Showing posts with label decency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label decency. Show all posts

Friday, February 19, 2010

Who Will Hold Them Accountable?

CPAC is looking a lot like the national Tea Party convention in Nashville a couple weeks ago, which is to say, three days of hating on President Obama from the far-right fringe. And that’s pretty much all they’ve got.

The rhetoric that comes out of these conservative gatherings is alarming. At the Tea Party we had immigrant-bashing, gay-bashing, conspiracy theories, birthers, and a lot of anti-Obama anger framed in apocalyptic terms. CPAC follows the same script, it’s just different scenery. Here’s Darrell Issa, doing his best to fan the fear:
“I intend to use every resource of my office to make sure that this Administration does not escape serious, thorough, and consistent oversight of its policies, its use of taxpayer money, and its aggressive determination to impose a foreign ideological vision on the people of the United States," he says in his prepared remarks.

What “foreign ideological vision” would that be? We don’t know, because the reporter never asked, or if he did, he didn’t get an answer.

Now here’s Jim DeMint framing the national situation as

"a battle between the American people and Democrats.”

A “battle.” Huh.

What I heard on TV was DeMint call the Democrats to task for their “unprecedented power grab.”

What? You mean the election? The one your side lost?

This is nothing new. The conservative language is one of fear, one that incites action, and it’s well thought out. Here’s Jim DeMint from last year’s CPAC conference:

Earlier this week, we heard the world’s best salesman of socialism address the nation.

Obama had been president all of five weeks.

Five weeks.

Let that sink in for a minute. It certainly set the stage for the next eight months’ worth of “Obama is a Socialist” rhetoric.

How do they get away with this constant drum-beat of anti-Democratic Party, anti-liberal, anti-Obama bile at conservative gatherings? Back in 2004 I remember liberals being criticized--constantly--for being “too angry.”

How come no one outside of a few liberal bloggers and the occasional journalist points out this hypocrisy? How come no one ever calls these folks on their angry rhetoric?

How come no political leader--the head of the DNC, perhaps--ever steps up to say, “what are you people smoking? Socialism? You cannot be serious!”

You know, if no one on the national stage ever challenges this right wing lie factory, then the point has been ceded. You’re letting them get away with the lies. You have allowed them frame you.

Maybe it’s not the media’s job to call the CPAC/Tea Party crowd to account for their rhetoric (at least, not 100% of the time). But someone needs to. Liberals need to stop being so damn polite and worried about "decency" all the time and start realizing that it’s a damn war to the other side, so time to start acting like it’s a war on your side.

Are you afraid Rush Limbaugh will have a sad? Will Glenn Beck have an even bigger sad? Limbaugh said today that

Joe Stack "sounds just like any liberal Democrat," writings "almost word for word" like Obama, Pelosi, Reid

That's a pretty outrageous claim. Has no one stepped up and said, no, it's not true? Not close to true?

Glenn Beck poured “gasoline” and lit a match to demonstrate his take on what Obama was doing to “the average American.” This wasn't challenged because, I guess, of some lame idea that to address it was to validate it. But people, it's been validated already. It's out there.

This constantly-unchallenged over the top rhetoric is dangerous. It fans the flames of populist anger. We're dealing with a low-information populace, and if no one ever challenges the idea that “Obama is a socialist” then the talking point is left out there to fester. Ultimately it creates right wing nutballs who burn their McMansions down before flying a private plane into the IRS building.

It results in people like Warren "Gator" Taylor who took hostages at a Virginia post office.

It encourages the Timothy McVeighs and James Von Brunns and Scott Roeders and Eric Rudolphs. You can’t scream “Obama is destroying the country, Democrats are evil baby killers, everything wrong with the country is the fault of liberals” 24-7 and not expect something to happen.

So what I want to know is: who is going to counter this hate speech? Who is going to step up on the national stage and say enough already?

Why haven’t we done it yet?

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Zero tolerance for zero tolerance

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fear of terrorists, fear of drugs -- fear itself shall be the law.

Does the hullabaloo about legal "loopholes" allowing gun sales to people secretly on an FBI terrorist list but not charged with anything, have anything to do with allowing school officials to strip a young girl half naked and rummage around in her underwear? Should people working for a local high school have police powers yet not be restrained by the responsibility a policeman has to explain the accused's rights? I think both cases illustrate the struggle between expediency and respect for civil rights and in neither case do I feel that the foundation of our legal system was to make it very, very easy for any authority to treat suspects as convicts.

Clarence Thomas was the only Supreme Court member to think such things as a summary strip search of an 8th grade girl are legal, although he may or may not think it's wrong. True to his Republican principles, he differentiates between law and justice as though one was not to serve the other. Of course I might often agree with that, but not this time. Thomas clearly stated that the "scourge of drugs" trumps the right to due process and elevates a school principal above the powers and responsibilities a police officer has. In his dissenting opinion, he claimed the court was making a “deep intrusion” into the administration of public schools and their efforts, constitutional or otherwise, to fight the scourge of drug abuse. Fear trumps the law, fear trumps justice, fear trumps freedom, due process and in some cases, common decency. Fear is turning some of our schools into little versions of Stalinist Russia where any accusation is as good as guilt.

I haven't read the transcripts and I have never walked through the door of a law school, but the sense of outrage can't be exclusive to me or any other parent and the legitimacy of allowing school personnel, who would otherwise go to prison for doing what they did, to have such authority simply because of the grave danger that Savana Redding might have had an Advil hidden on her person. I can say with near certainty, that had it been my 13 year old daughter, there would be some folks at Safford Middle School in need of their own pain pills.

While most of us would disagree with Thomas and would side with the majority decision that the danger was so minimal that such a false accusation could not justify personal violation of that sort by people who are, after all, not policemen, some appear to be quite happy with using innuendo, suspicion and prejudice to deprive anyone of his civil rights. After all, we passed a Patriot Act designed to do just that and suggested that those who opposed it weren't true Americans.

In other countries; in countries that value freedom more than we do, there would be demonstrations in the streets against the things we ignore while giggling about the sex lives of Senators. It's sad.