Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Hi, and welcome

This site is an attempt to provide yet another Republican perspective on American politics.

Obviously, I felt that several kazillion political blogs out there weren’t enough, so you may already suspect that I have a bit of an ego. However, this perspective might be a little different than most. For one thing, I don’t pointlessly slap labels like “Traitor” or “Enemy” on people that have a different take on the problems facing this nation today. For another, I actually know what terms like “balanced” or “fair” actually mean.

In short, I’m something you may not recognize anymore: an actual American who happens to fall on the Republican side of the political spectrum. There don’t seem to be very many of us left. Most of those who claim to be Republican these days aren’t particularly Republican—or even seem to understand what America is supposed to be about.

For some years, I’ve been posting little political screeds privately to a few friends—sometimes in email, sometimes in one blog or another—and have found myself tempted from time to time to take on a more public voice. I’ve been reluctant, however. There are a lot of wacknuts out there who claim to be Republicans—wacknuts so cowardly, so damaged, that they do things like launch vulgar assaults on fifteen-year-old girls who dare to post videos protesting the war in Iraq—and there is not an iota of concern on the part of the right-wing blogging machine. In fact, the sheer amount of hypocrisy, fabrication and distortion exhibited by blogs that supposedly espouse Republican views has been distressing, and I certainly didn’t want to run the risk of lumping myself in with those people, nor did I want to run the risk of worrying my family with the email I would surely receive.

However, my willingness to stay quiet evaporated early last month. I was catching up on Andrew Sullivan’s site (one of many I read, on both sides of the political aisle), and he referred to an October 1 article on rightwingnews.com that gave the results of a poll of over 200 “right-of-center bloggers” asking them what their “Favorite People on the Right” were. There were 33 names on the list—25 favorites, plus eight honorable mentions. The top five?

• Rush Limbaugh
• Ann Coulter / Michelle Malkin (tied)
• Mark Steyn
• Newt Gingrich

This was sobering. These are the favorites? These are the living hearts and minds that the “right-of-center bloggers” look to? Others on the list were equally surprising: GWB, arguably the worst president we have ever had in our nation’s history, polled at number eight; his puppeteer, Cheney, tied at number ten with Laura Ingraham.

At first, I was shocked.

In fact, I think I threw up a little bit in my mouth

In looking over those 33 names, I found precisely two people I still had any respect for—the rest have terrible credibility issues, are rife with hypocrisy, or are simply full of brainless invective. Yet most of those names are eager to present themselves as some sort of “voice of the conservative movement.”

In fact, they are nothing of the sort. There are not only fundamental problems with the message they’re presenting, and fundamental problems with the format with which they present that message, but they are often flagrantly dishonest as well, willing to resort to the most odious and unsupported insinuations to smear their opponents, and frequently reach for blatant lies to support their rhetoric.

They’ve been getting away with this, in part, because—well, because of me, and other silent, thoughtful Republicans, who have been intimidated into that silence by the increasing volume and odious conduct by raving GrOuPies.

So, honest and civil discourse have suffered. We have allowed these mental ciphers and the mean-spirited liars who apparently have a hold over them take control of the rhetoric of what once was the most inspiring political movement in the world.

I miss the simpler days. I miss thinking of the Democratic Party as the more corrupt one, more willling to erode our individual rights, more willing to ignore the Constitution, more likely to be financially irresponsible, more likely to pursue ill-informed military action, more likely to interfere in our personal lives.

Now? The Democratic Party is a relative bastion of ethics, of freedom, of accountability, of fiduciary responsibility—while the Republican party squanders our military resources, our financial health, and our fundamental individual rights to privacy and habeus corpus, promoting and celebrating dishonesty and incivility to pursue even more catastrophic policies.

Let’s just look at one example of this celebrated dishonesty and incivility for now.

The Unfortunate Ann Coulter

That’s how I always think of her, at least. Early on, I looked upon her as sort of the Sandra Bernhard of the Right: crass, hypocritical, not funny enough, ambiguous, self-serving, self-important, money-grubbing and shameless. It wasn’t long before I came to the inescapable conclusion that she wasn’t nearly as funny or smart as Ms. Bernhard, who is at least relatively honest and doesn’t take herself very seriously.

So why do I find Miss Coulter to be so awful? It’s simple. In order to “prove” her points, she often uses outright deception, occasionally backed up with fanciful, ridiculous citations. She will happily take an isolated report, distort it, misrepresent it (or just make something up), and develop not just an entire crazy conspiracy on top of the misrepresentation, but will then make sweeping implications from that about anyone who disagrees with her.

As an example, I’m going to provide an excerpt from her June 28, 2006 column, in which she goes onto a tear because the New York Times published a story regarding the investigation of terrorists’ financial transactions by the US Government.

Now, these probes were (and are) authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 USC, Chapter 25, §§1701–1707), and there was nothing particularly secret about it. What the Times discovered was that Bush administration probably overstepped the authority granted by the Act, giving specific examples.

The Unfortunate Ann Coulter decided that the editorial staff of the Times was, therefore, guilty of treason:

This brief example demonstrates that at the time this article was written, The Unfortunate Ann Coulter:

1. didn’t seem to have a grasp of what treason is;
2. didn’t seem to be able to comprehend that someone in the government originally leaked this information, not the Times;
3. didn’t seem to comprehend that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act specifically states that any foreign financial transaction that is linked to an unusual and extraordinary threat may be investigated or prohibited, so that was hardly secret or new information;
4. didn’t seem to grasp that mining the data in the way the Bush administration did quite probably overstepped the power granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, thereby violating the law; and
5. didn’t seem to understand that Osama bin Laden is an unhinged zealot who conspires in terrorist activities, and is not, in fact, a legitimate member of the press.

However, the odds are that she actually was aware of all those things—she just omitted and distorted facts to bias the reader in favor of her crazy thesis: that the editorial staff of the Times should be convicted of treason.

Sadly, this is not her craziest line of rhetoric.

It’s not just her

She is, of course, not alone in this intemperate howling. The modern GOP has others: Bill O’Reilly. Rush Limbaugh. Bill Donohue. Michelle Malkin. James Dobson. Melanie Morgan. These and dozens of others are people that have often been caught in outright lies in order to support their often-weird premises. Take this one:

In fact, during Clinton’s presidency, he signed precisely one federal income tax increase in 1993, which instituted two new tax brackets—one for couples making between $140K and $250K a year, at 36%, and for couples making in excess of $250K a year, at 39.6%. The maximum tax rate was 50% in 1985. It was 60% in 1975. 1965? 53%. 1955? 59%.

So, in short, Bill lied.

Want another?

In fact, the Dispatch never reported that ACORN registered Abdi. Truth be told, Abdi and Faris both registered on their own at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and the Dispatch reported on Abdi’s self-registration on at least two occasions.

So, in short, Michelle lied.

Want another?

In fact, Republican senators blocked sixteen of Clinton’s appellate court nominees in his second term alone; in most cases, they even headed off committee hearings.

So, in short, James . . . well, you know the drill.

When pundits like these get caught, they often blame the “liberal media” for exposing them—all the while, claiming a moral high ground that they abandoned long ago.

Down in the muck

On top of the lies, there are all the cheap shots. Here’s an example I ran into a while back—Coulter (again) in a column back in March of 2006 where she’s ripping on George Clooney at the Oscars:

Har-de-har-har. So we have some butt-sex jokes (so much for the moral high ground), and then she uses the bit about “the Hollywood set” not even wearing the AIDS ribbon until 1992 as some sort of sign of Clooney’s hypocrisy.

Of course, she omits a few relevant facts—an inevitable problem with Coulter’s writing.

For starters, the Reagan presidency—a period of time akin to a long-ago paradise in the eyes of The Unfortunate Ann Coulter—gave AIDS a fairly low priority. Granted, when Reagan took office in 1981, AIDS had only been recognized (but not clearly understood) for two years. It had claimed only 31 lives in the US, and the CDC had yet to begin tracking it. However, within five months of Reagan’s inauguration, the CDC started reporting on the disease, and by the end of 1981, the CDC reported that AIDS had killed 234 Americans. The following year, the CDC linked AIDS transmission to blood exchange, and 853 more Americans died.

But aside from a few jokes by Reagan’s press secretary in 1982, the Reagan administration didn’t acknowledge the problem until 1985:

• seven years after AIDS had been discovered,
• three years after the first congressional hearings on AIDS took place,
• two years after it had been a cover story on Newsweek, and
• only after AIDS had claimed around 13,000 victims, and Reagan’s friend Rock Hudson was in the final stages of the disease.

Two more years went by before Reagan made a single reference to AIDS in a major policy address. By then, 20,000 had lost their lives to the disease.

Apparently, in Coulter’s eyes, the Reagan administration can drop the ball on a serious health crisis, but the entertainment community was clearly neglectful in not wearing ribbons sooner.

There’s one more thing she neglects to mention. The AIDS ribbon didn’t even exist until shortly before the 1991 Tony Awards. The Tonys are held in the summer. The Oscars are held in the spring. The very first opportunity that the ribbon could possibly have appeared in the Oscars was 1992.

In short, the only viable content in that passage is snorky butt-sex jokes—and they aren’t even all that funny.

Unfortunately, if you’ve read any of Coulter’s work, you’ll note that this sort of thing happens a lot.

One other thing to note. She says, “Hollywood was about seven years behind.” Do the math. Seven years before 1992 was 1985. Apparently, Coulter figures AIDS wasn’t a problem until the Reagan administration belatedly acknowledged it.

Go figure.

I never expected . . .

It’s not that The Unfortunate Ann Coulter is stupid. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She may be too dim to understand why she has the views she has (aside from pandering to her slavering fans to try to maximize her book sales and media appearances), but she does know exactly what she’s doing: she’s lying.

In fact, so much of what she says is so false, so biased, that dismissing her entirely is often the most expedient course to the truth. She spouts so many lies that it becomes an impossible task just to refute them all. She repeats these lies over and over and over again, trying to drill them into the consciousness of her committed fans, and many of the others on that list of 33 names doggedly pursue the same tactic.

The thing is, this tactic has been used before. That it’s still effective is a profound testament to how slowly we humans learn from past mistakes.

The practice of providing biased or misleading (and usually derogatory) information to sway public opinion in a particular direction is called propaganda. And this is precisely what The Unfortunate Ann Coulter and her philosophical buddies engage in, time and time again. It weakens the veracity of anything else they say.

It also causes me considerable concern every time I see them being featured in the press as some sort of spokesthings for conservatism, because none of them are constitutional conservatives. At best, they are social conservatives—but not very good ones.

While they kick up a huge ruckus about what they see as the plummeting moral values of liberals, they are often practicing obvious hypocrisy (besides the lies, you may as well factor in Limbaugh’s prescription-drug abuse, O’Reilly’s sexually charged phone calls, and other such pecadillos). They have little interest in the preservation of the Constitution, in freedom, in peace, in a strong economy, or in the opportunity for each and every citizen of this country to pursue happiness. What they’re concerned about is promoting a political and religious philosophy that guarantees a world that is very good for them, where they can be as hedonistic and debased as they like, to the utter disregard of those outside their special club, their private church of privilege.

The word propaganda originally came from a Latin phrase: congregatio de propaganda fide—“congregation for propagation of the faith,” which was a committee of Catholic cardinals responsible for foreign missions established in 1622. This was done under the brief service of Pope Gregory XV, who in his two years of papal rule, extended the authority of those carrying out the Inquisition.

Make no mistake: For the last 25 years or so, we have been witness to the germination of a new Inquisition, which is only now becoming entrenched and obvious. It is just as nonsensical, intolerant, cruel and ultimately pointless as the Spanish version of centuries ago. The “neoconservative” one uses different words, different media, different methods. But you’ll see the same time-tested tactics—tactics, ultimately, based on loudly stated, repetitive lies.

We’ve seen Inquisitions before. They always start with persistent, popular liars.

I miss my Party

In this case, it’s a little more obvious that the liars are also hypocrites. How else can they shout down opposing viewpoints, and then call liberals hypocrites for protesting? How else can you see so many of these people claim to promote Christian ideals, and then so consistently violate the Ninth Commandment?

What’s more distressing is that the GOP at large has gotten into this cowardly spirit. Why do the hard work of having a legitimate debate about a topic when you can just make stuff up, lie about your opposition, and scream as loud as you can whenever anyone dissents? The “right wing” no longer seems to care about the truth, the Constitution, freedom, sovereign rule, or for that matter, Republicanism. Debate is hard—why bother, when you can dash off a cheap, careless tirade at high volume?

Americans deserve better than this. We deserve more accountability and honesty—from our elected officials, from the press, and from political commentators. It’s high time we cast aside the screeching zealots that have taken over so much of the political landscape, from the two-bit blogs to major media corporations. We are overdue in reclaiming our heritage as a bastion of civilization, of enlightenment, of progress, of responsibility, of freedom.

Republicanism is a concept of governing a nation as a state in which sovereignty is entrusted to the people—not to a hereditary elite, not to an aristocratic elite, not to a religious elite, not to the rich, nor to corporations, nor to dictators. It attempts to protect individual liberty from forces of tyranny through a constitution that establishes a given system of law. It relies on pragmaticism, on discourse, on discovery, on facts. It emphasizes civic duty, civic responsibility, high principles—and rejects corruption, dishonesty and the concentration of power.

Where are the Republicans among us?