Page Two
As the right wing frantically dissembles, its hypocrisy becomes ever more apparent
By Louis Black, Fri., Oct. 28, 2005
I
It seems like a ridiculous time to write about politics. The Republican leadership has become absolutely brazen in terms of executing its power. Their apologists have twisted themselves into hideous knots trying to justify the stupidity and brutality, as though it is part of an ideological mission. Not only have they taken hypocrisy, demagoguery, pandering, and just outright lying to new heights, they've married that to inept governing. Unfortunately, the Democrats are in such disarray as to recall the Keystone Kops. Meanwhile, Iraq is an unsolvable, ever-growing, ever more significant problem. Hail fellow and well met; let's dance!
In last week's New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon asked Florida's former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack how the government was going to pay for everything it plans to do and still cut taxes. "We'll borrow [the money]," he cheerfully admitted, without indicating there is any plan for paying it back. When the motion was made in the Senate to cancel certain "pork" projects in order to help fund Iraq and hurricane relief efforts, senators were indignant. Now, a lot of worthwhile and valuable projects are labeled "pork" because their merits are too complicated to sell in a line or two. But there is no question that the $200 million allotted to build the bridge to nowhere in Alaska is pure "pork." Yet Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, threatened to quit the Senate if it was cut not due to any ideological commitment, but because it was "pork," and to threaten it threatened his status in the Senate and at home.
The government is spending more than ever, while making financially meaningless but surprisingly mean-spirited cuts in social spending. In others words, they're cutting taxes for the very richest Americans and shafting all the working classes.
They've done this behind a smoke screen of verbiage that suggests they are basically doing the opposite. Instead of taking one taxpayer's money and giving it to a minority for a Cadillac or paying for an illegal immigrant to study to be a doctor, they suggest, they are giving it back to you. The Bush administration is shifting the tax burden from the rich to those who are working. If you have two jobs, but make a reasonable living, you'll pay taxes. If you sit at home collecting stock dividends from a fortune a grandfather accrued, you won't.
When there is a large lower class that feels completely alienated from mainstream society and holds precious little hope of ever integrating into it, you end up with a Mexico City where everyone, but especially the very rich, is afraid of being kidnapped or robbed.
Here's one place I part with my liberal brethren. I don't think we're there yet, but for a long time this country was making a serious and sustained effort to change that situation. Progress, of course, would be so slow as to appear not to be happening. But anecdotal evidence (welfare cheats living rich, the lazy cashing in), combined with a concentrated, focused effort to suggest that these random incidents really constituted pervasive patterns, as hyped by the right, won taxpayers over. Forget that they exaggerated the cost of the social safety net while minimizing the benefits to all of us. They demonized the lower classes, though with more careful wording, promoting that good old-time racism. Finally, they completely misrepresented the purpose of the programs while also stating as fact that fraud consumed an overwhelming amount of the funding.
Given that the ruling Republicans are now more obvious and unrestrained then ever, their apologists have to go the distance, and then some.
"Clinton was indicted by a grand jury; Bush hasn't been!" goes one common argument. Yes, Clinton lied about whether or not he had sex with an intern in the White House during an investigation of a land deal in Arkansas that was in no way related. Rove and Cheney have been accused of exposing an American intelligence operative for political gain. There's an old joke, that the shortest time in the world is that between when the traffic light changes and the driver behind you honks his horn. The apologists have actually shaved significant amounts off that record, in the time between which they acknowledge somebody in the administration may have done something wrong and when they switch the subject to Joseph Wilson's character or motive, Valerie Plame's actual assignment, or whatever.
These are conservative, religious patriots who are essentially condoning top government officials' turning over personal information related to national security in order to gain political advantage in the press. How can you justify that action? How can anyone?
The level of lying and dishonesty is shocking. But as long as promising to cut taxes, cut government, and improve everything can get Republicans elected, don't expect much change.
Yes, the Republican Party is in disarray and disfavor, but don't expect the Democrats to cash in on this situation. They are, after all, Democrats so they can't really help themselves. They'd rather rally to an ideological fine point, selling out their constituency, than try to present a united front or coherent message.
The best illustration of this crippling ineptitude was painfully evident during the most recent presidential primaries. In a party with a shrinking base that has lost focus and boasts, by almost every account, a troubling lack of leadership, 10 candidates decided to run. While Bush smiled, uttered relatively simple bromides, and assured everybody that everything was all right, the Democrats couldn't get organized enough within the party to agree on a candidate and a plan of attack. Sure, it gave voters more choice, but regardless of what they say, most voters are looking for rock-solid leadership. In that category, liars win every time.
II
The overwhelming fiction is that the new conservative movement is taking America back from the godless secularists. Though the country has never been overwhelmingly liberal, selling this package was easy. Accepting the equation that Democrat = liberal (which ended up = communist, but we don't have to go there now) and Republican = conservative, they simply pointed out how long Democrats had dominated state and the federal governments. Now it was time for the Republicans to take back the country in the name of the Constitution.
In point of fact, for many, party affiliation was determined more by geography than ideology. Especially in the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction South, the party of Lincoln was anathema to the power establishment. The Democratic Party dominated Southern politics but these were pro-segregation, conservative Democrats. Northern and Western Democrats were generally more liberal, though sometimes union affiliations found them conservative on race and immigration. Conversely, there were many moderate Republicans, including some outstanding political leaders.
The notion that the Democrat-dominated Congress was liberal is a semantic joke. After an unlikely coalition of urban Democrats and Republicans, forced together to some extent by common decency and a lot more by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, passed the body of civil rights legislation, the situation began to change. Southern Democrats became Southern Republicans, changing their party affiliation but not their ideology. When the Southern Democrats were forced to join forces with longtime conservative Republicans, they discovered there was a real power in this union. Unfortunately, in the most undemocratic of ways, they proceeded to purge the party of anyone not committed to a fanatical conservative philosophy.
The poor showing of Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election did not, as is too commonly represented, indicate the nadir of the conservative presence on the national stage. Its current strength was not an unlikely resurrection, the consequence of think tanks, strategists, and pundits working in a coordinated campaign.
The United States was conservative even when LBJ beat Goldwater only then, the Democratic camp brilliantly positioned Goldwater as a marginalized lunatic.
By attacking the "progressive revolution," Rush Limbaugh and company have been giving permission for conservatives, reactionaries, and right-wingers to embrace their victimhood while advocating the longtime status quo and existing dominant American ideology as though they are revolutionary, outside, and embattled.
III
People claiming to be indignant at the Constitution's being violated by the considerations given minorities, women, and the economically disadvantaged (groups claiming historical patterns of discrimination) were mostly pissed that other groups were trying to get access to the privileges they had always held.
The defense of one's freedoms begins in defending others even, or especially, those with whom we most violently disagree. Crucial to a constitutional republic is the idea that broad community discussion and disagreement are the fertilized bed of reasonable government.
The right keeps speaking against legislating from the bench, but that's exactly what they want. Certain core ideas, regardless of specifics, are clearly the foundation for the Constitution's whole conception of government:
1) Separate branches of government, in order to provide a greater range of input and an ongoing system of checks and balances; 2) universal suffrage, civil liberties, and human rights is an area where the founding fathers' commitment is obvious, even though their specific vision was restricted by some of the dominant prejudices of their time; 3) an independent judiciary to provide equal justice for all; 4) a clear separation of church and state was necessary for the republic to function.
In its demand that judges not legislate and in trumpeting "original intent," the activist right has assaulted every one of those principles, using any tools they can lay their hands on. Don't listen to what they say! Watch what they do!