PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY, SPIN AND THE POWER OF WORDS
01/13/11-by L.S. Carbonell
Last night, Gov. Tim Pawlenty ducked Jon Stewart’s very simple question – if the conservatives are really concerned about what Pawlenty characterized as “the incremental expansion of Federal power,” why weren’t they opposed to the blatant expansion of Federal powers during the Bush administration?
Simple question, right? Here’s a few more: Why weren’t conservatives concerned when Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each signed an executive order giving internal surveillance authority to the C.I.A.? Why didn’t they applaud when Presidents Carter and Clinton rescinded that power? President Obama was denied that simple method of restoring our freedoms by the passage of the Patriot Act which went so far beyond C.I.A. internal surveillance as to amount to creating a police state in which we were fearful of using our electronic communication methods. Why didn’t conservatives recognize in the 291 executive orders issued by Bush to bypass Congress on such issues as illegal torture and the over 100 signing statements by Bush that voided rightfully passed laws that he was our third “constitutional dictator”? Abraham Lincoln used executive orders in the early days of the Civil War rather than wait on Congress to slowly pass bills that authorized response to the insurgency in the South. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used them to start the programs that took us out of the Great Depression because he knew the Congress would not support them. Though Roosevelt’s method of creating those programs was later judged to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the programs themselves weren’t and they are the same programs people are calling for today. Bush’s actions were, both by American and international law, outright illegal. In the eyes of political scientists and Constitutional lawyers, he occupies a place somewhere beyond our polite term “constitutional dictator.” So, where were the conservatives and their opposition to expanded Federal government during the Bush administration? Simple question. Anyone hearing an answer out of the right?
Here’s another one – It has been common practice since the Johnson administration to characterize Democratic presidents as “socialist” because post-World War II Democratic presidents have supported social programs to aid the poor and disenfranchised. Why has this labeling gone beyond that one word so that President Obama been brandeded a “communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi” (usually in combination with Muslim Kenyan)?
Words have power. Anyone who seriously believes that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” is an idiot who is in denial about the cause of the spike of suicides in our teenagers. For most of my life the greatest enemy of the United States has been communism. During the Cold War, out of that fear, the United States government supported brutal, genocidal fascist regimes like that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Our government didn’t care how corrupt or repressive a dictator was just as long as he was anti-communist. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, we still had China and North Korea to keep our fear of communism alive, even though neither of them actually qualifies as a purely communist regime anymore.
There are still in this country large numbers of people who fear communism, who expect a communist invasion at any moment, who still think we will shortly be wishing we still built fallout shelters and trained our kids to duck and cover. These are the people who have defended their right to own guns because we must be able to repel the invasion with civilian militias after a nuke takes out Washington. They are as incapable of seeing this perceived threat reasonably as the Ulster Protestants who claim that the Pope is planning to invade the British Isles and depose the Queen with his army of 90 men in doublets and tights carrying pikes.
Years ago, Ann Coulter wrote newspaper columns in praise of Joe McCarthy and Augusto Pinochet. The sight of her addressing an audience of tan-shirted Boy Scouts was too close for comfort to old newsreels of the Nazi youth rallies. The rhetoric was bad enough during the Clinton administration to create Tim McVeigh, it has gone far beyond that now.
When conservative demagogues label a President a communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi they are triggering a defense response in those who fear those words. That is the simple explanation for the alarming resurgence of militias in this country. People like Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have convinced the easily terrified that our own government is the communist enemy who will subject them to a dictatorship which will strip them of their personal property rights, ship them off to slave labor camps and take hold of their children. When you add to that fear-mongering politicians who use gun imagery like gunsights, “don’t retreat, reload” and revolutionary words like “use Second Amendment remedies” you have a situation in which people are arming themselves against our own government out of irrational fear.
President John Adams considered that kind of speech “sedition” and pushed a law that made it illegal in the United States use it. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 expired during the early 1800’s, but they were specifically written by the Federalist Party (which later evolved into the Republican Party) to repress the free speech of the Democratic-Republican Party (which later evolved into the Democrats). Anyone seeing a pattern here? Adams was willing to suppress our freedoms to protect the power of his party. Adams – one of our founding fathers, one of the heroes of our history. Fast forward 200 years and you have the Nixon administration and their “enemies list” and the Bush administration monitoring our communications looking for “evidence” of “terrorist activity” and it all amounts to a reinstatement of the Alien and Sedition Acts without Congressional involvement. It is perfectly acceptable to the Republican Party to incite suppression of free speech as long as that speech is liberal criticism of the Republican Party, but no one is willing to tone down the use of powerfully evocative words that put guns into people’s hands and make them join militias and make targets of Democrats and liberals. As Jon Stewart pointed out, there is an enormous difference between some 18-year old anti-war protester and a political party that idolizes one of the demagogues inciting this fear. (Remember the bouncing Rush video?)
I’m a crack shot with a World War II Enfield whose kickback and brass buttplate would throw Palin on her skinny derrière and dislocate her shoulder, and in over fifty years of target shooting, I have never felt I had to “retreat” from my targets. So Sarah Palin’s “explanation” that she was talking about reloading the ballot box doesn’t fly against her use of the same words – “don’t retreat, reload” – while handing her daughter a bullet on her reality show. The only time a hunter “retreats” from his/her quarry is when they are such rotten shots they have wounded and enraged a very large animal. Jared Loughner probably did not act out of any political motivation, but this tragedy must make us look at how one party is encouraging fear of and advocating violence against the opposition both overtly and with their refusal to denounce it.
