by rational conclusions about economics, political philosophy, or social policy. This makes real religions like Christianity well suited for integration with a fascist movement. If fascism occurs in America, it will be Christian in nature because only Christianity has the power to motivate a mass-based movement with a passionate concern for unity, redemption, victim-hood, and nationalism. Christian fascism will also be convinced of its own righteousness, moral purity, and godly intentions.”
While Cline’s proclivities can hardly be described as unbiased with respect to religion, in that he is a self-professed atheist, he has, I feel, accurately articulated the neo-conservative evangelical community in this country, and those of us who call ourselves Christians should be very afraid of the growing fascist tendencies within it. Groups like Randall Terry’s “Operation Rescue,” James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family,” Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” and John Hagee’s “Christians United for Israel” are about as inimical to the true ideals of Christianity as the laws of the Pharisees were to the teachings of Christ. In deed they are worse for they have become symbols for millions of people of a faith that they neither understand nor adhere to.
The latest battle over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is another case in point of how the Right is looking to rewrite the laws of the land and weaken decades of judicial progress. Ideological arguments over judicial activism are a smoke screen for a larger agenda, to take the country back to a pre-Warren Court day with a weaker Federal government and less corporate oversight and regulation. Imagine an America with no "Brown v. Board of Education" or "Mapp v. Ohio" or "Baker v. Carr" or "Griswold v. Conneticut." Such landmark issues as racial segregation, criminal procedure, voting rights and reproductive rights might never have been heard, or if they had been heard would've gone the other way. Imagine a country where racial segregation was still a states' rights issue. Weakening the federal government does not restore the nation to its earlier post-colonial days the way the Founding Fathers intended, it makes it far more vulnerable to the kinds of activities we've been seeing from the Right; hence far less likely to withstand the sort of onslaught that malitia movements and fascist organizations could potentially bring about. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has had a devastating impact on broadcast journalism in this country over the last twenty years, making it far easier for wingnuts like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin to stir up the pot of discontent with virtually no checks and balances to thwart them.
If all of this sounds too fantastic to contemplate, remember they thought the same thing in Germany in 1932 and look what happened. If history has taught us anything it’s that anything is possible. A famous quote is worth mentioning here. "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." That quote ironically came from Ronald Reagan. Ironic in that many of his most ardent admirers don't even understand its meaning. And that is the most frightening thing of all.
Last Sunday, my wife and I were coming home from church and I stopped at a red light. A car pulled up around us and was on my driver’s side. The driver was laughing at something that I couldn’t figure out. I opened the car window to hear what it was that was so funny. He then opened his window and remarked, “You voted for Obama?!” It was clearly a reference to the bumper sticker on my car that says “Obama ’08.” My wife wisely suggested I close the window, which I did. When the light turned green I let him speed off, not wanting to get into a heated exchange with an obviously demented individual, especially one who was driving a car. But the episode left an indelible impression upon me.
Living in a free society with the right of expression does have its benefits. No body can tell us to shut up, and we are free to voice our opinions as we wish. But, unfortunately, the flip side of that coin is that along with the benefits comes the very somber reality that those who lack the basic tenets to form a coherent or cogent thought are also accorded the same rights. It is at those moments that I thank God that the Founding Fathers established not just a democracy, but a republic with a representative form of government. Men like Hamilton and Madison were petrified at the prospect of what they referred to as the “tyranny of the majority.” The specter of a simple majority taking control of the whole of society and deciding what all of its citizens could or could not do was as unacceptable to them as the system of government they had just successfully revolted against. Only a republican form of democracy insured liberty for all. It was an experiment that has thankfully lasted for over two hundred years, and there has never been anything like it since.
But as precious and as unique as our system of government may be, it is constantly under attack by groups who can’t stomach the idea of diversity of thought. There is, within these groups, an underlying and pathological contempt and hatred not just for those who are different than them, but for the values and beliefs such people hold. For these groups such values and beliefs pose a grave threat to their way of life. As long as such people are allowed to live and breath, they will always be feared and hated. The Nazis blamed the Jews for the nightmarish conditions that Germany had to endure after World War I, and the result was that six million of them were murdered. Pathological dissent often reads like freedom of expression until it is turned up a few notches and it is given voice in the form of riotous hatred. In such instances, the ignorant and frightened are often manipulated and mobilized to act in manners they normally would not be prone to do. Shakespeare understood this all too well when he wrote his masterpiece: “Julius Caesar.” Haven’t we seen the likes of Mark Antony all throughout history? Have we not seen the mob that turned on Brutus in the Nuremberg rally? Or in the town-hall meetings that have been taking place throughout the country? Whenever fear meets prejudice, the result is usually the same: the truth is drowned out and our baser selves come out in full force.
In an op-ed piece called “Fascist America: Are We There Yet?” in Campaign for America’s Future, Sarah Robinson describes in great detail how fascism takes root in a society.
"Historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as 'a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.' He goes on to add that it is 'a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.'
"According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.
"In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls 'palingenesis' -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
"Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that “the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.
"As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From 'Morning in America' to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.
"In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
"Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage 'depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner.' He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: 'deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement.'
"And more ominously: 'The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate.'
“That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity. When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.
“All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it 'fascism' because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
“Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to 'a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.'
“This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding. According to Robinson this is the 'catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.'
"According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.
Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?
2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?
3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
By Robinson’s reckoning, we're three for three. “That's too close. Way too close.”
“History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate / brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.
“What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.
“Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)
“It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.
“Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.
“We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.”
Austin Cline, Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and a former Publicity Coordinator for the Campus Freethought Alliance, recently wrote an article titled, “If Fascism Comes to America, It Will Be Wrapped in the Flag, Carrying the Cross.”
“It should be clear that there is nothing fascist about "Islamofascism," so that's an example of people using the fascist label as a means of attack rather than as a serious description. Fascism is more like a religion than it is like a political movement. Fascism isn't motivated by rational conclusions about economics, political philosophy, or social policy. This makes real religions like Christianity well suited for integration with a fascist movement. If fascism occurs in America, it will be Christian in nature because only Christianity has the power to motivate a mass-based movement with a passionate concern for unity, redemption, victim-hood, and nationalism. Christian fascism will also be convinced of its own righteousness, moral purity, and godly intentions.”
While Cline’s proclivities can hardly be described as unbiased with respect to religion, in that he is a self-professed atheist, he has, I feel, accurately articulated the neo-conservative evangelical community in this country, and those of us who call ourselves Christians should be very afraid of the growing fascist tendencies within it. Groups like Randall Terry’s “Operation Rescue,” James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family,” Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” and John Hagee’s “Christians United for Israel” are about as inimical to the true ideals of Christianity as the laws of the Pharisees were to the teachings of Christ. In deed they are worse for they have become symbols for millions of people of a faith that they neither understand nor adhere to.
The latest battle over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is another case in point of how the Right is looking to rewrite the laws of the land and weaken decades of judicial progress. Ideological arguments over judicial activism are a smoke screen for a larger agenda, to take the country back to a pre-Warren Court day with a weaker Federal government and less corporate oversight and regulation. Imagine an America with no "Brown v. Board of Education" or "Mapp v. Ohio" or "Baker v. Carr" or "Griswold v. Conneticut." Such landmark issues as racial segregation, criminal procedure, voting rights and reproductive rights might never have been heard, or if they had been heard would've gone the other way. Imagine a country where racial segregation was still a states' rights issue. Weakening the federal government does not restore the nation to its earlier post-colonial days the way the Founding Fathers intended, it makes it far more vulnerable to the kinds of activities we've been seeing from the Right; hence far less likely to withstand the sort of onslaught that malitia movements and fascist organizations could potentially bring about. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has had a devastating impact on broadcast journalism in this country over the last twenty years, making it far easier for wingnuts like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin to stir up the pot of discontent with virtually no checks and balances to thwart them.
If all of this sounds too fantastic to contemplate, remember they thought the same thing in Germany in 1932 and look what happened. If history has taught us anything it’s that anything is possible. A famous quote is worth mentioning here. "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." That quote ironically came from Ronald Reagan. Ironic in that many of his most ardent admirers don't even understand its meaning. And that is the most frightening thing of all.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
A Moment's Sunlight
With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock I thought it would be appropriate to post a song that ironically was written two years before Woodstock, but which didn't get a whole lot of airplay. And then a New York disc jockey by the name of Dan Ingram used the song in a brotherhood promotion for WABC and it took off all the way to number 5 on the pop charts. The group was called the Youngbloods and the song was called Get Together.
It remains as current and relevant now as it was then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fWN6VvgKQ
Get Together
by
Jesse Colin Young
Love is but a song we sing
Fear's the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why
C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Some may come and some may go
We shall surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass
C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try to love one another right now
If you hear the song I sing
You will understand (listen)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It's there at your command
C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Right now
Right now!
With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock I thought it would be appropriate to post a song that ironically was written two years before Woodstock, but which didn't get a whole lot of airplay. And then a New York disc jockey by the name of Dan Ingram used the song in a brotherhood promotion for WABC and it took off all the way to number 5 on the pop charts. The group was called the Youngbloods and the song was called Get Together.
It remains as current and relevant now as it was then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fWN6VvgKQ
Get Together
by
Jesse Colin Young
Love is but a song we sing
Fear's the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why
C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Some may come and some may go
We shall surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass
C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try to love one another right now
If you hear the song I sing
You will understand (listen)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It's there at your command
C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Right now
Right now!
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Hatred and Fear: The Enemy's Favorite Tools of Kingdom Building
Whether you are a Keith Olbermann fan or not, his "Special Comment" last night on "Countdown" struck a nerve, as did Jon Stewart's segment on The Daily Show last night. I firmly believe that this debate on health care has absolutely nothing to do with being a conservative or a liberal. There are plenty of legitimate concerns regarding the House bill, but none of this is getting much airplay. The truth is the enemy lives for chaos and ignorance, and feeds the dark side of our very natures, seeking death and destruction at every opportunity. Those who feed that dark side are as guilty as those who show up and drink the koolaid; in deed they are worse, for they should have known better.
There is nothing so despicable as those who turn away from reason and compassion and promote, for their own cheap ambition, despair and deception, except perhaps those who sit by and watch it happen. May God have pity on their souls.
To all out there, raise your voices on the health care issue, if you haven't already. We have heard a monologue; now let's have a REAL discussion. I know you are out there; I have your emails to show for it. This isn't a town hall meeting. You are allowed to speak your minds without intimidation or flat out lies. Contact your congressman or senator to tell him or her how you feel. It's your right!
http://thisweekwithbarackobama.blogspot.com/2009/08/keith-olbermann.html
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-10-2009/healther-skelter
Whether you are a Keith Olbermann fan or not, his "Special Comment" last night on "Countdown" struck a nerve, as did Jon Stewart's segment on The Daily Show last night. I firmly believe that this debate on health care has absolutely nothing to do with being a conservative or a liberal. There are plenty of legitimate concerns regarding the House bill, but none of this is getting much airplay. The truth is the enemy lives for chaos and ignorance, and feeds the dark side of our very natures, seeking death and destruction at every opportunity. Those who feed that dark side are as guilty as those who show up and drink the koolaid; in deed they are worse, for they should have known better.
There is nothing so despicable as those who turn away from reason and compassion and promote, for their own cheap ambition, despair and deception, except perhaps those who sit by and watch it happen. May God have pity on their souls.
To all out there, raise your voices on the health care issue, if you haven't already. We have heard a monologue; now let's have a REAL discussion. I know you are out there; I have your emails to show for it. This isn't a town hall meeting. You are allowed to speak your minds without intimidation or flat out lies. Contact your congressman or senator to tell him or her how you feel. It's your right!
http://thisweekwithbarackobama.blogspot.com/2009/08/keith-olbermann.html
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-10-2009/healther-skelter
Monday, August 10, 2009
Tortured Logic
Obama Administration DOJ Does It Again!
For those who still believe that we who voted for Obama are somehow in the tank for him, this should hopefully dispel such notions.
This was taken straight off Glenn Greenwald's blog. I will print it in its entirety. It speaks for itself, but I know some, if not all, of you will share my outrage at the continuation of this practice and the reluctance of Eric Holder to prosecute, at the highest level, those who stained our nation and did so believing that they were justified in their actions.
Appalling!
I urge all of you to write your congressmen and senators, and while you're at it the White House, and demand that the DOJ immediately start criminal prosecutions of high-ranking officials who sanctioned these disgusting practices. We may not make a difference, or change policy, but God will hear our collective voices and take note of our steadfastness.
What was that about those who sit by idly and do nothing...
Monday Aug. 10, 2009 11:11 EDT
Tortured logic
Editor's note: Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week. Digby is guest-blogging today.
We weren't sure he was going to even go this far, but according to news reports over the weekend, Attorney General Holder has decided on a "narrow" investigation into torture. In fact, it's so narrow that it won't investigate any of the torture that was authorized by DOJ functionary John Yoo at all. Using inverted pretzel logic, they are apparently going to go after those who failed to follow John Yoo's directives.
For instance, according to the LA Times, Holder will not investigate allegations of waterboarding in themselves, but rather if they failed to properly follow their waterboarding instructions to the letter:
The inspector general also voiced alarm over how much water was being used. Rather than dripping liquid from a canteen, as the 2002 memo envisioned, CIA interrogators "applied large volumes of water," raising questions about whether the method "was either efficacious or medically safe." Because of such documented discrepancies, Justice Department officials and legal experts regard the waterboarding abuses as cases that hold the most promise for prosecution.
I think we can all see the problem here, can't we? By prosecuting waterboarding "abuses" we are essentially declaring waterboarding under John Yoo's only slightly less sadistic guidelines to be legal. Evidently, the new standard will be that if you're going to torture, you'd better do it right.
But it is actually worse than that. Buried in the LA Times story is an item I hadn't heard before, but which one would think would be important in all this:
Officials said it wasn't clear that any CIA interrogators were ever informed of the limits laid out in the Justice Department memo. "A number of people could say honestly, correctly, 'I didn't know what was in it,' " said a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the inner workings of the interrogation program. The CIA report also cites cases in which interrogators engaged in potentially illegal improvisations. One interrogator brandished a gun, former CIA officials said. Other prisoners were reportedly threatened with bodily harm, including being buried alive.
It's hard for me to see how these memos can be considered legally binding if the people who allegedly followed them didn't know they existed. And if they didn't know of the memos, the obvious question is what legal basis they thought they had for doing any of it? If they can't be held liable for "abuse" of the torture techniques because they didn't know the techniques could be abused, did they think they could do anything at all? These seem like questions worth asking.
If these questions aren't asked, you end up with an incoherent legal structure that says that if you waterboarded a prisoner "properly," that is by using the legally sanctioned amount of water to temporarily drown them, you cannot be prosecuted. But if you merely threatened the prisoner with bodily harm, you could be in big trouble:
The CIA report also cites cases in which interrogators engaged in potentially illegal improvisations. One interrogator brandished a gun, former CIA officials said. Other prisoners were reportedly threatened with bodily harm, including being buried alive.
Meanwhile, such truly horrible psychological techniques such as long term sleep deprivation escape scrutiny altogether.
One begins to see why the CIA is so threatened by all this. They are being asked to answer for something that makes no sense. (Obviously, they all have free will and could have declined to participate at all, but that's another subject.)
And, of course, even worse than all that (if that's possible) is the fact that by validating John Yoo's directives, they are also validating the idea that obscure Justice Department officials can be granted the authority to essentially immunize officials at all levels of the government, from the president down to the lowest field officer, by issuing a secret memo. This is very important new development in western jurisprudence and one that surely requires more study and consideration. If Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had known about this, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
Andrew Sullivan says that Holder's plan is much worse than nothing because it is:
...the kind of split-the-difference pragmatism that will end up alienating everyone. It is vital that the Obama administration does nothing to imply that what was authorized within the rules under the Cheney torture program is in any way legal, defensible or moral.
It strikes me that this isn't actually pragmatism at all. It will protect Cheney and his lieutenants, to be sure, but doing this is going to cause a great deal of dissension among the intelligence services for no real purpose. The bad apple approach doesn't solve the political, legal or moral problems. Indeed, that seems so clear that you have to wonder if this isn't being done to serve some other purpose.
As it happens the UK is dealing with some similar issues right now, with the Binyam Mohammed case heating up with the revelation that the government lied about knowing he was imprisoned in Morocco. (MI5 is accused of being complicit in Mohammed's horrifying torture after he was "rendered" there in 2003.) As Glenn discussed at length when it was revealed, the Obama Administration issued a memo to the UK that the US would withhold vital anti-terrorism information from the British Government if they allowed their judges to release information to the public about the torture programs. I personally always felt this was unlikely to have been a real threat, but rather a result of collusion between the two governments to keep the information under wraps.
But one wonders, considering the recent activity on this front in both countries, if they both haven't decided that they are both better off conducting some show trials on the torture issue rather than trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug. If pragmatism is what's guiding the administration on this, I suspect it's this kind of Real Politic pragmatism rather than domestic political considerations. Otherwise they wouldn't be making the laws governing this issue even more obscure than they already are.
UPDATE: The ACLU produced this powerful video, also called Tortured Logic, featuring the actual words of the notorious OLC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjoX59e75L4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2Fopinion%2Fgreenwald%2F&feature=player_embedded
Obama Administration DOJ Does It Again!
For those who still believe that we who voted for Obama are somehow in the tank for him, this should hopefully dispel such notions.
This was taken straight off Glenn Greenwald's blog. I will print it in its entirety. It speaks for itself, but I know some, if not all, of you will share my outrage at the continuation of this practice and the reluctance of Eric Holder to prosecute, at the highest level, those who stained our nation and did so believing that they were justified in their actions.
Appalling!
I urge all of you to write your congressmen and senators, and while you're at it the White House, and demand that the DOJ immediately start criminal prosecutions of high-ranking officials who sanctioned these disgusting practices. We may not make a difference, or change policy, but God will hear our collective voices and take note of our steadfastness.
What was that about those who sit by idly and do nothing...
Monday Aug. 10, 2009 11:11 EDT
Tortured logic
Editor's note: Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week. Digby is guest-blogging today.
We weren't sure he was going to even go this far, but according to news reports over the weekend, Attorney General Holder has decided on a "narrow" investigation into torture. In fact, it's so narrow that it won't investigate any of the torture that was authorized by DOJ functionary John Yoo at all. Using inverted pretzel logic, they are apparently going to go after those who failed to follow John Yoo's directives.
For instance, according to the LA Times, Holder will not investigate allegations of waterboarding in themselves, but rather if they failed to properly follow their waterboarding instructions to the letter:
The inspector general also voiced alarm over how much water was being used. Rather than dripping liquid from a canteen, as the 2002 memo envisioned, CIA interrogators "applied large volumes of water," raising questions about whether the method "was either efficacious or medically safe." Because of such documented discrepancies, Justice Department officials and legal experts regard the waterboarding abuses as cases that hold the most promise for prosecution.
I think we can all see the problem here, can't we? By prosecuting waterboarding "abuses" we are essentially declaring waterboarding under John Yoo's only slightly less sadistic guidelines to be legal. Evidently, the new standard will be that if you're going to torture, you'd better do it right.
But it is actually worse than that. Buried in the LA Times story is an item I hadn't heard before, but which one would think would be important in all this:
Officials said it wasn't clear that any CIA interrogators were ever informed of the limits laid out in the Justice Department memo. "A number of people could say honestly, correctly, 'I didn't know what was in it,' " said a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the inner workings of the interrogation program. The CIA report also cites cases in which interrogators engaged in potentially illegal improvisations. One interrogator brandished a gun, former CIA officials said. Other prisoners were reportedly threatened with bodily harm, including being buried alive.
It's hard for me to see how these memos can be considered legally binding if the people who allegedly followed them didn't know they existed. And if they didn't know of the memos, the obvious question is what legal basis they thought they had for doing any of it? If they can't be held liable for "abuse" of the torture techniques because they didn't know the techniques could be abused, did they think they could do anything at all? These seem like questions worth asking.
If these questions aren't asked, you end up with an incoherent legal structure that says that if you waterboarded a prisoner "properly," that is by using the legally sanctioned amount of water to temporarily drown them, you cannot be prosecuted. But if you merely threatened the prisoner with bodily harm, you could be in big trouble:
The CIA report also cites cases in which interrogators engaged in potentially illegal improvisations. One interrogator brandished a gun, former CIA officials said. Other prisoners were reportedly threatened with bodily harm, including being buried alive.
Meanwhile, such truly horrible psychological techniques such as long term sleep deprivation escape scrutiny altogether.
One begins to see why the CIA is so threatened by all this. They are being asked to answer for something that makes no sense. (Obviously, they all have free will and could have declined to participate at all, but that's another subject.)
And, of course, even worse than all that (if that's possible) is the fact that by validating John Yoo's directives, they are also validating the idea that obscure Justice Department officials can be granted the authority to essentially immunize officials at all levels of the government, from the president down to the lowest field officer, by issuing a secret memo. This is very important new development in western jurisprudence and one that surely requires more study and consideration. If Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had known about this, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
Andrew Sullivan says that Holder's plan is much worse than nothing because it is:
...the kind of split-the-difference pragmatism that will end up alienating everyone. It is vital that the Obama administration does nothing to imply that what was authorized within the rules under the Cheney torture program is in any way legal, defensible or moral.
It strikes me that this isn't actually pragmatism at all. It will protect Cheney and his lieutenants, to be sure, but doing this is going to cause a great deal of dissension among the intelligence services for no real purpose. The bad apple approach doesn't solve the political, legal or moral problems. Indeed, that seems so clear that you have to wonder if this isn't being done to serve some other purpose.
As it happens the UK is dealing with some similar issues right now, with the Binyam Mohammed case heating up with the revelation that the government lied about knowing he was imprisoned in Morocco. (MI5 is accused of being complicit in Mohammed's horrifying torture after he was "rendered" there in 2003.) As Glenn discussed at length when it was revealed, the Obama Administration issued a memo to the UK that the US would withhold vital anti-terrorism information from the British Government if they allowed their judges to release information to the public about the torture programs. I personally always felt this was unlikely to have been a real threat, but rather a result of collusion between the two governments to keep the information under wraps.
But one wonders, considering the recent activity on this front in both countries, if they both haven't decided that they are both better off conducting some show trials on the torture issue rather than trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug. If pragmatism is what's guiding the administration on this, I suspect it's this kind of Real Politic pragmatism rather than domestic political considerations. Otherwise they wouldn't be making the laws governing this issue even more obscure than they already are.
UPDATE: The ACLU produced this powerful video, also called Tortured Logic, featuring the actual words of the notorious OLC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjoX59e75L4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2Fopinion%2Fgreenwald%2F&feature=player_embedded
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Stupid is as Stupid Does!
Formerly titled You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.
While President Obama continues to decide whether he has the stomach to take seriously and challenge the extreme conservative flank of the Republican Party on health care reform, it’s always refreshing to know that we can count on some of the more unhinged of the conservative movement to strut their stuff and give us a few lowlights.
So, with that in mind, I have decided to launch a new monthly entry, titled, Stupid is as Stupid Does. Each month I will pick three contestants who have distinguished themselves in the annals of stupidity. I know it will be difficult, given that there are so many contestants to choose from and so little space. And, of course, there are some individuals who will be frequent flyers, if you know what I mean.
So let's start the festivities, shall we?
First Place in this month’s contest goes to Sarah Palin, now former governor of Alaska, who just can’t resist reassuring the millions of Americans who didn’t vote for her last year that they made the right choice. Seems she’s been blogging on her Facebook page and had some choice words about President Obama’s health care plan.
"The America
I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
Now of course Palin is not the only conservative who has deliberately distorted for political purposes what’s in the health care plan, but not even the most partisan hacks have invoked the term death panel. When you’re further to the right than most of the space cadets who have shown up at the town hall meetings and engaged in staged shouting matches you’re about as fringe as it gets. Rumor has it that Palin has decided to go out on the stump for Republican congressmen and senators during the 2010 mid-terms and that the vast majority of them have not returned her phone calls. I can’t imagine why.
Runner up goes to the self-proclaimed “mobfather” of the lunatic Right, Rush Limbaugh, who never lets an opportunity to embarrass himself go by. This time he has truly gone all out by comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler.
“Ms. Pelosi, you asked for this. Here you go. Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate. His cabinet only met once, one day. That was it. Hitler said he didn’t need to
meet with his cabinet. He represented the will of the people. He was called The Messiah. He said the people spoke through him. Do you know what the very first law that Hitler ordained was? The very first law was a law declaring how to cook lobsters. They were to be boiled. That was deemed to be the least painful. The law was sent around to all the restaurants. Now, does this sound like something any conservative president has ever done or does it sound like the things that liberals are doing all over this country? The links to show you just how off-the-wall radical environmentalist the Nazis were are posted now at the top of RushLimbaugh.com. Okay, Ms. Pelosi. You say you see swastikas? Well, when it comes to it, you look much more like one than any of us ever will.”
BTW, the reference that Limbaugh is making regarding Pelosi has to do with a comment she made about some of the, shall we say, more enlightened of the town hall meeting attendees who were sporting swastika tattoos. She was not insinuating that these deranged individuals were in any way connected to the Republican Party; merely that they were being incited by radical elements within it. Not that that matters to the likes of a Limbaugh. The only thing he seems concerned about these days is his maniacal hatred for anything Obama.
But our third place winner this month is a tie between personal favorites, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck. Talk about persistence paying off. Malkin appeared on last week’s The View, which for her is analogous to a vampire staying up to see the sunrise. Malkin is promoting her new book “
Culture of Corruption” to people who actually read, which means she has to leave the comfort zone of her fan base who are barely above crayons. The book, all 400 pages of it, chronicles all of the scandals and lies of President Obama. While I haven’t had the honor and privilege of picking it up, much less thumbing through its pages, what puzzles me is how this so-called journalist can write a comprehensive book on a 6-month old administration, yet said virtually nothing during the interminable eight-year reign of King George II. Hmmm. As for Captain Video, who was last month's winner all by himself with his now infamous interview of Michael Scheuer in which Scheuer said that the only chance we had was for bin Laden to attack us again with Smiley just nodding stupidly throughout the whole interview. Well this time all he managed to do was call the President a racist, joke about Nancy Pelosi drinking a glass of wine that he had poisoned, and drum roll please, state that the government, through its Cash for Clunkers Program, was looking to take over your computer. He referred to a link on the government website cars.gov which states that your computer is “
now the property of the United States.” Turns out the alleged link was never on cars.gov, but on another site where dealers had to register to get their rebates; the consumer was never under any threat alleged or real of losing their privacy, not to mention their computers. Seriously, Glenn, I know all of you are paranoid about the government and even more pissed off that you have to look at a Democrat in the Oval Office for the next three and a half years, but enough is enough. I don’t expect much when I watch Fox, which thankfully isn’t all that often, but calling the President a racist and just flat out making up stuff about government programs you have stated you don’t like in the first place is beneath even you.
So there you have it. This month’s “Stupid is as Stupid Does” awards. Stay tuned next month to see who our winners will be; or you can just watch Fox News.
Formerly titled You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.
While President Obama continues to decide whether he has the stomach to take seriously and challenge the extreme conservative flank of the Republican Party on health care reform, it’s always refreshing to know that we can count on some of the more unhinged of the conservative movement to strut their stuff and give us a few lowlights.
So, with that in mind, I have decided to launch a new monthly entry, titled, Stupid is as Stupid Does. Each month I will pick three contestants who have distinguished themselves in the annals of stupidity. I know it will be difficult, given that there are so many contestants to choose from and so little space. And, of course, there are some individuals who will be frequent flyers, if you know what I mean.
So let's start the festivities, shall we?
First Place in this month’s contest goes to Sarah Palin, now former governor of Alaska, who just can’t resist reassuring the millions of Americans who didn’t vote for her last year that they made the right choice. Seems she’s been blogging on her Facebook page and had some choice words about President Obama’s health care plan.
"The America
I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."Now of course Palin is not the only conservative who has deliberately distorted for political purposes what’s in the health care plan, but not even the most partisan hacks have invoked the term death panel. When you’re further to the right than most of the space cadets who have shown up at the town hall meetings and engaged in staged shouting matches you’re about as fringe as it gets. Rumor has it that Palin has decided to go out on the stump for Republican congressmen and senators during the 2010 mid-terms and that the vast majority of them have not returned her phone calls. I can’t imagine why.
Runner up goes to the self-proclaimed “mobfather” of the lunatic Right, Rush Limbaugh, who never lets an opportunity to embarrass himself go by. This time he has truly gone all out by comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler.
“Ms. Pelosi, you asked for this. Here you go. Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate. His cabinet only met once, one day. That was it. Hitler said he didn’t need to
meet with his cabinet. He represented the will of the people. He was called The Messiah. He said the people spoke through him. Do you know what the very first law that Hitler ordained was? The very first law was a law declaring how to cook lobsters. They were to be boiled. That was deemed to be the least painful. The law was sent around to all the restaurants. Now, does this sound like something any conservative president has ever done or does it sound like the things that liberals are doing all over this country? The links to show you just how off-the-wall radical environmentalist the Nazis were are posted now at the top of RushLimbaugh.com. Okay, Ms. Pelosi. You say you see swastikas? Well, when it comes to it, you look much more like one than any of us ever will.”BTW, the reference that Limbaugh is making regarding Pelosi has to do with a comment she made about some of the, shall we say, more enlightened of the town hall meeting attendees who were sporting swastika tattoos. She was not insinuating that these deranged individuals were in any way connected to the Republican Party; merely that they were being incited by radical elements within it. Not that that matters to the likes of a Limbaugh. The only thing he seems concerned about these days is his maniacal hatred for anything Obama.
But our third place winner this month is a tie between personal favorites, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck. Talk about persistence paying off. Malkin appeared on last week’s The View, which for her is analogous to a vampire staying up to see the sunrise. Malkin is promoting her new book “
Culture of Corruption” to people who actually read, which means she has to leave the comfort zone of her fan base who are barely above crayons. The book, all 400 pages of it, chronicles all of the scandals and lies of President Obama. While I haven’t had the honor and privilege of picking it up, much less thumbing through its pages, what puzzles me is how this so-called journalist can write a comprehensive book on a 6-month old administration, yet said virtually nothing during the interminable eight-year reign of King George II. Hmmm. As for Captain Video, who was last month's winner all by himself with his now infamous interview of Michael Scheuer in which Scheuer said that the only chance we had was for bin Laden to attack us again with Smiley just nodding stupidly throughout the whole interview. Well this time all he managed to do was call the President a racist, joke about Nancy Pelosi drinking a glass of wine that he had poisoned, and drum roll please, state that the government, through its Cash for Clunkers Program, was looking to take over your computer. He referred to a link on the government website cars.gov which states that your computer is “
now the property of the United States.” Turns out the alleged link was never on cars.gov, but on another site where dealers had to register to get their rebates; the consumer was never under any threat alleged or real of losing their privacy, not to mention their computers. Seriously, Glenn, I know all of you are paranoid about the government and even more pissed off that you have to look at a Democrat in the Oval Office for the next three and a half years, but enough is enough. I don’t expect much when I watch Fox, which thankfully isn’t all that often, but calling the President a racist and just flat out making up stuff about government programs you have stated you don’t like in the first place is beneath even you.So there you have it. This month’s “Stupid is as Stupid Does” awards. Stay tuned next month to see who our winners will be; or you can just watch Fox News.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Et Tu Obama?
Why the Right Will Never Go Away!
Watching politics in this country, it is often said, is like watching a good tennis match between two excellent servers. We wait for the serve that can’t be returned to know who won. But some of the more astute have a different opinion. It’s more like the scene after the “Et tu Brute” moment in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. You keep waiting for Mark Antony to appear and rile up the mob to turn on its hero, Brutus. Those who studied the play in school will note that the fatal error Brutus makes is believing that the mob will have enough intelligence to see the assassination of Caesar as a virtuous thing. After all, after he explains the rationale for the deed, they cheer him as the true patriot of Rome. But almost as fatal as Brutus’ overestimation of the crowd’s intelligence and sophistication is the decision to leave it in the hands of Antony. Nature abhors a vacuum and will look to fill it anyway it can. Within a few short minutes, Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech turns the crowd decidedly against Brutus and the rest of the assassins. Soon it is Brutus who is on the run for his life. The irony is that Brutus uses rational logic to make his point to the people, while Antony resorts to emotional manipulation. Guess which tactic works in the end. I’ll give you a hint for those who never read the play: it doesn’t end up well for Brutus.
Now look at the current debate on health care and tell me if you don’t see this scene playing out. Bill Maher said on his Real Time program last week that “Democrats never learn.” The Swiftboat campaign against John Kerry in 2004 was thought to be juvenile and was never taken seriously. Kerry was quoted as saying that the American people would see through the lies. He was wrong. Like Brutus, he gave the mob a bit too much credit and paid for his overconfidence. By the time Kerry woke up and fought back, it was too late. The mob had turned on him. The lead over Bush evaporated and he lost the election.
Now enter Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States. He swept into the White House with about as decisive a victory as any Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election. Opinion polls were decisively in his favor. He enjoyed a honeymoon unlike any President in almost a century. The Republican Party, by contrast, was in retreat and when it did occasionally voice an opinion, it sounded lame and irrelevant by comparison. Brutus stood over the dead body of Caesar and had made his case; Romans everywhere rejoiced that the tyrant had met the fate he deserved. Hail Brutus!
But Mark Antony was waiting in the wings for his opportunity. In deed, you could say he was there from the very beginning, chirping and chirping and chirping away, undaunted by anyone’s opinion of him, relentless in his onslaught. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” he kept repeating over and over. Soon the silliness and irrelevance began to take hold. “I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. I am no orator, as Brutus is; but, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, that loves my friend and that they know full well that gave me public leave to speak of him --- for I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action nor utterance, nor the power of speech to stir men's blood.” Does that not sound like something the GOP could’ve written? In deed did we not hear all throughout the 2008 campaign shouts of elitist whenever Obama would speak out against the policies of his opponent? Weren’t the Joe Sixpack and terrorist sympathizer comments made by Sarah Palin nothing more than attempts to win over by subterfuge an audience that had grown weary of the status quo? Was not Bush Caesar?
That the attempts failed was fortuitous for the country, mainly because, like Mark Antony, the enemy was never vanquished. He kept at it. The DOW was plummeting throughout December and January. It was Obama’s fault, even though he not yet been sworn into office. The stimulus package was runaway spending without accountability, even though Bush had signed off on it back in September. The budget was evidence of a government hell bent on the ruination of free-market capitalism that would lead to record deficits, even though the last two two-term Republican presidents had more than doubled the debt during their time in office. And now the health care bill is socialized medicine that will lead to rationing, old people being killed off and the end of life as we know it. Even Mark Antony would choke on some of the rhetoric being used.
It is often said that all glory is fleeting. Sadly, the rhetoric of the Right appears to be working and it is working for two main reasons that owe their genesis to that famous play. The first is that at their core people have very short memories. They are easily manipulated. Look at how quickly Antony turns the mood of the people against Brutus. Within a few minutes, the crowd goes from hailing Brutus as an honorable man who liberated Rome from the would-be imperialist to wanting to hunt him down and murder him. History is replete with similar examples, though not filled with nearly as much alacrity. But the main reason that Antony is able to turn the crowd so effectively is that Brutus hands him the stage. It is Brutus’ naiveté, his over confidence in the population to have the capacity to understand his motives and see beyond mere emotion, that affords Antony his opportunity and would eventually lead to his demise. It was the same error John Kerry made in 2004, and Barack Obama is making it again five years later.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Facts are not driving this debate, anymore than they did in ’04. Every thinking, rational human being knew there was no truth to the Swiftboat claims, and yet the GOP kept repeating them over and over and over and over again. Say something often enough and it becomes fact, no matter how ludicrous. Health care reform is no different. So far, the only legitimate criticism that responsible conservatives like David Brooks have been able to make is the issue of costs. No matter which plan emerges from Washington, unless it can deal effectively with bringing down the spiraling costs of treatment, it will ultimately fail. On that, everyone seems in agreement. But that argument, alone, is insufficient to stop the reform legislation from being passed, and the Right knows it. Hence, the town hall meetings over the last few weeks and the “outrage” of “ordinary” citizens who show up and shout down elected members of Congress and the Administration.
Shouts of socialism, fascism, euthanasia, fill every town hall meeting. Throw in a few birthers for good measure and you have an insane asylum. Inaccuracies are given legitimacy by conservative talk-show hosts. Seeds are planted, given fertilizer and spring up as full-bodied weeds intent on devouring all living plants that get in their way. The truth is buried alive amidst the distortions and deceptions. And, all the while, proponents of real change sit by and naively believe that in the end reason will win out and the people will come to their senses and reject the lies. Truth will vanquish fear, and all will be well with the universe. Brutus has left the building and Mark Antony is preparing his eulogy. Oh, death where is thy sting?
When will they ever learn? You do not lie down in the middle of a busy intersection and not expect to get run over. The idea that because the Republicans got routed in last year’s election that they would go quietly into the night is arrogant to say the least and incompetent to say the worst. It is one thing to be mugged in the middle of the night; it is quite another to hand over to the mugger the gun and wallet before hand and then have the temerity to claim you are a victim of some foul mischief.
If universal health care meets its death this fall it will not be because the Republicans killed it; it will be because a Democratic president and a Democratic congress left the building, took a long stroll down a short peer and gave the murder weapon over to the very foes they should’ve known could not be trusted with it in the first place. They will have no moral high ground from which to shout foul from, for they ceded the very debate they had hoped to wage. No matter how rational and logical your argument is, if you cannot defend it against all manner of criticism and do whatever is needed to protect it from harm, in the end you will be vanquished. It is that simple. The sad truth is that American politics is not about separating truth from fiction; if it were that easy, we would’ve had universal health care in this country decades ago. It is about winning and losing. Those who are resourceful enough to do whatever it takes to make their point often win; those who don’t lose.
And all we are left with are two telling, yet ominous, quotes to sum up what this might well be about in the end.
“Good countrymen, let me depart alone,
And, for my sake, stay here with Antony:
Do grace to Caesar's corpse, and grace his speech
Tending to Caesar's glories; which Mark Antony,
By our permission, is allow'd to make.
I do entreat you, not a man depart,
Save I alone, till Antony have spoke.”
"Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot.
Take thou what course thou wilt."
History is cruelest of all, is it not?
Why the Right Will Never Go Away!
Watching politics in this country, it is often said, is like watching a good tennis match between two excellent servers. We wait for the serve that can’t be returned to know who won. But some of the more astute have a different opinion. It’s more like the scene after the “Et tu Brute” moment in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. You keep waiting for Mark Antony to appear and rile up the mob to turn on its hero, Brutus. Those who studied the play in school will note that the fatal error Brutus makes is believing that the mob will have enough intelligence to see the assassination of Caesar as a virtuous thing. After all, after he explains the rationale for the deed, they cheer him as the true patriot of Rome. But almost as fatal as Brutus’ overestimation of the crowd’s intelligence and sophistication is the decision to leave it in the hands of Antony. Nature abhors a vacuum and will look to fill it anyway it can. Within a few short minutes, Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech turns the crowd decidedly against Brutus and the rest of the assassins. Soon it is Brutus who is on the run for his life. The irony is that Brutus uses rational logic to make his point to the people, while Antony resorts to emotional manipulation. Guess which tactic works in the end. I’ll give you a hint for those who never read the play: it doesn’t end up well for Brutus.
Now look at the current debate on health care and tell me if you don’t see this scene playing out. Bill Maher said on his Real Time program last week that “Democrats never learn.” The Swiftboat campaign against John Kerry in 2004 was thought to be juvenile and was never taken seriously. Kerry was quoted as saying that the American people would see through the lies. He was wrong. Like Brutus, he gave the mob a bit too much credit and paid for his overconfidence. By the time Kerry woke up and fought back, it was too late. The mob had turned on him. The lead over Bush evaporated and he lost the election.
Now enter Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States. He swept into the White House with about as decisive a victory as any Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election. Opinion polls were decisively in his favor. He enjoyed a honeymoon unlike any President in almost a century. The Republican Party, by contrast, was in retreat and when it did occasionally voice an opinion, it sounded lame and irrelevant by comparison. Brutus stood over the dead body of Caesar and had made his case; Romans everywhere rejoiced that the tyrant had met the fate he deserved. Hail Brutus!
But Mark Antony was waiting in the wings for his opportunity. In deed, you could say he was there from the very beginning, chirping and chirping and chirping away, undaunted by anyone’s opinion of him, relentless in his onslaught. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” he kept repeating over and over. Soon the silliness and irrelevance began to take hold. “I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. I am no orator, as Brutus is; but, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, that loves my friend and that they know full well that gave me public leave to speak of him --- for I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action nor utterance, nor the power of speech to stir men's blood.” Does that not sound like something the GOP could’ve written? In deed did we not hear all throughout the 2008 campaign shouts of elitist whenever Obama would speak out against the policies of his opponent? Weren’t the Joe Sixpack and terrorist sympathizer comments made by Sarah Palin nothing more than attempts to win over by subterfuge an audience that had grown weary of the status quo? Was not Bush Caesar?
That the attempts failed was fortuitous for the country, mainly because, like Mark Antony, the enemy was never vanquished. He kept at it. The DOW was plummeting throughout December and January. It was Obama’s fault, even though he not yet been sworn into office. The stimulus package was runaway spending without accountability, even though Bush had signed off on it back in September. The budget was evidence of a government hell bent on the ruination of free-market capitalism that would lead to record deficits, even though the last two two-term Republican presidents had more than doubled the debt during their time in office. And now the health care bill is socialized medicine that will lead to rationing, old people being killed off and the end of life as we know it. Even Mark Antony would choke on some of the rhetoric being used.
It is often said that all glory is fleeting. Sadly, the rhetoric of the Right appears to be working and it is working for two main reasons that owe their genesis to that famous play. The first is that at their core people have very short memories. They are easily manipulated. Look at how quickly Antony turns the mood of the people against Brutus. Within a few minutes, the crowd goes from hailing Brutus as an honorable man who liberated Rome from the would-be imperialist to wanting to hunt him down and murder him. History is replete with similar examples, though not filled with nearly as much alacrity. But the main reason that Antony is able to turn the crowd so effectively is that Brutus hands him the stage. It is Brutus’ naiveté, his over confidence in the population to have the capacity to understand his motives and see beyond mere emotion, that affords Antony his opportunity and would eventually lead to his demise. It was the same error John Kerry made in 2004, and Barack Obama is making it again five years later.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Facts are not driving this debate, anymore than they did in ’04. Every thinking, rational human being knew there was no truth to the Swiftboat claims, and yet the GOP kept repeating them over and over and over and over again. Say something often enough and it becomes fact, no matter how ludicrous. Health care reform is no different. So far, the only legitimate criticism that responsible conservatives like David Brooks have been able to make is the issue of costs. No matter which plan emerges from Washington, unless it can deal effectively with bringing down the spiraling costs of treatment, it will ultimately fail. On that, everyone seems in agreement. But that argument, alone, is insufficient to stop the reform legislation from being passed, and the Right knows it. Hence, the town hall meetings over the last few weeks and the “outrage” of “ordinary” citizens who show up and shout down elected members of Congress and the Administration.
Shouts of socialism, fascism, euthanasia, fill every town hall meeting. Throw in a few birthers for good measure and you have an insane asylum. Inaccuracies are given legitimacy by conservative talk-show hosts. Seeds are planted, given fertilizer and spring up as full-bodied weeds intent on devouring all living plants that get in their way. The truth is buried alive amidst the distortions and deceptions. And, all the while, proponents of real change sit by and naively believe that in the end reason will win out and the people will come to their senses and reject the lies. Truth will vanquish fear, and all will be well with the universe. Brutus has left the building and Mark Antony is preparing his eulogy. Oh, death where is thy sting?
When will they ever learn? You do not lie down in the middle of a busy intersection and not expect to get run over. The idea that because the Republicans got routed in last year’s election that they would go quietly into the night is arrogant to say the least and incompetent to say the worst. It is one thing to be mugged in the middle of the night; it is quite another to hand over to the mugger the gun and wallet before hand and then have the temerity to claim you are a victim of some foul mischief.
If universal health care meets its death this fall it will not be because the Republicans killed it; it will be because a Democratic president and a Democratic congress left the building, took a long stroll down a short peer and gave the murder weapon over to the very foes they should’ve known could not be trusted with it in the first place. They will have no moral high ground from which to shout foul from, for they ceded the very debate they had hoped to wage. No matter how rational and logical your argument is, if you cannot defend it against all manner of criticism and do whatever is needed to protect it from harm, in the end you will be vanquished. It is that simple. The sad truth is that American politics is not about separating truth from fiction; if it were that easy, we would’ve had universal health care in this country decades ago. It is about winning and losing. Those who are resourceful enough to do whatever it takes to make their point often win; those who don’t lose.
And all we are left with are two telling, yet ominous, quotes to sum up what this might well be about in the end.
“Good countrymen, let me depart alone,
And, for my sake, stay here with Antony:
Do grace to Caesar's corpse, and grace his speech
Tending to Caesar's glories; which Mark Antony,
By our permission, is allow'd to make.
I do entreat you, not a man depart,
Save I alone, till Antony have spoke.”
"Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot.
Take thou what course thou wilt."
History is cruelest of all, is it not?
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